Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T15:55:18.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: VICTORIAN AGE CONSTRUCTION AND THE SPECULAR SELF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2006

Kay Heath
Affiliation:
Virginia State University

Extract

AT AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDY was beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem: I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, “Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”For then, I, undistrestBy hearts grown cold to me,Could lonely wait my endless restWith equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve,Part steals, lets part abide;And shakes this fragile frame at eveWith throbbings of noontide. (T. Hardy, Complete Poems 81)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Armstrong Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP
Austen Jane. 1985. Persuasion. 1818. Middlesex Penguin,
Benson Jon. 1997. Prime Time: A History of the Middle Aged in Twentieth-Century Britain. London: Longman
Braxton Hicks J. 1877The Croonian Lectures on the Difference Between the Sexes in Regard to the Aspect and Treatment of Disease.” The British Medical Journal 1: 47577.Google Scholar
Brontë Charlotte. 1980. Jane Eyre. 1847. Oxford: Oxford UP,
Cohen, Ed. 1991. “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation.” Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde. Ed. Regenia Gagnier. New York: G. K. Hall & Co, 6887.
Craik Dinah Mulock. 1872. Hannah. New York: Harper and Brothers, nd.
Dickens Charles. 1977. Bleak House. 1853. New York: W. W. Norton
Dickens Charles. 2001. Hard Times. 1854. New York: W. W. Norton
Dickens Charles. 1967. Little Dorrit. 1857. Middlesex Penguin,
Eliot George. 1977. Middlemarch. 1871–72. New York: W. W. Norton
Epperly Elizabeth R. 1987From the Borderlands of Decency: Madame Max Goesler.” Victorians Institute Journal 15: 2435.Google Scholar
Featherstone Mike and Andrew Wernick. 1995. “Introduction.” Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life. Ed. Featherstone and Wernick. London: Routledge: 115.
Gardner John. 1875. Longevity: The Means of Prolonging Life After Middle Age. London: Henry S. King
Gillespie Michael Patrick. 1996. Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity. Gainesville: UP of Florida
Gullette Margaret Morganroth. 1997. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia
Gullette Margaret Morganroth. 1994Male Midlife Sexuality in a Gerontocratic Economy: The Privileged Stage of the Long Midlife in Nineteenth-Century Age-Ideology.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5: 5889.Google Scholar
Hardy Florence Emily. 1930. The Later Years of Thomas Hardy: 1892–1928. London: MacMillan
Hardy Thomas. 1978. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. Ed. James Gibson. New York: Macmillan Publishing
Hardy Thomas. 1991. The Well-Beloved. 1897. Oxford: Oxford UP
Jalland Pat. 1996. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford UP,
Kucich John. 1993. “Moral Authority in the Late Novels: The Gendering of Art.” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy. Ed. Margaret R. Higonnet. Urbana: U Chicago P,
Lacan Jacques. 1977. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton,
Lock Margaret. 1998. “Deconstructing the Change: Female Maturation in Japan and North America.” Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions). Ed. Richard A. Shweder. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 4574.
Michie Helena. 1987. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies. New York: Oxford UP
Millgate Michael. 1982. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. New York: Random House
Price Jody. 1996. “A Map of Utopia”: Oscar Wilde's Theory for Social Transformation. New York: Peter Lang
Roebuck Janet. 1979When Does ‘Old Age’ Begin?: The Evolution of the English Definition.” Journal of Social History 2: 41629.Google Scholar
Ryan Michael. 1979. “One Name of Many Shapes: The Well-Beloved.” Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. London: Macmillan, 17292.
Seymour-Smith Martin. 1994. Hardy. New York: St. Martin's,
Sinfield Alan. 1994. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and The Queer Movement. New York: Columbia UP
Tilt Edward John. 1883. The Change of Life in Woman, in Health and Disease. 4th ed. Philadelphia: P Blakiston
Trollope Anthony. 1996. An Autobiography. 1883. Ed. David Skilton. London: Penguin
Trollope Anthony. 1988. Miss Mackenzie. 1865. Oxford: Oxford UP
Trollope Anthony. 1869. Phineas Finn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.
Trollope Anthony. 1973. Phineas Redux. 1874. Oxford: Oxford UP,
Trollope Anthony. 1995. The Way We Live Now. 1875. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions
Trollope Frances. 1995. The Widow Barnaby. 1839. Phoenix Mill Alan Sutton Publishing Limited,
Wilde Oscar. 1998. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. Oxford: Oxford UP
Woodward Kathleen. “Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and The Literary Imagination.” Kenyon Review 5.4 (Fall 1983): 4366.