Thomas Hardy and the Pre-Raphaelites

In Hardy's novel Return of the Native, we find an extended description of the anti-heroine Eustacia Vye that veers between rhapsody and ominous warning. 

                    CHAPTER VII.

                      QUEEN OF NIGHT.

EUSTACIA VYE was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passion there is and instincts which make a faultless goddess, that is, those which make not quite a faultless woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious interchange of caresses and blows as those we endure now.

     She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. It closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.

     Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed, she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx....

      She had deep Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries. Their light, as it came, and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so: she might have been believed capable of sleeping without closing them up. Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia's soul to be flame-like. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils conduced to the same impression.

Proserpine by D.G. Rossetti.

       The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl. Viewed sideways, the closing-line of her lips formed, with almost geometric precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as the cima-recta, or ogee...

       The sight of such a flexible bend as that on grim Egdon was quite an apparition. It was felt at once that that mouth did not come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips met like the two halves of a muffin. One had fancied that such lip-curves were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten marbles; yet behold a specimen was here. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. This keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which she knew too well for her years.

       Her presence brought memories of Bourbon roses, jacinths, and rubies, a tropical midnight, an eclipse of the sun, a portent; her moods recalled lotus-eaters, the march in Athalie, the Commination Service; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. In a dim light, and with a slight re-arrangement of hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities. The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases.

The Blue Dress by D.G Rossetti
using Jane Burden as model

     ...Egdon was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto. Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the gloomy and stifled warmth within her. She differed from Demeter's daughter as a queenly bondswoman differs from a bondaged queen. But true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow...

. . The subtle beauties of the heath were lost on on Eustacia; she only caught its vapors. The environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."

      There is more to this than purple prose. The fanciful extravagance is interwoven with gloomy hints about the power of such a woman and the dangerous fascination she might exert over men. She is no pure ideal. And who or what could have inspired such a vision? Certainly "the shady splendour of her beauty"  is alien and un-English, ..."such lip-curves were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten marbles."

Prosperpine.
Version in Birmingham Art Gallery.

  The comparison between Eustacia and Prosperpine, "Demeter's daughter" for whom "Egdon was her Hades" provides a connection to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting - or rather paintings, as he did many versions of it -  of Proserpine, in which the model was Jane Burden Morris (1839-1914). Jane, the wife of William Morris and an artist in her own right, was like Eustacia, dark and saturnine, with a gloomy countenance, strong somewhat severe classical features and an immense cloud of black hair. In some versions of Rossetti's painting Proserpine has red or dark auburn hair but in the most familiar one, the canvas that is in the Tate Gallery, it is very dark. She looks fearsome and mysterious, like a goddess or an enchantress of myth. It is just that sort of mythical resonance that Hardy is trying to capture.

     Whether Proserpine is actually beautiful is a matter of debate. Her face is strong, proud and cruel, reminding one of Francis Bacon's dictum, "There was never any excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." 

        

In Rossetti's painting "Astarte Syriaca" (the ancient Syrian goddess Astarte), she is clearly an arcane figure, a witch-goddess in triplicate, a Pagan female Trinity. She has power and mystery. Astarte was the Queen of Heaven, a title very close to Hardy's Queen of Night.

       

Pandora

"Pandora" is another of Rosetti's mythical portrayals of Jane in which she is a quasi-goddess, whose powers are baneful and dolorous. Her beauty exerts a fatal fascination.

And she is more than a mere femme fatale, she is a vision of womanhood from a culture that regarded the feminine as awesome.

    

   In "The Day Dream" Jane, in a classical robe, is presented in a langorous reverie with overtones of sensuous temptation. She could be a lotus-eater or even a laudanum addict like Rosetti himself. The book she holds has filled her thoughts with romantic and seductive fantasy. Hardy writes of Eustacia Vye, "To be loved to madness -- such was her great desire..." The painting is the antithesis of the Victorian ideal of innocent feminine beauty, and there is also a determination in her expression that corresponds to Hardy's description of Eustacia Vye as a "rebellious woman".

    To find a comparable face that became an icon we would have to look at 20th-century examples such as Frieda Kahlo's arresting self-portraits. 

         How much opportunity did Hardy have to see Rosetti's paintings in the 1870s, before he wrote The Return of the Native? We know from Hardy's biographers that he was passionately interested in art, and practised painting and drawing all his life. He often visited the National Gallery and it was the International Exhibition in South Kensington that drew him to move to London. In 1884 he met Edward Burne-Jones, and although by that time Rossetti was dead it is quite possible that Hardy met him at some earlier point. He kept a notebook about his reactions to artworks and his novels are scattered with references to art of the past and present. He told his early biographers that when composing his novels, "ideas presented themselves to his mind more in the guise of mental pictures than as subjects for writing down." (Bullen quoting Brennecke 1928 1913-4).

He has given us a broad hint when he writes "with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases."

      I think it is extremely likely that his description of Eustacia was inspired by one of the versions of  Rosetti's Proserpine. Nevertheless, the parallel and the intersection of ideas do not depend on proving direct influence. If it cannot be proved that Hardy ever saw these particular Rossetti paintings, it is nevertheless true that in his presentation of Eustacia Vye, he is trying to do something similar. He is trying to create an image of a mythical goddess, a woman who is larger than life and exerts a hypnotic, tragic power over the men who meet her.

     An earlier painting on a similar theme is "Morgan le Fay" by Frederick Sandys (1864) depicting the powerful sorceress of Arthurian legend. Rossetti's lead was followed by John William Waterhouse, whose painting, "Circe offering the cup of temptation to Ulysses," offers a similar vision of a mythical enchantress. 

A second painting by Waterhouse "Circe Invidiosa" shows Circe at her most malevolent,  turning a hapless victim into a sea monster, and here her face has a distinct resemblance to Jane Burden. 

Waterhouse even painted Medea, perhaps the most fearsome of all the enchantresses of classical mythology. She broods as she mixes the poison that she will use to take revenge on her rival Glauce.

 

The subject of Medea was also painted by 

Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904), whose image is a striking one. Medea here brandishes the knife she will use to slay her own children.

Although these paintings were done in the 1890s, after Hardy wrote The Return of the Native, all are part of the same Pre-Raphaelite tradition.

      For men in a male-dominated society this could possibly be regarded as the ultimate luxury belief, an indulgence in fantasies of thralldom that could be put aside like the empty bottle of last night's whisky or laudanum, when morning brought sobriety. It would be more optimistic to see it as a genuine and important endeavour to create icons of the feminine that transcended the prevalent stereotypes of the time and possibly empowered women. However, I doubt if reading about Eustacia Vye ever made many young women feel empowered. It is a pity that more of her rebellious nature is not seen in the story that follows. 

        The description is of course pre-occupied with female beauty and in that respect does not challenge established conventions but Prosperine also fascinates because of her pride, her dignity, even her disdain. She is a fearsome and strong-willed woman. Astarte and Pandora are not subject to human law or moral judgement. 

     Ultimately Eustacia Vye is more than a vision of womanhood, she is Hardy's pagan vision of nature and the world as amoral, indifferent to petty human concerns and Christian values. Callous caprice and accident, not mercy or justice, are the laws of the post-Darwinian universe. The vision relates to a fundamental shift in worldview during the epoch, the epoch when science undermined faith.

 Sources:

J.B. Bullen, "Hardy and the Visual Arts" in Keith Wilson, ed., A Companion to Thomas Hardy
(Wiley, 2012)

https://www.demorgan.org.uk/jane-morris-1839-1914/