"I exercise a malignant power": Telepathic Touch in "The Withered Arm"

Abstract Hardy's short story "The Withered Arm" highlights the use of telepathic touch, touching at a distance where the spiritual or spectral becomes material again. By first delineating the Victorian understanding of the mechanics touch, this paper explores how Rhoda Brook's apparently malignant dreamstate touch of Mrs Lodge's arm complicates the ethics of touch. Hardy's story illustrates how touch can enact violence across space, both telepathically and visually, which reconfigures boundaries and spatial relations created within the narration of the text. A movement from the metaphysical telepathic touch to a physical manifestation of contact demonstrates how the depiction and construction of embodied subjects is transformed in the short story. A relationship between the memory of touch and telepathic touch is also seen in Hardy's poem "Haunting Fingers."