Tragedy and Evolution: Hardy's the Woodlanders
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chapter 6 Tragedy and Evolution: Hardy’s The Woodlanders Nearly a century ago, Herbert Grimsditch made the simple but profound observation that “Hardy is fond of beginning his stories with a road, along which a pedestrian makes his way”—this pattern helping “to set off humanity very well against the background of the earth’”.1 “Fond” would be an under- statement. The Hand of Ethelberta begins on “A Street in Anglebury” where the heroine meets her old suitor, Christopher Julian. Jude Fawley sets off on his abortive trip to Christminster along a “white road” that “seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the sky”; he is standing on a similar bit of roadway when Arabella throws a pig’s pizzle at his ear. A Laodicean opens with George Som- erset on a twilight path; he witnesses the heroine refusing baptism, becomes benighted, and ends up following a telegraph wire leading to Paula Power’s castle where it departs from the road. The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with Henchard’s dysfunctional family on the road to Weydon Priors where he will divest himself of them, and A Pair of Blue Eyes opens with Stephen Smith being driven to West Endlestow, the “moving outlines” of the two men being seen “against the sky on the summit of a wild lone hill in that district.” After an elegiac introduction to Egdon Heath, the second chapter of The Return of the Native begins with the heroine’s father, Captain Vye: “Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.” Tess of the D’Urbervilles opens with John Durbeyfield “walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott” when he encounters the meddling parson who chang- es his daughter’s destiny with a passing remark, and Two on a Tower opens with “a gleaming landau” coming to a halt “where the old Melchester Road, which the carriage had hitherto followed, was joined by a drive that led round into a park at no great distance off.” Finally, The Well-Beloved opens with “A person who differed from the local wayfarers … climbing the steep road” leading onto “The Isle of Slingers”, or Portland Bill. The reader is getting the point, and I shall not trouble him or her with the short fiction or the poetry but only enlist some scattered quotations from the novels to indicate how pervasive the theme is: “the glazed high-road which 1 Herbert B. Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (1925; New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 45. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004356856_007 <UN> 118 chapter 6 stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past a directing-post where another road joined it … lying like a riband unrolled across the scene”;2 “green lanes, whose deep ruts were like Cañons of Colorado in miniature”;3 “the road, still adhering to its Roman foundation, stretched onward straight as a surveyor’s line till lost to sight on the most distant ridge”; “the old western highway, whose course was the channel of all such communications as passed between the busy centres of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs”;4 “the hard, white, turnpike road … followed the level ridge in a perfectly straight line, seeming to be absorbed ultimately by the white of the sky”;5 “she followed the path towards Rainbar- row, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal”;6 “the tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he could see, and as he gazed a mov- ing spot intruded onto the white vacuity of its perspective”;7 and, finally, “a carriage-road, nearly grown over with grass, which Anne followed as it turned and dived under dark-rinded elm and chestnut trees”.8 Tess, in particular, is an encyclopaedia of roads, with its “three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night by the light of moon” on the night of Tess’s seduction (80), Angel’s ride with his father when Alec D’Urberville is mentioned (212), the “long and unvaried” lane Tess walks from Port-Bredy to Flintcombe Ash (352), and the road she tramps back from the Clares, in her good shoes: “Its dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold aridity here and there” (391). (Only Hardy could have provided those horse- droppings.) Finally, there is that “long and regular incline of the exact length of a measured mile” which Angel and Liza-Lu climb to witness the heroine’s execution at the end of the novel (506). Why are roads so important to Hardy? And what is their significance as re- gards setting humanity off against the background of the earth? The answer lies, I think, in the road as a metaphor, both tragic and evolutionary, cultural 2 Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta (London: Macmillan, 1960), 30. 3 Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (London: Macmillan, 1961), 114. 4 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Macmillan, 1958), 235, 368. 5 Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London: Macmillan, 1960), 37. 6 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Macmillan, 1961), 420. 7 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1960), 490–1; cited by page num- ber below. 8 Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major (London: Macmillan, 1962), 43. <UN>.