Reinterpreting Hardy’s “Child of the Soil”: Tess of the d’Urbervilles as Phenomenological Green Writing
Famous for their detailed descriptions of bucolic landscapes, Hardy’s novels have often been classified within the pastoral genre, along with works portraying an idealised nature that should be protected from any contact with modern man. If this label was much debated over the last century, it becom...
Сохранить в:
| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/fathom, |
|---|---|
| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
FATHOM
2023
|
| Предметы: | |
| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | Famous for their detailed descriptions of bucolic landscapes, Hardy’s novels have often been classified within the pastoral genre, along with works portraying an idealised nature that should be protected from any contact with modern man. If this label was much debated over the last century, it becomes even more problematic when it comes to assessing the ecological dimension of Hardy’s writing, becoming an obstacle to a proper analysis of the relationship between characters and their environment. Indeed, this very relationship is precisely the point of origin of the term “ecology” and of the ecological movement, and it is precisely this idealised separation between human modernity and natural tranquillity that ecocritical studies need to overcome in order to estimate the ecological commitment of an author. Through the close reading of Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), this essay aims at reassessing the Victorian author’s “greenness” through an ontological approach, more specifically using conceptual tools offered by modern phenomenology. Hardy’s philosophical reflections that can be read between the lines of the novel are then to be reinterpreted in light of phenomenological concepts that only appeared decades after the publication of Tess. By demonstrating the affinity between the ideas of a Victorian novelist and those of the twentieth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Hardy’s writing was a pioneering one in the field of environmental philosophy. |
|---|