Hardy’s Palette and the Colours of Nature

Abstract

It is now more than twenty years since Richard Kerridge described Hardy as an "obvious candidate for the ecocritical canon" (Kerridge 126). A number of critics had, of course, already perceived Hardy's potential relevance to the burgeoning ecocritical movement, notably Kim Taplin, Lawrence Buell and Jonathan Bate. And for Raymond Williams, whose work anticipates some of the main concerns of ecocriticism, Hardy was a necessary and inevitable resource. One way to answer the question "How green is Hardy?" would therefore be to say: "canonically" -meaning not only that Hardy's work is "required reading" for anyone who wishes to explore the intersection of ecology and literature, but also that it affords a richer, more rewarding ecocritical experience than that of other writers. 2But -all of "Hardy"? The Hand of Ethelberta? The collection Satires of Circumstance? The autobiography? Thus far, ecocriticism -defined by one of its early practitioners as "an earth-centred approach to literary studies" (Glotfelty xix) -has tended to reproduce a normative view of Hardy by focusing on his more explicitly "earth-centred" works. A survey of ecocritical accounts of Hardy shows that The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders and Tess of the d'Urbervilles are by far the texts most frequently discussed. Kim Taplin's survey of Hardy in her collection of essays Tongues in Trees (1989) contextualises The Woodlanders with reference to Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Lawrence Buell (1995) acknowledges Hardy's powerful representations of the natural world, as exemplified by Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native; Egdon, says Buell, is not only depicted "in fine visual detail" but endowed with "aboriginal personhood"even if, ultimately, Hardy fails "to do justice to place" (Buell 255). In his section on Hardy in The Song of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Bate focuses on The Woodlanders. For him this novel is a "perfect example" (Bate 15) of how Hardy uses his characters to embody the "irreconcilable clash between the forces of tradition and of innovation" (14).