Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 339

Yvonne Bezrucka

Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders: Tradition, Heritage and

Identity

Identities are about questions of using the resources of his-

tory, language and culture in the process of becoming
rather than being: not who we are or where we came
from, so much as what we might become, how we have
been represented and how that bears on how we might rep-
resent ourselves. Identities are thus constituted within, not
outside representation. They relate to the invention of tra-
dition as to tradition itself not the so-called return to
roots but a coming to terms with our routes.
(S. Hall, P. Du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity, p. 4)

In the Life he dictated to his wife in the winter of 1880-81, Tho-

mas Hardy wrote:
Arnold is wrong about provincialism, if he means anything more
than a provincialism of style and manner in exposition. A certain
provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is of the essence of individu-
ality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which
no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done. (Hardy 1970:
147)
Matthew Arnold had charged the English literati with provincialism
in The Literary Influence of Academies and had made a call for
urbanity, asking for the foundation of a censoring body similar to
the French Academy: a recognized authority, imposing on us a

Textus XX (2007), pp. 339-354.

340 Yvonne Bezrucka

high standard in matters of intellect and taste.1 Hardy, however,

takes issue with Arnolds concept of regionalism, by which he meant
the limited standards of English letters. Province and region are thus
used here as terms concerning criticism.
But once we move into the realm of the content of literature, the
two terms acquire quite different meanings: from an adjectival they
acquire a nominal status. As Robin Gilmour argues,2 the two terms
refer to locality, to physical places and spaces. According to their
dialogical relation with space, the term regional defines the per-
ception of space as a contained geographical place with an autoch-
thonous tradition of ethnographic import, whereas provincial re-
fers to often unspecified local places which define themselves simply
as being anti-metropolitan spaces.3 Using these differences as opera-
tional tools, John R. Reed applies them diachronically to Victorian
literature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century he sees the
establishment of a regionalist discourse (inaugurated by Irish and
Scottish writers), then at the end of the 1840s a resurgence of re-
gional fiction (related to the industrial North and the Midlands),
whereas the decades from 1850 through the early 1870s witness, he
says, the invention of provincial life, with its stabilizing equation
of provincial with national life.4 From the mid-1870s until the end
of the century he identifies the resumption of a variety of different
regionalisms, which pass from the praise of the regionalist escap-
ism which offers imaginary refuge from contemporary conditions
1 For Arnolds attack on the provinciality of English writers and their lack of ur-

banity, see his The Literary Influence of Academies, in Arnold (1983: 30-59: in par-
ticular, see 34, 40, 44 et passim).
2 Gilmour (1989: 51-60). See also Snell (1998), who expands the category re-

gional, usually pertaining to the rural and the provincial, to encompass gothic and
detective fiction of a strong local setting (5) and also, and more disputably, city-litera-
ture. See also LeClaire (1954); Bentley (1941); Keith (1988). For the country novel sta-
tus at the mid nineteenth century, see M. Williams (1972: ch. 4). The political aspect of
regional literature is dealt with in Bell (1995), and in Dainotto (2000). I have myself
tackled the issue of regionalism in Bezrucka (ed.) (1999; 1997); and specifically, con-
cerning Hardy, in Regionalismo e antiregionalismo: Thomas Hardy e V.S. Naipaul,
in (1999b: 99-116). See also Giovanazzi (2006).
3 The canonical study of the falsely binary opposition of country and city as rural

virtue and urban greed is R. Williams (1985).

4 See Duncan (2002: 318-335).
 Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 341

to other tendencies which tend rather to confront modernity di-

rectly. Hardy, within this frame of reference, is seen as the writer
who performs the turn from mid-Victorian provincialism to an
increasingly critical account of regional and national forms of cul-
tural identity in that he empties regional being into a [...] post-
georgic (and certainly antipastoral) condition of loss and aliena-
tion,5 a reading in line with Raymond Williamss earlier comments
on Hardys rural focus, which he saw as: a deliberate reversal of
pastoral.6
In his General Preface to the 1912 edition of The Wessex Nov-
els, Hardy comments on his use of a well-defined topological spatial
region, encompassing his whole oeuvre, and justifies his choice of the
limited stage apparently local of the Wessex region as covering
sufficient room for the outplay of the magnificent heritage from
the Greeks in dramatic literature, in that the Wessex people were
meant to be typically and essentially those of any and every place.7
The specification is not amiss. Hardy overturns here the canoni-
cal country/city binary and claims for the secluded nooks a role
which foregrounds even more the drama of emotions of the country
people who dwell there and have emotions of universal import. This
embodies also Hardys democratic and class-conscious stand against
an all too easy and nave urban reading of the so-called rustics.
He therefore seems to undercut a direct influence of place on the
people. Nevertheless, this is not the case, as he outlines most clearly
in his Preface to The Well-Beloved, where, he says, the place is able
to generate distinct types of people.8 Hardy therefore neither relies
on a purely pastoral (a leisure fantasy of country life; Duncan
2002: 323) or on a purely Georgic model (according to which hu-

5 Ibid.: 326 and 332.

6 Williams (1985: 255). See also Kevin Z. Moores conclusion that In Hardys
Hintocks, Wordsworths romances of rural England are laid to rest (1990: 132).
7 Reported in Hardy (1985a: 468), my italics.
8 In his 1897 Preface to the novel Hardy spoke of the peninsular Isle of Slinger

(or Portland) as a spot, once the Roman Vindilia home of a [] distinctive people,
cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs apt to generate a type [] a native
of natives, a fantast produced by the genius loci, the spirit of place (Hardy 1997:
171, Preface).
342 Yvonne Bezrucka

man labor is the force that binds together the natural order [] and
the social order; ibid.), but rather depicts spatial regions as distinc-
tive cultural environments: places and milieux with their own
myths, superstitions and mores, which are subject to the pressures of
time and change as all biological organisms are. He thus sees Wessex
as a paradigmatic spatially holistic cultural environment, but also as
a transitory, biological organism threatened by exogenous forces
which drive and compel drastic evolutionary changes. If the Wessex
topographic organism registers only barely recognizable, uniform
and long-reaching phylogenetic changes, the people of the region
will register correspondingly strong, ontogenetic and intraspecies
ones.9 In particular, they will be subjected to and pay the price of
irony,10 the indifference of the external changes active in the su-
perstructure to which they belong the inexorable laws of na-
ture,11 indifferent to mans condition, the intangible Cause (TW:
126) which determine the tragic quality of their life.12 Hardy, nev-
ertheless, opposes a reading of change in terms of preordained fate.
Rather he speaks of the operation of chance and interdependent
converging destinies (TW: 85) on people and things,13 and
records these interpretations as ironies whose impact characters view
superstitiously. For example, in The Woodlanders, Marty Souths
father believes himself to be identified with his garden tree, a tree
planted at his birth, and accordingly dies when the tree is felled on
the orders of Fitzpiers, the deterministic doctor who comes from the
city.
9 The mechanism of such influences in the intercourse of people Hardy registers as

a natural process: Such anticipated glimpses of her [Grace] now and then realized
themselves in the event. Encounters of not more than a minutes duration, frequently
repeated, will build up mutual interest, even an intimacy, in a lonely place. Theirs grew
as imperceptibly as the tree-twigs budded. There never was a particular moment at
which it could be said they became friends; yet a delicate understanding now existed
between two who in the winter had been strangers, in Hardy (1985: 183), hereafter re-
ferred to directly in the text with TW and page number.
10 Cf. Hardys 1894 collection of short stories.
11 Cf. Hardy (1985b: 129).
12 Cf.: Giles Winterborne, by obtaining for her a horse of such intelligence and

docility, had been the means of saving her [Graces] husbands [Fitzpierss] life (TW:
271).
13 Compare to this The Convergence of the Twain, in Hardy (1975: 45-47).
 Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 343

Some characteristic elements of the region are thus doomed to

die, to become, in Darwinian terms, dead branches of the tree of
life, i.e., extinct species, fossil remnants of the natural selection proc-
ess of which they are part.14 Hardy deconstructs and contests in this
way the optimistic reading of evolution as progressive force (Bowler
1993, 2003), which inherently fosters what has been called the vi-
rus of progress (Harris 1968). The idea of a sustained and uninter-
rupted historical progress, which reads the present as the teleological
and glorious result of the past and forges events into a progressive
line of change, all too well adapted itself to the nineteenth-century
nationalistic and colonial vision of cultures and nations. It author-
ized a taxonomy of peoples along a synchronic, evolutionary, pro-
gressive and hierarchical basis. Accordingly, some cultures were seen
as more evolved than other, purportedly primitive ones, so that it
became the white mans burden to educate those who belonged to
cultures viewed as inferior or less developed. It, furthermore, pro-
moted the fiction of the white, Protestant subject as the most
evolved and sophisticated being on earth, a standpoint and basis for
all racial and pseudo-racial readings of cultures.
The same, synecdochically, happens in The Woodlanders, where
the people of the city perceive themselves as a superior species,
weltbrgerlich (TW: 103) in comparison with those living on in
outlandish place (ibid.), so that they consider acquaintances with
them vulgar (TW: 183), and a social intimacy is not even taken
into consideration (cf. TW: 182). At the same time local people
with their crude rusticity (TW: 162) begin to perceive themselves
and their ways of life in a self-deprecatory way (TW: 112). As a
result, their old simple indigenous feeling becomes literally en-
grafted with and overlaid with implanted tastes (TW: 126). The
dear old Hintock ways where everything [] is just as it used to
be and where mens thoughts were conterminous with the margin
14 Cf. Darwins view of the common origin of man in his image of the tree of life

given at the end of ch. 4 of his Origin of Species: From the first growth of the tree,
many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of vari-
ous sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no liv-
ing representatives, and which are known to us only from having been found in a fossil
state (Darwin 1998: 106-107).
344 Yvonne Bezrucka

of the Hintock woodlands have charm no more (TW: 116). The

new people inaugurate a new era forthwith (TW: 149) which fells
trees and destroys the animism of those unable to adapt themselves
to those apparently determinist idealists who, unmasked in their
pretentions, ironically prefer the discovery of principles to their
application (TW: 162). The new era of those with empirical eyes
(TW: 148) sharp for the surface of things with only an apparent
depth of vision (ibid.) is indeed inaugurated by doctors whose rem-
edies bring death to their patients.
The Woodlanders, registering these issues of cultural clash, consti-
tutes a case in point in identity matters. Hardy depicts the Hintock
peoples traditions and beliefs as coextensive with their identity,
symbolically objectified in Souths rootedness and personification
with his elm tree a whole system (TW: 150) and contrasts it
with the rootlessness of Fitzpiers, an interloper who behaves in this
region like a tourist.15 In this way Hardy carefully deconstructs the
optimistic dream of modernity which acritically projects onto nov-
elty and newness inherently positive, progressive values. The novel
clearly points out that Fitzpiers, the new man fails Grace, whereas
Giles, the old man, would not have.
In order to challenge novelty Hardy exploits Darwins thesis, and
Lamarcks before him, of change as a simply neutral adaptation to
an environment a thesis Darwin forcefully demonstrated by his
theory of the cirripede, a barnacle to which he dedicated eight years
of his work. The little animal provides the best example of a para-
digmatic regressive evolutionary change, which contests an opti-
mistic and progressive reading of change as positive development:
in some genera the larvae become developed either into hermaphro-
dites having the ordinary structure, or into what I have called com-
plemental males: and in the latter, the development has assuredly been
retrograde; for the male is a mere sack, which lives for a short time,
and is destitute of mouth, stomach, or other organ of importance,
excepting for reproduction.16 (my emphases)
15 For the tree symbolism, and its ancestry as the Wordsworthian synecdoche of

nature, in The Woodlanders, cf. Moore (1990: 107-159).

16 Quoted in Gillian Beers canonical study of the plots Darwins work gave ori-

gin to, (1985: 131-132). See also Darwin (1998: 356-357).

 Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 345

This potentially possible retrograde development is exactly the

change Hardy envisages for the Wessex cultural organism and its
traditions. Again, like Darwin, he not only allows for a potentially
retrograde development, he also fears a possible cultural death and
disappearance: to this demise he counterposes the transformation of
Hintock culture into a dead, corpse-like, fossil-like, but still docu-
mented cultural cycle. This is a possibility he will clearly illustrate in
his last novel, The Well-Beloved (1897), where he depicts the isle of
Slingers stratification of its different and discrete geological, but also
cultural, cycles of time. These successive transformations form the
archaeological whole made of layered and enclosed strata which,
layer after layer, have produced the historical island of Slinger. Har-
dys contention, as he makes clear, is that evolution does not involve
heredity, the basis for a teleological, arrow of time evolutionary
pattern (Gould 1990: 41-59) of continuous progress towards perfec-
tion, typical of Spencerian evolutionism (Himmelfarb 1995: 314-
332). Rather, as is clearly pointed out, the Slinger isle and, in The
Woodlanders, the Hintock community, are a Vichian concretionary
product of successive, yet discrete, once alive but now dead, fossil-
like, and non-synchronizable, cycles and cultures:
the unity of the whole island as a solid and single block of limestone
four miles long, were no longer familiar and commonplace ideas. All
now stood dazzlingly unique and white against the tinted sea, and the
sun flashed on infinitely stratified walls of oolite.
The melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles, ...
(WB: 179, I, ch. 1, my emphases)
This vision of the island (and, most importantly, of its people) as a
concretion of layers of successive and organic cultures each with its
own life-cycle (Celtic, Saxon, Roman, English) determines its com-
plex genius loci, made up of traditions and history which, whether
invented or not (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984: 1-14), determine the
characteristics of the place: a spot, once the Roman Vindilia
home of a [] distinctive people, cherishing strange beliefs and
singular customs apt to generate a type [] a native of natives
(WB: 171, Preface 1897). In the same way also the Weatherbury
346 Yvonne Bezrucka

farmlands of Far from the Madding Crowd, Egdon Heath of The

Return of the Native, and Little Hintock in The Woodlanders, are
geological and topographic regions, but also community cultures
which are the product, as we shall see, of their old association: for
Hardy the meaningful and unique fabric woven by the connection
of time, space and people, which produces its distinct history:
They are old association an almost exhaustive biographical or his-
torical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate,
within the observers horizon. He must know all about those invisible
ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which
look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has
turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees
that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have
torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake;
what domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment
have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street, or on the
green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience;
but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles
there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind. (TW: 172)
This last concept will also be resumed in his poem On an Invita-
tion to the United States, where it is stated that the new regions
do not attract him because they are, paradoxically, free from the
tears of history.17 History, therefore, produces the strange beliefs and
singular customs which create the spirit of a place. Hardy feels that
these connections, present in the ontogenetic memory of the people,
need to be preserved and monumentalized for phylogenic memory
in order not to fall into oblivion and thus die. They need to be
made into a cultural heritage. Associations, Hardy implies, which
result from the complex interactions both within and between spe-
cies, are clearly a human, historical, and thus provisional, product.
They are the second nature created by people in distinctive and
17 The poem appears in Thomas Hardy, Poems Past and Present and it is worth

quoting: I shrink to seek a modern coast // Whose riper times have yet to be;// Where the
new regions claim them free // From that long drip of human tears // Which peoples old in
tragedy // Have left upon the centuried years. // For, wonning in these ancient lands, [...]
Though my own Being bear no bloom // I trace the lives such scenes enshrine, // Give
past exemplars present room, // And their experience count as mine (my emphases;
Hardy 1902).
 Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 347

characteristic topographical places and they produce a historically

particular, and not an atemporal, genius loci. Associations are not
inherently there, once and for all, essences; genius loci can refer to
picturesque landscape qualities (again subject to changing cultural
taste) and thus be considered as a presiding divinity of place, but a
place and its genius loci do not produce a distinctive ethnic people,
only a historically-located and culturally characteristic people. The
people who share a common place cannot be ethnically typified or
geopolitically hypostasized.18
Characteristic topographic places which are naturally limited
create enclosed communities which share a common history. These
are seen by Hardy as social organisms, concretions of space, people,
and time, wherein traditions (common-sense cultural mores, milieux
and language, the old association[s]) set values which tend to be-
come and are perceived as the identity of a community as such,
and where new ideas, the irrepressible New (Hardy 1989: 6),
coming from the outside, once they set in, change the previous en-
vironment and hybridize the status quo. The repertoire of traditions
and superstitions:
the sundry narratives of their fathers, their grandfathers, and their
own adventures in these woods; of the mysterious sights they had
seen only to be accounted for by supernatural agency: of white
witches and black witches: and the standard story of the spirits of the
Two Brothers who had fought and fallen, and had haunted Kings
Hintock Court a few miles off till they were exorcised by a priest,
and compelled to reatreat to a swamp (TW: 187),
thus invested, dies or develops into something different, a new cul-
tural organism, which in its turn will again be subjected to the new
historical changes, to the new irrepressible cycles of time, as happens
with Henchard, who is economically displaced by the technological
superiority of Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Cultural herit-
age, the ethnographic roots of a people living in the same cultural
environment, which they perceive as their identity, is the only bul-
wark these people can set up against innovation. But their heritage
18 As Hardy says people of a region can share outward phenotypical traits but these
do not imply a heredity of spiritual characteristics. See Bezrucka, forthcoming.
348 Yvonne Bezrucka

can neither render them immune from change nor help them resist
its seduction. The new sometimes simply comes as a form of inter-
nal, economic, colonialism.
Thomas Hardy should thus be considered a critical regional-
ist.19 He does not take a sentimental or conservative regionalistic
stand in dealing with his historical Wessex material,20 not even
when he talks about the folklore or the superstitions of the region.21
Rather he wants to deconstruct perceptions of the area as an in-
stance of inferiority and marginality and to transform it into a criti-
cal regionalism recognizing its status as a minority culture able
dialogically and dialectically to contest the supposed superiority of
the culture of the centre. He thus preserves its trace by documenting
its threatened existence and makes it accessible to collective cultural
memory,22 in his awareness that memory is too readily prone to for-
getfulness in its worship of novelty. Doing so, he registers it as a
spatial, historical, and cultural cycle, as a nearly bygone identity-
heritage phase. In this respect, Hardy acts thus as an archaeologist
who in a Foucauldian way registers discourses, their power, their
development and their demise.
In order to deconstruct atemporality and universality and their
dangerous essentialisms the all too easy declension of reactionary
regionalism into a Blut und Boden ideology or the projection on it of
a nationalistic ideology based on the questionable metaphor of
modern social cohesion the many as one which eludes the cul-
tural liminality within the nation(Bhabha 1990: 294, 299) in
The Woodlanders Hardy offers us a reading of cultural traditions
adopting a Darwinian evolutionary pattern, indifferent to, though
not uninfluenced by, human subjects. As he demonstrates, novelty
reigns, variety triumphs, people die if they do not adapt themselves
to the pressure of outside stronger forces. (Marty can have and reign
over Giles only once he is dead and she, indeed, sacrifices herself in

19
See Bezrucka, forthcoming.
20
See Draper (1987) for Hardys reworking of the pastoral tradition.
21 For the superstitions and apotropaic elements in the region, see Pinion (1968:

131-133).
22 Cf. Assman and Czaplicka (1995: 125-133); see also Agazzi (2004: 254-261).
 Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 349

his memory.)
The Darwinian model becomes most clear in this novel (M.
Williams 1987: 170-179). Even the strongly adamic Giles Winter-
borne Autumns very brother, the specimen of Nature una-
dorned and undiluted manliness (TW: 261) is, tellingly, bound
to die in his effort to preserve the old values of Graces reputation,
to save her integrity. Graces modern nerves, the result of her edu-
cation in the city, and the remnants of her primitive emotions,
make her the perfect mixture and hybrid product of the grafting of
tradition and innovation, but also an impressible creature, who [...]
was doomed by such coexistence to be numbered among the dis-
tressed (TW: 362). Grace is dissociated and is not happy; she per-
ceives herself as a tropical plant in the hedgerow of Little
Hintock (TW: 91), and fails to recognize love as it should be and
could have been, choosing as her husband an adulterous Tann-
huser, the intruder Edred Fitzpiers instead of Giles Winterborne.
Only in a rare moment of self-recognition can her early instincts
finally triumph when she gives vent to a truthful language: her
senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature unadorned
[Giles] (TW: 261). At that point she fully perceives her lost oppor-
tunities. But, as a divided being, this revelation of her capacity to
read Natures language, and in parallel the language of her own
body, is immediately sublimated by her and downplayed as a too
destabilizing excursion of the imagination (ibid.). This capacity to
access ones inner self, which Grace refuses, Giles and Marty, the
tree-planters, still retain, even if menaced by the tree-fellers, Fitzpiers
and Mrs Charmond. Nevertheless, ironically, the natural Giles
constrains himself through nave morality (neglecting his sexual
drives to Grace, even when she calls him (cf. TW: 375), whereas
Fitzpiers, a Darwinian, brute, narcissistic force, spends all his in
every possible direction (Suke Damson, Grace, Mrs Charmond).
Meek nature, Giless purity [...] his freedom from grosser passions
(TW: 381) is undone by natures stronger and much more elemen-
tary forces and drives.23

23 In the entry for 16th Feb. 1882 in his dictated autobiography Hardy speaks of
350 Yvonne Bezrucka

Nature is far from beneficent in The Woodlanders. It is unques-

tionably driven by force, chance and instinct, as the walk of Grace
and her father testifies:
They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through inter-
spersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots, whose
mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed
old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water
that overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green
cascades. On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like
lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes
life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved
crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled,
the taper was interrupted; the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and
the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. (TW: 93)
Nature, if left to her own devices, is a place where the rule of the
more adaptable triumphs, and needs thus to be artificially restrained,
otherwise it will challenge and cancel the cultural, man-made arti-
facts and constructions:
The ashlar of the walls [of Hintock house], where not overgrown
with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade,
intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground, till, below
the plinth, it merged in moss. Above the house to the back was a
dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the
chimneys. [...] The situation of the house, prejudicial to humanity,
was a stimulus to vegetation, on which account an endless shearing of
the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a continual lopping of trees
and shrubs. It was an edifice built in times when human constitu-
tions were damp-proof [...] and its hollow site was an ocular re-
minder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to which
these have declined. [...] It was vegetable natures own home. (TW:
99-100)
Unchecked nature, and in peoples lives, instinct, often govern and
win over weaker forces, as do new ideas replacing just older ones.
Reason also can fail, unable to forecast results and check real values,
his intention to write this alternative history: Write a history of human automatism, or
impulsion viz., an account of human action in spite of human knowledge, showing
how very far conduct lags behind the knowledge that should really guide it (Hardy
1970).
 Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders 351

and thus choices can have a posteriori, casual results, which may be
either progressive or regressive.24
Hardys organic view of the changing of historical processes and
of the sources of identity of, by now, less adaptable people and rural
communities render him a far from nostalgic, vernacular, or reac-
tionary writer. Hardy, as has been seen, is rather a cultural scientist
and archaeologist25 who records and analyses changes as they occur
in the nineteenth-century Wessex environment and registers the
epistemological impact, often downright havoc, they have on the
people. If questions of authenticity are not an issue in Hardys writ-
ing, he nevertheless tackles the question in the terms of peoples per-
ception of their subjectivity and identity, which he sees as contermi-
nous with the historically contingent values of the locality in which
they choose or are constrained to live. People are thus organisms
which are subject to their cultural environments. But people tend,
nomadically, to move. New discourses come and go, intersect, pro-
duce changes; they seduce, confuse, improve, cancel or supplant
other cultural representations, as happens with cultural ideas and
ideologies and with language itself.26 The shearing of the sheep in
the Great Barn in chapter 22 of Far from the Madding Crowd, the
Mummers play in The Return of the Native, past working occupa-
tions like that of the reddleman Diggory Venn, the folksongs,
idiolects, and dialects, in Far from the Madding Crowd all are ar-
chaeological cultural phases which Hardy decides to record not be-
cause he considers them worth keeping for nostalgic or reactionary
reasons, but simply as a significant, historical and cultural heritage
which needs to be preserved and analyzed in order not to die out
completely and be thus simply forgotten.

24 Cf. the pessimistic note on nature given in Jude the Obscure and underlined in

Marroni (2002: 181-217).

25 On the many identities Hardy can assume as natures observer, see Bindella

(1979).
26 Hardy feels thus bound to record the dialect of the Hintock community: What

maggot has the gaffer got in his head now? said Tangs the elder. Sommit to do with
that chiel of his! When youve got a maid of yer own, John Upjohn, that costs ye what
she costs him, that will take the squeak out of your Sunday shoes, John! (TW: 208).
352 Yvonne Bezrucka

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