‘The Face at the Casement’: Window Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry

In a number of characteristic poems Hardy deploys the image of the window in a mode which serves to explore the notion of the threshold and ways in which the window-pane may be construed as suspending or pausing narrative, leading to immobility and entrapment, and thereby problematising issues of space and time, identity and alterity. In these texts the window separates inside/outside whilst simultaneously connecting them, converting presence into absence, distance into proximity, with the result that, as Maurice Blanchot suggests,