The Woodlanders (Thomas Hardy, 1887)

Hardy, Thomas. The Woodlanders. Pub. 1887. Ed. Dale Kramer. Oxford: World's Classics, repr. 2009.

• serialized May 1886-April 1887 in Macmillan's Magazine, then published in three volumes in 1887 by Macmillan
• good for: artistic possibilities of shorter-than-triple-decker (shows how that unevenly progressed) with form and naturalism - Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 1886), New Grub Street (Gissing, 1891), Roberts 2006; 134-5 naturalism and pretty open casual sex, then 329 radical critique of sexual mores; Fitzpiers an analogue for Lydgate in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872), too -- including his literary pretensions 228; Grace reading the Bible and being "staggered" by the marriage service 319

General Notes

• it seems like we come sideways into the main narrative: the central individuals are less important than community and landscape
  • 5 pastoral solitude contrasted with communal awareness
• 14 "lifehold" lease on property - perhaps a lower class version of the life interest in property of the wealthy?
• 70ff Winterbourne's Christmas party - the way class difference is externally set in the yeoman farmer class, Grace had to go away to make it really apparent
  • like Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
• 115 the frisson of Grace and Fitzpiers' first encounter
• 120 Grace is socially beneath Fitzpiers
• 123 "The secret of happiness lay in limiting the aspirations"
• 134-5 some pretty freely represented casual sex between Suke and Fitzpiers
• 142 parental pressure on Grace to accept fitzpiers
• 149 "retrospective criticism" of Grace's origins if Fitzpiers purchases a practice in another town
• what would a contemporary audience have made of Fitzpiers' irreverent view of marriage? Would they have felt unsettled as Grace does on the next page?
• 151 F has been having it off with Suke
• 171 Felice: "Women are always carried about like corks upon the waves of masculine desires."
• 176 clematis -- "old man's beard" -- Edward Thomas
• 180 the fatality of Charmond not renewing Giles's lease contributing to the later frustration of her desire for Fitzpiers - class and property conspiring against desire
• 183 the nature of Grave's feelings for Fitzpiers

Grace was amazed at the mildness of the anger which  the suspicion engendered in her: she was but little excited, and her jealousy was languid even to death.

• 185: Wouvermans https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philips_Wouwerman_-_A_View_on_a_Seashore_with_Fishwives_offering_Fish_to_a_Horseman_(1650s).jpg
• 186: Emotional honesty tied up with nature for Grace - remarkable passage

Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been cast aside by Edred Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating chivalrous and undiluted manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready for her hand. [...] Her abandonment to the seductive hour and scene after her sense of ill-usage, her revolt for the nonce against social law, her passionate desire for primitive life, may have shown in her face. Winterbourne was looking at her, his eyes lingering on the flower that she wore in her bosom. Almost with the abstraction of a somnambulist he stretched out with his hand and gently caressed the flower.

• 188:

As her husband's character thus shaped itself under the touch of time Grace was almost startled to find how little she suffered from that jealous excitement which is conventionally attributed to all wives in such circumstances. But though possessed by none of the feline wildness which it was her moral duty to experience, she did not fail to suspect that she had made a frightful mistake in her marriage.

• 201 "Cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles": I keep feeling echoes of Grace in Maggie in Mill, here especially in their passive self-abnegation, and in Mr Melbury and Mr Tulliver's well-intentioned busybody actions esp. pertaining to education and its value
• 215-6 Grace's sympathy with Charmond
• 233-4 rumor (from the imaginative little errand boy) bringing Suke and Felice to check on Fitzpiers
• 240-1 conspiracy to keep Edred hidden at Felice's
• 261 "social sin" of kissing G when GW knows the case has no hope
• 267 inviting Fitzpiers back into the house - "Surely it is the most respectable thing to do?" (Me Melbury)
• 279 "come to me, dearest! I don't mind what they say, or what they think of us any more."
• 283 parallel scenes of "womanly devotion" but "infinite in spiritual difference"
• 297-8 Giles and Marty - the language of the woods - lovely
• 316 extended description of man-traps and their local social history
  • almost reminiscent of the fatality of "The Convergence of the Twain"
• 329 ending resolution, then the workmen talking about husbands and wives, then Marty at Giles's grave: hard to know what to make of it
  • if we take the maxim from Mayor, that character is fate, to apply here too, what does that say about Edred and Grace? That they deserve each other because she can't find the strength to carry on alone and that his actions aren't severe enough to demand atavistic punishment?
  • is the critique here the more radical because they aren't punished?

Theme Tracking

Reading and Writing

• 12

"No, no, no!" she [Marty] cried beginning to be much agitated [with Barber Pelcomb]. "You are tempting me. You go on like the Devil to Doctor Faustus in the penny book."

• 24

To have completely described him [Robert Creedle, Winterbourne's man] it would have been necessary to write a hunting memoir, for he wore under his smockfrock a cast-off soldier's jacket that had seen hot service, its collar showing just above the flap of the frock; also a hunting memoir, to include the top-boots that he had picked up by chance; also chronicles of voyaging and ship-wreck, for his pocket-knife had been given him by a weather-beaten sailor. But Creedle carried about with him on his uneventful rounds these silent testimonies of war, sport, and adventure, and thought nothing of their associations or their stories.

• 55

"Now I [Mrs. Charmond] am often impelled to record my impressions of times and places. I have often thought of writing a New Sentimental Journey. But I cannot find enough energy to do it alone.... You [Grace] might read to me, too, if desirable."

• 74

Melbury followed her [Grace]. She rambled on to the paddock, where the white frost lay, making the grass rustle like paper-shavings under their feet[.]

• 80 [Melbury and Grace]

"Now do as I tell you and look over these papers [turnpike-bonds, Port-Breedy Harbour bonds], and see what you'll be worth some day.... Perhaps when your education is backed up by what these papers represent, and that backed up by another such a set and their owner, men such as that fellow was this morning may think you a little more than a buffer's girl."

• 81

"But if you do cost as much as they, never mind. You'll yield a better return." "Don't think of me like that!" she begged. "A mere chattel." "A what? Oh, a dictionary word. Well as that's your line I don't forbid it, even if it tells against me," he said good-humouredly.

• 111

In the course of a year his mind [Fitzpiers'] was accustomed to pass in a grand solar sweep throughout the zodiac of the intellectual heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in the Bull; one month he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the Twins of Astrology and Astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature and metaphysics.... As may be inferred from the tone of his conversation with Winterborne, he had lately plunged into abstract philosophy with much zest; perhaps his keenly appreciative, modern, unpractical mind found this a realm more to his taste than any other.

• 126

Fitzpiers lingered yet. He had opened his book again, though he could hardly see a word in it, and sat before the dying fire scarcely knowing of the men's departure. He dreamed and mused till his consciousness seemed to occupy the whole space of the woodland round, so little was there of jarring sight or sound to hinder perfect mental unity with the sentiment of the place.

• 146

Meanwhile her father was awaiting him also. In his house there was an old work on medicine, published towards the end of the eighteenth century, and to put himself in harmony with events Melbury spread this work of his knees when he had done his day's business, and read about Galen, Hippocrates, and Herophilus.... Melbury regretted that the treatise was so old fearing that he might in consequence be unable to hold as complete a conversation as he could wish with Mr. Fitzpiers, primed, no doubt, with more recent discoveries. 

• 165: At times, however, the words about his [Fitzpiers] having spoiled his opportunities, repeated to him as coming from Mrs. Charmond, haunted him like a handwriting on the wall.
• 228 (Drunk Fitzpiers, unwittingly to Melbury)

"I tell you, Farmer What's-your-name, that I'm a man of education. I know several languages: the poets and I are familiar friends: I used to read more in metaphysics than anybody within fifty miles; and since I gave that up there's nobody can match me in the whole county of South Wessex as a scientist...yet I am doomed to live with tradespeople in a miserable little hole like Hintock!"

• 253 (Grace and Melbury talking about trying to apply for divorce in Parliament)

"Have you to sign a paper, or swear anything? Is it something like that?" [...] To hear these two Arcadian innocents talk of imperial law would have made a human person weep who should have known what a dangerous structure they were building up on their supposed knowledge. They remained in thought, like children, in the presence of the incomprehensible.

• 276: From long acquaintance they [Grace and Winterborne] could read each others's heart-symptoms like books of large type.
• 291: (Grace) "Look, Marty, there is a Psalter. He [Winterborne] was not an outwardly religious man; but he was pure and perfect in his heart. Shall we read a psalm over him?"
• 294 (Grace/Melbury)

"Did Edred tell you this?" "No. But he put a London newspaper, giving an account of it, on the hall table, folded in such a way that we should see it... Before he went away she [Marty] wrote him a letter, which he kept in his pocket a long while before reading. He chanced to pull it out in Mrs. Charmond's presence, and read it out loud. It contained something which teased her very much, and that led to the rupture. She was following him to make it up, when she met with her terrible death."

• 297-8

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even of the supernatural, were simple occurences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted togehter, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remotr signs and symbols which seen in few were of runic obscurity, but all together make an alphabet.

• 310 [Fitzpiers/Grace]

"I was going to ask you to burn - or at least get rid of - all my philosophical literature. It is in the bookcases in your rooms. The fact is I never cared much for abstruse studies." "I am so glad to hear you say that. And those other books those piles of old plays - what good are they to a medical man?" [...] "Make a bonfire of em directly you get home. I meant to do it myself. I can't think what possessed me ever to collect them. I only have a few professional handbooks now, and am quite a practical man."

• 319

Impelled by a remembrance she took town a prayer-book and turned to the marriage service. Reading it slowly through she became quite appaled at her recent offhandedness, when she rediscovered what awfully solemn promises she had made him at Hintock chancel not so very long ago. She begame lost in long ponderings on how far a person's conscience might be bound by vows made without at the time a full recognition of their force. THat particular sentence, beginning, "Whom God hath joined together," was a staggerer for a gentle woman of strong devout sentiment.

Shakespeare references

• 10 "The palm [Marty's] was red and blistering, as if her present occupation were as yet too recent to have subdued it to what it worked in." Sonnet 111, "the dyer's hand"
• 26!"...a soul's specific gravity constantly reasserts itself as less than that of the sea of troubles into which it is thrown." About Melbury - Hamlet "to be" soliloquy, as the note suggests a very specific, labored yoking of literary imagery to scientific language about relative density
• 191 Old Timothy says "all's well that ends well" when they find Fitz asleep in the stable
• 198 quotes Hamlet comparing Winterbourne to Horatio, who "as one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing"
• 239 no "poppy or mandragora" will aid their feud, says Fitzpiers - Othello
• 261 "as desdemona says, men are not gods" othello
• 301 G and Marty compared to characters in Cymbeline in mourning Giles
• 306 Measure for Measure again