Central to both works is a woman--the only person in the painting and one of two real characters in the poem and certainly the main character. Both women are in the latter stages of life--the woman in the painting old, the woman in the poem dead. Both are despairing over their state.
Each work deals with this despair in different ways, however. I wrote in my last blog post about the lack of dissonance between background and subject in the Cézanne painting. In fact, there is more to the background. Characteristic of a few of Cézanne's portraits is a kind of bending, not-quite-right perspective, which we can see in the wood panels on the wall--they don't line up from one side of the woman to the other. I'm still thinking about this and how to incorporate it into my thoughts on the painting, but the main sense of the background anyway is darkness and bleakness, a reflection of her inner state.
The poem itself could be considered the frame for its main character's voice--and here there is great dissonance. The dead woman is plaintive, lonely, and growing more and more desperate (as evidenced by a quick glance at the first line of each of the first 5 stanzas (I included the 2nd line of stanza 4 as well):
stanza 1, line 1 (1.1): "Ah, are you digging on my grave
2.1: "Then who is digging on my grave?
3.1: "But some one digs upon my grave?
4.1 - 4.2: "Then, who is digging on my grave?
Say -- since I have not guessed!"
5.1: "Ah yes! You dig upon my grave . . .
The poem as a frame for her voice, on the other hand, is extremely ironic, perhaps mocking of her loneliness in death.
Although one woman is dead and one is alive, there is a parallel in the state of both of them, the perspective that the works take, as evidenced by their "endings." The poem leaves off with the dog's voice, taking up the whole 6th stanza:
"Mistress, I dug upon your grave
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting-place."
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting-place."
We don't get a return to the dead woman's voice, saying something like (obviously horrible writing), "Ah! Begone you wretch!" or "Ah, I thank you for your piercing honesty" or anything like that. Rather, we have to imagine her reaction--does she sink back in her grave, sad but accepting? Does she want to burst out into the air, screaming?
Paintings obviously don't "end," but just like the poem we do not see any resolution to the woman's plight--only her in the midst of it.
Neither work gives us much background at all about who these women are. For that, we must enter into the dangerous territory of biography: the artists who depict these women. Cézanne's woman is apparently a destitute ex-nun he took in. All but one of the female portraits he had painted in the previous five years had been of his wife.
I also know from research that the artist was a very poorly-tempered person who had difficulty interacting with others and so missed out on many models to paint. Not only that, but Cézanne himself was obsessed with death, having drawn up a will out of fear for death at an early age and turned to religion originally out fear. All of these things suggest that he felt a deep connection with this woman--also seeming to fear death and her fate. (Indeed he might've felt such a connection with anyone he painted, as he apparently took up to 150 sessions to complete a portrait.)
We can only speculate about the woman in Hardy's poem, though it is extremely interesting that the poem was first published less than a year after his first wife, Emma Lavina Gifford, had died. Also, only a few months prior to the poem's publication, he remarried--to a close friend of Emma's, Florence Dugdale. It seems impossible that the dead woman in the poem is not his wife, that he is not the lover gone off to wed another. It is well known that Hardy and Emma had a mostly unhappy marriage. Do we dare read into this poem as mocking his dead ex-wife?
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