Reading and Mapping Hardy's Roads

Scott Rode

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135519872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book examines Thomas Hardy's representations of the road and the ways the archaeological and historical record of roads inform his work. Through an analysis of the uneven and often competing road signs found within three of his major novels- The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure - and by mapping the road travels of his protagonists, this book argues that the road as represented by Hardy provides a palimpsest that critiques the Victorian construction of social and sexual identities. Balancing modern exigencies with mythic possibilities, Hardy's fictive roads exist as contested spaces that channel desire for middle-class assimilation even as they provide the means both to reinforce and to resist conformity to hegemonic authority.

Chapter One

Orientation in a Disoriented Victorian World

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.”

—Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” 1855.

In 1865, a young architectural assistant for Arthur Blomfield’s London office was given the job of supervising the proper exhumation and removal of hundreds of bodies and coffins from the Old St. Pancras Churchyard (as narrated in The Life of Thomas Hardy 57–59). The cutting of a new line of the Midland Railway had disrupted the cemetery, and the parish contracted Blomfield to supervise the delicate undertakings. The parish held Blomfield in high regard despite a minor scandal on a similar removal job by Blomfield when the contractor was rumored to have foregone the expense of reburial and instead had reportedly sold bags of bones to fertilizer mills. Determined not to repeat any irregularities at St. Pancras, Blomfield decided to have his talented young assistant, who had only recently come from the country town of Dorchester, visit the site at night to check up upon the exhumation and removal process and thus keep the contractor honest.

The young assistant wrote back home imaginatively describing the macabre night work. Accompanied by the lurid flare of lamps and with coarse voices, muffled curses, and gin breath, the gravediggers appeared ghoulish as coffins often disintegrated upon exhumation, and rotting skeletons tumbled out before being placed into new boxes. He recalled that one coffin that fell apart revealed only one skeleton but two skulls. Some “irregularity,” it seemed, had occurred in the past, but what it was remained only a narrative to be speculated upon. Years later, the young architect’s assistant joked with Blomfield on a chance meeting, reminiscing about finding the man with two heads in St. Pancras. Besides renewing their lapsed friendship, such humor regarding a rather grotesque experience also provided thematic grist for the young assistant who had turned from architecture to writing to make a living. That young assistant was none other than Thomas Hardy.

This biographical incident remains significant for three inter-related reasons. First, it illustrates Hardy’s lifelong interest in material history, especially that of archaeology, an interest by which he expands our understanding of the Victorians. Second, it shows how a single topographical space—a cemetery—can possess multiple values. A burial site of a community’s ancestors can be treated in three ways: as sacred and worthy of preservation, as the means for the unscrupulous to turn a quick, illegal profit (bones sold as fertilizer), or as an obstacle in the face of modernity’s rush to progress (the railway cutting). In other words, Hardy’s anecdote illustrates the friction between opposing responses to the past and to space: a cultural respect for the past that appears incompatible with either imperious disruption or self-serving exploitation of the past, an incongruity not easily lost upon Hardy. And third, the incident reveals the intimate connection between past and present. The past simply cannot be cordoned off and isolated from the present. By merely scratching the surface of today, one disturbs an underlying and often mysterious past that tumbles out into the light intruding upon the present in many different ways, ways often unexpected whose values conflict.

Like him, Hardy’s fellow Victorians had one foot in the past and one in the future. Positioned between the momentous shocks of the French Revolution and the First World War, the Victorians were a people caught within forces of tremendous transformation, and they were extremely anxious about these monumental changes that destabilized their identity. Given the large-scale disruption in both the social fabric and the physical landscape as England developed into the world’s first fully-industrialized nation, individual Victorians often faced the danger of getting disoriented and lost, feeling powerless and dominated by immense forces beyond their control. They often looked to history for models with which to negotiate their present and prepare for their future. As the epigraph by Matthew Arnold that began this chapter intimates and Hardy’s St. Pancras incident illustrates, the Victorians considered their present unstable as they uncertainly wandered between a knowable but lost past and an unknowable but uncontrollable future relentlessly and sometimes dangerously thrust upon them.

Because the society in which the Victorians lived was changing so rapidly in all areas of culture, Victorians grew skeptical about their ability to understand and therefore to operate satisfactorily within a society made incomprehensible to them by rapid change. In his essay “Thomas Hardy and the English Novel,” Raymond Williams has termed “the crisis of the knowable community” (124–25) those problems that arose when Victorians no longer understood the society in which they lived, their own place within this society, and their relationships to other Victorians. For Williams, the rapid growth of society in nineteenth-century England impeded the Victorians understanding their landscape, their society, and their cultural traditions and values. Material changes due to capital development, industrialism, the rise of a consumer society, empire, and urbanization saw parallel cultural changes, such as the changing role of women, the rise of science and simultaneous decline in religious faith, the redefinition of the upper class, and the gradual enlargement of the political franchise to the working class. Rural migration to urban industrial centers made Victorian England the first country in world history to find a majority of its population living in urban settings rather than rural.

Williams claims that a “knowable community” is more than the mere fact of known surroundings and people; rather it “is a matter of consciousness … of finding a position, a position convincingly experienced, from which community can begin to be known” (125) either again or for the first time. Williams implies that the crisis includes not only the problem of known place but also the space of ideas—a space of consciousness—by which community (self as well as others) can be known with any degree of certainty. Pervasive changes—both scientific and material—disrupted the Victorian sense of historical continuity and tradition bringing them to a crisis of knowable community. In addition to the crisis of knowable community, individual identity was also destabilized. People seemed unable to know themselves. Relationships within a family—especially between wife and husband—were under review if not challenge. What it meant to be human was challenged by Darwin’s science while what it meant to be English was destabilized by England’s expanding empire, a process that exposed the British both to diverse peoples and to an official policy of what David Armitage in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire calls an “imperium” (11) within their own country. Increasingly, many Victorians found themselves defined and treated like a colonized other as their stable identities were disrupted.

Class and gender identities were included in the values and institutions many Victorians viewed as changing significantly. While many middle-class Victorians were anxious about losing their middle-class status and slipping down the social ladder, many working-class Victorians desired a middle-class identity, a social position that seemed a way to manage and to survive these disruptive social shocks. In addition to the growth of the middle class, this destabilized period also saw the emergence of the British Empire in its final form and the rise of the novel as the dominant literary form. In The Idea of Spatial Form, Joseph Frank reiterates that the later Victorian period is characterized as a destabilized time. He maintains:

If there is one theme that dominates the history of modern culture since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it is precisely that of insecurity, instability, the feeling of loss of control over the meaning and purpose of life amidst thecontinuing triumphs of science and technics. Artists are always the most sensitive barometers of cultural change; and … spiritual crisis. (58)

Addressing problems of varied cultural forces and differentiated power, Victorian writers employed the emergent art form of the novel to explore unknowable society, unknowable relationships, and unknowable self. In his 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire says that half of what concerns modern art is the changing, the transient, the ephemeral, the impermanent; the other half remains the eternal, the permanent, and the immutable (403). Yet Baudelaire insists that one of art’s defining characteristics as well as necessary functions is to deliver both the transitory and ephemeral and the permanent and eternal. If so, where is the artist to look for the eternal and permanent in an increasingly fragmented and uncertain present? One answer is the past: the history of patterns or ideas and the history of aspirations and ideals that change little or not at all.

Given the large-scale transformation of Victorian culture as well as industrial changes in transportation and Hardy’s consistent discursive exploration of gender, I have asked myself why so many of Thomas Hardy’s novels exhibit a similar narrative: a narrative crisscrossed by roads that describes journeys of working-class Victorians trying to fulfill their desires of stable community and satisfying personal relationships. While roads occupy merely the margins of contemporary Victorian Studies, roads remain central both to the literary Victorian imagination, to Hardy’s major novels, and to the everyday, ordinary experience of those Victorians who read Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.

Thomas Hardy is one of those writers sensitive, reflective, and expressive of the magnitude of the change his era was undergoing. Inhabiting past and present as well as the rural and the urban worlds, he hovered on the margins of each, conscious of not being fully a member of either. Hardy himself held an ambiguous social position, one that saw successful entry into the middle class coupled with a self-consciousness concerning his humble rural roots. His life and novels embody the desire and the fear as well as the hope and the anxiety that characterized his fellow Victorians and their age. Hardy’s Victorian characters and their settings anticipate the modern sense of alienation and dislocation. Hardy’s Victorians seem displaced, and they can be characterized most aptly as “travelers.”

As travelers, Hardy’s characters use roads. Just as the road is the connective structure joining two places—a known point of departure and a recognized yet more uncertain destination—the road in Hardy’s novels embodies the focal point between a stable Victorian identity undergoing change and an unknown one in transition. If the Victorian era is recognized primarily for its transition, then as Hardy sees it Victorians are marginal figures living in a historical region bounded by definitions and representations both of the Enlightenment’s future and Modernity’s past.

Hardy’s fiction uses roads in three ways: to invoke the past’s values in the face of disruptive modernity, to add narrative cohesion to destabilized setting and circumstance, and to perform the cultural work of stabilizing the identity of his fictive subjects. In other words, the Victorian subject lies embedded within the road; embedded within maps, geographic terrain, and layers of culture associated with road history resides the Victorian subject. Hardy employs the road and its residual histories as a trope for stable, gendered subjectivity, an identity that can be equitable, just, and satisfying or inequitable, unjust, and frustrating. At the synchronic point of time in the novel, Hardy uses the diachronic residual histories of the road to complicate his characters and the interpretation of his text. In particular, I argue that Hardy uses roads as a palimpsest by which to critique Victorian constructions of gender identities, class ideologies, and power relationships. Through his gendered constructions of roads, Hardy reveals a complex and often conflicted material understanding of the way Victorian culture constructs gendered subjectivity.

This study interrogates Thomas Hardy’s treatment of the road within his narrative landscapes of Wessex and the cultural terrain of the Victorians. I argue that aside from an actual means of transportation, Hardy’s fictive Victorians use roads for three related reasons: first, to achieve a middle-class station; second, to secure love in the form of marriage; and third, to find a knowable, stable community. I analyze their pattern of departure-arrival- and return along roads from a spatial center found within each of three major novels: The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. I compare this literary pattern to the past purposes of older roads in historical Dorset.

For example, I discuss domination and desire in The Return of the Native in terms of the imperial Roman road. I consider the sexual politics of gender in Tess of the D’Urbervilles in terms of the ritualized practices of the ancient Dorset Cursus and the competing nineteenth-century transport technologies of road-using steam carriages and fixed-line railroads. And in Jude the Obscure, I analyze changing Victorian gender relations in terms of the archaic pilgrimage path called the Icknield Way. Hardy intertwines and integrates these histories that are sedimented in the road with that of his characters in order to underpin and reflect pressing issues of sexual desire, gender domination, and class inequality.

For Hardy’s Victorians who consistently travel along the road, the residual histories of the road represent layered maps of power relations which they negotiate as they attempt to realize their desires. Hardy is a novelist “at the edges” since his productive life spans both the Victorian and the modern literary periods. Like a road, Hardy is a mediating link¹ between locations—between literary spaces—because he narrates both the ephemeral and the eternal elements associated with Baudelaire’s characterization of the aesthetic of the modern.

In Hardy’s novels, circulating Victorians are empowered by inscribing a mythic map upon their local physical landscape through their pedestrian travels along roads, an empowerment that balances if not resists the dominating forces of nationalism and imperialism. The multiple road trips of Hardy’s protagonists from central locations can be mapped as a significant though subliminal pattern: the shape of a cross—a pagan Celtic cruciform. Nigel Pennick states that the

omphalos², a centre of sacred order, for the ideal city should reflect the cosmos, standing at the centre of the land that it rules. It should possess four roads running towards the cardinal directions, quartering the enclosure, making the form of the Celtic cross upon the land. It is an image of completion, of wholeness … the holy city symbolizes cosmic order and wholeness. (117–18)

As a student of ancient Britain, Hardy was well aware of the cruciform as an archaic sign. While he did not necessarily believe in the Christian religious meaning, he recognized that the older meaning existed as a residual sign of a stable center for people inhabiting the same terrain in which modern Victorians moved in de-centered ways. The spatial centers of his narratives fix the intersecting points of the two perpendicular axes that form the shape of this cruciform. This “Celtic cross” is a spatial analogue for a historical knowable community, a palimpsest for the unity rather than the fragmentation of community. The mythic Celtic cruciform represents a stable community lacking the destabilization of the tumultuous Victorian period.

If the teleology of the modern is that of de-centering and displacement, and persistent travels embody this modern teleology found in narrative, then layered beneath or integrated into Hardy’s narrative is the more archaic sign, a map of a more permanent ideal. As heterogeneous or hetereotopic space, the road enables the bodily inscription of a mythological pattern of stability and permanence in the form of a Celtic cruciform at the same time as it historically facilitates and fictively reflects instability and impermanence to traditional community for Hardy’s characters. As Joseph Frank says in The Idea of Spatial Form:

Ever since the Renaissance, modern man has cultivated both the objective visual imagination (the ability to portray space) and the objective historical imagination (the ability to locate events in chronological time); both have now been abandoned. What has occurred, at least so far as literature is concerned, may be described as the transformation of the historical imagination into myth—an imagination for which historical time does not exist and which sees the actions and event of a particular time only as the bodying forth of eternal prototypes. (63–64)

These “eternal prototypes” of the archaic cruciform suggest Baudelaire’s sense of the “immutable” and “permanent” elements found within art.

As long-term images or narratives, myths and mythic images coexist simultaneously with the more modern narrative written by Hardy within his novels. Joseph Frank in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” elaborates that the “objective historical imagination, on which modern man has prided himself … is transformed in these writers into the mythical imagination for which historical time does not exist” (653). According to Frank, this imaginative process transforms historical events bound by time into “eternal prototypes” and thus into myth. Frank insists that “it is this timeless world of myth, forming the common content of modern literature, which finds its appropriate esthetic expression in spatial form (653). Mapping the travel narrative found in Hardy’s novels suggests a different kind of teleology, one centered about one specific place, and one that subliminally inscribes the symbol of permanent placement and centered community—the Celtic cross. In other words, Hardy’s literary production produces two “texts”: a first order, one of narrative discourse; and a second order, one of spatial maps and mythic inscription.

While stories, myths, and folklore provide narratives of understanding and models for living in an unchanging society, the fixed narratives of the past proved of limited help to the Victorians. But Hardy’s narratives, while they may have provided few solutions, draw a reflective map by which Victorians (and we) could (and can) describe, explore, comprehend as well as model new relationships in order to navigate the changing Victorian cultural terrain. According to Robert Dainotto, the Victorians possess a cartographic obsession with places—surveying, mapping, charting, and cataloguing. Dainotto claims that literature often acts as a force to preserve a lost regional past, that is to distinguish the past from the modern in order to provide a culture with a sense of unity that is otherwise unavailable (56). In Landscape and Power, W. J. T. Mitchell asks us to consider not what landscape is or means, but rather “how it works as a cultural practice” (1). To paraphrase Mitchell, roads which exist in the physical terrain as well as in the representations of that physical terrain within maps and novels don’t just signify power relations; they’re instrumental in implementing cultural power. According to Mitchell, landscapes can be read ideologically as textual systems (1).

Hardy resisted the monumental loss of a local, knowable community by weaving spatial centers throughout his narratives. From a topographic omphalos within his novels, roads radiate and his Victorians circulate toward a destination of knowability. After writing The Return of the Native, Hardy returns to Dorchester, builds a house—Max Gate—and uses this place as his primary residence for the remainder of his life. Max Gate becomes the spatial position—his omphalos—from which he wrote. Not surprisingly,...