Thomas Hardy’s Mourning: Photographic Images in Emma Poems.

Abstract

Kim, Yeonmin. “Thomas Hardy’s Mourning: Photographic Images in Emma Poems.” Studies in English Language & Literature 43.2 (2017): 49-73. A melancholic mourner, Thomas Hardy expresses his unending lamentation for the death of Emma, his first wife. In Emma poems (Poems of 1912-13) he adopts photographic images in the process of his mourning as a modern elegist. The visual images he captures in his poetry can be discussed in three ways: First, the presence of the dead is revealed through metonymy. Hardy suggests that metonymic objects retain direct traces of Emma in the same way as a photograph, which develops the light, keeps the direct contact with an object. Second, he conveys through photographic images an experience of sudden, stingy awareness, a sort of “punctum,” a concept theorized by Roland Barthes. Hardy’s punctum confirms the undeniable fact that Emma was there in the past, despite her absolute absence in the present moment. Last, his punctum creates dramatic irony arising from perceptual gaps between an object (Emma) and an observer (Hardy or readers). In showing his painful awakening, always belated but rendered by the dramatic irony through the visual, Hardy continues his perpetual project of melancholic mourning. (Chonnam National University)