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The Woodlanders and the Cultivation of Realism

Thomas Hardy is perhaps best known for his depictions of a nostalgic, rural past—and the interruption of that rural life by modern cultivation. This essay takes as its starting point Hardy's suspicion of cultivation, but it reverses any notion of nostalgia. Hardy's skeptical depiction of cultivation ultimately arises not from the novel's ambivalence about culture but from its ambivalence about nature. Modern cultivation in The Woodlanders (1887) is a circular, nonprogressive practice that undoes the narrative of linear individual development on which the midcentury realist novel was founded. Though Hardy is often seen as departing from midcentury realism, this article argues that, instead, we can see a new direction for realism in the discussion of cultivation. Hardy contends that nature is not, and probably has never been, more real than cultivation. By making a world of surfaces and then undoing it, The Woodlanders highlights the cultivated nature of subjecthood, a cultivation that end-of-century realism must attempt to capture.