Introduction: Desire and the “Expressive Eye”

“In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury” (Illustrations 154) Hardy’s famous drawing of a pair of glasses superimposed on a pastoral landscape, an illustration for the poem “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury”, is chosen by Catherine Lanone as her starting-point in the essay she wrote for this volume. What better illustration could be found for our subject, whose problematics is the connection between desire and the gaze? Indeed the onlooker requires glasses to see the landscape better: are we not all aff..