Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy

The Body of Nature

Eithne Henson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317108306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Examining a wide range of representations of physical, metaphorical, and dream landscapes in Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Eithne Henson explores the way in which gender attitudes are expressed, both in descriptions of landscape as the human body and in ideas of nature. Henson discusses the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, particularly on Brontë and Eliot, and argues that Ruskinian aesthetics, Darwinism, and other scientific preoccupations of an industrializing economy, changed constructions of landscape in the later nineteenth century. Henson examines the conventions of reading landscape, including the implied expectations of the reader, the question of the gendered narrator, how place defines the kind of action and characters in the novels, the importance of landscape in creating mood, the pastoral as a moral marker for readers, and the influence of changing aesthetic theory on the implied painterly models that the three authors reproduce in their work. She also considers how each writer defines the concept of Englishness against an internal or colonial Other. Alongside these concerns, Henson interrogates the ancient trope that equates woman with nature, and the effect of comparing women to natural objects or offering them as objects of the male gaze, typically to diminish or control them. Informed by close readings, Henson's study offers an original approach to the significances of landscape in the 'realist' nineteenth-century novel.

Chapter 1
Fields of Enquiry

The terms ‘landscape’ and ‘Nature’ are both capable of many different, sometimes conflicting, meanings. Landscape can be seen as ‘a body of symbolic forms capable of being invoked and reshaped to express meanings and values’,1 and the complex reshaping process is culturally determined. The aim of this study is to look at a wide range of representations of physical and mental landscapes in the work of three nineteenth-century novelists. Although I consider many aspects of landscape as it appears in these novels, I am particularly interested in exploring the way in which gender attitudes are expressed, both in descriptions of physical landscape (in which I include seasons, weather, buildings), and also in the idea of ‘Nature’, described by Raymond Williams, in Keywords, his seminal study, as ‘perhaps the most complex word in the language’.2 I discuss many connotations of ‘Nature’, often defined by its opposite, positive or negative, and in terms that imply gender.3 Implicit throughout my discussion of landscape, although I have not spelled it out, is the idea that looking at landscape gives pleasure. Ruskin claims to have the ‘gift of taking pleasure in landscape’, which he describes as ‘the ruling passion of [his] life’,4 and, while I recognize that this pleasure is culturally constructed, I do assume it to be offered as an essential element of the representation of landscape, in whatever medium.5

A major area of landscape studies today is concerned with what Stephen Daniels, in Fields of Vision, calls ‘the power of landscape as an idiom for representing national identity’, and this has been explored in many ways, whether from a Marxist standpoint,6 or in relation to colonial and feminist issues, or through the medium of literary-critical and philosophical theory. Daniels, for instance, investigates the contested issues of national identity through the cultural history of changing representations of specific sites. He has, he says, ‘concentrated on particular landscape images which yield many fields of vision in their own time and since, in their making and remaking, in their mobilization by many social interests’.7 Elizabeth Helsinger, in Rural Scenes and National Representation, points out how ‘representations of the land, particularly rural land, can naturalise and reify — rendering all but invisible — a variety of historically specific internal and external relations, between biological and political history, between rural places and urban or industrial areas, between bordering states or between different classes and people’.8 Landscape, like ‘Nature’, is defined by its Other; in most discussions of national identity, these studies concern themselves with specifically English landscapes, metropolitan, often southern,9 cultivated land; the wilder parts of Scotland, Wales and Ireland offer different forms of alterity against which the national norm can be defined. As Helsinger points out, ‘The “country” that is metaphoric for the nation is worked land, land marked and shaped by its inhabitants, as opposed to the wilder country, even within England, visited by ‘internal tourists, poets and painters in the eighteenth century’ (p. 15). This is broadly true of the landscapes I discuss, but I shall also look at the essential role un cultivated landscapes play in Brontë’s novels, and in Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

For George Eliot, the significant landscape is the English Midlands, which she defines as ‘that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent’,10 extending to Lincolnshire in The Mill on The Floss, and in which all but two of her novels are set. However, pursuing this reduction of ‘England’ to a limited geographical area towards the end of the nineteenth century, Anne Helmreich, in a study of the work of Helen Allingham (the very successful painter of cottage scenes peopled by women and children), points out how by 1903 the title of a collection of Allingham’s paintings, Happy England, ‘naturalised the relationships between [her] cottage subjects and Englishness, so that her subjects, taken from a relatively limited geographical range, stood in for all of England’, and Helmreich continues that this was ‘a common trope of the period: during the second half of the nineteenth century, the southern metaphor of thatched cottages, village greens and hedgerows (as opposed to the northern metaphor of industry and urbanism) was transformed into the national metaphor in response to perceptions that the urban sphere had become a place of disease and chaos and was therefore no longer a symbol of the nation’s strength and character’.11 The theme of industrial despoliation recurs throughout the fiction of the nineteenth century: the end of Brontë’s Shirley already looks back to the loss of the unspoiled dale because of the new mill and workers’ houses, and Eliot, in Felix Holt, also contrasts the picturesque agricultural landscape with the ‘spoilt’ scenes of coal-pits and hand-weavers’ cottages, while, for Gaskell, it is the great manufacturing city of Manchester that she contrasts with pastoral midland farmland. By the end of the nineteenth century, Allingham’s images of an ideal England were widely disseminated through the empire. Conversely, as the empire had expanded, England had come increasingly to be defined against, while embracing, the colonial Other. Ian Baucom illustrates this process by a quotation from J.S. Mill: ‘ “These [outlying properties of ours] are hardly to be looked upon as countries carrying on an exchange of commodities with other countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community.” ‘ Because both the capital for, and the profits from, colonial trade are English, or at least British, ‘ “The trade with the West Indies is hardly to be considered an external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.” ’12 Many critics extend these parallels between metropolitan and colonial, city and country, to relations between men and women, where in each case the second, inferior term, will be the Other against which the norm is judged, with the colonized woman lowest in the hierarchy. Among many studies of this colonial relationship, Roger Ebbatson, in An Imaginary England, argues that ‘through the nineteenth century, a complicated process of signification of national identity based in binary tropes and a sense of stable cartographic models is perpetually undermined by cultural uncertainties and disorienting fragmentations’, and illustrates how, under the pressure of the First World War, for instance, poetry ‘attempts to reconstitute and define an England of the imaginary in a dialectical process that paradoxically discovers national identity through its other — moving outwards to imperial margins’.13 I shall be looking at how this relationship is signified through landscape, particularly in Brontë and Eliot.

I have chosen nineteenth-century novelists because, although particular landscapes have been extensively commented on by critics, I wish to bring together a very wide range of landscape uses under these headings of ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’. Much recent critical study has concentrated on eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, especially in relation to the Romantic period, and I shall look at how this theory persists as an influence on the landscapes of my writers, particularly Brontë and Eliot. But the increasing industrialization of England, the railways, the mechanization of agriculture, changes in aesthetic and scientific approaches to countryside, as well as the wider issues of empire, and definitions of Englishness, mean that the realist nineteenth-century novel reflects attitudes to landscape that differ, while developing from, those of their predecessors.14

Other critics have of course treated aspects of landscape use in their studies of the three principal writers with whom I am dealing, in particular, feminist readings of Hardy, but I hope, by concentrating exclusively on the subject of landscape, to bring to it new, and again particularly feminist, readings. I have chosen these three major canonical writers because together they provide an exceptionally rich variety of examples of landscape use, which intersect with a number of areas of contemporary social and ideological preoccupation. The writers, two female and one male, through their narrators and through their characters, offer a wide spectrum of gender perspectives. While Brontë’s principal narrators, in the two works I am discussing, are respectively female and ‘neutral’, Eliot’s, particularly in the early works, are by implication male,15 and Hardy’s nearly always so, although sub-narrators may destabilise the boundaries of both masculinity and femininity. The novels I am discussing cover much of the nineteenth century: between their dates of publication there is nearly 50 years, and this is extended within the texts by the setting of events retrospectively, taking us back to the early nineteen hundreds.

What are the conventions of reading landscape — what is the reader’s implied expectation? The reader does not expect gratuitous landscapes, for example, described for their own sake, having no relation to plot, and unseen by characters.16 If the flow of narrative is to be interrupted, it is assumed to be for a reason, and these expectations are rarely disappointed. The most obvious use of landscape is as instrumental to the plot: lovers may be parted by physical distance, for example, by mountains or by water; new lands are to be discovered, explored and tamed; brambles constitute an impenetrable barrier to Sleeping Beauty’s castle; the Glass Mountain disposes of all inferior suitors, and in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, Knight must have a cliff to be rescued from. These are the physical landscapes that film can provide with no loss of meaning. But this is only the most obvious of landscape use. Literary landscape implies a viewer, whether a narrator or a character, and implies an aesthetic theory by which it is constructed or evaluated, and a more or less overt social or economic structure.

In the realist novel, place initially defines the kind of action to be expected, and the kind of characters who are likely to be encountered in a particular setting: clearly, the park or terrace of the country house promises a different narrative from the field or cottage garden, and many of the texts I am considering will move between sets of characters in both kinds of setting.

Landscape is commonly used to create mood, often in conjunction with the seasons: a flowery spring meadow, a sultry midsummer cornfield, a richly fruitful autumn orchard, can all be used as erotic signifiers, implicitly conveying different messages. Readers are aware of these meanings, more or less consciously: the ‘pathetic fallacy’ — the correspondence of landscape, weather, season, and plot events — is commonplace. So, in Wuthering Heights, the stormy heath is read as a setting for sublime suffering and passion, appropriate to the savage Heathcliff, while the conventional Edgar Linton belongs in the tamed and prosperous valley. The reader learns to take the seasons as mirroring different stages of the plot: in my texts, the contrast in Tess between lush Talbothays in summer, and bleak Flintcomb-Ash in winter, is perhaps the most extreme. But the reader can also readily recognize the ironic reversal of such correspondences: despair may be intensified if the character’s misery is out of key with the happy season, as in Adam Bede, when Hetty Sorrel’s dread of exposure is contrasted with the promise of spring. These automatic correspondences between landscape and plot or mood constitute the pathetic fallacy, and I shall be looking at such uses as they occur in the texts, and at Eliot’s commentary on Ruskin’s view of it.

The pastoral is often a moral indicator for readers: the convention of innocent country life contrasted with the corruption of city and court is one of the most ancient themes of landscape description, and of increasing significance as the nineteenth century goes on. The pastoral often also implies the past: the retrospective innocence of childhood, the idea of a simpler, less hurried time, which Eliot represents in Middlemarch as ‘Ancient Leisure’. For many nineteenth-century novelists, as for many landscape painters, the country is the Other, opposed to the dynamic, mechanised, inventive present of the industrial city, and also to the filth and misery concomitant upon such ‘progress’. In nineteenth-century pastoral, there can be no reference to rural misery and unrest, although, as Elizabeth Helsinger points out, ‘Few members of the pre- or post-Reform national audience could avoid the widely-reported, vividly-figured intrusions of the unpropertied and disenfranchised, whose protests made country scenes potentially fearsome prospects between 1815 and 1848’.17 The country belongs in the past; it is passive, static, the pastoral or the georgic, the locus amoenus, the consoling refuge, the place of virtue, the mother. Dickens’s eponymous Bleak House, for example, or the pastoral scene which opens Gaskell’s Mary Barton, or even Flora Thompson’s unsentimentalised Lark Rise to Candleford, sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Fields of Enquiry
• 2 Charlotte Brontë
• 3 George Eliot
• 4 Thomas Hardy
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index