IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: VICTORIAN AGE CONSTRUCTION AND THE SPECULAR SELF

A T AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDY was beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem: I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, “Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”For then, I, undistrestBy hearts grown cold to me,Could lonely wait my endless restWith equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve,Part steals, lets part abide;And shakes this fragile frame at eveWith throbbings of noontide. (T. Hardy, Complete Poems 81)