The ?madder stain ? imprinted on Tess d ?Urberville ?s arm is part of a motif which runs through Hardy ?s fiction. Similar to Barthes ?s punctum shooting out of the studium , the stain is a place where the Real erupts, a blind spot that eludes interpretation. In the diegesis of the tragic novels, it is a surplus object whose intrusion disrupts reality and spells disaster. This book attempts to approach that unknowable kernel of jouissance by using Lacan ?s concepts of object-gaze and object-voice ?sometimes revisited by Zizek. The stain has a vocal quality: it is silence audible. In a world where sound cannot reverberate for lack of a structural void, voice is by necessity muted, stuck in the throat. Hence the peculiar quality of Tess ?s voice, a silent feminine cry that has retained something of the lost vocal object. The sound of silence is what Hardy ?s poetic prose allows us to hear.