Hardy Ruins: Female Spaces and Male Designs

Abstract

Whereas Hardy's novels follow the conventions by which male mansions become domesticated by female occupants, his poetry depicts the far more precarious fate of female enclosures. Like Wordsworth, Hardy associates a female place of origin with death. His youthful poem “Domicilium,” in which a mediator helps her grandson retreat into a lost natural habitat, is soon subverted by “Heiress and Architect,” which gives an ironic twist to the yoking of houses, femininity, and death found in nineteenthcentury poetry. Desire becomes paramount again in Satires of Circumstance and Moments of Vision, where Hardy recalls his wife in various abodes to fill his home with remembered sound and movement. Built on a Bachelardian “dream-memory” of his earliest home and hence associated with a mother's body, Hardy's poetry dramatizes his sense of eviction from a primal refuge even when re-creating odd structures like the mother hull of the sunken Titanic.