Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Master’s Theses Student Theses Spring 2020 Landscape, Gender, and the Politics of Belonging in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Tess of the D’Urbervilles Sarah Dickerson Bucknell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/masters_theses Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Other Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Dickerson, Sarah, "Landscape, Gender, and the Politics of Belonging in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Tess of the D’Urbervilles" (2020). Master’s Theses. 233. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/masters_theses/233 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master’s Theses by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LANDSCAPE, GENDER, AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN THOMAS HARDY’S THE WOODLANDERS AND TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES by Sarah A. Dickerson A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Bucknell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English April 2020 Approved by: ______________________________________ Advisor: Dr. Virginia Zimmerman ______________________________________ Committee Member: Dr. Jean Peterson ______________________________________ Committee Member: Dr. John Rickard ______________________________________ Department Chair: Dr. Anthony Stewart Dickerson iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is dedicated in memory of Dr. Susan Bowers. When I met Susan as a prospective first-generation college student in 2009, she immediately made me feel like I belonged in the academic community. She later encouraged my combined interest in Hardy and gender when I was a sophomore. Susan also advised my interdisciplinary BA thesis when I was a senior, and by treating me like a valued member of the academic community, she helped me develop the skills and confidence that were essential for my MA thesis work. --- I would also like to thank some of the individuals who facilitated my completion of this project. Thank you to Jason Snyder for your research guidance and library assistance. Thank you to both of my thesis committee members, Dr. Jean Peterson and Dr. John Rickard, for your thoughtful questions and attention to my project. Thank you to Dr. Betsy Verhoeven, my dear friend and mentor, for your kindness and encouragement. Thank you also to my partner, Brian Zuidervliet, for always being a source of steady support during this process. Above all, I would like to thank my outstanding advisor, Dr. Virginia Zimmerman. Without your advice and generous contributions to this project, my success would not have been possible. Thank you. Dickerson v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .............................................................................................................................. vi 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Hardy’s Pastoral ................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Hardy and Gender ................................................................................................ 7 1.3 The Politics of Belonging ................................................................................... 13 1.4 Analyzing Belonging in Hardy’s Novels ........................................................... 17 1.4.1 The Woodlanders (1887)............................................................................. 20 1.4.2 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) ................................................................ 23 2 A Place to Belong: Exploring the Interrelations between Insiders and Outsiders of Little Hintock in The Woodlanders................................................................................... 26 2.1 The Woodsman and the Doctor .......................................................................... 32 2.2 The Women of and in Little Hintock ................................................................. 50 2.3 The Unique Case of Grace Melbury .................................................................. 66 2.4 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 79 3 Rewriting the Expectations of Belonging: Harnessing Liminality in Tess of the D’Urbervilles .................................................................................................................... 82 3.1 Mapping Tess’s Pure Body onto the Land ......................................................... 90 3.2 Shifting Expectations of Tess’s Laboring Body .............................................. 108 3.3 Tess’s Mediation of the Liminality between Day and Night ........................... 120 3.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 133 4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 143 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 150 Works Consulted ............................................................................................................. 155 Dickerson vi ABSTRACT In my thesis, I analyze Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), exploring the way that Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. I argue that in these two novels, we can analyze how one’s belonging to a physical environment and performative gender role directly relate to characters’ tragedy or success in the narratives. Characters who challenge normalized gender roles and characters whose place attachment manifests in natural rather than social spaces, endure worse tragedies than their gendered insider and environmental outsider counterparts in Hardy’s prose. By calling attention to this pattern of tragedy, Hardy uses his novels to undermine, critique, or at least call attention to, the dominant norms and values of Victorian society that seemingly reinforce the insider/outsider relationship based on the discourse of the politics of belonging. The chapter focusing on The Woodlanders offers an interrogation of the differing levels of autonomy that characters experience when performing in opposition to traditional gendered Victorian expectations, focusing specifically on the role that the insider/outsider relationship to a physical place has in curtailing or supporting individual agency in gender performance. My analysis departs from the typical scholarly focus on social and class-based belonging in the novel by introducing gender and sexuality to the conversation. The notion of identity narratives that constitute a character’s belonging is central to my understanding of the interrelationship between seemingly separate communities of belonging. Dickerson vii The chapter I dedicate to Tess of the D’Urbervilles explores the ways the feminine body interacts with the land. I track the way the shifting standard of farm work rewrites the social and physical expectations of the female body and how Tess mediates these expectations. Rather than mapping Tess onto a spectrum of belonging, I explore the range of Tess’s liminal belonging. While it seems most obvious to consider liminality as not belonging to a particular community, I argue that Tess’s liminality is an alternate to, rather than the negation of, belonging. While Tess does strive to locate herself in communities of belonging, Tess’s liminality is both a persistent inability to belong and a refusal to make concessions for the sake of belonging. It is only through her temporal liminality that Tess can briefly experience a kind of belonging. In the end, however, Tess’s only option for sustained belonging is death. Finally, I conclude with a brief exploration of the possibility of expanding this project to include an analysis of the role of belonging in Hardy’s poetry. In analyzing “The Puzzled Game-Birds” (1901), I call attention to Hardy’s reworking of a scene that he first recorded in his journal, wrote in his novel, and then developed into a poem. This process of writing and rewriting encourages a parallel reading of Hardy’s own repeating remediations of the terms of his belonging as he transitions from a working-class man to a novelist and then to a poet. Dickerson 1 1 INTRODUCTION Scholarly readings of Thomas Hardy’s prose tend to focus on either his representation of landscape or gender, but my analysis considers how Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. By belonging, I mean locating oneself as an insider or an outsider to a particular community. For my analysis, I focus on two intersecting factors that contribute to the insider/outsider status: the intersectionality of belonging for characters who do or do not align themselves with nature and those who fulfill or challenge normalized gender roles. Hardy weaves these two factors together in his depictions of his characters. To evaluate how Hardy uses the rural landscape to manifest the issues