ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman” (1888) ought to hold a prominent place in magic portrait literature of the nineteenth century. While similar stories with fantastically life-imbued pictures, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842), Margaret Oliphant’s “The Portrait” (1885), and Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst” (1886) typically place female figures on magical canvasses following gendered traditions of spectatorship where a woman is gazed at by a normative male viewer, Hardy reverses the dynamics of the gaze. The magic portrait in “An Imaginative Woman” is of a male figure who is on view for the titular female character, and it is her desire that determines the potency of the image and the narrative of which it is a part. Hardy’s reversal of these gender roles is not a simple switch, though; he is keenly attentive to the fickle shifts of desire on the part of a viewer and to the fallacy of distinctly “masculine” and “feminine” subjectivities. The male figure in the frame, Robert Trewe, is a poet, feminized through his craft and Romantic sensibility. Ella Marchmill, the viewer, is an unhappy but soulful woman – also a poet – intent upon communing with the imaged figure as both a fellow writer and a sexual partner. She succeeds fantastically through the mediation of the photographic image, becoming pregnant with the portrait’s child. Hardy’s story is profoundly progressive in crafting a narrative that adheres to the trajectory of female desire, particularly in that it relies for its development on the elaborate relationship between a female spectator and the figure upon which she gazes. In this tale, Hardy anticipates feminist models of visual pleasure not formally theorized until nearly a century later by scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Miriam Hansen, and Vivian Sobchack.
