ABSTRACT
Hardy's central protagonist Jocelyn Pierston (Pearston in the 1892 textt is a sculptor who, like his creator, has moved from relatively modest origins in southwest England to become an acclaimed and affluent member of polite metropolitan society. Pierston's endeavour to capture in stone an immaculate female form makes him a descendant of all the naive 'fantasts' and frustrated idealists who populate the psychic terrain of the later fiction.5 Pierston believes the 'female' is a worthy object of, but cannot ever create, great art. His chronic inability (or refusal) to recognize 'the reality of any world outside himself6 links him with the 'unpractical lofty-notioned dreamer' Edred Fitzpiers (Woodlanders 172), who much prefers 'the ideal world to the real' (Woodlanders 87) in order to practise his self-serving aestheticism of erotic indulgence. Angel Clare, though not hedonistic like Fitzpiers, is a variation on this type; as is Jude Fawley, who regards the epicene Sue Bridehead as 'an ideal character, about whose form he [begins] to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams' (Jude 90). Angel Clare exacts a particular kind of perfection from the woman of his choice, and to serve this demand he transforms the felt potency of ancient divinities (such as Artemis and Demeter) into a superficial intellectual concept.1 Pierston is an exaggerated parody of Clare and uses a poeticizing tendency to convert any trace of carnal passion into sterile neo-pagan rhetoric: 'Sometimes at night he dreamt that [the Well-Beloved] was ''the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus" in person, bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art - the implacable Aphrodite herself (1897 WB 184-5).8 He also speculates whether the 'love-queen of his isle' may actually be the Old Testament fertility goddess 'Ashtaroth' (see Judges 2:13), or the Norse
3 Michael Millgate (ed.), Thomas Hardy's Public Voice, pp. 181-5. This quotation is taken from Hardy's 1902 contribution to H. Rider Haggard's 'Dorsetshire' chapter of his Rural England: Being an Account of Agricultural and Social Researches Carried Out in the Years 1901 & 1902,2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1902). 4 All references are to Thomas Hardy, 'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved' and 'The WellBeloved', ed. with introd. Patricia Ingham (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997). Hereafter referred to as WB. 5 For further discussion of these 'fantasts' see Andrew Radford, '"Fallen Angel": Hardy's Critique of Shelley in the Final Wessex Novels', Thomas Hardy Yearbook 29 (2000), 51-63. 6 Ian Gregor, The Great Web, p. 151. 7 An earlier title for Tess of the d'Urbervilles was 'Too Late Beloved'. 8 Michael Millgate contends that Pierston's 'repeated invocations of Aphrodite under names so various' implies 'a possible influence from [Hardy's] recent reading of Frazer's The Golden Bough'. See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Bodley Head, 1971), p. 293.
