Thomas Hardy first published The Woodlanders as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine between May 1886 and April 1887. It emphasizes themes of marriage and adultery, faith and duplicity, and, a favorite element for Hardy, unrequited love and the human propensity to love anyone other than the one who loves us. The Woodlanders has never received the attention given to Hardy’s other works, although he felt that in some ways, the novel was his best work.

The woods become a symbol of a particular way of life, one more innocent and dictated by tradition than that of the impersonal industrial city. That emphasis on setting calls attention to the fact that when the woodlanders engage in actions that go against their traditions, they defy their heritage and tempt fate to cause them to fail.

George Melbury represents an individual who disregards his culture’s ritual. He has remained diligent in obtaining for his daughter Grace the best education, in hopes that she can leave woodlander traditions behind. He wants her to move up the social scale by marrying above the family’s “place,” but she has already been promised to a rustic named Giles Winterbourne, who is completely devoted to her. Melbury plots to extricate Grace from the engagement by cruelly using Giles’s financial problems against him. In a subplot, a common worker named Marty South is fiercely in love with Winterbourne, but he is fixated on Grace.

Free from her promise to Giles, Grace may instead marry Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, member of a family once particularly well thought of but who has fallen on hard times. Fitzpiers conducts himself in a manner beneath his good breeding, and Grace resists the match, knowing that he has had an affair with a local loose woman named Suke Damson. Because her father pushes her, she completes the marriage, after which Fitzpiers takes up with the recently returned from the Continent Felice Charmond, his former lover.

As one who owns land but spends little time on it, Felice represents a foreigner in her own home. Her movements in and out of the community help promote the symmetry of plot for which Hardy was well known. Another example is the appearance at both the beginning and the end of the novel of the barber, Mr. Percomb. Percomb represents an evil force that descends on the woods people. His main role is to convince poor Marty, who thinks Percomb resembles the devil, to sell her beautiful hair in order to make a wig for Felice. The false hair helps Felice in the deception that contributes to her temptation of Fitzpiers.

Melbury understands his mistake too late and personally attacks Fitzpiers as he visits Felice at her home, Hintock Manor House. Felice takes Fitzpiers into her care, and they escape to the Continent but have a disagreement that ends their tenuous relationship. In typical Hardy irony, it is the false hair that brought the two together that also ends up separating them.

In a tragic turn, a past American lover of Felice murders her out of jealousy. That unexpected event allows Hardy to emphasize that all must assume responsibility for their actions, and that our past always stays with us. His abundant detail accumulates to promote an overall effect of repeated patterns. In those patterns, readers may see parallels between characters and events. His ability to cause each detail to function as a part of a whole made him much more a modernist writer than a Victorian, according to critic David Lodge.

Melbury again interferes, encouraging Grace to obtain a divorce and to begin anew her relationship with Winterbourne. She had always had feelings for Winterbourne and does not need much urging. However, when she arrives at his home, a storm dictates that she must remain there overnight. As a foil to Fitzpiers, Winterbourne does not take advantage of the situation but moves outside into a flimsy shelter. Exposure to the elements sickens Winterbourne, who dies and is mourned by the brokenhearted Marty. Fitzpiers returns to Grace, and the novel concludes with no character realizing his or her true desire.

Lodge ventures the reason that the novel remains little known is because within Hardy’s collection of “Novels of Character and Environment,” it “belongs to the genre of pastoral elegy rather than tragedy.” He explains that no heroism exists, the death of Giles draws from its readers “pathos” rather than “pity and fear,” and the violent murder of Felice Charmond is too distant for readers to relate to. Giles’s death actually represents the death of a way of life, which is regrettable but, in the tradition of realism, inevitable.

Bibliography
Lodge, David. Introduction to The Woodlanders, by Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1974, 13–32.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century british literature, Analysis of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, David Lodge on Hardy, Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, Felice Charmond, Giles Winterbourne, Grace Melbury, Hardy and realism, Hardy novels, Hardy's use of setting, Hardy’s lesser-known novels, Hardy’s modernist elements, Hardy’s narrative style, Hardy’s portrayal of human desire, industrialization vs tradition, Macmillan’s Magazine serial novels, marriage and adultery in literature, pastoral elegy, rural life in Victorian novels, social class in Hardy’s works, symbolism in The Woodlanders, The Woodlanders, The Woodlanders literary criticism, The Woodlanders plot analysis, The Woodlanders summary, The Woodlanders themes, themes of faith and duplicity in Hardy, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy characters, tragedy vs realism in literature, unrequited love in The Woodlanders, Victorian Literature, Victorian pastoral novels, Victorian social norms in literature