Illimitable Darkness Analysis

As a phenomenon that interferes with the adequate perception of the empirical sense-data, darkness objectifies doubts about the possibility of knowing things. While reading the letter communicating his wife’s decision to leave him, Hervey “saw an illimitable darkness […]” (118). The perusal of the letter culminating in a confrontation with darkness is a metaphor of a failure to interpret the visual flow as an orderly text from which all the hints of the non-discursive and hence the ineffable must be erased. The wife’s incomprehensible decision which takes him by surprise opens up the realm of emotions, of uncontrollable desires, all that resists verbal articulation. Darkness which thwarts all the effort of the eyes to recognize shapes is a
The metaphor of “an illimitable darkness” doubly contradicts the visual capacity – it not only deprives the eye of light and thus the ability to see, but it also questions the monocular mode of perception by seducing the eye into infinity, which is ungraspable and offers no stable, definitive point to focus on, inviting the eye to enjoy the multiplicity of perspectives.
The dramatic situation sets Hervey frantically groping for the means of dealing with the “ugliness of truth” (154) exposed by Mrs. Hervey’s gesture to leave. Finding all his certainties shattered Hervey is gripped with fear that the overall configuration of his life has been invalidated and that the breakdown of the marriage might bring the “hidden stream,” which he was so eager to ignore, to the surface. He blames his wife not so much for her alleged infidelity but rather for her unwillingness to maintain decorum, which the narrator articulates by invoking the rhetoric of unveiling: “There was an utter unreserve in her aspect, an abandonment of
Hervey pursues his policy of restoring the privileged status of appearance and banishing “a terrifying knowledge” (147) by making his wife an embodiment of the ideal which is founded on the correspondence between the outside and the inside: “He was looking at the candid eyes, at the pure brow […] that imposing, unthinking stillness of her features, had till then mirrored for him the tranquil dignity of a soul […]” (157). Her beauty bearing the imprint of “marmoreal impassiveness” (157) equates her with an eternal and unchangeable work of art, “a wonderful statue” (157) and makes her a representative of immaterial transcendence. Hervey’s project of rescuing the dominant status of appearance accounts for this idealizing perspective which reduces her self-definition to cultivating unblemished femininity and endows her body with candour and purity, the attributes of spiritual innocence. By resorting to the power of sight Hervey hopes to restore the shattered world to its prior unquestionable coherence. Hervey wants to bring his wife into line with the rules of decorum and he supports his