2000 MMLA
SCE Session on "Aesthetic(ism)s"

Matthew Potolsky
Department of English
University of Utah

Fidelity: Hardy, Shaftesbury, and the Cruelties of Aesthetic Education

"For if you grant admission to the honeyed Muse in lyric or epic, pleasure
and pain will be lords of your city instead of law" (Plato, Republic X).

"It has pleased Nature so to make us that we attain happiness
only by way of pain" (Sade, Philosophy of the Bedroom).

The modern institution of literary education rests upon a curious assumption. Unlike teaching in the sciences or the professions, literary education does not aim primarily for the transmission of methods and facts. Rather, methods and facts in this context serve the interest of pleasure: biographical or historical details and critical methods are not taught as ends in themselves, but as ways of "enriching" the student's experience of reading. The end result of this enrichment, moreover, is less an accumulation of knowledge than a kind of secular conversion, a moral, political, or intellectual transformation of the student's soul. It is, in this regard, the pleasure of reading itself that literary education relies upon to convey its lesson.

The intrication of pleasure and learning is, of course, a long-running concern in aesthetic and educational thought. Aristotle, for example, made it basic to his thinking about education. In a well-known statement from chapter four of the Poetics, he argues that the pleasure we find in art arises from the fact that, "in seeing [a] picture . . . one is at the same time learning--gathering the meaning of things" (1457; 1448b). Similarly, in the Metaphysics he notes that the pleasure of learning is fundamentally related to "the delight we take in our senses" (689; 980a). The neo-classical critical topos of poetry as a "guilded pill" that hides stern moral lessons within the pleasurable shell of poetic diction is yet another familiar version of this equation. Like a wise doctor, Sidney writes in a locus classicus of this idea, the poet brings the reader "to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste" (164). But while Aristotle and Sidney define pleasure as a concomitant of all learning, current educational models suggest that certain pleasures are inherently transforming. The author of this notion in modern Western thought is, arguably, Shaftesbury. According to Shaftesbury, our responses to art and to morality spring from the same innate sources. We respond with "affection" or "aversion" to the "beauty" or "deformity" of what we perceive, subjecting "actions, minds and tempers" to the same judgments as "figures, sounds, or colours" (Shaftesbury 178). Pleasure thus become a mediating term joining art and morality. Just as the student of morality will feel "the beauty of honesty," so the student of physical beauty will learn truth, proportion, and moderation (65). The authors of the 1921 Newbolt report on the teaching of English in England, which formalized ideas about English instruction that remain with us today, uncannily echo Shaftesbury in their claim that only the disinterested study of literature can teach "the three great natural affections of the human spirit--the love of truth, the love of beauty, and the love of righteousness" (21). The notion that literature can join the distinct realms of epistemology (truth), aesthetics (beauty), and morality (righteousness), points directly Shaftesbury's justification for what would later be theorized and institutionalized as aesthetic education.

But while this model has come to define modern literary education, it did not go unquestioned in the nineteenth century. In what follows, I would like to explore the challenge posed to Shaftesbury's model by Thomas Hardy's short story "Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1891). While there is, to my knowledge, no unequivocal evidence that Hardy knew Shaftesbury's work directly, his extensive reading in German philosophy makes it likely he knew of his ideas. It is thus suggestive that Hardy based this story loosely on the life of Shaftesbury's grandson, the fifth Earl of Shaftesbury, and organizes its narrative around the idea of aesthetic education. The story takes place at the end of the eighteenth century, and concerns the young noble woman Barbara's elopement with the commoner Edmond Willowes. When Barbara's parents fail to "unearth" (61) the lovers in the city to which they have fled, they come grudgingly to accept the unfavorable marriage. Eventually, Barbara and Edmond return home, and are welcomed on the condition that Edmond improve himself with a trip to the Continent. In an act of heroic self-sacrifice, Edmond is disfigured while trying to save the victims of a theater fire in Venice. Upon his return to England, he is rejected by his wife, and soon departs. Giving him up for dead, Barbara accepts the hand of Lord Uplandtowers, whom she dislikes but her parents favor. Shortly after the wedding, Barbara receives a statue of Edmond, which he had commissioned before his accident, as a gift to his wife. Barbara secretes the statue in her room, and, like a female Pygmalion, begins to visit it nightly. When Lord Uplandtowers discovers his wife's nocturnal habit, he resolves to "cure" her, and has the statue disfigured so that it resembles Edmond after the accident. Subjected to this shock, Barbara renounces her love for Edmond's memory, and becomes maniacally faithful to her husband--so much so, indeed, that "the cure became . . . itself a new disease" (90).

Consistent with Shaftesbury's ideals, the process of aesthetic education in this story aims not at a specific kind of training, but at a moral transformation of the student. In fact, the story measures the educational value of each of the "fine arts": visual (sculpture, painting), kinetic (dancing), performing (theater), and literary (the story's frame). Hardy, I would like to suggest, offers two uncomfortable lessons about the relationship between art and education. He demonstrates, to begin with, that art is by no means an inevitably benign means of teaching: as we shall see, works of art in this story regularly produce pain; and, far from creating free and cultivated individuals, aesthetic education tends instead to dehumanize. Hardy's point, I would argue, is that, despite Shaftesbury's optimism, ethics and aesthetics are not interchangeable, and that art may just as likely destroy as improve both the teachers and the students who try to use it.

As Philip Collins has observed, education in Hardy's writings is regularly tied up with questions of class and courtship (41). It is in precisely these terms that Barbara's parents question their daughter's choice of Edmond. He is, they suggest, "very imperfectly educated" (61). As such, Barbara's father agrees to fund a year's travel on the Continent for Edmond, and to provide him with "the company of a tutor" (64). He will undertake the study of "language, manners, history, society, ruins, and everything else that come under his eyes" (64). Under the influence of his tutor, Edmond should become "polished outwardly and inwardly" and will be able to "return to take his place without blushing by Barbara's side" (64). There is, let us note, an ominous allusion raised by this reference to blushing. For Barbara's parents, Edmond's blush is an emblem of his inability to live up to his new class status. As the son of a glass painter, he has neither the learning nor the manners to fit in with his new family. Yet in Ovid's story of Pygmalion, a constant point of reference for this work, the blush signifies life and humanity. Pygmalion turns to his ivory statue when Venus takes away the ability of the Propoetides--the first prostitutes--to blush. As punishment for their lack of devotion, Venus turns them into women of stone: "and as their shame vanished and the blood of their faces hardened, they were turned with but small change to hard stones" (II, 81). Pygmalion's statue, by contrast, first signals her animation by blushing. The prospect that Edmond will be "polished outwardly and inwardly" links his education to a kind of dehumanization: the ironic result of his cultural "polishing" is his replacement by a piece of polished marble.

Indeed, Edmond's increasing education results precisely in his literal and figurative dehumanization. Hardy indicates this process most strikingly in the progressive destruction of Edmond's body. The clearest sign of Edmond's successful aesthetic education constitutes the first step in this destruction. When Edmond risks his own life to save the victims of a theater fire, he performs an act of moral beauty in a site associated with artistic beauty. Ironically, though, this success marks the loss of precisely the faculties that made it possible. We find out in the course of the story, for example, that Edmond's disfiguration (Hardy emphasizes this word throughout the text) affects each of his five senses; this in fact is all we find out about his injuries. The tutor reports that Edmond had lost the power of sight in one eye (68). When Barbara first sees him upon his return, she notes that his hand is missing "one or two of its fingers" (72). And when Lord Uplandtowers has Edmond's former tutor draw a picture of "the disfigured head" (84) he immediately exclaims: "'Neither nose nor ears, nor lips scarcely'" (85). The student's aesthetic (from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning sense perception) education quite literally destroys his ability to sense. While in Venice recovering from his injuries, we also learn, Edmond has a mask fashioned to cover his face. This mask so resembles a "real countenance" (71) that Barbara is shocked when she notices it. It is constructed "of some flexible material like silk, coloured so as to represent flesh" (72). The mask "joined naturally" to Edmond's face, and thus effectively covers over his injuries; but it also indicates Edmond's literal transformation into a work of art. And while it accurately represents flesh, the mask can never show evidence of a blush. Thus it marks the ironic success of the student's education: when Edmond returns to England he indeed can "take his place without blushing by Barbara's side." As with Ovid's Propoetides, Edmond's final transformation into stone--his replacement by the statue--is heralded by his inability to blush.

The connection between Edmond's education and his dehumanization is also suggested through Barbara's thoughts about her husband's development. The more cultivated Edmond becomes, the less real and the more abstract he seems to his wife. Edmond's regular letters to Barbara reflect "the development of her husband's mind"; and yet, as he is no longer present "to fortify her in her choice of him," her own feelings begin to wane (65). In despair, Barbara writes to Edmond in Italy and asks him, "now that he was in the land of Art, to send her his portrait, ever so small, that she might look at it all day and every day, and never for a moment forget his features" (65). When Edmond tells Barbara that he had commissioned a Pisan sculptor to make a bust of him--later extended to a full-length statue--she worries that the delay will cause her love to diminish even further, and sickens as a result. Although Barbara seems to want the portrait chiefly as a mnemonic device, her desire foreshadows Edmond's more dramatic transformation into a statue. Indeed, the possibility that Edmond might be exchanged for a work of art is implicit in the way all of the characters in the story talk about him. From the moment he leaves on his Grand Tour, he is described in ways appropriate both the a person and a work of art: he is a "figure" (63, 71, 72, 75, 81), a "spectacle" (73, 75, 80), a "form" (77), and an "image" (80). Given the metaphorical implications of this vocabulary, it is not surprising that Edmond's dehumanization registers rhetorically as well as literally. When Barbara first sees him, for example, the educated-mutilated Edmond seems to her a "remnant," an "échorché," and "a specimen of another species" (74). The form she sees is "not her husband's" (75). After she finds the bitter and hastily written farewell note Edmond has left her, she can still only think of him as "an afflicted being" (76). And even months later, as she tries to imagine her early days with him, she mentally juxtaposes "that lopped and mutilated form" of the educated Edmond with the uneducated man "who had stood beside her" on her wedding day (77).

Barbara's response to the arrival of Edmond's statue--the final step in her husband's dehumanization--similarly suggests that, in the context of the story, education can destroy as well as enhance the student's humanity. When Edmond first returns, and before she confronts his mutilated features, Barbara notes that his education has changed him. His clothing makes him appear "a foreigner" (71); and although she recognizes his voice, "the enunciation was so altered as to seem that of a stranger" (72). But when Barbara first gazes upon the sculpture, she sees Edmond as he was before his education: "The statue was a full-length figure, in the purest Carrara marble, representing Edmond Willowes in all his original beauty, as he had stood parting from her when about to set out on his travels . . . . The work had been carried out with absolute fidelity" (81). Rather than returning, for example, to the day of their wedding, Barbara tellingly goes back to the moment before Edmond begins his education. Similarly, whereas Barbara's figures for the educated and mutilated Edmond dehumanized him, her response to the statue quite explicitly humanizes it. She describes the statue, for example, as "a specimen of manhood," and immediately confuses it with the "real" Edmond: "The mutilated features of Willowes had disappeared from her mind's eye; this perfect being was really the man she had loved, and not that later pitiable figure " (81). When Lord Uplandtowers asks her what she is doing, she says "'I am looking at my husb-- my statue'" (81). And in her nocturnal visits to statue, she kisses and "apostrophize[s]" the marble image as if it were her husband (83). In his account of Edmond's fate, then, Hardy questions Shaftesbury's faith in the beauty of morality and the morality of beauty. Edmond does indeed exemplify morality in his self-sacrifice, but loses his beauty as a result; and Barbara confuses the dictates of beauty and morality, rejecting her husband because of his deformity, and loving his statue because of its beauty alone.

For Shaftesbury, among the key qualities that join beauty and morality are measure, proportion, and regularity: our response to a work of art or a moral action is in effect a response to "natural rules of proportion and truth" (67). Perhaps the main function attributed to aesthetic education in Hardy's story is, significantly in this regard, the production of regularity. This function is the point of Edmond's education--Barbara's parents seek to make a "standard" aristocratic husband. It is also, I would argue, the main aim of Barbara's education. Everything about Lord Uplandtowers is regular. He is, we are told, governed in his desire for Barbara by "an idea, rather than a passion" (55). As a consequence either of heredity or of his early succession to rank, he had skipped the stage of life at which "impulse mostly rules calculation" (55). Throughout the story, Hardy repeatedly points to Lord Uplandtowers's undisturbed "equanimity," (56), his "mechanical stiffness" (66), his "still countenance" (77), his "passionless manner" of courting Barbara (78), and his "too exacting" method of seeking his ends (89). Barbara, by contrast, has "no more calculation in her than . . . a bird" (56). Like her parent's house, which was larger but "far less regular" than that of Lord Uplandtowers, Barbara remains impulsive and immature (57). The "first important act of her life" was eloping with Edmond (55). Although this act had been "planned . . . cleverly" (60), like most of her actions it "had been undertaken without much reflection" (70). Hardy stresses Barbara's difference from Lord Uplandtowers in many other seemingly incidental details. For example, she shows little control over the emotional swings of her "her ingenuous heart," and allows "her troubles to leak out of her" at inopportune moments (70). Her feelings are "as prone to change as the leaves of the creeper on the wall" (77). Even her facial features, we are told, "were not regular" (63). After Edmond's death, Hardy writes, Barbara was led by her nature, and not her desire, to marry Lord Uplandtowers: "hers was essentially one of those sweet-pea or with-wind natures which require a twig of stouter fibre than its own to hang upon and bloom" (78).

Given this contrast between Barbara's irregularity and the mechanical calculation of her suitor, it is suggestive that Lord Uplandtowers makes his first attempt at "tender relations" with Barbara at a dance thrown by her parents (56). As an art form that finds its beauty in an almost mechanical precision, dance was an important metaphor in the eighteenth century for the educating of society. Lord Uplandtowers, tellingly, has "a phlegmatic dislike of dancing for its own sake" (58). Dance is, for him a means to an end. It is a way of turning Barbara to his will, of educating her as yet untutored desires. Accordingly, when he arrives at the ball and he finds that Barbara "was not dancing" (57), he immediately leads her to the floor. She dances with him briefly, but soon pleads a headache and goes to her room. Barbara, however, uses the dance as cover for her escape, and thus for a transgression against precisely the social order Lord Uplandtowers seeks to assert. Although Lord Uplandtowers does not succeed in his initial effort at education, this episode indicates the direction his pedagogy will take.

If Barbara's education toward regularity begins under the sign of dance, it develops under the sign of theater--like dance a conventional model for the relationship between art and society. This education is charted in two parallel scenes in which Barbara "learns" by viewing a spectacle: the "lopped and mutilated form" of her husband (77). In each scene, Barbara endures--or is forced to endure--the "dreadful spectacle" as a means of training her sentiments (73). These scenes, we might suggest, carry the implicit cruelty of aesthetic education to a literal extreme. Rather than educating though beauty, Barbara's confrontations educate through horror; and rather than seeking to broaden the student's outlook, in each case the training serves to reinforce the dictates of domesticity. Whereas Shaftesbury definitively joined beauty, morality, and regularity, Hardy will suggest that an education in proportion imply an education in beauty, and can just as easily serve ignoble as altruistic ends.

The first scene in Barbara's theatrical education occurs when Edmond returns from his tour and reveals his disfigured body to his wife. This "performance" takes place in a small lodge near the house that Barbara's parents had given to the young couple. Hardy's description of this lodge points to its theatrical quality. Like a stage set, which simulates the outside world within the narrow confines of the theater, the lodge is "a small place on the plan of a large one--a cottage built on the form of a mansion" (66). And much as a stage set is all façade, so the rooms of the lodge are all but useless and "no bigger than closets" (66). The one architectural feature Hardy mentions is the "gallery" running around a central hall of the lodge. In this context, the gallery refers to an inside corridor on the second floor; but the gallery is also a part of a theater, usually designating the highest balcony. Surrounded by this figurative "audience," then, Edmond debuts his new features. After Barbara assures him that "nothing external" can affect her, he unveils his face. Barbara's response to the spectacle is disheartening:

She breathlessly awaited the operation, which was one of some tediousness, watching him one moment, averting her face the next; and when it was done she shut her eyes at the dreadful spectacle that was revealed. A quick spasm of horror had passed though her; but though she quailed she forced herself to regard him anew, repressing the cry that would naturally have escaped from her ashy lips. Unable to look at him longer, Barbara sank down on the floor beside the chair, covering her eyes. (73)

Barbara's reactions suggest a futile effort at self-education. As the teacher Edmond places the "truth" before her eyes, she forces herself, against her "natural" instincts, to serve the higher ideal of devotion and gaze upon her mutilated husband. Driven by an effort to train herself, she alternately looks at the spectacle and turns away in horror, divided between repulsion and "her natural sentiments of affection and pity" (74). Barbara continues her effort at educating her sentiments later in the evening. Upon hearing her husband's footsteps on the stairs, she runs outside in fear to the greenhouse. There she spends the entire night oscillating between the dread of seeing Edmond and the desire to test the devotion that "she ought by law" to feel (75). By the morning, devotion has won out, and she resolves to "accustom herself to the spectacle" (75) and "do her duty" as a wife (76). Edmond, however, has fled and never returns. But despite her initial resolve, the training does not pay off: months after Edmond's disappearance Barbara cannot summon up his form "without a shiver" (77). And rather than having her sentiments purified, Barbara seems "unmoved" by Edmond's fate or her mother's callous conclusion that all really turned out for the best (77).

Although she never sees Edmond again, Barbara is confronted with his mutilated form a second time. This time, however, her education--now figured as a "treatment" (88)--is directed by Lord Uplandtowers. Like Barbara's initial, self-directed, education this treatment also ties the act of seeing with the transformation of moral sentiments; but unlike that first education, Lord Uplandtowers's treatment relies on a work of art. The struggle between teacher and student, moreover, is explicitly couched in the form of a debate over the nature of representation. Barbara's response to the statue is an almost parodic version of nineteenth-century invocations of the "religion of beauty." When Barbara receives the statue from the Pisan sculptor, for example, she is strangely transfigured. She stands before the image of her first husband "in a sort of trance," "lost in reverie," and wholly unconscious of her current spouse (81). Lord Uplandtowers, noting this transfiguration, mockingly asks if she intends to spend her entire morning "worshipping" the statue (81). In order to hide the statue from him, Barbara moves it to a "tabernacle" she has constructed in her room (82). Soon Lord Uplandtowers notes "a sort of silent ecstasy, a reserved beatification" (82) on his wife's face; she returns "strangely moved" from her frequent nocturnal visits to the tabernacle (83). Curious, he decides to follow her, and one night witnesses the following scene:

Arrived at the door of the boudoir, he beheld the door of the private recess open, and Barbara within it, standing with her arms clasped tightly round the neck of her Edmond, and her mouth on his. The shawl which she had thrown around her nightclothes had slipped from her shoulders, and her long white robe and pale face lent her the blanched appearance of a second statue embracing the first. Between her kisses, she apostrophized it in a low murmur of infantine tenderness. (83)

In a way, Barbara's Pygmalionesque eroticization of the statue suggests that her aesthetic education has been a success. For the "absolute fidelity" (81) of the work to Edmond's beauty sparks a reassertion of Barbara's lost sense of marital fidelity--the beauty of art, in other words, leads directly to a moral transformation. She even apologizes to the statue for her "'seeming infidelity'" (83). And yet, Barbara's sexualization of the work, along with the fact that she takes on the appearance of a "second statue" suggests that her moral transformation is problematic: the actual effect of the work of art here is closer to petrification than rectification. Like Edmond, Barbara too is dehumanized by art. At her second wedding, we are told, Barbara "looked pale and the reverse of blooming" and soon came to irritate her new husband with "her lack of warmth" (79); rather than reversing the progress of this figurative petrification under the influence of Lord Uplandtowers, the arrival of Edmond's statue only hastens it.

Significantly, Lord Uplandtowers's anagnorisis upon witnessing Barbara with the statue turns not upon jealousy, but a fear for his name. "'This is where we evaporate,'" he thinks, "'this is where my hopes of a successor in the title dissolve" (84). Much as Barbara's restored sense of marital responsibility joins two meanings of the word fidelity (relation of husband to wife and relation of copy to original), so Lord Uplandtowers seeks to cure his wife by means of a similar theoretical turn: in order to assure the reproduction of his line, he argues for the value of an artwork that accurately reproduces its model. Lord Uplandtowers finds Edmond's former tutor--now a local schoolmaster--and learns from him all the grisly details of Edmond's injuries. He then defaces the statue accordingly: "What the fire had maimed in the original, the chisel maimed in the copy. It was a fiendish disfigurement, ruthlessly carried out, and was rendered still more shocking by being tinted to the hues of life as life had been after the wreck" (85). Lord Uplandtowers ironically justifies this aesthetic remedy for Barbara's refusal to reproduce with a theoretical assertion: "'A statue should represent a man as he appeared in life,'" he explains, "'and that's as he appeared'" (85).

His strategic application of this remedy--"'to good purpose, and not idly,'" he insists (85)--constitutes Barbara's second theatricalized confrontation with the spectacle of Edmond's disfiguration. The first night after Lord Uplandtowers has disfigured the statue, he hears Barbara opening the tabernacle, and then "a loud and prolonged shriek" followed by the "noise of a heavy fall" (86). Lord Uplandtowers carries the unconscious Barbara back to her bed, and elicits a repudiation of her love for Edmond. The next day, however, she refuses to repeat this repudiation, and Lord Uplandtowers decides that a full "cure" will require another "dose or two" (87). He has the statue moved to the foot of the bed, and places it in a tall wardrobe--"'a little shrine,'" he calls it (87)--which he has fashioned into a small theater of cruelty. Playing the role of a "diabolical showman" (Morrell 117), Lord Uplandtowers presents Barbara the next evening with this pedagogical spectacle:

He pulled a cord which hung covered by the bed-curtains, and the doors of the wardrobe slowly opened, disclosing that the shelves within had been removed throughout, and the interior adapted to receive the ghastly figure, which stood there as it had stood in the boudoir, but with a wax candle burning on each side of it to throw the cropped and distorted features into relief. (88)

Barbara's response to this spectacle repeats elements of both Edmond's educational disfiguration and Barbara's own attempt at educating her sentiments. Much as Barbara spent the night of Edmond's return in pious vigil, for example, so Lord Uplandtowers repeats his therapy over three entire nights. "Firm in enforcing his ferocious correctives," Hardy writes, "he continued the treatment till the nerves of the poor lady were quivering in agony under the virtuous tortures inflicted by her lord, to bring her truant heart back to faithfulness" (88). On the first night of these "virtuous tortures," Barbara simply begs Lord Uplandtowers to remove the statue; but her husband, ironically echoing Barbara's own resolve in her vigil, insists that "one gets accustomed to anything" and forces her to continue looking (88). The second night, however, she develops a "morbid curiosity," alternately looking at the "grisly exhibition" and looking away, much as she did in her prior effort at self-education (88). On the third night she breaks down, laughing hysterically; and like Edmond deprived of his sensory organs, she is herself rendered "insensible" (88).

Much as Edmond's aesthetic education culminates in his replacement by the statue, so Barbara's education at the hands of Lord Uplandtowers destroys the "real" Barbara and replaces her with a woman of stone. When Barbara recovers from her fit, she undergoes "a considerable change . . . in her emotions" (89). Responding to her husband's chatechistic prompts, she declares her love for Lord Uplandtowers and her hatred of Edmond. In a perverse fulfillment of Hardy's metaphorical characterization of her as a "second statue," though, Barbara now becomes an automaton whose very "fidelity" to Lord Uplandtowers proves burdensome. His perverse devotion to artistic fidelity returns as Barbara's excessive fidelity to him. "The strange thing now," Hardy writes, "was that this fictitious love wrung from her by terror took on, through mere habit of enactment, a certain quality of reality" (89). Lord Uplandtowers's homeopathic remedy turns out to be allopathic: artistic fidelity to nature produces not the supposed natural fidelity of a wife for her husband, but a simulacrum of fidelity that turns against its author. In a way, Barbara's newly instilled regularity is so precise as to be distorted. She becomes servile and clings so tightly to her husband that "her very fidelity" ends up "curtailing his liberty" (90). She is excessively jealous, and perennially fixes her eyes upon him. Barbara's transfiguration also--and appropriately--affects her reproductive powers, as she bears a series of still-born children; only a girl reaches maturity, leaving Lord Uplandtowers without an heir. Like Edmond, moreover, she wears the effects of her education on her body. After all of her abortive pregnancies, she is "enervated" "completely worn out in mind and body," little more than a "wasted frame" (90-91). It is thus not surprising that she, too, loses her life in "the land of Art" (65), as she dies of exhaustion in Florence.

The unfortunate success of both Barbara's and Edmond's aesthetic education does not constitute a closure of the problems the story raises. Both the students and the teachers may have died, but the process of dehumanization has not ended. Indeed, as Hardy's framing of the story suggests, the question aesthetic pedagogy must be extended to the act of reading as well. "Barbara of the House of Grebe" was included in a volume of stories entitled A Group of Noble Dames, first published in 1891. This collection is framed by a meeting of the fictional "South-Wessex Field and Antiquities Club." The group is storm-bound and so ten different narrators each tell a story related to local historical places. The effect of this framing, though, is to repeat the pedagogical dehumanization of Edmond and Barbara that the story as a whole relates. Each of the narrators in Hardy's collection takes great pains to demonstrate the veracity of his or her story. For example, the Old Surgeon, who tells "Barbara of the House of Grebe," regularly punctuates his story with references to its reliance in part on "tradition" (56), on "a tale handed down by old women" (63) and on "conjecture" by the villagers (87). He supports his descriptions of Barbara and Lord Uplandtowers, respectively, by referring to "miniatures in possession of the family" (63), and "the figures on his family monument" (77). The effect of these references is to give a kind of figurative life to Barbara and Edmond, to take them out of the realm of fiction and situate them within a recognized historical context. But no sooner is this life given then it is taken away--for educational purposes. The story concludes with a flurry of morals proposed by the listeners. Each of these morals turns the fate of the lovers into an illustration of some abstract idea, in effect draining the characters of the life they have been given. Hardy's narrator, for example, blames Barbara's destruction on "the ignoble ambition of her parents and the conventions of the time" (90). He also mentions "an excellent sermon" preached the by the Dean of Melchester, "unquestionably suggested by the aforesaid events." The Dean, according to the narrator, "dwelt upon the folly of indulgence in sensuous love for a handsome form merely; and showed that the only rational and virtuous growth of that affection where those based on intrinsic worth" (91). After the story ends, a number of the other antiquarians comment upon its lesson. The Bookworm suggests Barbara's return to Edmond after his death illustrates "a woman's natural instinct of fidelity," which survives even in the face of disfiguration and disparities in social class (92). The rural dean suggests, by contrast, that Barbara's love for the statue was a case of "passion electrified back to life," and not the result of "a latent, true affection" (92). The entire group debates the unique power of women have "of seeing the actual in the representation, the reality in the dream" (92).

At the end of his 1888 essay entitled "The Profitable Reading of Fiction," Hardy addresses the inevitable distance between literature and moral education. "It is unfortunately quite possible," he writes, "to read the most elevating works of imagination . . . and, by fixing the regard on the wrong sides of the subject, to gather not a grain of wisdom from them, nay, sometimes positive harm" (Personal 125). Hardy here focuses on choices made by readers, but his warning is equally applicable to all who seek to join art and education. As Hardy's story suggests on almost every level, art and education, beauty and morality, pleasure and learning, do not form the seamless unity that theorists following Shaftesbury have long insisted they do. Aesthetic education in this story disfigures and dehumanizes rather than elevating; it creates statues and automatons rather than free and moral individuals; art educates by inflicting pain as well as pleasure, and serves equally both the noble and ignoble ambitions of its teachers. By its very nature, representation inevitably produces the "wrong" choices Hardy mentions--and indeed makes it impossible to determine what a "right" choice might be. To this extent, any pedagogy that relies upon art and literature will have to face the likelihood of causing the "positive harm" Hardy fears. "What author," Hardy asks, "has not had his experience of such readers?" (125). So long as literary education continues to work under the shadow of Shaftesbury, Hardy's text compels us to ask the same question of pedagogy: what teacher has not had the experience of such students?

Aristotle. Basic Works. Ed Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.
Board of Education. The Teaching of English in England (The Newbolt Report). London: HMS0, 1921.
Brady, Kristin. The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin's, 1982.
Collins, Philip. "Hardy and Education." Thomas Hardy: The Writer and his Background. Ed. Norman Page. London: Bell and Hyman, 1980.
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
de Man, Paul. "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist's 'Über das Marionettentheater.'" The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
Ebbatson, Roger. Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed. Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993.
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods. New York: Harcourt, 1934.
Fischler, Alexander. "Theatrical Techniques in Thomas Hardy's Short Stories." Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1966): 435-45.
Hardy, Thomas. A Group of Noble Dames. London: Macmillan, 1952.
---. Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol 1. Ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
---. Personal Writings. Ed. Harold Orel. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1966.
Hunter, Ian. Culture and Government. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Johnson, Barbara. "Taking Fidelity Philosophically." Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Lessing, G. E. Hamburg Dramaturgy. No Trans. New York: Dover, 1962.
Marroni, Francesco. "The Negation of Eros in 'Barbara of the House of Grebe.'" The Thomas Hardy Journal 10, 1 (1994): 33-41.
Morrell, Roy. Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way. Kuala Lumpur: U of Malaya P, 1965.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
Ray, Martin. Thomas Hardy: A Textual Study of the Short Stories. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1997.
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967.
Scott, James F. "Thomas Hardy's Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17 (1963): 363-80.
Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. "Abjection and Degeneration in Thomas Hardy's 'Barbara of the House of Grebe.'" College Literature 26 (1999): 1-17.
Sidney, Sir Philip. "An Apology for Poetry." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed Hazard Adams. San Diego: Harcourt, 1971.