Wednesday 2 November 2011

Lecture 4: Man's Place in Nature 'The Woodlanders'




For The Woodlanders we have to leave Dorchester and travel north towards Yeovil. After about fifteen miles we come to a sign on the left to Melbury Bubb, the birthplace of Hardy's mother Jemima.

It is this group, Melbury Osmond, Melbury Sampford and Melbury Bubb that forms the nucleus of places in the novel.




 Melbury Osmund is the village of Hardy's mother's family, with its church, St Osmund and graveyard.


This provided the model for Great Hintock, where Grace and Fitzpiers, like Hardy's parents, were married. And where Hardy's mother was brought up.




The opening of the story that elides the human and the woodland world is set on the old carriageway between Dorchester and Yeovil.


Mrs Dollery's van with Barber Percombe aboad turns off the highway and down to Little Hintock (Melbury Bubb) which, now as then, was 'outside the gates of the world'.



The farmhouse in which Grace, her father and stepfather lives, stands at the bottom of the hill.


It provides for the novel a touchstone of the importance of being rooted in a place









From her window, Grace Melbury could look up to Bubb Down woods where she saw the strange lights coming from the cottage of the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, as he performed strange scientific experiments.


 The farmhouse was a reminder of the conditions necessary for a life that is integrated into its ambient environment. To understand oneself and the place in which one lives:



Giles Winterborne, off all characters in the novel embodies this sense of being established and rooted in his environment.


Giles is linked to the plentitude of the woodland world as it is symbolise in the apple-blossom and fruit harvest.


Grace Melbury, however, through the expensive eduction given to her by her father has begun to pull away from 'the good old Hintock ways' and between her primitive affection for Giles and her attraction to Fitzpiers is left suspended between 'two storeys' of society.

As for Fitzpiers, he chooses his for his dwelling the wood, a residence that is quite out of place.



The formal gardens with their rigid layout reflect the rigid, scientific aspects of Fitzpiers' mind. Affection and love he understands in dry philosophical terms.


But he has another side to him. He is sexually highly charged and this impulsiveness comes out in an operatically romantic temperament that pursues Suke Damson, Grace Melbury and Felice Charmond.

For Hintock House, Hardy decided to move away from the Illchester house at Melbury Sampford




and replace it with a manor house with which he was familiar at Turnworth in East Dorset.





This was a location entirely unsuited to the worldly Felice Charmond. Twenty eight, once an actress she was plucked from the stage by a northern engineer thirty years her senior and brought to the house and estate that he purchased. When he died she was left in the Hintocks that she hated. Loathing the woodlands, the seasons, and the people she longed (a little like Eustacia Vye) to be off to the south, to the continent and especially to Germany.



THE WOODLANDS


The woods above Little Hintock are the site for the Midsummer festival, a ritual where girls find out about their future husbands. It also provides and exemplary moment for the natural sexual selection that take place in the novel. Both Winterborne and Fitzpiers wait for Grace to return from the summit of the hill. Winterborne retires, Fitzpiers steps forward and captures her. When she passes on he then captures Suke Damson with whom he spend the night in the field, and he later goes on to capture Felix Charmond and run away with her to the continent.


The woods are also sites where humans readily lose themselves. When people have lost touch with nature, they forget the paths through the woods: such is the case with Grace and Mrs Charmond, who after a discussion plunge in opposite directions into the undergrowth. Grace once knew her way round the woods; Mrs Charmond hates the woods, and though they lose their directions they discover their shared sexual relationship with Fitzpiers.



Most of all, the woods are a site of struggle and conflict. The apple-orchards are associated with plenitude, but the oaks, hazel and other trees fight for existence in a continuing battle.


Everywhere, the human world merges or elides with the tree world and vice-versa. And the struggle Darwin identified in the organic world and amongst lower animals Hardy applies to humans.



Giles Winterborne and his female anima Marty South representative of an ancient ontology are losers in the struggle for survival. Giles's house is demolished by Felice Charmond and he withdraws (as he often withdraws in this novel) into the depths of a wood to one of the humblest of human habitations.




It is here that nature both strikes him down and draws her back into itself. Paralysed by obsolete ideas of propriety between the sexes he remains outside his hut during a storm rather than share it with Grace. He is already ill, and the combination of wind and weather kill him off.


His death is registered as slow fading away as Grace hears his voice merging with the natural sounds of the woodland.

Fitzpiers, canny, flexible, assertive is a surviver. He even survives the man trap set for him by Suke Damson's husband when he returns to Little Hintock to court his wife for a second time.




In fact far from wounding, the mechanical mantrap serves to bring Grace and Fitzpiers together again, though their reconciliation is far from positive. Giles, the representative of the old order has been swept away; Fitzpiers, and with him Grace, are representatives of the new dispensation, but as Grace's father predicts, it will not be long before Fitzpiers (since 'love is a subjective phenomenon') finds a new woman on which to focus his affections.





2 comments:

  1. Dr. Bullen, I thoroughly enjoyed your Hardy Lecture series. I am compiling my own Illustrated Literary Atlas of BRITAIN - A HUGE HOBBY PROJECT. Would you kind enough to identify the places in your Woodlanders presentation. I would ask your permission to include yur images into my project with of course full credit and acknowledgment to you. My project is purely a research project intended for school use only . I was a former HMI of Schools and I'm attempting to share literary images (no so much narrative) with youngsters. I hope this message connects with you. Dr. David Ford, Canada. 403.242 9629.

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    1. Did you have any luck getting the locations of the images? I live in Sherborne (Sherton Abbas in the story) and have started exploring the area the Woodlanders is meant to be set in as it's a few miles south of here.

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