Journal articles on the topic 'Jude the obscure (Hardy, Thomas)'

In their evaluation ofJude the Obscure (1895), some earlier literary critics have justifiably (given the historical context) judged the text by the standards of the then dominant and sustained New Criticism trend, taking into account its symbiotic relationship with modernist aesthetics. The basic premise behind this conception was the aesthetic notion of structural and thematic unity as well as coherence and integrity of character. These notions were high on the agenda of the New Criticism of the 1940s and onwards. The narrative was found most lacking in this respect. An article entitled, “Hardy and the Fragmentation of Consciousness” (1975) by Harold L. Weatherby, a foremost Hardy critic, serves as an outstanding example of such a critical view. It makes the case that what ails Jude is its unruliness and disjunctiveness: “the brilliance of the novel's peripheries can scarcely compensate for a profound weakness at its center. Indeed the centre cannot hold: the book falls into fragments” (“Hardy” 469). Weatherby continues, arguing that “There is no unified authorial consciousness” (470), that “Hardy as narrator contradicts himself repeatedly in his estimation of what is right or wrong, good or bad, for his characters” (470), and that it is “an artistic failure . . . failing to achieve unity and coherence” (479). Hardy, in addition, is undeservedly dismissed as “the old-fashioned man from Wessex” (483) – which reminds us of the well-known “good little Thomas Hardy” epithets of Henry James's adverse judgment (Cox xxxi). The article also associates incoherence and contradictions in the narrative with attitudinal ambivalences in Hardy's own mind (473, 476). Undeniably, Jude is permeated with incoherence. Who can disagree? It is deeply involved in sustained and unsettled opposition and what may be termed the play of Derridean différance (Positions 14). And, indeed, Hardy himself acknowledges the tangle of disconnections and self-contradictions disrupting the stability of character in a notebook admission (which shows it to be his design): Of course the book is all contrasts . . . Sue and her heathen gods set against Jude's reading the Greek testament; Christminster academical, Christminster in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude the sinner; Sue the Pagan, Sue the saint, marriage, no marriage; &c., &c. (Life 272–73)

Jude the Obscure (1895) is traditionally interpreted as Thomas Hardy’s bleakest and most pessimistic novel. From the perspective of ecocriticism, it may be viewed as the author’s endeavour to challenge the dominant anthropocentric attitude of the nineteenth century. Relying on Darwin’s theory of the common origin of species, Hardy believed that people should recognise their connectedness and dependence on the whole living world. The novel implies that man should abandon his self-centeredness and embrace other perspectives. This, however, does not mean that Hardy does not see people as valuable and important. In a world where religion loses its power we should rely on other people. The implication of Jude the Obscure is that the way we treat each other is linked to the way we treat nature. Hardy’s pessimism is the consequence of his realisation that ideas of Darwin were manipulated and (mal)adjusted to society. The character of Jude Fawley is doomed to tragedy due to his hypersensitivity, which is incorrectly perceived as a flaw in the society which promotes autonomy and separateness instead of connectedness and mutual dependence.

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure got the most attention of the critical world in the nineteenth century of Britain. The theme was always regarded as the embodiment of original sin, pessimism and voluntarism. However, when the theme is analyzed again, it will be found something totally different. Hence, three-phase patterns are to be singled out for a case study in order to shed light upon some facts and conclusions. The first stage is the expression of optimism from the perspective of symbolism; the second stage is the representation of conflict between character and environment in light of Darwinism; the third stage is the exploration of rationality from the viewpoints of religion and feminism. What can be learned is that the story is meant to show readers the kindness tendency, the courage to face the harsh reality and a sense of rationality.

This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

Abstract: This article demonstrates the importance of Jude the Obscure's Oxford setting to Thomas Hardy's project of writing a novel of maturation that refuses to conclude with successful reproduction. Linking the character of Sue Bridehead with Hardy's interest in writing about Greek love by Oxford graduates, I show how Jude's coupling with Sue incites intellectual exploration rather than the reducing development to the ends of reproductive marriage or professional achievement. To narrate the effect of Sue's tutelage, I show, Hardy derails the novel's teleological progression in favor of a pastoral mode made possible by spaces where the couple can safely practice non-marital sexuality. By way of conclusion, I position Jude at the start of a queer pastoral tradition in British fiction in which setting is formally significant because of its historical significance to the sustainability of sexually nonnormative lives.

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure has frequently been read as Hardy›s social critique of marriage, class, and systemic education. Readings of the novel in this critical tradition have a tendency to simplify the text into an allegory emergent from Hardy’s own biography. I seek to destabilize these readings by instead engaging with the text as one not concerned with institutions but rather the underlying social codes that give them coherence. By pairing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of speech and counter speech with Lee Edelman’s queer critique of child-centered futurity, I offer a new reading of the novel that privileges codes and legibility as central to the novel’s critical project.

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

Abstract The aim of the paper is to analyse the idea of cooking/eating in two novels by Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure and Tess d’Urbervilles. Both works present the idea of food as one of the major points of reference in human relationships. One of the aspects worth analysing is eating as one of the most crucial primary needs. Another one is family eating. The meetings are preceded by careful preparation of meals (e.g. Sunday preparations in Arabella’s house or cooking in the house of the Crick family). The food often becomes the major topic during these meetings, showing in this way the idyllic character of family eating: the looks of dining rooms and kitchens are essential as well as the possibility of talking to each other while eating. This idyllic space of collective eating (according to M. Bakhtin) can be frequently destroyed by social conventions; when Tess was rejected by society, she used to eat alone and did not take care of what she eats. Both novels explore the idea of food making it important for the creation of an idyll.

The societal phenomenon of self-blame disproportionately impacts women who encounter tragedies as wives and mothers. This is demonstrated in Jude the Obscure (1896) by Thomas Hardy, one of the most controversial pieces in Victorian literature. With the use of textual analysis and the application of feminist theory concentrating on Clarissa Pinkola Estes' idea of the female psychic slumber in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves (1995), this paper inspects Hardy's character of the enigmatic Sue Bridehead, aiming to unearth the underlying causes of her spiritual suicide after the three children’s death. Estes’ notion of spiritual demise indicates a woman’s submission to conventionality after encountering tragedy, especially during marriage and motherhood. As a nonconformist within a traditional societal framework, Sue’s transformation from Part III to VI of the book stands out as she shifts from being a free spirit to a conventional wife after encountering tribulations. Her spiritual suicide stems from three interrelated factors: Regret for her children’s short life; culpability; and her idea that it is God’s way of punishing her for her nonconformist beliefs. This convergence weaves together a memorable picture of a woman's spiritual self-destruction amidst traumatic events and the expectations of a conventional society that women should submit to their husbands and renounce whatever unorthodox beliefs they have.

[Hardy] is too fond — and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books — of writing like a man “who has been at a great feast of languages and stole the scraps,” or, in plain English, of making experiments in a form of language which he does not seem clearly to understand, and in a style for which he was assuredly not born. (Mowbray Morris)No reader can fail to notice — and few critics have failed to deplore — the ponderous allusions to literature and art which strew with their initial capitals the pages of Hardy’s early novels. . . . The mark of the autodidact is perhaps to be found not so much in what he knows as in how he regards the world of knowledge. . . . Hardy may have known more than many a man with a university education, but he lacked the kind of intellectual as well as social assurance that such an education might have given him. (Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, Michael Millgate)DESPITE A GAP OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS between these two statements, they exhibit little difference with regard to an issue that has drawn critical comment since first publication of Thomas Hardy’s novels: the language of the texts. Morris and Millgate both disapprove of Hardy’s style because of its overt use of quotation, but behind this lies the view that good style depends upon correct language, and that the ability to use language correctly is the preserve of a select few by virtue of their class or education. In the one hundred years and more since Hardy wrote the novels, there are many instances of critics sharing this opinion. And yet, of course, from the early 1970s onwards, new theoretical approaches to language have increasingly dominated critical practice, changing rapidly the premises of literary interpretation. More specifically, the relationship between literature, language, and education has been theorized as an ideological matrix requiring precise historical and political analysis. The late nineteenth century in England, with its dramatic changes in State Education and the cultural crisis leading to fin-de-siècle decadence has proved fertile ground for investigations of these issues, which have indeed cited Hardy’s texts in the process.1 This article invokes that research in its focus upon Jude the Obscure — the novel by Hardy that most explicitly explores the links between education, literature, and language in the context of class.

This essay argues that the phenomenology of light in Thomas Hardy's novels affords a key to his representation of subjectivity. The lighting of most scenes in nineteenth-century fiction is never specified. But from the spectacular lighting effects of Hardy's early sensation novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), to the futile quest for the "City of Light" in Jude the Obscure (1895) and the burned-out pyrotechnics of his last narrative, The Well-Beloved (1897), the light of Hardy's fiction is marked in a double sense——both described in detail and registered as exceptional. Rather than a figure for enlightenment, as in the realist novels of George Eliot and others, Hardy's light is the medium of subjectivity, and it characteristically occludes and distorts as much as it illuminates. Like the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose art the novelist excitedly recognized as an analogue of his own, Hardy represents light not as an absence to be looked through but as something to be looked at and closely observed in all its varieties.

The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved was first published in serial instalments (from 1 October to 17 December1892) with illustrations by Water Paget; see Figure 6) in the Illustrated London News and were published simultaneously with the same title in the American magazine Harper's Bazar. It then appeared in book form, with substantial revisions, as The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament in 1897, and was, in fact, the last of Hardy's novels to appear (Jude the Obscure being published in 1895).

IS THERE A VICTORIAN WRITER who has won as much attention in the last few years, critical or popular, as Oscar Wilde? One or two decades ago, Hardy, Dickens, and the Brontës were the Victorians that large numbers of people wanted to read, discuss, and see on film and stage. It seems like another era that saw Nicholas Nickelby ruling on the Great White Way. The decline of Dickens’s mass appeal was probably signaled some time ago with an episode of the TV series Law and Order in which a murder case resulted from a business feud over a disastrous Broadway production of Bleak House. The Brontës have fared no better; the musical Jane Eyre, after some of the worst reviews ever to have greeted a musical, recently closed on Broadway, its producers in its last weeks having resorted to advertising on milk cartons. Although Hardy reportedly continues to top the sales of nineteenth-century British classics, Michael Winterbottom’s 2001 film adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, set during the California Gold Rush, played to mixed reviews and nearly empty theaters, its gloomy fealty to the spirit of Hardy’s fiction, not unlike Winterbottom’s brooding version of Jude the Obscure, an evident obstacle for most audiences.

In the final volume of a trilogy about the concept of culture and its relation to politics, Francis Mulhern defines a new genre, the condition of culture novel, and traces it from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, reading off from it middleclass anxieties about the rise of the working-class movement. What does it mean about the novel or about the working-class movement itself that so many working-class characters are killed off by their aspiration to culture or are presented as murderers of their so-called superiors? Is the aspiration itself fundamentally flawed, or is the flaw in the novels? Mulhern’s persuasive allegorical readings can be read as a fascinating application of the Greimasian semiotic square as well as a renewal of Mulhern’s epic debate with the intellectual historian Stefan Collini, in the pages of New Left Review, over the proper relation between culture and politics.

This study examines the perpetual suffering of the farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants who were forced to abandon their habitat from Wessex and settle in big industrial cities of England. This forced migration was due to the industrialization and mechanization of the rural areas of Wessex which finally led to the environmental destruction during the critical period of the nineteenth century in the history of England. The peasants and farmers, who lost all sources of living, were heading towards the big cities in the hope of finding a new opportunity and a better way of living. As a result of this displacement, the moral and the social values of the English peasantry changed greatly. The life of the displaced farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants underwent powerful transformations as a result of the social change in the cities. There, they faced unforgettable social problems that destroyed the dreams and aspirations of most of them in life. The anguish and the agonies of the afflicted group of the farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants are vividly reflected in Thomas Hardy’s major novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge focuses on the tragic plight of the English peasantry when they come into contact with the people from the cities. Jude the Obscure (1895) portrays the disappointment and the tragedy of the ambitious countrymen who think that the glitter of the industrial cities offers them more happiness than the simple beauty of the rural society.

King sago palm or sago cycas are the other name of Kangi palm (Cycas revoluta) sago palm has been used as an indoor and outdoor landscape plant for centuries. The present study was conducted to estimate the effect of different priming treatments on seed germination of sago palm (Cycas revoluta L.) in the research area of Department of Horticulture PMAS, University of Arid Agriculture Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The Experiment consisted of ten treatments; the seeds without pulp were soaked in solution of 500, 750 and 1000 ppm GA3 and 2%, 3% and 4% solution of KNO3 for 24 hr at room temperature. In case of hot water treatment, seeds were primed at 80oC, 90oC and 100oC for 30, 20 and 10 minutes respectively. The effect of different concentrations of gibberellic acid (GA3), potassium nitrate (KNO3) and hot water on various parameters like germination rate, germination percentage, germination value, decayed seed percentage, time of germination, number of leaves and seedling height were studied. Significant results of germination rate (55.56 days), germination value (192.19) were achieved from 500 ppm GA3. Maximum germination percentage (73.33%) and number of leaves (2) were observed in KNO3 at 2% followed by 500 ppm GA3. Similarly lowest decayed seed percentage (26.66%) and time of germination (59.41 days) were noted in 2% KNO3. The seedling height was optimum (19.33 cm) in 3% KNO3 followed by 2% KNO3. Best germination results were obtained due to permeability of hard seed coat made by low concentrations of priming treatments (KNO3 @ 3%).Key wordCycas revoluta, gibberellic acid, potassium nitrate, germination parametersINTRODUCTIONThe sago palm (Cycas revoluta L.) is one of the important cycad commonly known as Kanghi palm or Japanese sago or simply sago palm. The cold hardy sago palm has been used as an indoor and outdoor landscape plant for centuries. It is used as a significant or focal point in any landscape design. Despite its importance in ornamental industry, it is facing certain problems regarding its germination due to its hard seed coat. It has been estimated that over 25% of all palm species require over 100 days for germination and they have less than 20% total germination (Tomlinson, 1990). So, there is a serious need of consideration to sort out this major issue. The reasons for this remain obscure, as little research work has been accomplished on seed dormancy in palms. Certain mechanical and chemical scarification, pretreatments were proved to be effective in germination of the hard-seeded species of Cycas and some other species (Frett, 1987; Chauhan et al., 2009; Rouhi et al., 2010). Cycad seeds respond to various pretreatment, including scarification, depulping and exposure to some chemical materials like gibberellic acid (GA3), potassium nitrate (KNO3) and soaking in hot water for specific period of time.The overall development of plant is regulated by the growth hormones, nutrient and environmental factors. They also vary in their germination requirement (Chauhan et al., 2009). KNO3 is most widely used chemical for promoting germination. Solutions of 0.1 to 0.2% KNO3 are common in routine germination testing and are recommended by the Association of Official Seed Analysts and the International Seed Testing Association for germination tests of many species (Copeland and McDonald, 1995).OBJECTIVESThe objectives of the present research was to minimize the time period of seed germination and to enhance percentage of germination by breaking the external dormancy through different levels of chemicals including GA3, KNO3 and hot water.MATERIALS AND METHODSThis study was conducted in the research field of Department of Horticulture PMAS, Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi. An experiment was conducted by using Completely Randomized Design (CRD).The seeds of sago palm were collected from 10-15 years old female stocks growing at a commercial garden located in suburb of Islamabad city. Uniform, equal and the same weight and healthy seeds were selected. The seeds had diameter 2.54 to 5.08 cm. Seeds were soaked in fresh water for two weeks to remove pulp from the upper surface of hard seed coat. Seeds without pulp were soaked in solution of 500, 750 and 1000 ppm GA3 and 2%, 3% and 4% solution of KNO3 for 24 hr at room temperature. In case of hot water treatment, seeds were primed at 80oC, 90oC and 100oC for 30, 20 and 10 minutes respectively (Table 1). Then seeds were washed with few drops of tween twenty in order to remove surface tension. Seeds were dried at 24oC room temperature. After sterilization, 10 seeds of sago palm were planted in each pot of 14 inch diameter containing sterilized soil media ( Sand, soil, FYM 1:1:1) at 4-8 cm depth and incubated in a greenhouse at daytime temperature of 25±2°C and relative humidity of 60-80% and watered weekly depending on weather conditions. Germination was evaluated at the end of 10 months. Seed emergence was recorded as germination index. The data for germination rate (days), germination percentage (%), germination value, seed decayed percentage (%) and time of germination (days) were recorded during the course of study. After seed germination, observations were recorded for number of leaves an d seedling height. The data collected was compiled and analysed statistically by using computer software germination; observations were recorded for number of leaves (Steel and Torrie, 1980).RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONAnalysis of data showed that parameters related to germination significantly affected by hydro and chemical priming treatments (Table 2). Seeds treated with 500 ppm GA3 showed maximum germination rate (55.56 days) which was statistically significant with control. Hot water treatments observed average germination rate. Minimum germination rate (159.88 days) was recorded in unprimed seeds. Gibberellin encourage germination by inducing hydrolytic enzymes that weaken the hurdle tissues such as the endosperm or seed coat, inducing mobilization of food reserves in seed and stimulating expansion of the embryo (Bewley and Black, 1994; Dhoran and Gudadhe, 2012).Germination rate (days) and germination percentage (%): The data regarding germination percentage indicated that difference between primed and non-primed seeds was statistically significant. Lower concentrations of potassium nitrate (KNO3) @ 2% and gibberellic acid (GA3) @ 500 ppm treatments significantly affected the germination percentage 73.33% and 70% respectively as compared to control (33.33%). Significant improvement in seed germination might be due to enhanced breakdown of reserve metabolites present in seed. The lower concentration of KNO3 has promoting effect on seed germination as compared to its higher concentration. This leads to supposition that higher concentrations exercise decreasing effects on seed germination by causing death of cells and ultimately result in loss of seed viability (Nascimento, 2003; Ramzan et al., 2010).Germination value: Analysis of variance revealed that germination value was affected by various priming treatments (Table 2). Result regarding germination value (192.19) was highest in T1 (500 ppm GA3) followed by 186.42 in T4 (3% KNO3) and 184.12 in T2 (750 ppm GA3). Minimum germination (74.43) was noted in control. The gibberellic acid has positive effect on germination value due to its hormonal regulation capability and retarding effect against abscisic acid present in dormant seeds (Var et al., 2010; Zarchini et al., 2013; Pipinis et al., 2015).Decayed seed percentage (%): Data regarding decayed seed percentage have displayed in Table 2. The difference between primed and non-primed seed was significant and primed seed have minimum decayed seed percentage as compared to non-primed seeds. Lowest decayed seed percentage (26.66%) was recorded when 2% KNO3 was applied followed by 30% when 500 ppm GA3) was applied. Whereas maximum decayed (66.66%) of seeds was occurred in untreated seeds. It is reported that scarified treatments have improved germination as compared to non-scarified seeds. Decayed seed percentage might be highest in control due to impermeability of hard seed coat (Fallahabadi et al., 2012).Time of germination (days): Potassium nitrate showed a statistically significant effect on reducing the germination time (Table 2). Minimum time of germination (59.41 days) was recorded in seeds treated with 2% KNO3 followed by 3% and 4% KNO 3 levelswhich took 63.81 days and 72.15 days respectively while maximum time duration was taken by control (204.58 days). Reduction in seed germination time was occurred when seeds of Descurainia sophia and Plantago ovate were primed with 0.3% KNO3 (Ali et al., 2010; Gashi et al., 2012). Stimulating effect of nitrate for seed germination might be due to dormancy breakage (Hilhorst, 1990). It stimulates oxygen uptake (Hilton and Thomas, 1986) and KNO3 act as co-factor for phytochrome (Mavi et al., 2006).Number of leaves: Analysis of data showed that number of leaves influenced by different treatments. Hormonal priming with 2% KNO3 gave maximum number of leaves per seedling followed by priming with 3% KNO3, 4% KNO3 and in 500 ppm GA3, 750 ppm GA3 and 1000 ppm GA3 in improving number of leaves per seedling as compared to other physical priming treatments, while results of minimum number of leaves were achieved in non-primed seeds. It was suggested that potassium is an important macronutrient that plays a key role in carbohydrate metabolism and photosynthesis (Marschner, 2011; Kazemi, 2013).Seedling height (cm): Analysis of variance exposed that there was a significant difference between primed and non-primed seed for seedling height (Table. 2). It was found that maximum seedling height was 19.33 cm influenced by 3% KNO3 while minimum 11.33 cm observed in 90oC hot water. It is reported that foliar application of K, improved the chlorophyll and fruits-NK content (Sarrwy et al., 2010; Marschner, 2011; Kazemi, 2013).CONCLUSIONThe present study was undertaken to assess the effect of different priming treatments on seed germination of Cycas revoluta L. The results of the study clearly indicated that germination rate and germination value were maximum at lower concentration of gibberellic acid (500 ppm GA3). While, germination percentage, maximum number of leaves, maximum seedling height , decayed seed percentage and time required for seed germination were observed minimum at lower concentration of potassium nitrate (2% and 3% KNO3). Hot water treatments had least effect on seed germination. CONFLICT OF INTERESTAuthors have no conflict of interest.REFERENCES Ali, T., P. Hossein, F. Asghar, Z. Salman and Z. C. M. Ali, 2010. The effect of different treatments on improving seed germination characteristics in medicinal species of Descurainia sophia and Plantago ovata. African Journal of Biotechnology, 9(39): 6588-6593.Bewley, J. and M. Black, 1994. Seeds: Physiology of development and germination plenum. Plenum Press New York, USA.Chauhan, J., Y. Tomar, N. I. Singh and S. Ali, 2009. Effect of growth hormones on seed germination and seedling growth of black gram and horse gram. Journal of American Science, 5(5): 79-84.Copeland, L. and M. McDonald, 1995. Seed science and technology (3rd eds.). Chapman and Hall.Dhoran, V. and S. Gudadhe, 2012. Effect of plant growth regulators on seed germination and seedling vigour in Asparagus Sprengeri regelin. Research Journal of Biologicalical Sciences 1(7): 6-10.Fallahabadi, P., D. Hashemabadi, R. Onsinejad, M. Zarchini and B. R. Kaviani, 2012. Improving germination rate of Cycas revoluta L. By using different cultivation media and scarification. Annals of Biological Research, 3(7): 3187-3191.Frett, J. J., 1987. Seed germination of Cyeas revoluta. Journal of Environmental Horticulture, 5(3): 105-106.Gashi, B., K. Abdullai, V. Mata and E. Kongjika, 2012. Effect of gibberellic acid and potassium nitrate on seed germination of the resurrection plants Ramonda serbica and Ramonda nathaliae. African Journal of Biotechnology, 11(20): 4537-4542.Hilhorst, H. W., 1990. Dose-response analysis of factors involved in germination and secondary dormancy of seeds of Sisymbrium officinale: Ii. Nitrate. Plant Physiology, 94(3): 1096-1102.Hilton, J. R. and J. A. Thomas, 1986. Regulation of pregerminative rates of respiration in seeds of various weed species by potassium nitrate. Journal of Experimental Botany, 37(10): 1516-1524.Kazemi, M., 2013. Effect of foliar application of humic acid and potassium nitrate on cucumber growth bull. Bulletin of Environment, Pharmacology and Life Sciences, 2(11): 03-06.Marschner, H., 2011. Marschner's mineral nutrition of higher plants. Academic Press.Mavi, K., S. Ermis and I. Demir, 2006. The effect of priming on tomato rootstock seeds in relation to seedling growth. Asian Journal of Plant Sciences, 5(6): 940-947.Nascimento, W. M., 2003. Muskmelon seed germination and seedling development in response to seed priming. Scientia Agricola, 60(1): 71-75.Pipinis, E., E. Milios, M. Georgiou and P. J. F. I. Smiris, 2015. Effects of gibberellic acid and cold stratification on seed germination of two sorbus species. 21(1): 107-114.Ramzan, A., I. Hafiz, T. Ahmad and N. Abbasi, 2010. Effect of priming with potassium nitrate and dehusking on seed germination of gladiolus (Gladiolus alatus). Pakistan Journal of Botany, 42(1): 247-258.Rouhi, H., K. Shakarami and R. Afshari, 2010. Seed treatments to overcome dormancy of waterlily tulip (Tulipa kaufmanniana regel). Australian Journal of Crop Science, 4(9): 718.Sarrwy, S., E. A. Mohamed and H. Hassan, 2010. Effect of foliar sprays with potassium nitrate and mono-potassium phosphate on leaf mineral contents, fruit set, yield and fruit quality of picual olive trees grown under sandy soil conditions. American-Eurasian Journal of Agricultural Environmental Science, 8(4): 420-430.Steel, R. G. and J. H. Torrie, 1980. Principles and procedures of statistics, a biometrical approach. McGraw-Hill Kogakusha, Ltd.Tomlinson, P. B., 1990. The structural biology of palms. Oxford University Press.Var, M., B. Bekci and D. Dinçer, 2010. Effect of stratification treatments on germination of Sorbus torminalis L. Crantz (wild service tree) seeds with different origins. African Journal of Biotechnology, 9(34): 5535-5541.Zarchini, M., D. Hashemabadi, N. Negahdar and S. Zarchini, 2013. Improvement seed germination of wild service tree (Sorbus aucoparia L.) by gibberellic acid. Annals of Biological Research, 4(1): 72-74.

This article discusses two prevalent tensions in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: Jude’s failed attempts to become a Christminster scholar, and his vexed sexual relationships. At different points in the novel’s publication history, Hardy figures each of these tensions as the novel’s primary conflict. By so doing, he seems to invite the reader to decide whether the novel is really about “the tragedy of unfulfilled aims” or “a deadly war waged between the flesh and spirit.” Reading the novel through a psychoanalytic framework, I argue that Hardy offers this as a false choice. Rather, I suggest that Jude’s academic and sexual ambitions are simply two manifestations of a single antisocial fantasy.

The relationship between reality and literature was and still is debated in intellectual circles. A literary text is not a historical text. In the latter case, authentic facts and real people are reported who can be localized in time and space, whereas in the literary text everything is in the imagination, in the author's creative faculty. He has the latitude, for example, to take real facts and to scramble the tracks. This is to say that, in the literary text, one can find in the final analysis, an analogy, a connection with reality. This is the whole object of this article which is interested in a literary character Jude Obscure of the eponymous novel by Joseph Conrad and on one of the most famous kings of the United Kingdom Henry VIII especially in relation to their behavior compared to the norms social and Christian religion.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the great English novelists of the late Victorian era. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are among his most famous novels. If he was not directly influenced by Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetics, Hardy was very much inspired by the heroine of Madame Bovary. Indeed, quite a few of Hardy’s female characters, whether in his novels or in his short stories, suffer with varying degrees from “bovarysme’, the disease of imagination and affectivity which is one of Emma Bovary’s central features. This paper aims to shed light on the posterity of Flaubert’s character through Eustacia Vye, the heroine of The Return of the Native, to show to what extent she represents not a pale imitation but an original variation on an essential model of Western literature.

Abstract When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes the fixity of meaning. There are several concerns linked to the growing primacy of literacy that appear time and again in Hardy’s novels, specifically: the alternative literacies of the lesser educated, semiotic multiplicities, and the transformative potential of spelling mistakes. I suggest that Hardy’s treatment of these themes demonstrates a sustained effort to ‘kill the letter’ and challenge the assumption of progress made by the various educational reforms that had taken place in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Abstract In this article I argue that ‘the formation of the character’ of the teacher, a phrase coined by the pioneer of elementary-school training, James Kay-Shuttleworth, was of as much concern to the novelist as it was to the educationalist. Focusing on what became a classic depiction of Victorian teacher training in Jude the Obscure (1895), I situate Hardy among those educationalists and men of letters held responsible for refashioning character to suit the liberal currents of late nineteenth-century culture. Hardy read about the issue of formation in sources as varied as the letters of his sister Kate, who trained to be a teacher at Salisbury (1877–1879), and the reports of his acquaintance, and chief inspector of women’s training colleges (1885–1894), Joshua Fitch. At times his novel reflects the views of the inspectorate, but it also accommodates those who challenged the conception of the teacher that was otherwise imposed upon them. This article therefore contributes to recent interest in overlooked perspectives in the Victorian institution by addressing the ways in which women began shaping a profession in which they had become by far the largest constituent.

John Rawls and Alasdair Macintyre are usually portrayed as opponents in the liberal-communitarian debate. However, Stanley Cavell’s critique of Rawls’ early paper “Two Concepts of Rules”, helps us recognize a similarity between their accounts of rules, games and practices and the role that these play in moral life. This paper shows that both authors pay insufficient attention to personal relationships, the flexibility of our moral life, and the need to take responsibility for our moral positions. A scene from Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” is used to show how this presents a serious problem for Macintyre’s model of tradition-based moral reasoning.

This present article deals with the idea of the feminine voice in Thomas Hardy’s short story “An Imaginative Woman”. As a naturalist writer, Hardy portrayed women’s faith as tragic and obscure; this how Ella Marchmill, Hardy’s heroine, encounters nothing but doom and disease when trying to free herself from herascribed duty as the “Angel of the house”. However, it is through her narration that she can challenge the social impositions that were place upon women; their public role and their intimacy. The concept of the“New Woman” rises as a feminine figure that opposes these constraints: a woman who speaks her mind and explores her sexuality by means of her imagination, the only place that does not surrender to male domination

This study looks briefly at a range of ways in which writers have approached the concept of death, from expressions of personal grief, through to the ways in which attitudes to death represented in a culture are also picked up and used by writers from the culture concerned. Writers considered are mostly (but not all) from the English and Spanish language traditions, and in particular Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Miguel de Cervantes and Federico García Lorca. The point is made that not all writing about death is centred on death as a source of personal grief, though a great deal is. Also considered is the way in which some writing about death is transparent, and in a sense overtly simple, while other writing is less so, and may even seem obscure.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self. Trans. S. Martin Cheadle. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013. Gardiner, Amanda. “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. NSW: Allen &. Unwin, 1994. Grotevant, Harold D., Nora Dunbar, Julie K. Kohler, and Amy. M. Lash Esau. “Adoptive Identity: How Contexts within and beyond the Family Shape Developmental Pathways.” Family Relations 49.3 (2000): 79-87.Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Howard, Sethane, and Mark W. Crandall. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: What Happens in the Brain. Washington Academy of Sciences 93.3 (2007): 1-18.Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. London: Serpentine Publishing Company, 1982. Kenny, Pauline, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff, and Reem Sweid. Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. International Journal of Behavioural Development 25 (2001): 97-104. doi: 1080/01650250042000131.Lifton, Betty J. “The Adoptee’s Journey.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 11.2 (2002): 207-213. doi: 10.1023/A:1014320119546.Lusebrink, Vija B. “Art Therapy and the Brain: An Attempt to Understand the Underlying Processes of Art Expression in Therapy.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 21.3 (2004): 125-135. doi:10.1080/07421656. 2004.10129496.Lynch, Catherine. “An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and Its Contemporary Literature.” Australian Journal of Adoption 1.1 (2009): 1-401.---. Doubting Adoption Legislation. n.d.McCutcheon, Sandy. The Magician’s Son: A Search for Identity. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2006. Metta, Marilyn. “Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 486-509.Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Rambo, Carol. “Twitch: A Performance of Chronic Liminality.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 627-638.Riley, Helen J. Identity and Genetic Origins: An Ethical Exploration of the Late Discovery of Adoptive and Donor-insemination Offspring Status. Dissertation. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2012.---. “Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence and Denial of Difference for Late Discovery Persons and Donor Conceived People.” Australian Journal of Adoption 7.2 (2013): 1-13.Skilbeck, Ruth. “First Things: Reflection on Single-Lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-Angle Lens.” International Journal of the Image 3 (2013): 55-66. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making: An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP)." The Arts in Psychotherapy 34 (2007): 22-25. doi:10.1016/ j.aip.2006.09.001.Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 1993.---. The Adopted Child Grows Up: Coming Home to Self. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 2003. Wierzbicki, Michael. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 22.4 (1993): 447-454. doi:10.1080/ 01650250042000131.