THE THOMAS HARDY
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DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 1999-2004
HARDY'S ROMANTICISM IN THE WOODLANDERS
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol3no3/holly1.html
Contact: Unidentified (deepsouth@stonebow.otago.ac.nz)
Date: 07/01/04
An interpretative commentary on The Woodlanders, originally published by Holly Davis, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand, in Volume 3, Number 3 (Spring, 2000) of Deep South. Derived from a more extensive chapter of an MA thesis on the Romantic influence on selected novels by Hardy, this article focuses on (1) "Hardy's view of the landscape" and (2) "the character of Fitzpiers, the Shelleyan idealist." Davis argues that in writing about nature in The Woodlanders Hardy "is both writing in a Romantic tradition and also rebelling against it."
COMMENT:
This study uses Dale Kramer's Oxford UP edition of The Woodlanders, and its documentation (some twenty citations) is also in other respects appropriate. But some of its main contentions--e.g., that Giles and Marty are "figures of the goodness of rural values" and that Fitzpiers is a "villainous Shelleyan idealist"--are variations on those reductive readings that see the novel as a conflict between rural innocence and worldly sophistication: like them, it tends to ignore the greater complexity of Hardy's characters.
SUMMARY:
A reading of The Woodlanders that is somewhat simplistic, but of possible interest for some of the supporting evidences it cites.