Party Like Hardy

Thomas Hardy. Hard to imagine anyone with such mustache game could have had any trouble with women

Let me add that this is not just about me exploiting everyone I know by making their most salacious stories public to my two readers. It’s about exploiting everyone I know for the purpose of showing how unoriginal their conundrums actually are. 

Anyway, I will of course preserve this person’s anonymity, but let’s just say that we are talking about a heterosexual man. We might not be. You’ll never know. Let’s call him Pierre.

So Pierre met his wife when she was 26. Years later, they divorce and he starts dating a woman who also happens to be 26. This doesn’t work out, so after a few years he meets someone on a dating app who’s then 26. They have a good run, but the relationship ended last year and he's since been hooking up with new love interest.

Do I have to tell you how old she is?

Anyone else's thoughts immediately jumping to Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved? Of course not, you have a life, plus Tess of the D’Urbervilles was depressing enough. Well, let me fill you in.

The Well-Beloved was Hardy’s last novel and follows the life of a sculptor named Jocelyn Pierston who falls in love with a young woman, then 20 years later becomes obsessed with her daughter and 20 years after that… Yeah, you got it – he almost marries the original’s granddaughter, who (good for her) elopes with a man closer to her own age. 

Life ain’t easy for a boy named Jocelyn.

Now, I am not in any way implying that the inspiration for this post is equally creepy, especially as the recipients of Pierre's affections are thankfully not related, but perhaps we are dealing with a similar pattern? Let’s explore!

For Pierston, the three generations of women all embody a certain ethereal quality he dubs “the well-beloved”. The women are actually quite different in character, just as all Pierre's 26 year old girlfriends have been, so this goes beyond having a particular type, and yet Pierston insists that they all possess an intangible, timeless quality that he devotes himself to entirely:

To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline or whatnot, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not recognize this as an excuse or a defence, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips.

In other words, he chases a particular ideal which settles only temporarily in one woman, never lingering long before soaring off to another. By never allowing himself to experience time by watching someone else age and he with them, Jocelyn is still described as a young man at 40 and 60. So is the obsession with a timeless well-beloved just about a man who doesn't want to grow old? 

Assuming that some of his impossible idealization is linked to his trade, this highlights how the feminine ideal's strong link to youth is what is in fact timeless and just as present now as in 1892 or even in year 8 when Ovid published Metamorphoses starring a certain Pygmalion who falls in love with a statue of his own creation. 

Are we to surmise from this that it's somehow more difficult for a man to accept that a woman's boobs will invariably begin to sag, if he is himself capable of sculpting a pair that will stay permanently perky?  

 Pygmalion and Galatea (1908-09) by Rodin, who also happened to consider himself a modern Pygmalion

Yes yes, I know I can’t reduce the spirit of the well-beloved to a pair of wrinkled tits. Idealization is much more complicated, but the fact is that youth is what all the incarnations of the well-beloved have in common, for Pierston as well as for Pierre.  So is Pierre a modern Pierston, cursed to continue on a quest to capture and hold on to the spirit of youth, or is it just a coincidence that every woman he dates is 26 at the onset? Are all these women, on a subconscious level, different facets of the same woman to Pierre?

In the world of music, we have a similar conundrum in Offenbach's opera Les Contes D'Hoffmann in which the writer Hoffmann is torn between his art and his flesh, as his muse, and his lover, Stella, fight for dominion over his thoughts.

The opera mainly consists of his tales of failed romances with 3 different women (or rather, 2 women and 1 automaton (it really speaks volumes about him that he doesn't realize he's in love with a wind-up-doll, even Pygmalion had more sense than that.) 

As with Piersten, Hoffmann recognizes the same spirit in the three women, whom he claims are all facets of one woman: Stella. And just like for Pierston, Hoffmann's exploits end in frustration as he chases the well-beloved in humans and robots alike, as one is dying, one is a concubine and one is, well, a robot – not exactly prime conditions for a solid, lasting relationship.

And to make matters worse, he is constantly foiled by a cartoonish villain, hellbent on cockblocking our hero. Or are these villains just an invention of a drunk author who needs to sabotage his love affairs to make room for his muse? I know what you're thinking; is it even worth the bother to sabotage a relationship between a man and a doll? In 2020, apparently so.

For Pierston and Hoffmann it may just come down to the same conflict of art and love. To feel inspired, they need the infatuation with the well-beloved which is basically an image of their own making projected onto a woman. But should that infatuation ever turn into a more earthly kind of love, the potent energy that comes from bending your neck back and gazing up at a very high piedestal evaporates.

So what can we conclude?

Well, if we see Hardy's novel as a parallel, then good news for Pierre! It does not end with a total shit show for Pierston, as he finally gets it together after the third generation of the well-beloved leaves his 60 year-old ass, and he stops hunting a fever dream and instead marries a woman partly because he cares for her, but also because he actually needs a companion that is neither made of stone nor a fickle idea. 

I’m not telling Pierre he should abandon all romantic ambitions and settle for cosy companionship, but maybe it would be interesting to date someone who’s not 26. Just to see what that's like. Now don’t jump straight into the deep end; start from 27 and work your way up from there so you don’t have a heart attack when you see how women your own age look without clothes on.

Or just get yourself a statue/robot/doll with really perky tits.