Preparing Hardy for Affect, or dressing Eustacia Vye for her readers.

Nick Harris. 12 18 2025

The point of my studies is not merely to ramble; with much trepidation I now bring up the concept of affect theory, a tumultuous set of ideas concerning the emotional reactions of the reader as a desired point of validity. I will relate affect to Hardy in further essays, but first I must briefly touch on why affect relates to the other points I embrace, namely the reaction against modernism which Susan Sontag calls “Against Interpretation” and the study of the ethics of literature inherent in the aesthetics of Martha Nussbaum, one which views ethics and artistry as interchangeable in many ways. 

Though emphasizing the individual, affect is more than readers’ interpretation or Death of the Author in favor of the reader. Affect is an examination of how emotions creep up from within the individual, especially in relation to the other, the thing outside the individual that proclaims them different or unique. 

Teachout points out that we do not necessarily have to be view affect as coming from within the individual, as the Freudian concept of affect would argue (Teachout, 13). Rather, affect may originate from the other, and the individual then must deal with accepting it or denying it. This wrestling with affect’s existence becomes the struggle of affect itself. The individual must ask her/himself if the emotional influence exists at all. 

Contemporary affect theory indicates that existence of affect is a determinant of the ethics of literature. On the other hand, modernist structuralism, the idea that structure determines artistic worth, would make the existence of affect superfluous. It may exist, emotions stirred in the reader are even an important outcome, but they are not the determinant of artistic quality – because structure fills that role. The Sontag “Against Interpretation” theory rebels against modernist structuralism by insisting that the reader be free from interpretive models in order to achieve the jouissance of life that reading brings. 

The progression I bring to the front here is one from a reaction against structuralism (“Against Interpretation”) through the ethics of literature (Nussbaum’s Upheavals) and into a theory of affect, a theory that comes from within the individual and from the individual’s struggle with the other. 

In writing my MA Thesis, my purpose was to determine how the gothic is present even in the non-gothic literature of Henry James’ later works. My success in these gothic studies is a matter of debate; I am not convinced of the success of Gothicism arising from ethics -of-literature. But in retrospect, I think what I hit upon was the importance of the progression I just outlined. The reaction against modernism by postmodernists, the path of that thinking to the ethics of literature as a purpose of literature, and the inward-reaching activity of determining ethics leading to an inward activity of determining emotion, and, as Teachout indicates, the question of whether emotion is totally inward in character. 

I like to think of the progression that I articulate as simplistic. But anything that attacks the great mid-century behemoth of structuralist thinking cannot be simplistic, as least seventy-five years of counterargument has proven that argument by postmodernist, post-postmodernists, and now the artificial intelligence community, though the latter is an argument for another day. So readers of the Return of the Native must now prepare the mysterious character of Eustacia Vye to meet the other that those readers characterize. For they bring Eustacia's character to their world in a way far beyond any "death of the author." Eustacia has an effect on the reader that is emotional, "affect"-acious.

Up next, I hope to show, within the confines of the next blogs in this series, how my earlier work with Henry James can now jump over to Hardy, especially his heroes such as Eustacia Vye. Such a reflection can add to the conjecture that affect theory is a natural evolution from ethics-of-literature and from “Against Interpretation,” an evolution that make the importance of literature even more efficacious. 

 

Works Cited 

Nussbaum, Martha C.  "Introduction" Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001, pp. 1-16.  

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.  

Teachout, Woden. “Foreward: Teresa Brennan In Memoriam.” Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell Univ. Press, 2015. vii-xi.