Phantoms and Fictional Persons:

Hardy’s Phenomenology of Loss

Elaine Auyoung

I
n the final pages of Middlemarch (1871–72), George Eliot’s narrator
acknowledges the difficulty of quitting “young lives after being long in
company with them” (832), while William Makepeace Thackeray, after
sending his final copy of The Adventures of Philip (1861–62) to the printer,
noted the “melancholy feeling” of sitting alone in his study (283), mourning
the “people who were alive half-an-hour since” (282). A hundred years earlier,
Denis Diderot, in his account of finishing Clarissa (1748), reflected, “With each
moment, I saw my happiness grow shorter by a page. Soon I had the same feel-
ing that is experienced by men who get along very well and have lived together
for a long time and are about to separate. At the end, it suddenly felt that I had
been left alone” (214). The diminution of happiness that Diderot describes
is due not to the outcome of the plot, but rather to the recognition that his
experience of reading will soon be over. If the problem of narrative closure—of
how to bring a story to a logically satisfying resolution—has long been recog-
nized as a central problem for narrative structure, then Eliot, Thackeray, and
Diderot alert us to the fact that coming to the end of a novel poses a problem
for readers as well.

Abstract: The end of a narrative, which has long been recognized as a problem for lit-
erary structure, poses a problem for readers as well. In the absence of conventional meth-
ods for examining this dimension of literary experience, this essay approaches Thomas
Hardy’s late lyrics as a gloss on the aesthetic and affective consequences of coming to the
end of a novel. Hardy’s intricate accounts of directing one-sided attention toward insen-
sible objects of desire, I argue, attune us to the pathos of thinking about fictional persons
that continue to dwell in our minds but exist nowhere in the actual world.
Elaine Auyoung (eauyoung@umn.edu) is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her first book, When Fiction Feels Real: Representational Technique
and the Reading Mind, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018. She has con-
tributed to Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies
(2015), and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015).

VICTORIAN STUDIES, Volume 59, Number 3, pp. 399–408.

Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.59.3.03
400 Elaine Auyoung

The sense of loss that these writers describe lends support to Catherine
Gallagher’s claim that novels accustom readers to “the necessary discontinu-
ities of feeling that must be suffered” in their actual lives (“Nobody’s Story”
276). While Gallagher celebrates the ease with which readers move “between
identification with fictional characters and withdrawal from them, between
emotional investment and divestment,” her suggestion that withdrawing from
a novel is an experience that “must be suffered” hints at a striking dimen-
sion of literary experience that remains underexplored (Nobody’s Story 280).
Investigating the nature of this experience, however, poses a unique set of
methodological challenges. Not every reader experiences separation anxiety
from fictional characters, and those who do have tended to describe this expe-
rience in metaphoric terms. Moreover, because the moment at which a novel
ends is defined by the absence of any further text, there is nothing on the page
for literary critics to examine. Finally, psychological perspectives on separation
are of little help, since they tend to focus on the long-term consequences of
loss and mourning.
In the absence of established methods for examining a reader’s experi-
ence of separating from fictional persons, I propose that authors themselves
can assist us with thinking more deeply about this largely undocumented
dimension of aesthetic experience. This essay considers a selection of Thomas
Hardy’s elegies to his first wife, Emma Gifford Hardy, as a surprisingly sugges-
tive resource for examining the experience of coming to the end of a novel.
Because Hardy’s late lyrics document the cognitive and affective challenges of
extinguishing a relationship in the mind that no longer exists in the actual
world, they attune us to the pathos—and to the surprising liberty—of thinking
about fictional persons and places that dwell only in the imagination.
To make such a claim is not to equate a purely literary experience with
the actual experience of bereavement that inspired Hardy’s poetry. Rather, it is
to recognize that Hardy’s elegies to Emma, a woman from whom he had been
estranged for twenty years, offer unusually intricate accounts of directing one-
sided attention toward an insensible, nonexistent figure. In these poems, Hardy
revisits and reimagines a condition that we already find dramatized through-
out his novels. The inhabitants of Wessex continually meet with material and
immaterial barriers that divide them from absent objects of desire. If Hardy’s
fiction displays an imaginative preoccupation with attending to objects that are
forever out of reach, his elegies center on speakers who find themselves newly
consigned to this mental state. As these lyrics work to illuminate the social and
affective contours of this condition, they become valuable to us in an unex-
pected way, serving as a gloss on an overlapping phenomenon within literary

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Phantoms and Fictional Persons401

experience: the struggle to reconcile one’s enduring impression of fictional

persons with the fact that the end of a novel leaves no further trace of them.
In many of Hardy’s poems, we find speakers struggling to reconcile the vivid
memory of a past experience with the fact that this experience no longer exists.
“Reminiscences of a Dancing Man” (1909) juxtaposes remembered scenes from
the dance halls of London with the consciousness that the dancers who once
moved across those polished floors have now turned to dust. The remarkable
vivacity of the speaker’s memory allows him to resurrect in his mind the embod-
ied sensory and kinesthetic experience of scenes that have long been over. By
evoking scenes of dancing both visually and acoustically, the speaker draws a
sharp contrast between the vitality of the remembered scene and his present
occasion of remembering, which in turn accentuates how much has been lost.
By representing dancing that has come to a permanent rest and, in poems such
as “To My Father’s Violin” (1916) and “Haunting Fingers” (1921), music that has
been forever silenced, Hardy mourns the loss not only of musicians and dancers
who were once at the height of human vitality, but also of specific social and
aesthetic experiences that are no longer available. The regret expressed in these
poems is not attenuated but heightened by the continued vivacity of the speak-
er’s memory: the more perceptual immediacy the scenes he evokes seem to pos-
sess, the more difficult it becomes to accept that they will never again be a reality.
Terry Castle, in her classic account of phantasmagoria, argues that when
Victorian magic lantern shows endowed phantoms and specters with a new
form of perceptual reality, the newly available experience of actually seeing
ghosts blurred the boundaries between what was empirically real and what was
only imagined. As a result, “the images in our heads” came to possess a new
degree of “haunting reality” (51–52). For Hardy, however, it is precisely the
vivacity of the mental representations that he is able to produce (both in his
own mind and in the minds of his readers) that renders him so painfully aware
of how far mental objects fall short of being material realities. For instance,
despite Hardy’s self-acknowledged sensitivity to the slightest perceptual cues
and receptiveness to the presence of ghosts, he firmly declares that he has
never seen one: “My nerves vibrate very readily: people say I am most morbidly
imaginative; my will to believe is perfect. If ever a ghost wanted to manifest him-
self, I am the very man he should apply to. But no—the spirits don’t seem to
see it!” (qtd. in Archer 37). We find the note of wistfulness that Hardy expresses
here amplified in his novels and poems, which are populated by characters who
are similarly frustrated by the failure of vividly imagined possibilities to become
realities. No matter how closely mental representations seem to approach real-
ity in their almost palpable vivacity, they always remain out of reach.

SPRING 2017
402 Elaine Auyoung

Hardy dramatizes this phenomenon in the poem “On a Discovered Curl

of Hair” (1922), whose speaker attends to a lock of hair that was once given to
him “to abate the misery / Of absentness” (7–8). Because this particular curl
has been miraculously preserved in its original state, “untouched of time” and
beaming “with live brown as in its prime” (13–14), the speaker marvels:

. . . it seems I even could now

Restore it to the living brow
By bearing down the western road
Till I had reached your old abode. (15–18)

The curl retains its conventional metonymic capacity to remind the speaker of
its absent owner, temporarily prompting him to retrieve the familiar impression
that its owner can be found just down the road. In retrieving this impression,
however, the speaker experiences a dissonance between the undiminished ease
with which he can imagine “bearing down the western road” to be in Emma’s
presence again and the impossibility of doing so in the actual world. Peter
Sacks notes that, as a genre, the elegy serves to repeat and reiterate “the death
that it mourns” in order to drive home “the resisted fact of the death” (239).
Hardy’s elegies remind us that this repetition is necessary not just because of
a refusal to accept the fact that the beloved is no longer available, but because
the mourner’s mind and body have become so accustomed to a world in which
the beloved is present. Sigmund Freud acknowledges that even when reality
testing “has shown that the loved object no longer exists” and demands that
we withdraw our attachments to that object, this is not an order that can be
“obeyed at once” (244–45).
By making visible the cognitive and affective difficulty of extinguishing a
relationship in the mind after it has ceased to exist in reality, Hardy offers a
means for understanding why novel readers reach for the vocabulary of mourn-
ing and separation when they come to the end of a text. The notion that char-
acters “go on living in our imaginations” has long been regarded as a naive
reader response, but once we recognize the substantial mental labor that com-
prehending a literary text requires, we can begin to account for why readers
can seem to be haunted by persons that never existed (Knights 17). As readers
move across the pages of a novel, they come into possession of durable mental
representations of unreal persons and places that persist in memory even after
the narrative falls silent. Regardless of whether a story draws to a close in a
satisfying way, the mental representations that readers have constructed and
reinforced over the course of a novel do not immediately vanish when the text
has come to an end. Just as Hardy’s speakers cannot instantly extinguish their

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Phantoms and Fictional Persons403

vivid memories of Emma, readers who come to the end of Middlemarch may not
instantly be able to get over Dorothea Brooke.
Here it is worth noting that readers who cannot let go of Dorothea are not
confused about the ontological status of fictional characters. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge observed that, “Images and thoughts possess a power in and of them-
selves, independent of that act of the Judgment or Understanding by which we
affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them” (641). Our
ability to make judgments about the ontological status of a text, such as recog-
nizing that it belongs in the category of fiction, operates independently from
our ability to comprehend and respond to the contents of the story itself. We
find contemporary support for this view from media theorists who observe that
audiences sitting in a theater immediately orient themselves toward perceived
motion and sound coming from a stage or screen and cannot help responding
to the perceived action in social ways. These theorists suggest that, far from
being irrational, it’s entirely natural that a perceptual system makes no distinc-
tion between actual and mediated motion and sound. There is no “switch” in
the mind that deactivates our responsiveness to perceived stimuli once we’ve
determined that it’s coming from an artificial source (Reeves and Nass 12).
Readers who are fully absorbed in the process of keeping track of everything
going on in a novel do not have attention left over to focus on the fictionality of
the represented persons and places. But they can, with remarkable agility, shift
their attention away from the scene at hand to reflect upon Eliot’s techniques of
representing Dorothea Brooke, upon her plausibility, or upon the fact that she
does not really exist. Having made these judgments, however, readers can still
redirect their attention to the text with undiminished responsiveness to the nar-
rative. Readers can recognize that characters belong in the category of fiction—
that they do not really exist in the world—and still respond to them in social ways.
If novel readers routinely describe the experience of reading in terms of
companionship with fictional characters without being deluded about their
ontological status, one feature that does distinguish this form of companionship
is its non-reciprocity. D. W. Harding describes reading as a “one-sided affair”
(139), in which the reader assumes the position of an onlooker or spectator,
while Stanley Cavell says that movies permit audiences to view a world “unseen”
(40). And while Michael Fried distinguishes between absorption and theatri-
cality in painting, whether the figures in a landscape seem to look directly at
or away from the spectator does not change the fact that no real interaction is
possible (103). In 1956, the sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl
coined the term “para-social relationship” to describe an audience’s one-sided
engagement with media personalities such as radio announcers and television

SPRING 2017
404 Elaine Auyoung

hosts. One-sided, para-social relationships can be entered into with “little sense
of obligation on the part of the spectator,” who remains “free to withdraw at any
moment” (215). These are undemanding relationships in which there is no pos-
sibility of real dependence. At the same time, this is also a relationship in which
audiences may be left with “real pity that must be kept to oneself, real anger that
is forever ineffectual, real love that is never to be returned” (Yanal 123).
To develop a more intricate sense of the affective consequences that come
with para-social relationships, we can again consult Hardy’s elegies. “Your Last
Drive” (1912) accentuates the one-sidedness of the speaker’s relationship by
having Emma anticipate all that she will be unconscious of after her unex-
pected death:

You may miss me then. But I shall not know

How many times you visit me there,
Or what your thoughts are, or if you go
There never at all. And I shall not care.
Should you censure me I shall take no heed,
And even your praises no more shall need. (19–24)

The many negations in these lines reiterate the fact that the speaker’s attempts
to visit her, to think of her, censure or praise her will be met with nothing. Yet
the poem concludes with the speaker’s determination to continue to uphold
his side of the relationship, remaining devoted to her despite the knowledge
that his attentions cannot be returned:

True: never you’ll know. And you will not mind.

But shall I then slight you because of such?
Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find
The thought “What profit,” move me much?
Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same,—
You are past love, praise, indifference, blame. (25–30)

Whereas “Your Last Drive” focuses on Hardy’s non-reciprocal attention to

Emma, “The Haunter” (1913) imagines the inverse scenario, in which Emma
says that she follows him as closely as his own shadow:

He does not think that I haunt here nightly:

How shall I let him know
That whither his fancy sets him wandering
I, too, alertly go?—
Hover and hover a few feet from him

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Phantoms and Fictional Persons405

Just as I used to do,

But cannot answer the words he lifts me—
Only listen thereto! (1–8)

This poem indulges in the imaginative fantasy that Hardy’s inability to detect
any sign of Emma’s spirit does not mean that she is insensible to his atten-
tions. She is by his side at all times, but unable to make him aware of her
presence:

Always lacking the power to call to him,

Near as I reach thereto!
What a good haunter I am, O tell him!
Quickly make him know
If he but sigh since my loss befell him
Straight to his side I go. (23–28)

If “The Haunter” expresses Hardy’s desire to imagine that silence is not nec-
essarily evidence for indifference, novel readers, too, display a yearning for
some kind of reciprocity. Gallagher has argued that, in Dorothea Brooke, Eliot
“gives us the disembodied spirit, the novel character . . . who only craves to be
us” (“George Eliot” 73). By proposing that Dorothea herself yearns to be real,
Gallagher indulges our own yearning for a kind of reciprocity that we know
we cannot have. We who have attended to Dorothea for so long without hope
of anything in return are surprised and delighted to imagine that Dorothea
thinks about us, too. The pathos bound up with this wistful pleasure reflects
our tremendous capacity for responding to social cues even when we know that
they are fictional.
Yet when we return to Hardy’s elegies, it is telling that the closest he comes
to imagining reciprocity is to represent two people similarly longing for one
another. In “Your Last Drive,” Hardy speaks to but never sees Emma’s “faithful
phantom,” while in “The Haunter,” Emma wants to reply but lacks the power to
speak. Neither can escape their para-social condition of being unable to make
contact with the object of their attention. The picture that begins to emerge
from these poems is that, as painful as he says it is, Hardy’s preferred imagina-
tive position is to long for someone who is completely out of reach. In this posi-
tion, he remains free from having to negotiate the conflict between competing
desires for connectedness and autonomy that reciprocal social relationships
introduce.
Hardy scholars have apologetically noted that Emma’s death awakened in
Hardy a resurgence of love and longing for her that he did not feel when she was

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406 Elaine Auyoung

alive. She became Hardy’s muse only after being permanently divided from him,
and he acknowledges as much in “The Haunter,” when Emma pointedly reflects:

When I could answer he did not say them:

When I could let him know
How I would like to join in his journeys
Seldom he wished to go.
Now that he goes and wants me with him
More than he used to do,
Never he sees my faithful phantom
Though he speaks thereto. (9–16)

While “The Haunter” emphasizes Emma’s inability to speak or act, a number

of Hardy’s earlier poems accentuate the dead’s dependence on the memory
of the living. In “Her Immortality” (1898), the beloved reminds the speaker
that the only thing keeping her memory alive is his continued consciousness
of her: “In you resides my single power / Of sweet continuance here” (37–38).
The shades in “The To-Be Forgotten” (1901) similarly anticipate a “future sec-
ond death,” when “with the living, memory of us numbs, / And blank oblivion
comes!” (6–8). And, in “My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound” (1913), Emma
says that she will accompany Hardy wherever he goes only as long as he cares
about her memory:

And there you’ll find me, if a jot

You still should care
For me, and for my curious air;
If otherwise, then I shall not,
For you, be there. (11–15)

These poems attune us, by analogy, not just to the pathos of a novel reader’s sus-
tained attention toward and affection for characters that can never love them
back, but also to the singular form of freedom that unreciprocated relation-
ships ensure.
Unlike other representational forms that solicit our one-sided attention,
such as film, theater, or the visual arts, the objects and incidents evoked by the
words of a novel are not available to our senses. The fragility of literary objects,
whose status as something rather than nothing depends on their continued
representation in the reader’s mind, means that the process of novel reading
involves the exercise of a certain kind of positive liberty: the world of a novel
can come into being only with the aid of the reader’s sustained mental effort

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Phantoms and Fictional Persons407

and attention. As a result of this effort, fictional persons and worlds can come
to be extremely durable within the reader’s mind at the same time that they
have no tangible existence outside of it. Susan Stewart reminds us that reading
“leaves no trace; its product is invisible” (14).
Because the particular mental world that an individual reader constructs is
inaccessible to anyone else, novel readers also enjoy the negative liberty of being
in possession of something that is free from the interference of others. Cultural
historians of the novel have long recognized that fiction provides readers with
“a separate dimension of affective life” (Gallagher, Nobody’s Story 192). When we
begin to recognize the extent to which novel reading is entwined with multiple
forms of freedom, it is no longer surprising that a reader’s relationship with fic-
tional persons, along with this relationship’s function and value, has remained
largely invisible to literary scholars. There is even a case to be made for why
readers might want it to stay that way. The companionship of fictional persons is
valuable precisely because it is resistant to the scrutiny of others, and because it
can endure even when there is no reason left for it to continue.
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

NOTES

My thanks to Aviva Briefel and Jonah Siegel, fellow explorers of “Haunted Victorians,”
and to Daniel Hack, for giving my presentation an afterlife.

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