The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved was first published in serial instalments (from 1 October to 17 December1892) with illustrations by Water PagetFootnote ¹; see Figure 6) in the Illustrated London News and were published simultaneously with the same title in the American magazine Harper's Bazar. It then appeared in book form, with substantial revisions, as The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament in 1897,Footnote ² and was, in fact, the last of Hardy's novels to appear (Jude the Obscure being published in 1895).

Figure 6.

Walter Paget, bannerhead for Thomas Hardy, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. From Illustrated London News 8 Oct. 1892, 457. Courtesy of the John W. Graham Library, Trinity College, Toronto.

The novel, which could, superficially, be misinterpreted as a sort of éducation sentimental of the protagonist Jocelyn Pierston, should, more relevantly, be deciphered as the manifesto of Hardy's “regional aesthetics,”Footnote ³ an aesthetics that Hardy had been developing through the years and which here finds its final formulation.Footnote ⁴ In fact, despite his declared intention to write “something light,” seemingly disparaging his novel, Hardy referred to it as being “entirely modern in date and subject.”Footnote ⁵ No surprise then that the first attentive reviewers were puzzled by the scheme of the novel; it was, as they put it, “in the abstract.”Footnote ⁶ Hardy himself, in order to set the standard of the novel, preferred to classify it in his “Romance and Fantasies” series, rather than in his “Novels of Characters and Environment.”Footnote ⁷ In 1903 he further qualified the aim of the novel by specifying that the story differs “from all or most other of the series [The Wessex Novels] in that the interest aimed at is of an ideal or subjective nature, and frankly fantastic, verisimilitude in the sequence of events has been subordinated to the said aim.” (WB:173–74, Preface).

Recent critical attitudes towards the bookFootnote ⁸ acknowledge its weight and importance; many critics agree with Norman Page, who has justly spoken of a “long and unmerited neglect. . . a work that has been not only greatly undervalued but seriously misunderstood” (Page 2000: 458). So, even if the novel has often been whitewashed,Footnote ⁹ it was, significantly, much admired by Marcel Proust (Page 2000: 459).Footnote ¹⁰ Of fundamental importance is the fact that Hardy wrote the novel twice, a striking fact indeed,Footnote ¹¹ bespeaking its importance as a final statement on narrative whence he could make a new start, this time through poetry – an artistic medium he had always used but which would now give him the opportunity to take a “full look at the Worst.”Footnote ¹²

As Patricia Ingham notes in her “General Editor's Preface” to the 1997 Penguin edition (TWB: viii–ix), the Wessex collections of Hardy's novels (1895–96, 1912–13) progressively witness, stress, and “strengthen the Wessex element so as to suggest that this half-real half-imagined location had been coherently conceived from the beginning, though of course he knew this was not so.” (TWB: viii). It is precisely this “regional attitude”Footnote ¹³ finding, and this is my point, in his last novel its metanarrational and theoretical manifesto, which can be considered to be Hardy's peculiar aesthetics. Besides, the importance and centrality of the topic proves the importance of the book – indeed a final statement – setting the perspective from which to look, with the advantage of hindsight and from a holistic point of view, at the entire Wessex “collection.”

It soon becomes clear, as we read the novel, that it gravitates around two main idealistic themes: Beauty and Art, as symbols of Perfection. Beauty and Art are inquired into, dissected, evaluated, and judged, but, as analysis is being undertaken, the book does not come to the point directly; there is the intentionally misleading ploy of seduction. Tantalizing beauty is embodied in each of a sequence of five principal women (besides others) with whom the artist, Jocelyn, falls in love.

The novel dramatizes and revives a conflict Hardy had confronted at the onset of The Return of the Native (1878), between what he there called “beauty of the accepted kind” and its opponent and counterpoint, “sublimity”, the anticanonical beauty that, as he had said, “appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.”Footnote ¹⁴ In the same novel Hardy had also professed his perplexity about the tenability of the old classical aesthetics of beauty: “Indeed,” he had posited, “it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter.” (RN: 4; vol. 1, ch. 1). The finality of how orthodox beauty was, indeed, over for him, will be stated clearly in The Well-Beloved both in 1892 and in 1897. If, in The Return of the Native, Hardy had situated the possible location of the new beauty that he had defined as “chastened sublimity” by saying, “The New Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule” (RN: 4; vol. 1, ch. 1), it is not by chance that the Isle of Slingers is expressly mentioned as a possible Ultima Thule in The Well-Beloved (WB: 248; vol. 2, ch. 7).

In a letter to the Academy, five years after the publication of the first version of the book (4 March 1897), Hardy wrote:

The quotation states the precise aim of the novel, which, far from being frivolous, has to be read as a tragi-comic but serious attack on ahistorical Platonism and its essentialist ideology. Well defined in its aesthetics with its provocative equation of beauty and truth,Footnote ¹⁶ its tantalizing promise of perfection, lure of fulfilment – in short its reproof of idealism hidden in the most secretive and alluring bait – the metaphysics of Beauty is equated by Hardy to a deceptiveness cloaked in an enthralling but misleading and deceiving “charm”; a “poetry” which, by then, only “visionary” artists could, according to Hardy, follow uncritically.Footnote ¹⁷ Dictatorial perfection – through one of its media, canonical Beauty (“the finest Greek vase” LTH:121) – will, through The Well-Beloved, be dismissed altogether, in the same way as Hardy will abandon the novel as too holistic a genre in its totalizing and teleological anxiety, in favour of the catachrestic, sidelong, partial and limited, discrete glances of poetry.Footnote ¹⁸

In the 1897 “Preface” to the novel Hardy spoke of the peninsular Isle of Slingers (or Portland) as “a spot,” once the Roman Vindilia – “home of a. . . distinctive people, cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs” – “apt to generate a type. . . a native of natives” (ironically, Hardy himself up to that point) capable of giving objective continuity to “a delicate dream” not “new to Platonic philosophers” (WB: 171, Preface 1897), philosophers who are directly mentioned in the “Preface” to the novel. The main dream of such a “fantast” (WB: 171, Preface 1897), a visionary dreamer, seems to be that of ideal Beauty, i.e., the essentialist idea of Perfection which will be attacked in the novel. This is confirmed by the epigraph of Hardy's book, taken from Shelley's The Revolt of Islam, which sets the purport and tenor of the novel, concerned as it is with what Shelley had characterized as the “evil” spirit, the “One shape of many names” (WB: 169, title page), a monistic and obnubilating tendency, rather than by positive qualities.Footnote ¹⁹ Hardy's novel “in [its] revolt from beauty” (WB: 331; vol. 3, ch. 8) can be considered as the ironic deconstruction of the dream of the “one shape”: the hypostasis of single and absolute abstract entities, such as Beauty, which entails the – for Hardy unacceptable and tragic – rejection of actuality. The novel will thus unquestionably declare the primacy of factual everyday life and, most appropriate in this case, of “non-artistic” reality; in short, the pre-eminence of life over art. Not only that: it will also unmask the hierarchical tendency to set evaluative and thus discriminating standards in the definition of an “absolute” standard of Beauty. The Well-Beloved states therefore the relevance of the “many shapes,” even those of the purported “Venus failures” (WB: 264; vol. 2, ch. 10), in its rejection of the discriminatory single one – Shelley's “one Power”Footnote ²⁰ – stating the necessity for plural and spatially defined versions of beauty rather than dictatorial (read Greek) uniqueness. Ideal forms and their claim to give us the “truth” of the worldFootnote ²¹ will be debunked for what they are: hierarchical and discriminatory (and, what is worse, unheeded) systems of values, concealing a purist essentialism which carries intolerance and, eventually, as in this case, tragic inhumanity. To single and holistic ideas of perfection – with Beauty as its most unnoticed typification – and their hidden ideological assumptions, Hardy will oppose his pluralistic aesthetics, his version of an antiessentialist “aesthetic regionalism”: the appreciation of an aesthetics referable only to peculiar and well-defined spaces and times (here the specific beauty of the Isle of Slingers). Hardy will withstand and confront Beauty, with its unchecked, unscrutinized, and taken-for-granted worth and estimation (founded as it is on a supposed inherent axiological quality) with his spatially and historically confined aesthetics, an aesthetics which privileges “characteristic” above universal elementsFootnote ²² (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Illustration to “In a Ewelease Near Weatherbury.” From Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems (London: Harper, 1898), 197.

An aesthetics of the characteristic had already been published by Francis Grose (1788)Footnote ²³ and as a phase of Gottfried Herder's aesthetics.Footnote ²⁴ Hardy's historical and spatially delimited aesthetics entails those provisional solutions that testify to Hardy's personal dismantling of the always resurgent dictatorship of the ahistorical metaphysics of Beauty cloaked in Platonism and Neoplatonism and their revisions.Footnote ²⁵ When he wrote his novel, a new resurgence of the old aesthetics had come, in primis, from Ruskin, but also from those immured and purely aesthetic attitudes issuing from the misinterpretation of Walter Pater's aestheticsFootnote ²⁶ that had produced the fin-de-siècle “art for art's sake” coteries of aesthetes and collectors that found their personification in Wilde's Dorian Gray. Footnote ²⁷ Hardy's attack on orthodox aesthetics is thus comparable to the assault launched against it by Walter Pater with his laconic dictum “Beauty is relative” (1873: xxix), and, from 1927 onwards, by Virginia WoolfFootnote ²⁸ up to the current versions of “regional aesthetics” present in the defence and safeguard of all oriental, minority, or camp perspectives.Footnote ²⁹ But we need to examine how Hardy deploys his attack on inhuman Beauty.

In chapter one we learn that Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor, who has just returned to his native island after living in London for nearly four years, is attracted to a young girl, Avice Caro. Jocelyn, who, we are told has come across many “sophisticated and accomplished women,” is already somewhat disillusioned about his abilities to be faithful in love. In fact, he senses that “the idol of his fancy” –”his Well-Beloved” – is probably not the immutable essence he had thought it to be: “an integral part of the personality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short while” (WB: 184; vol. 1, ch. 2). However, he is not yet fully conscious that the idol is, in fact, only a projection of his: “a subjective phenomenon vivified by the weird influences of his descent and birthplace” (WB: 184; vol. 1, ch. 2), which, as already noted, produces “fantasts,” that is, visionary dreamers. The novel will ironically explode this essentialist vision of Art (Jocelyn's misleading dream of Ideal Beauty) by keeping it, indeed, perfectly ideal, as symbolized by the frustration of the “final” statue he cannot carve and by his unconsummated loving of the Caro women. Jocelyn, following his dream, will meanwhile squander his sentimental (read artistic and real) life.

His fault lies in the fact that he cannot recognize that Beauty has to be found in “typical” and “characteristic” qualities rather than in “universally” tenable ones. Nevertheless, and ambiguously, we have to add that the universality of the Isle of Slingers as aesthetic microcosm is constantly underlined. Its particularist rather than holistic importance will be symbolized by the constantly emphasized insularity (read wholeness) of Slingers (in reality, and significantly, a peninsula). The fact that we are here concerned with a microcosm (a region) is also emphasized by the reference to the intermarriages between its inhabitants, to the small number (six or seven) of families living here, and by the family ties between Jocelyn and his ideal women.Footnote ³⁰ Avice the First is his cousin and marries another cousin of hers; Avice the Second marries a man related to Jocelyn in that they have the same surname; Avice the Third is in reality his great-niece. The progressive confinement, contraction, and shrinking of this microscopic universe renders the defence of its typical and characteristic genius loci an unconditional statement on minority cultures and their regionalisms. Nevertheless, ingeniously, in order to debunk all types of reductionism, even this already relative, already partial one, but still synthetic reconfiguration of so-called regional and minority cultures, regionalistic attitudes will in their turn be exploded by Hardy and shown to be unities produced by the mere sum of its particulars (individuals) only.Footnote ³¹ In the “General Preface” to the 1912 edition of The Wessex Novels, Hardy wrote:

This latter local/global contrast could be taken as a standpoint of what Kenneth Frampton, in architecture, has called “critical regionalism,” an attitude that tries to protect autochthonous culture without giving in to conservative impulses by remaining constantly “critical,” engaged as it is in a dialectical and continuous negotiation with global civilization founded on equality terms: “[t]he fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place” (21). Such “critical regionalism” can be applied to literature and most aptly to Hardy's aesthetics. The characteristic regionalism, the genius loci Footnote ³³ (WB: 239; vol. 2, ch. 5) of Jocelyn's birthplace lies, the narrator tells us, in the Isle of Slingers’ “insularity,” a vessel containing a mixture of times and peoples: “Like his own, her [Ann Avice's] family had been islanders for centuries – from Norman, Anglican, Roman, Balearic-British time” (WB: 232; vol. 2, ch. 3). This genius loci, nevertheless, should not be confused with a kind of reactionary defence of racial purity or racial essentialism as the product of a particular “geopolitical” space. In fact, as Jocelyn will have to recognize, regionalism is here more of a synonym for characteristic distinctiveness and typicality of a historical and provisional “here and now,” rather than the final outcome of a horizontal progressive historicity or the dangerous declension of an “earth and blood” ideology as used by the champions of nationalism, i.e., the Nazi Blut und Boden propaganda of shameful memory. Hardy is very clear on this point and purposefully relates it to identity-questions: “The Caros [who are the embodiment of regional beauty], like some other local families, suggested a Roman lineage,Footnote ³⁴ more or less grafted on the stock of the Slingers” (WB:232, 2, ch. 3) so that ‘regionalism’ is rather the result of a Derridean “grafting,”Footnote ³⁵ the result of a successive miscegenation of distinct cultures and peoples, in fact a hybridization which has produced “Avice as the ultimate flower of the combined stocks” (WB: 252; vol. 2, ch. 8). The question is then that of cultural and genetic combination/adaptation, not evolutionary heredity.

In the same way, heredity is deconstructed in the isle's successive stratification of the different and discrete geological cycles of timeFootnote ³⁶ which produce a whole – the historical island – which nevertheless, as Hardy makes clear, does not involve the teleological, “arrow of time” evolutionary pattern (Gould 41–59) of continuous progress towards perfection, typical of the Spencerian misreading of Darwinism (Himmelfarb 314–32) and its implied Whig interpretation of history; rather, the isle is the concretionary produce of successive yet discrete, final, and non-synchronizable, cycles:Footnote ³⁷

That is, Hardy was fully aware of the nineteenth-century pervasiveness of the racial discourse linked to the hierarchical visions of peoples that the social misreading of Darwinism had engenderedFootnote ³⁸ and chose to underline the invaluable uniqueness and “otherness,” of those who are thought to be, and are identified as being, uniform (“one”): the kimberlins,Footnote ³⁹ the Slingers, the Caros, the Pierstons.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jocelyn's dream of absolutes – the “essential” qualities he has dreamt of finding in the three real versions of his “one” and single Avice-dream – is ironically debunked when he is forced to recognize that the one-shape can only be a juxtaposition of three very distinct “names,” i.e., persons (Avice, Ann Avice the Second, and Avice the Third): “Could it be possible that in this case the manifestation was fictitious? He had met with many such examples of hereditary persistence without the qualities signified by the traits” (WB: 242; ch. 6). As traits do not imply physiognomy, and thus mock and debunk his dreams of “metempsychosis”Footnote ⁴¹ and spiritual heredity (WB: 244; vol. 2, ch. 6)Footnote ⁴², Jocelyn will also have to appreciate that the Many cannot be subsumed unto monisms or hypostasizations of the Ones of any sort (in this case physiognomic and geopolitical typologizations).

Nevertheless, in Jocelyn's dreams the women he meets are all referred to Greek and Roman deities; with these ideal and unsubstantial figures of womanhood, mere mythological, ahistorical and fictive types, he compares, to their detriment, the real, and all-too-substantial, ones. None of them, indeed, can rival, equate, or claim superiority over their ideal form. Thus we come across a whole repertoire of idols of absolute and mythical beauty: the Latin Venus, reincarnation of the Greek Aphrodite (compared to Avice the First), Juno, reincarnation of Hera (compared first to Marcia, then also to Ann Avice), and Minerva reincarnation of Athene (again compared to Ann Avice who is referred to also as Psyche, WB: 261; vol. 2, ch. 10). In fact, they are the three contenders who have to submit to Paris's judgement, the classical motif referred to in the novel through a reference to a picture by Rubens (WB: 247; vol. 2, ch. 7). Irony, nevertheless, lies in the fact that Hardy's nineteenth-century Paris, i.e., Jocelyn, does not provoke a Trojan war but will lose his personal war, wasting and squandering his most precious assets and property – his life. Ironically, he loves to conceive of himself as the powerful Paris, but, in reality, he has no choice at all, despite his thinking to the contrary (WB: 314; vol. 3, ch. 6): Avice has neglected him by not going to the appointment which would bind them, through Island Custom, for life (WB: 188–89; vol. 1, ch. 3, 4.); Ann Avice will decline him because she has already been led to Island Custom by Isaac Pierston, to whom she is secretly married, and, more satirically, because she is Jocelyn's mirror, his exact inconstant counterpart; Avice the Third – the last in his illusory “genealogical passion” (WB: 304; vol. 3, ch. 4) going from grandmother to granddaughter – will not hesitate to flee from the island with her lover, a Frenchman, in order to escape from him. In the same manner as women are depicted and compared to their mythical types, so Jocelyn loves to envision himself as the inheritor of the “genealogical” line starting with Praxiteles, Lysippus (WB: 233; vol. 2, ch. 3), Demetrius of Ephesus (WB: 261; vol. 2, ch. 9), that is as “The Sculptor,” but, as he is forced to witness, he will be derided as their modern mock-heroic progeny, a successful but unsatisfied A.R.A sculptor, as the Isle of Slingers is the modern demythologized seat of Jocelyn's imaginary Acropolis: “behind the houses forming the propylæa of the rock rose the massive forehead of the Isle” (WB: 255; vol. 2, ch. 9).

Fidelity to the dream of the fantast: “his bondage to beauty in the ideal” (WB: 325; vol. 3, ch. 7) will thus always minimize reality to something imperfect, deficient, and inadequate. The price that the Artists of the Absolute, the dreamers, have to pay for their perfection-dreams is horribly high. It either dictatorially compels one to shut one's eyes to orthodox (i.e., “cultural”) beauty, as manifested in this excerpt: “How incomparable the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest material things, when here, between those three sublimities – the sky, the rock, and the ocean – the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to a corner therein” (WB: 252–53; vol. 2, ch. 8); or, even worse, and tellingly, the price is the death of the longed-for object, perfection being obtainable only as a retrospective effect unattainable in life: “He loved the woman [Avice Caro] dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life” (WB: 231; vol. 2, ch. 3). Indeed, as a corpse she is “love rarefied and refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before.” (WB: 231; vol. 2, ch. 3). Jocelyn's words betray that only thus – as a dead body – has she become the manipulative still-life “object” over which he, as artist, unchecked and finally unrestrained, has full command: the mastery of the now, and only now, fully passive, reified, but, alas, lifeless woman, who has finally been submitted: “a language [Hardy's own textual appropriation], a living cipher no more” (WB: 229; vol. 2, ch. 3).Footnote ⁴³

This tendency to assume ruling control can be noted also in the scopophylic command and the voyeuristic attitudes he assumes in spying on women.Footnote ⁴⁴ Dreams and idealism, the narrator implies, undermine reality; unitary formFootnote ⁴⁵ and ideal beauty – the ordered, harmonious, watertight, intelligible plot that memory and creativity set with hindsight – are lies that can portray life's incongruities as perfect, but at the price of definitive crystallisations, hypostases (storiographic emplotments and ideal beauty) that deny life's complexities and render them hic et nunc unacceptable and tragic. The full gender-discourse anticlimax of his dreams of mastery will soon await him when Ann Avice, his feminine alter ego, assumes his dream-role in reality, denying him on the same grounds on which, he realizes, he has based his rejection of women: “This seeking of the Well-Beloved was, then, of the nature of a knife which could cut two ways. To be the seeker was one thing: to be one of the corpses from which the ideal inhabitant had departed was another; and this was what he had become now, in the mockery of new Days” (WB: 254; vol. 2, ch. 8), the new days of the new beauty (here also of the new women), one might add, when: “Perhaps divine punishment for his idolatries had come” (WB: 261; vol. 2, ch. 10, my emphasis). The final issue of his idolatries arises after Avice the Third has eloped and Jocelyn comes across Marcia, his former lover. They had not married previously, despite living together, because Marcia had left him, refusing to conform to people's expectations: “My independent ideas were not blameworthy in me, as an islander, though as a kimberlin young lady perhaps they would have been” (WB: 334; vol. 3, ch. 8); a remark which, we cannot fail to note, is directed at the reversal of global/local standard prejudices.

Global/local issues also figure prominently in Hardy's aesthetics. Let us now look at how his standards of beauty are defined, in order to unravel his aesthetic regionalism. Avice the First is attracted to him because he is “not at all an island man” (WB: 182; vol. 1, ch. 1); for Jocelyn, matters are more complicated: “But did he see the Well-Beloved in Avice at all? The question was somewhat disturbing. . . . She was, in truth, what is called a ‘nice’ girl; attractive, certainly, but above all things nice. . . . Her intelligent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful carriage, ensured one thing, that of all the girls he had known he had never met one with more charming and solid qualities that Avice Caro's” (WB: 185; vol. 1, ch. 2). Besides, Avice recites poetry, plays the piano, sings: all qualities that would make her a perfect match to Victorian eyes. But still, something in her disturbs him, something that Jocelyn clearly identifies:

Avice, that is, originally “local to the bone,” has submitted to “the tendency of the age” (WB: 187; vol. 1, ch. 2), losing her characteristic regional beauty, that now lies slumbering “under the veneer of Avice's education” (WB: 187; vol. 1, ch. 2). Notwithstanding their engagement, her failure to come to the appointment to carry out Island Custom (“premarital intercourse to test. . . a woman's fertility”Footnote ⁴⁶) will enable him to feel entitled to break off their engagement. The narrator, nevertheless, does not fail to comment ironically on Jocelyn's regionalistic pretensions and their outcome (his refusal of Avice the First's regionalism): “But he, in fact, more than she, had been educated out of the island innocence that had upheld old manners” (WB: 196–97; vol. 1, ch. 5).

The second woman he meets (as he is waiting for Avice) is Marcia Bencombe. He is immediately attracted to the “Junonian quality of her form” (WB: 191; vol. 1, ch. 4), a “new type altogether in his experience” (WB: 190; vol. 1, ch. 4). Though her accent is “not so local as Avice's” (WB: 190; vol. 1, ch. 4) she is not a kimberlin and the daughter of his father's “bitterest enemy” in the stone-trade (WB: 194; vol. 1, ch. 5). They live together for a time but, because Marcia's father does not consent to her marrying “a hated Pierston” (WB: 207; vol. 1, ch. 8) and because Pierston will not bury old hatreds,Footnote ⁴⁷ Marcia leaves him, preferring “scandal” to being “the wretched victims of a situation they could never change” (WB: 209; vol. 1, ch. 8).

It is during the long period after Marcia's departure (thirteen years) that he experiences the “productive interval” (WB: 212; vol. 1, ch. 9) that renders him a successful A.R.A. (WB: 211; vol. 1, ch. 9), when his energy is, to put it in Freudian terms, sublimated in art, “hitting a public taste he never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised” (WB: 212; vol. 1, ch. 9). At forty, he becomes attracted to Nichola Pine-Avon, the apparently final incarnation of his “vanished Ideality” (WB: 210; vol. 1, ch. 9); but, as soon as he learns that Avice has died, Nichola loses all her “radiance” and grows “material” (WB: 229; vol. 2, ch. 3), a mere “empty carcase” as other women had before. (WB: 212; vol. 1, ch. 9). Avice, neglected in life, can now – as manipulatable “corpse” (WB: 231; vol. 2, ch. 3) – become the vehicle for “the One” (WB: 219; vol. 2, ch. 1), “the only one I shall ever regret” (WB: 230; vol. 2, ch. 3). As a mere (lifeless) container of his fantasies, Jocelyn projects on her his would-be aesthetic ideal of regional beauty, but refinement (WB: 232; vol. 2, ch. 3, my emphasis) – canonical beauty – the “beauty of the accepted kind” (RN: 4; vol. 1, ch. 1), still undermines his inclinations, exercising dictatorial control and undercutting the legitimacy of his cherished projection of an “obscure country-girl” (WB: 230; vol. 1, ch. 3). To this discriminating influence he can now impute his philanderer's life:

The “idealizing passion” that holds him “powerless in [its] grasp” (WB: 260; vol. 2, ch. 9) that he had previously rationalized as an influence oozing from the island itself – “the weird influences of his descent and birthplace” (WB: 184; vol. 1, ch. 2) – he now specifies through a subtle architectonic symbolism: “The church of the island had risen near the foundations of the Pagan temple, and a Christian emanation from the former might be wrathfully torturing him through the very false gods to whom he had devoted himself both in his craft, like Demetrius of Ephesus, and in his heart” (WB: 261; vol. 1, ch. 9, my emphasis); indeed this explanation can be read as a reference to aesthetics and to the Neoplatonist emphasis, stressed and Christianised in Plotinus, of the relationship between beauty and truth present in Platonic Beauty,Footnote ⁴⁸ which dictates one, and only one, idea of perfection – the in itself “regional” though acritically so, Greek one, and canonically Western. This aesthetic opening bar, as it were, also neglects a reading of Hardy in terms of a geopolitical regionalism (which projects direct reflections of race in regional characteristics) in favour of a more liberal and critical adoption of regionalistic attitudes which prohibit Hardy's too direct co-option into politically devolutionary or conservative schemes. Platonic (universal and thus dictatorial) beauty is here clearly dismissed in the invocation of a hybrid and, most importantly, provisional beauty, a local, picturesque, regional and characteristic beauty ready to negotiate with, rather than incorporate, history's continuous anomalies and changes, the “irrepressible New” (RN: 6; vol. 1, ch. 1)Footnote ⁴⁹ and the “inexorable laws of nature” (J: 129; vol. 3, ch. 3), indifferent to man's condition.

Platonic Beauty is, in fact, both directly and symbolically referred to in reference to his next love object, Ann Avice, or Avice the Second, who is for Jocelyn “the epitome of a whole sex” (WB: 256; vol. 2, ch. 5). Jocelyn explains: “Behind the mere pretty island-girl (to the world) is, in my eye, the Idea, in Platonic phraseology – the essence and epitome of all that is desirable” (WB: 257; vol. 2, ch. 9). In this girl, “less cultivated” (WB: 237; vol. 2, ch. 4) than her mother, “defects” become “charms” (WB: 238; vol. 2, ch. 5). Notwithstanding his recognition that she is “fairer than her mother in face and form. . . [but] her inferior in soul and understanding” (WB: 240; vol. 2, ch. 5), he cannot fail to see her as “an artless islander” (WB: 244; vol. 2, ch. 6), an “uneducated laundress” (WB: 238; vol. 2, ch. 4), though simultaneously she is the “perfect copy” of her mother (WB: 244; vol. 2, ch. 6). He will soon have to realize that, far from being “one” essence, she is also and contradictorily, the “antitype” (WB: 259; vol. 2, ch. 9) of both “prototype” (Avice, WB: 246; vol. 2, ch. 6) and “type” (her mother, WB: 259; vol. 2, ch. 9). As already noticed, Avice the Second will be the “Divine punishment for his idolatries” (WB: 261; vol. 2, ch. 9), being “his wraith in a changed sex” (WB: 292; vol. 2, ch. 2) leaving him, for a man “of the typical island physiognomies” (WB: 258; vol. 2, ch. 9), a “black-bearded typical local character” (WB: 275; vol. 3, ch. 12).

Avice the Third appears at a time, when, having reached the age of sixty-one, Jocelyn believes that things within him have changed: “Once the individual had been nothing more to him than the temporary abiding-place of the typical or ideal; now his heart showed its bent to be a growing fidelity to the specimen, with all her pathetic flaws of detail; which flaws. . . increased his tenderness.” (WB: 286; vol. 3, ch. 1).Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, once he sees her “the very she, in all essential particulars,” the reincarnation of Avice the First (WB: 289–90; vol. 3, ch. 1), “his curse. . . was come back again” (WB: 290; vol. 3, ch. 2), and once more the dream of unity overcomes variety: “the three Avices were interpenetrated with her essence” (WB: 291, vol. 3, ch. 2). As we know, she will flee, so that Jocelyn will, once more, be forced to recognize that “the type of feature” is only “almost uniform” (WB: 294; vol. 3, ch. 2, my emphasis); indeed, in the three Avices, as he will have to admit, “the outcome of the immemorial island customs of intermarriage and of prenuptial union” produces features that are uniform only “externally” (WB: 294; vol. 3, ch. 2), so that unifying taxonomies are debunked as mere idealistic and fictive projections. In the same manner Beauty can be, ambiguously, the result of mere Baudelairean maquillage (see WB: 331; vol. 3, ch. 8).

Disenchantment will force the tragi-comic dénouement of the novel. Avice the Second dies, Avice the Third has fled. The “bondage to beauty in the ideal” (WB: 325; vol. 3, ch. 7), to type, will eventually cease, producing a final change (WB: 330; vol. 3, ch. 8) towards specimen. After Avice's funeral, Jocelyn falls ill and Marcia Bencombe, the stepmother of Henri Leverre, Avice the Third's lover, nurses him. After his recovery he is a different man: in his “revolt from beauty” (WB: 331; vol. 3, ch. 8), beauty is now only “a stupid quality” he is at last prepared to despise (WB: 330; vol. 3, ch. 8). His sense of “ideal” beauty being now “absolutely extinct” (WB: 333; vol. 3, ch. 8) he is able to accept, as an ironic anticlimax of his bondage to the Ideal, “his sciatica and her rheumatism” (WB: 334; vol. 3, ch. 8), so that he will at last marry a far from Ideal – according to his previous standards – Marcia, “wheeled into the church in a chair” due to one of her acute attacks (WB: 335; vol. 3, ch. 8).

It is nevertheless his mock-heroic, but fully earthly new being – from whom the curse of Platonism and its tyranny of the Ideal Beauty is eventually “removed” (WB: 333, vol. 3, ch. 8) – who is now able, as a result, to appreciate the variety of humanity as it is. In strictly aesthetic terms this will mark a far from puzzling new capacity to prize as direct equals both “the work of the pavement artist” and the “time-defying presentations of Perugino, Titian, Sebastiano [Luciani] and other statuesque creators” (WB: 333; vol. 3, ch. 8); a final and convincing new start, indeed. The transition, far from being a renunciation of art, marks his new anti-absolutist aesthetics – from Beauty to aesthetic regionalism (the regional versions of beauty), the plural beauty styles of the world – signalled also in the transition from the holism of the novel to the particularism of the mosaic-like and partial visions of his poetry-collections, an ‘aesthetic regionalism’ which avers everyone's right to express their personal idea of the various beauties and aesthetics – local and global – of the world. “[F]alse gods” (WB: 261; vol. 2, ch. 9) have, indeed, run their course: “At first he was appalled; and then said ‘Thank God!’” (WB: 330; vol. 3, ch. 8).