The "madder stain" imprinted on Tess d'Urberville's arm is part of a motif which runs through Hardy's fiction. Similar to Barthes's punctum shooting out of the studium, the stain is a place where the Real erupts, a blind spot that eludes interpretation. In the diegesis of the tragic novels, it is a surplus object whose intrusion disrupts reality and spells disaster. This book attempts to approach that unknowable kernel of jouissance by using Lacan's concepts of object-gaze and object-voice--sometimes revisited by Zizek. The stain has a vocal quality: it is silence audible. In a world where sound cannot reverberate for lack of a structural void, voice is by necessity muted, stuck in the throat. Hence the peculiar quality of Tess's voice, a silent feminine cry that has retained something of the lost vocal object. The sound of silence is what Hardy's poetic prose allows us to hear.

The Madder Stain (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, 21)

Literature & Fiction

AnnieRamel

History & Criticism

Brill/Rodopi

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Books by AnnieRamel

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The Madder Stain (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, 21)