The Sound of Silence in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

The article aims at showing how, in Hardy’s fiction, all sound aspires to the condition of silence. For example in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, sounds are very often conveyed as visual impressions, and Tess’s voice is hardly every heard – her voice seems choked, throttled, “stuck in her throat”. The article also examines Far from the Madding Crowd and the import of the voice, of silence, of the scream, and of the heroine’s temporary aphonia. Starting from J. J. Lecercle’s work on “the violence of language”, the author argues that the female voice in Hardy’s fiction is repressed because it conveys an uncontrollable, potentially dangerous form of jouissance. The Hardyan text makes us hear fractions of that jouissance by letting us perceive the echo of lalangue, that language which is filled with the lost substance of enjoyment.