Dichotomy Of Truth In Hervey's She Had No Gift

Eventually the dichotomy of truth and appearance underlying the portrayal of Hervey’s doubts about his wife breaks down, which is reflected in the disjunction of seeing and knowing and in the prevalent ocular strategies. In the narrative the accumulation of the vocabulary of negativity and emptiness conveys his frustration. Hervey accuses his wife of being unable to sustain his faith in the absolute values and of withholding access to “the secret of hearts,” which is summed up in a recurrent statement: “She had no gift” (167). This recognition is inscribed within the discourse which invalidates any interpretations of reality in terms of the surface/depth dichotomy founded on the premise that there is an enigma or “a mysterious goal” (159) to be discovered behind the veil of appearance: “But they had lived in a world that abhors enigmas […]” (161).
This observation anticipates the undoing of the hierarachy of cognitive activities which incorporates visual perception as the first step to go deeper to grasp the hidden truth and which can be denounced as misleading or inconsequential: “and now he was shocked to see [her appearance] unchanged. She looked like this, spoke like this, exactly like this, a year ago, a month ago – only yesterday when she. . . . What went on within made no difference” (157). Thus, the crisis he faces culminates in a discovery that knowledge conceived of as a search for truth or apprehension of reality is not to be attained : “What did she think? What meant the pallor, the placid face, the candid brow, the pure eyes? […] And yet how could he get to know? […] She looked lies, breathed lies, lived lies […]! And he would never know what she meant. Never! Never! No one