[HARDY-Ll] Tess and Sleeping Women

[JoAnna Mink]

Shortly after reading some latest posts about Tess asleep in The Chase before and upon Alec's arrival (and how long she remained asleep), I started to read Sisters by Michael Cohen (citation below) for a complete different research project.  For those not familiar with this book, Cohen's intent is to show how sisters were depicted in 19C literature and art.  He doesn't discuss Tess but some comments are gemane to our thread.  
 
Cohen says, "For sleeping women in art, associations go back at least as far as the most famous unconscious sex-object of the Renaissance, Giorgione's Sleeping Venus from about 1500."  "Henry Fuseli painted one of England's sexiest sleepers in his 1781 The Nightmare, a pre-Freudian primer on the dream imagery of sex. ... Finished earlier in 1781, Sir Joshua Reynolds's The Death of Dido, from which Fuseli's painting derives, could as easily convey sleep as death (and even, given the subject, indicate gratified sexual desire). ... Reynolds's picture in its turn derives from a 1528 fresco in Mantua by Giulio Romano, titled Sleeping Psyche" (16).
 
Interestingly, Cohen opines, "In Romano's fresco, Psyche is watched not only by a satyr, but by the unseen watcher, Cupid"  (16).  Cohen goes on to point out that 19C English painters "frequently used the Psyche subject or related literary subjects that enabled them to show a beautiful sleeping woman who would fall in love with her watcher (or vice versa) when she awoke" and gives as examples Titanias, Sleeping Beauties, and Madeline (from Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes").
 
None of the paintings that Cohen uses are housed in Britain, with the exception of The Death of Dido in the Royal Collection of Queen Elizabeth II.  So, I'm not saying that Hardy would have necessarily been familiar with these specific ones, though we all know that his was quite interested in and knowledgeable about paintings.  My point is that, in addition to the layers of meaning and ambiguity of that scene in The Chase is the idea that the image which Hardy depicts follows this established tradition.  And the paradox of the Psyche idea, quoted above, is interesting.
 
Citation:  Cohen, Michael.  Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings.  Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995.
I hadn't realized there was such a tradition of showing sleeping women in art.
Cheers,
JoAnna
JoAnna S. MinkProfessor Emerita of English
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