Reading Stratigraphical Woodscapes in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders

Abstract

In The Woodlanders (1887), Hardy uses the texture of Hintock woodlands as more than description: it is a terrain of personal association and local history, a text to be negotiated in order to comprehend the narrative trajectory. However, upon closer analysis of these arboreal environs, it is evident that these woodscapes are simultaneously self-contained and multi-layered in space and time. This essay proposes that through this complex topographical construction, Hardy invites the reader to read this text within a physical and notional stratigraphical framework. This framework shares similarities with William Gilpin's picturesque viewpoint and the geological work of Gideon Mantell: two modes of vision that changed the observation of landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This comparative discussion at once reviews the perception of the arboreal prospect in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures, and also questions the impact of these modes of thought on the woodscapes of The Woodlanders.