SOURCE: “Vision Without Promise,” in Man in the Modern Novel, University of Washington Press, 1964, pp. 96–122.

In the following essay, Hardy argues that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent the “Masculine Principle and the Feminine Principle” and, as such, symbolize the tension between subject and object and their respective places in reality.

It would seem impossible to construct the problem of human identity apart from consideration of the mysteries of sex and procreation. The sexual character of the human individual, however inevitably mixed, no one person purely male or purely female—and, indeed, this indecisiveness only serves to emphasize the importance of the dichotomy—is radical. Chiefly in being aware of this character in other persons, which is the procreative potentiality, whether affirmed or denied, deprived or richly endowed, the capacity to bring forth many out of the one, do we recognize the otherness of ourselves.

Virginia Woolf's novel [To...