1In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1980) art critic John Berger discusses the gaze between humans and animals. He argues that while the gaze of animals has the power to surprise humans (who see themselves being seen through the animals' eyes), this look has been “extinguished” with the marginalization of animals from society (Berger 37). In Thomas Hardy's novels, humans who encounter animals face-to-face and eye-to-eye often find themselves uncomfortable being seen through the gaze of the animal. In The Return of the Native (1878), for example, Mrs Yeobright shudders under the gaze of the adder. While Berger argues for the importance of metaphor in restoring the human-animal relationship, the adder in the scene can be read not only as a metaphor for the absent-yet-implicated Eustacia, but also as a living being in its own right. Of significance to this paper is the refusal of the human-animal gaze that occurs during the encounter: the turning away, or the desire not to see oneself being seen through the eyes of another, a desire that also occurs during interactions between humans in the novel. What happens to desire when the gaze flickers, is deflected, or becomes indifference? Furthermore, how might this affect the way one looks at – or away from – literary animals?

2Berger frames his essay with a provocative titular question: why look at animals? Chronicling the human-animal relationship, he posits a history where animals existed with humans at the center of the human world, living alongside them in their homes and working beside them in the fields. In this world before what Berger describes as the process from nineteenth-century industrialization to twentieth-century corporate capitalism that utilized Cartesian dualism to transform animal bodies into “machines”, “raw material”, and eventually “manufactured commodities”, Berger describes the gaze between an animal and a human (Berger 23). He writes:

The animal scrutinizes him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why the man can surprise the animal. Yet the animal – even if domesticated – can also surprise the man. The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension [...] when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him. His recognition of this is what makes the look of the animal familiar. (Berger 13-14)

3This ability to return a gaze, to look back, indicates a power on the part of the animal. In the words of Ron Broglio, “[t]raditionally, sight is possession at a distance: we take in to human interiority and reason the object of our gaze. When the animal looks back, the hegemony of human vision becomes confounded” (Broglio 58). The ability to gaze back implies another point of view, and if seeing is a vital way of knowing – a primary empirical process through which knowledge of the material world is acquired – then an animal’s ability to look back at a human implies its own way of knowing.

5The gaze, then, implies both power and vulnerability – in looking and being looked at – even without any further action or speech. Perhaps because of this felt power and exposure, the gaze has been studied as the site of the birthplace of ethical obligation, as can be seen in the writings of twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on face-to-face encounters. He argued that the face – which he defined as “[t]he way in which the other person presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me” – speaks more clearly than speech itself (Levinas 50). In the moment of the gaze, one’s “idea of the other” cannot remain an abstraction; it becomes a flesh-and-blood reality. Despite the brevity of the gaze, it communicates in a way speech itself cannot. In Levinas’s words, speech “does not have the total transparence of the gaze directed upon the gaze, the absolute frankness of the face to face proffered at the bottom of all speech” (182). He concluded, through the course of his work, that the face-to-face encounter demands ethical obligation to one’s neighbour, placing the needs of the other before the self.

6Yet unlike the power and vulnerability that both the animal and the human experience in a face-to-face encounter, the extension of ethical obligation to the animal in such an encounter was not a given, at least not for Levinas. If the animal could not reciprocate the ethical imperative presented by the gaze – that is, if the animal, unlike the human, could not put the needs of the other before the self – then could an animal be said to have a face? Levinas considered this question directly when it was posed to him during an interview with a group of students. Perhaps a dog could have a face – could act in such a way, as arguably the dog who aids Fanny on the Casterbridge highway in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) behaves – but could a snake? “I don’t know if a snake has a face”, Levinas responded. “A more specific analysis is needed” (Wright et al. 171-172).

   

The live adder regarded the assembled group with a sinister look in its small black eye, and the beautiful brown and jet pattern on its back seemed to intensify with indignation.

Mrs Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her: she quivered throughout, and averted her eyes. (Hardy 2005, 285)

8Mrs Yeobright’s discomfort at the gaze of the adder is striking: the act of seeing and being seen shakes her thoroughly, and she not only turns away but “avert[s]” her gaze – a verb that implies not only looking away but an attempt to “prevent or ward off (an undesirable occurrence)” (OED). With the previous discussion of the gaze in mind, one might ask, why does Mrs Yeobright react in the way that she does, averting her gaze away from the adder?

11Yet just because the aversion may be linked to a superstition does not render that fear as irrational. Dillion argues that Hardy complicates the easy dismissal by the reader of the heath-folk’s superstition by framing Christian’s anxiety with “another folkloric custom, applying fresh adder fat to an adder bite” (Dillion 24). While this “remedy” may seem out-dated – as Clym himself expresses – the doctor who attends Mrs Yeobright notes that the practice has some overlap with scientific knowledge. This mix of fact and folklore – with a difficulty of knowing “which seemingly outlandish folkloric beliefs and practices might nonetheless have some basis in truth”, as Dillion explains (24) – makes it difficult to dismiss the heath-folk’s worry of overlooking. Similarly, Mrs Yeobright’s physical reaction to the adder has a basis in biology. While the “universal abhorrence of these creatures” (to quote Carl Hagenbeck, the infamous exotic animal importer and creator of the modern zoological park) may seem like a stereotypical generalization, psychologist Paul Ekman notes that biologically speaking, humans are predisposed “to respond in a fearful way to snake-like shapes” (Hagenbeck 177; Darwin 44n). Aversion to reptiles is ingrained in the human body. As with Dillion’s note on Hardy’s depiction of overlooking in his supernatural short story “The Withered Arm”, his “portrayal of the act [of overlooking] from a variety of perspectives refuses to privilege any one view of reality” (Dillion 24). The adder may be a metaphorical stand-in for Eustacia through Mrs Yeobright’s eyes, or a potential “overlooker” from the heath-folk’s point of view, but he is at the same time a literal animal in the scene, behaving in the manner of a snake, with the power to look back, to hold the human as the object of his gaze.

12If one considers the rendering of the adder as a “creature” in the act, his gaze does indeed seem to interrupt “the hegemony of human vision” in the scene (Broglio 58). When Hardy uses the term “creature” in his novels to indicate an animal during an interspecies encounter, the depiction of that animal usually interrogates a traditional boundary that would separate the human from the animal: in this case, the dominance of human perspective. As Broglio argues, “[i]n this look from another species, we realize there are more points of view than our own” (67). The repetition in the sentence in which the gaze occurs emphasizes the reciprocity of the act: “Mrs Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her” (Hardy 2005, 285). In his essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, Derrida focuses on this act of looking that the animal performs during his encounter with his cat. He notes,

it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets [...] – it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat. (Derrida 380)

13Derrida describes his cat as

this irreplaceable being that [...] enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked [...] here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. (Derrida 378-379)

14Does Mrs Yeobright “see [her]self seen” through the eyes of the adder, as Arabella later seems to experience upon locking eyes with the pig during the slaughter scene in Jude the Obscure (1895)? Does she recognize something of the adder’s “absolute alterity”, his “existence that refuses to be conceptualized”? Christian Cantle’s use of the gendered pronoun “he” rather than “it” to name the adder – usually reserved for humans in English, as Suzanne Keen notes in relation to the gendered representation of the slaughtered pig in Jude – reiterates the existence of the adder as a named, mortal creature (Keen 376). Ironically, while Mrs Yeobright bitterly felt the refusal of hospitality when Eustacia turned away from her at the window – “I would not have done it against a neighbour’s cat on such a fiery day as this!” she tells the young Johnny Nunsuch as he walks with her on the heath (Hardy 2005, 276) – she turns away from the adder much in the same way. Does she recognize her own failure to extend hospitality to another creature? Furthermore, the effect of this rendering of the adder as a creature places the reliability of Mrs Yeobright’s perspective in question: not just in relation to her view of the adder in this moment, but with her earlier view of Eustacia and assumption of her daughter-in-law’s character and motives.

15Whatever the case, this face-to-face confrontation with the adder forces Mrs Yeobright to acknowledge her own exposure and mortality: perhaps it is this recognition that causes her to turn away. Mrs Yeobright and the adder – and Eustacia, as the novel soon reveals – are bound by their shared vulnerability, the vulnerability of all living things that is all the more poignant for the fact that in this interspecies face-to-face encounter, the animal is about to be put to death for possible human benefit. The thwarted desire of the animal gazing upon his killers parallels the undercurrent of desire in the relationships between the human characters in the scene (for Mrs Yeobright, the desire to restore her relationship with her son Clym), and the death of the adder marks a turning point in the plot. Mrs Yeobright dies, and shortly thereafter, so does Eustacia.

   

16The linking of these deaths is perhaps appropriate in light of Hardy’s view of animals as kin. In a letter written to the Humanitarian League in 1910, he argued for a “readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called ‘The Golden Rule’ from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom” (Hardy 2001, 311). Nor did he limit his extension of a primary morality to exclude the snake: in his poem “Drinking Song” the speaker explains,

We all are one with creeping things;
            And apes and men
            Blood-brethren,
And likewise reptile forms with stings. (Hardy 1976, 906-907)

17In his ghosted autobiography, Hardy even included as one of the only anecdotes from his early childhood an instance of being discovered with a large snake curled up with him in his cradle, “comfortably asleep like himself” (Hardy 1984, 19). For Hardy, there is no question that a snake has a face. Although he realized that nonhuman animals might not reciprocate this relationship, he believed humans had an ethical responsibility to all animals.

19In Philosophy and Animal Life, Cary Wolfe and Cora Diamond discuss the role of exposure and deflection in encounters with animals. Wolfe, writing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, points to moments that “acknowledge [...] not only the unspeakability of how we treat animals in practices such as factory farming but also the unspeakability of the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a reality” (Cavell et al. 3). Diamond suggests the phrase “difficulty of reality” to indicate moments in which reality resists thinking, becomes difficult to place into thought or words. She notes that when such moments occur, the result is often deflection, a notion she defines as “what happens when we are moved from the appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity” (Cavell et al. 57). Deflection turns away from the present difficult reality to focus on a comprehensible problem that supposedly is related.

20While the deflection of the gaze in the scene discussed is literal, Clym’s difficulty in grappling with the reality of his mother’s death – and his failure to reconcile with her before it – moves him to focus on the supposed “moral problem apparently in the vicinity”, that is, Eustacia’s refusal to admit Mrs Yeobright to their house – and to admit her suspected infidelity. As he approaches to question her about the day of his mother’s death, he meets Eustacia’s gaze through the reflection in a mirror, an echo perhaps of Perseus’s use of the reflection of his shield to slay Medusa. In their final moments together, Clym intentionally refuses to look at Eustacia, “turn[ing] his eyes aside” as he ties her bonnet strings, her hands too shaky with emotion to accomplish the task herself (Hardy 2005, 319). Faced with the difficult reality of Eustacia’s death, Clym becomes withdrawn from and nearly indifferent to the world around him, his deteriorating eyesight an external symptom of an internal loss of vision.

21By the end of the novel, Clym’s gaze becomes similar to what Berger later calls the look of an animal in the zoo. In the zoo, Berger writes, “the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention” (Berger 37, emphasis original). The animals, he argues, have been “rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize [them]” (34, emphasis original). In this marginal existence, the animals assume an attitude of indifference (35). Likewise, Clym’s existence after the deaths of his wife and mother is one of solitude and indifference: he walks the heath alone, is clueless to his cousin’s developing romance with the reddleman-turned-dairyman, and has “but three activities alive in him”: to visit his mother’s grave by day, his wife’s by night, and to prepare as a preacher of the “eleventh commandment” (Hardy 2005, 376). When Diggory Venn rescues Thomasin’s lost glove, she tells him, “[e]verybody gets so indifferent that I was surprised to know you thought of me” – a phrase revealing of her life as Clym’s tenant. Although Clym considers the possible necessity of offering his hand in marriage to Thomasin, he finds that his experiences have rendered all but the presence of his departed mother as marginal, unable to occupy a central place in his attention. Despite his turn as a preacher of the “eleventh commandment” – to love one’s neighbour as oneself – Clym ironically never finds his place in the community again.

   

22One might consider the literary relevance of Berger’s example of the zoo further. For Berger, the zoo is the site that reveals the “historic loss [...] irredeemable for the culture of capitalism”: the completion of the removal of nonhuman animals from human society, at least in places where capitalism has shaped the environment. In turn, this loss also indicates the removal of humans from the rest of the animal world. The human creation of the zoo seems to preserve a relation lost, but as Berger notes, a trip to the zoo often evokes a sense of disappointment. Historically, zoos are sites of imperialism and of scientific knowledge, of power through the demonstration of dominance and the accumulation and compilation of knowledge. Yet we go to the zoo not with the desire to feel dominant or to learn; we go to the zoo expecting something, expecting an encounter. Instead, Berger notes, we are left with the unsaid but often felt question, “[w]hy are these animals less than I believed?” (Berger 33). It is this “unprofessional [...] but fundamental question” that concludes Berger’s essay, erecting the zoo as a “living monument” to a dead relationship, to an “irredeemable loss” (36-37).

  

26Looking at animals in Hardy rewards an extended gaze. His depictions of nonhuman animals engage with many of the philosophical and scientific debates over human-animal boundaries that were taking place in the Victorian era. Notably, Hardy’s animals do not appear in his texts simply as mirrors of or companions to the human world. They are more than symbols or movable parts of the landscape; they exist as creatures in their own right, carrying out lives of their own unrelated to the humans they encounter. Their appearance in pivotal scenes exposes characters to the recognition of points of view outside their own, and to the possibility that all may not be as it seems. His animals suggest that there is always more than one way of looking. In the act of looking at these literary animals, one can begin to attribute value not only to what is known and capable of being catalogued, memorized, and recited as forms of knowledge, but to the unknown, to the never-knowable: not just the mysterious or the somehow sacred, but to the acknowledgement of one’s own limits and boundaries, to the sense that there are other ways of knowing and being, “Earth-secrets” as the speaker of “An August Midnight” suggests (Hardy 1976, 147), animal secrets to paraphrase Berger. Looking at animals in Hardy reminds readers that looking closely does not necessitate a division or loss of attention elsewhere. Rather, it calls for a multiplicity in modes of looking.