For Thomas Hardy's short story "A Withered Arm":  AI generated Adobe Stock. “A ghost with a spectral form and a haunting expression, wandering through a haunted castle in search of a lost soul.”

         For one further foray into the world of Thomas Hardy, I will enter the eerie world of the mysterious heath in his short story “The Withered Arm.” Hardy depicts two innocents, female protagonists, in this story. Each one at times views the other as a threat. Hardy usually writes of individuals struggling with the concept of fate, lost in a harsh, industrialized world. Introducing a possible supernatural element turns the deterministic meanderings of Hardy into a much more complex maze of themes. Therefore, before going into the story proper, I will try to define “Gothic” as it pertains to Hardy and to the general idea of signs and symbols about which I attempt to write.

The gothic innocent fears coming upon that thing which may frighten or repel. This frightening object might take the form of a supernatural being, such as in the AI generated image. But the object is always a threat, and this threat defines the area we call Gothic.

            This threat constitutes that which Julia Kristeva calls the “abject” in horror; in Powers of Horror, Kristeva terms her basic idea the “abject,” and she defines “abject” in several ways. In one instance she gives simple synonyms—loathing, repugnance, improper/unclean. In another instance she waxes poetic: “A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (2). Kristeva defines the abject as that which is undesired, for the simplest of reasons because it is loathsome and repugnant.³ But more complex reasons exist, and with her sentence, “But not nothing, either,” Kristeva launches into the exploration of that which is desired, even within the paradoxical confines of the undesired. In the tapestry of emotions, fears reach out as horrible and unwanted; but the absence of anything, including fear, becomes unwanted to a greater degree. So, the curious attraction of the loathsome continues.

            Characters in stories often feel this abjection. They desire what is lacking in their lives, usually defined as a sense of happiness or beauty. The acquisition of the objects or feelings carries with it the threat of abjection, the threat of not acquiring what they seek. The gothic idea of the innocent finding themselves in another’s world, a strange and foreign world, creates validates a character’s innocence. They feel the innocence, but they feel the threat to the innocence also, the abjection.

            One of Hardy's characters can feel an abjection by means of a dream image, a threatening specter that appears in her sleep to attempt to keep her away. The other of Hardy’s protagonists feels a very tangible threat in the form of a withering of her arm that appears suddenly, scarring her beauty and causing her husband to shy away from her. Hardy’s gothic complexity comes from the two protagonists who feel threatened by their various abjections, yet who sometimes feel a great empathy for the other. I hope to deal with these abjections in a further commentary that focuses on the Hardy story itself. For now, I will continue defining Kristeva’s abjection as a tool for investigating the use of the gothic in a character-oriented story.

            Julia Kristeva, in The Powers of Horror writes that in facing the abject one must go “beyond the unconscious” and confront the ambiguity of facing the “Inside” as well as the “Outside” of the mind (7). To Kristeva, the analyst of literature must use outwardly symbolic references as well as inwardly psychological ones. In her own analysis, she specifically relates this to the work of modernist novelists such as Joyce and Celine. With Celine especially, Kristeva wishes to show how the reader must go both “fascinating, mysterious, inwardly nocturnal” and at the same time “liberating” (133). A postmodern analyst may easily adopt such a stance when confronting various texts such as Hardy’s. The psychological rambling is in the text in full force. But also, the characters face the abject forces that threaten them when they must confront abstract symbols such as dream images or tangible symbols such as a withered arm.

            My point in this brief commentary on Kristeva is to show how an evolutionary idea of symbology can help to define the characters of a story that, for some reason, may not lend itself to an immediate gothic interpretation. In my own work, I have used this type of analysis to redefine the events of the melodramatic and psychological novel The Golden Bowl by Henry James. In these brief comments, I will continue such commentary in my investigation of Hardy, an author usually associated with the struggle for freedom in the face of a harsh, worldly determinism. Gothicism, usually associated with a certain Romantic angst, sturm, und drang, can especially come to the forefront when Hardy himself uses fantastical elements within his naturalistic stories of life on the heath.

 

 

 

To be continued.

 

Hardy, Thomas. “The Withered Arm.” Wessex Tales, Project Gutenberg, Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3056] Most recently updated: February 4, 2021 (original publication date 1888).  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3056/pg3056-images.html

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. tr., Leon S. Roudiez. New

            York: Columbia University Press. 1982.

                                                                                    Nick Harris Feb. 2024