FATHOM
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom
FATHOM est une publication électronique de l’association FATHOM (French Association for THOMas Hardy Studies) dont le but est de promouvoir les études hardyennes en France et à l’étrangerReinterpreting Hardy’s “Child of the Soil”: Tess of the d’Urbervilles as Phenomenological Green WritingFamous for their detailed descriptions of bucolic landscapes, Hardy’s novels have often been classified within the pastoral genre, along with works portraying an idealised nature that should be protected from any contact with modern man. If this label was much debated over the last century, it becomes even more problematic when it comes to assessing the ecological dimension of Hardy’s writing, becoming an obstacle to a proper analysis of the relationship between characters and their environment. Indeed, this very relationship is precisely the point of origin of the term “ecology” and of the ecological movement, and it is precisely this idealised separation between human modernity and natural tranquillity that ecocritical studies need to overcome in order to estimate the ecological commitment of an author. Through the close reading of Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), this essay aims at reassessing the Victorian author’s “greenness” through an ontological approach, more...]]>Marie Bertrand
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/1969
2023-05-18Of Furtive Hedgehogs and Steam Machines: An Ecofeminist Reading of Thomas HardyIn “Afterwards”, Thomas Hardy includes the furtive hedgehog among the things and creatures that he draws attention to. Such a detail is symptomatic of Hardy’s ecopoetic approach to the nonhuman. While poems devoted to birds highlight man’s insensitivity, “The Mother Mourns” lays down Hardy’s own Gaia hypothesis, so to speak, as if he foresaw the extinction of species. This environmental ethics helps to cast light on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where prevailing patriarchal models of capitalist development threaten the eponymous protagonist, but also animals and the land. An ecofeminist reading of the novel may trace the disquieting undertones of the apparently idyllic dairy of Talbothays, as well as the viral progression of machinery in Wessex. The novel dismisses the ideological dichotomy virgin/sinner and calls for an ecologically sound, non-exploitative version of agriculture as well as for women’s ability to use their bodies freely.]]>Catherine Lanone
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2316
2023-05-18Thomas Hardy and EcosexualityBuilding on past ecological readings of Hardy’s exploration of the relationships between humans and the ecosystem, this paper takes further William Cohen’s focus on affect and ecology in Hardy’s works (2014) by examining the sensual or even sexual delight in nature suggested in various scenes of his fiction. The emergence of an “ecosexual” movement and its development into a field of study in the past twenty years point to a new conception of ecology resulting from a metaphorical shift from Earth as mother to Earth as lover, implying a more sustainable and reciprocal relationship. The ecosexuals’ claim that the ecological crisis and the erotic crisis both arise from disconnection, and that therefore a healing relationship with the ecosystem requires a healing relationship with our bodies and sexuality, hearkens back to Hardy’s preoccupations with the human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman physical connection. Was Hardy a precursor of this ecosexual awakening? To what extent do Hardy’s...]]>Fiona Fleming
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2065
2023-05-18An Ecocritical Reading of Hardy’s The Woodlanders: Supernature and EcoGothic In The Woodlanders Thomas Hardy builds a kaleidoscopic vision of nature and the environment thanks to shifting modes of representation and the use of multiple generic perspectives, each one of which entails a specific discourse on ecology. Reworking Romantic aesthetics, using the supernatural and the fantastic forms and ecoGothic or adding a fairy-tale dimension to his novel, helps Hardy unfold a complex, idiosyncratic ecocritical vision which goes beyond the mere use of nature as a backdrop to his novels. In The Woodlanders, Hardy ceaselessly addresses the question of “belonging” or “not belonging”, of consuming nature or being part of it. Through a subtle generic interplay, using well-identified topoi (the woods, the tree, the hut) and turning them into supernatural images, Hardy asserts in his 1887 novel that the human and the non-human cannot be considered as distinct.]]>Peggy Blin-Cordon
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2439
2023-05-18The End of the Farm? Thomas Hardy’s Agricultural VisionIn his depictions of rural life in semi-fictional Wessex, Thomas Hardy has sometimes been charged with romanticising rural life and portraying the pastoral instead of the real. His characters frequently inhabit agricultural communities, which form the basis of their lives and livelihoods. In tension with the pastoral, romanticised village is the recognition of agriculture as a capitalist venture: Hardy’s writings capture the end of the old sense of land as a natural relative and the shift to land as an exploitable resource. With the industrialisation of agriculture in the late nineteenth century, the scale on which farming took place increased, both in the working of the land and in the raising of domesticated animals for consumption. This essay will attempt to mobilize a reading of Hardy’s agricultural vision in the context of changes to farming that have contributed to the current ecological crisis, with the goal of defamiliarizing the familiar concept of the farm by way of the al...]]>Anna West
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2268
2023-05-18The Art of Analogy in The Woodlanders and Other Novels: Hardy’s Eco-WritingHardy’s lifetime spanned a time of intense technological, societal and sociological change. Pushed away from pollution-saturated urban centres, the wealthiest classes sought to create an idealistic version of the countryside. A novelist like Thomas Hardy contributed, albeit unwittingly, to this myth-making; he also, in what one might call a counter-text, fiercely criticised the system producing a commodification of the countryside. It is the counter-text of one of his novels that I propose to examine in this paper; more specifically, I will focus on a rhetorical device recurring in Hardy’s prose works which is instrumental in the elaboration of this counter-text: the analogy between the human and the non-human. The likening of the former to the latter is what contributes to the creation of a timeless rural countryside and also what underlies the capitalistic, hierarchical relationships within the human community and also of men with Nature. This naturalisation of the human is comple...]]>Nathalie Bantz-Gaszczak
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/1877
2023-05-18The “Poetic Justice” Done by Hardy to Nature in The WoodlandersIn the diegesis of Hardy’s novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal, mortifying. Tragedy often results from a linguistic “error” that conflates bodies and tropes – a deadly confusion between nature and culture. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess’s “corporeal blight”, which many Victorians viewed as a moral “fault”, ceases to be a metaphor when it turns into “sticky blights” making real stains on her skin. The sexual act taking place in the forest of the Chase is a form of writing on Tess’s body. Nature here is impregnated by culture. The novel ends with the triumph of the sign: the phallic tall staff, the “black flag” fixed on the tower of the Wintoncester prison, is a writing on the sky which indicates that Tess has been hanged. But Hardy’s poetic texts, whether they be poems or fiction, operate differently. This essay will try to argue that they take us beyond the Symbolic, “beyond the printed page”, to the Real, perhaps to “nature” itself. “Stepping ...]]>Annie Ramel
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2200
2023-05-18Introduction: Hardy’s Various Shades of GreenThis issue proposes a rereading of Hardy’s oeuvre (novels and poetry) in light of the most recent developments in the field of ecocriticism and nature studies in general. With its emphasis on the natural landscapes of Wessex, and its many warnings about the dangers of the incipient mechanisation of agricultural labour, Hardy’s work indeed seems to qualify as a perfect example of a nature-conscious type of writing, denouncing the ravages of the Anthropocene long before the notion was even thought of. Hardy could thus read as an ecologically-aware or ecologically-committed author before the letter – more: a possible “pioneer of environmental philosophy” as Marie Bertrand cautiously proposes here. But it may also be necessary to question this anachronistic affiliation, which may largely derive from our present preoccupations, inevitably colouring our perception of Hardy’s texts. Does his work indeed fully comply with the definition of “green”, or “environmentalist”, fiction? Or could w...]]>Isabelle Gadoin
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2310
2023-05-18The Aesthetics, Politics and Ethics of Becoming-Animal in Thomas Hardy’s NovelsThis essay aims to bring into dialogue the encounters between humans and non-human animals that feature prominently in Hardy’s novels with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal. It demonstrates that the close proximity of Hardy’s characters to non-human animals sometimes initiates the process of becoming-animal, albeit with varying degrees of success. This possibility of affective becoming challenges the notion of human auto-affection and provides us with an unusual vantage point from which to examine Hardy’s subversion of the human/animal dualism. This becoming-animal not only functions as an aesthetic device, creating a destabilising lyricism in Hardy’s text, but also provides a new lens through which to explore Hardy’s political and ethical concerns with reference to what Deleuze and Guattari call “minoritarian groups”. The article argues that the ontological continuity between humans and animals does not necessarily exclude an ethic of care. If Hardy’s fictional port...]]>Junjie QI
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2177
2023-05-18Hardy’s Palette and the Colours of NatureThis paper invites an intertextual reading of Hardy’s use of “green” in his descriptions of nature, arguing that the English imaginary is by now so steeped in “green” that any mention of the colour inevitably calls up other texts that write nature as the site of health, youth, and vigour. By contrast Hardy’s greens are both a sign of ill health in nature and of his judicious distancing of himself from the English green tradition. As Hardy predicted in The Return of the Native, a different palette is now needed to paint nature in its damaged state.]]>Andrew Hewitt
http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/2116
2023-05-18