A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873): Policing the Self

Abstract

A Pair of Blue Eyes continues the interrogation of available modes of female subjectivity, and their relationship to the articulation of desire, initiated by Hardy’s first published novel, Desperate Remedies. A Pair of Blue Eyes highlights the extent to which gendered forms of subjectivity owe their construction to discourses in the human sciences — in particular the newly formulated discourse of sexuality — rather than to supernatural decree. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Michel Foucault examines how sex was ‘put into discourse’ in the nineteenth century and became a means of reaching and affecting individual self embodiment through the techniques of ‘refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification’ (Sexuality, 1: 11).¹ Desperate Remedies and A Pair of Blue Eyes expose and examine the mutable nature of feminine subjectivity and demonstrate the desirability and feasibility of alternative forms of female emplacement within the social formation. This idea is developed in The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) which explores the potential for resistance to the specifying techniques of a masculinist social system.