The Woodlanders

“She would not turn again to the little looking glass out of humanity to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look back at her, and almost break her heart.”

Marty has just cut off her beautiful hair to sell to Mrs. Charmond, after hearing Mr. Melbury explain that Grace is intended for Giles. However, Marty wilfully ignores the ambiguity in Mr. Melbury’s speech here, which suggests a reluctance to have Grace marry someone of Giles’s low social standing. Her act of hair-cutting and symbolic self-harm reveals a tragic fatalism in Marty’s character.

“[…] she was watching the light quite idly, when it gradually changed colour, and at length shone blue as sapphire.”

Grace observes the illumination caused by the experiments in Dr. Fitzpiers’s house from her bedroom. The light here serves as a metaphor for the allure of Dr. Fitzpiers for Grace, and its danger. He represents something new and exotic, but he also represents something potentially superficial and transient.

“On older trees […] huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs […]. The unfulfilled intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed […] the taper was interrupted […] and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.”

Hardy describes the state of the trees in the Hintock woods. Rather than something beautiful or healthy, they are associated with death, decay, and disfigurement. Hardy is reacting against the common pastoral idealization of nature and rural life.

“She looked toward the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were being cast.”

Hardy uses Marty’s description of the evening sky to, again, react against the pastoral ideal. This ideal and artistic genre draws a sharp division between the rural idyll and the urban world of industry. As such, Hardy subverts this by identifying the sky with a foundry.

“I’ll help finish the tarts.”

The Melbury family shows up early for Giles’s Christmas party and Grace offers to help with the preparation of the food. Grace is happy to do this, which shows that she does not necessarily see herself as superior to Giles. However, the incident in Mr. Melbury’s eyes, like the party as a whole, confirms his belief that Giles is not good enough for Grace.

“Grace will gradually sink down to our level again.”

This quote highlights Mr. Melbury’s anxiety regarding Grace. He worries that if she marries Giles, she will gradually lose the distinction she has from her newly acquired education and manners. Instead, she will become just another rustic country wife.

“Mrs Charmond should have heard the village news, and become quite disappointed in her expectations of Grace at finding she kept such company.”

This is Mr. Melbury’s explanation for why Mrs. Charmond did not call again on Grace despite suggesting that she would. Mr. Melbury is mistaken here though. The real reason for Mrs. Charmond snubbing Grace is her jealousy over Grace’s youth and looks. Nonetheless this comment betrays Mr. Melbury’s obsession with how he and Grace are perceived by those of higher social standing.

“I, too, cost a good deal, like the horses and waggons and corn.”

Grace accidentally discovers receipts for her clothes and education when Mr. Melbury is showing her his bonds and finances. Mr. Melbury does this to try and make her covet a higher social standing and a different husband to the relatively poor Giles. However, his plan backfires as Grace realizes that her father has been viewing her as an investment.

“[…] it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object in our line of vision.”

This is Dr. Fitzpiers’s definition of love, outlined to Giles. This subjective view of love, allegedly drawn from the philosopher Spinoza, suggests that the object of love is to some extent unimportant and arbitrary: It could, under the right conditions, be anyone. This also suggests that Dr. Fitzpiers’s interest in Grace, not based in any inherent quality of the object, is likely to be superficial and transient.

“[…] one month he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature and metaphysics.”

Hardy describes the varied, and varying, interests of Dr. Fitzpiers. On the one hand, this indicates that Dr. Fitzpiers is highly cultured and intelligent, traits which make him attractive to Grace. However, it also indicates an unwillingness or inability to remain fully committed to any one interest or passion.

“[…] he constructed dialogues and scenes in which Grace had turned out to be the mistress of Hintock manor-house.”

Fitzpiers has discovered that the woman he is attracted to, Grace, is in fact the daughter of timber merchant Mr. Melbury. In a bid to reconcile this attraction with his desire for social status, he imagines Grace as the aristocratic owner of Hintock House. This also reflects the importance of imagination and fantasy in Dr. Fitzpiers’s fantasy life.

“Instead of my skellington he’ll carry home her living carcass before long.”

This is what Grammer Oliver says about Dr. Fitzpiers regarding Grace on Midsummer Eve. On one level this is merely a humorous allusion to the fact that Grace will likely end up with Dr. Fitzpiers. However, it also reveals a more troubling insight about the way Dr. Fitzpiers will use Grace to satisfy his own curiosity before discarding and ruining her.

“[…] he was no longer regarded as an extrinsic, unfathomed gentleman of limitless potentiality, scientific and social; but as Mr Melbury’s compeer, and therefore in in a degree only one of themselves.”

After marriage to Grace, Dr. Fitzpiers imagines that he has fallen in the estimation of his patients and the locals. This is because he has married someone who is merely a local woman. Thus, he is no longer seen as someone special or important.

“O! why were we given hungry hearts and wild desires if we have to live in a world like this?”

Mrs. Charmond believes that Dr. Fitzpiers, whom she loves, is leaving her and going to a practice in Budmouth. However, he later reveals that he turned down this opportunity to be with her. Her comments reflect a frustration with a social world which imposes so many regulations and restrictions on love. However, it also betrays her penchant for self-pity and melodrama.

“I have never got any happiness out Hintock that I know of.”

With her marriage failing, Grace questions the value of the education for her that Melbury spent so much money on. She questions the motivation behind it, of giving her the ability to literally and metaphorically leave Hintock. This is because her times away from Hintock, at boarding school, were unhappy ones.

“I’ve come all the way from London today […]. Ah, that’s a place to meet your equals.”

When Dr. Fitzpiers is unsaddled by a horse on his way back from seeing Mrs. Charmond at Hintock House, Mr. Melbury picks him up and holds him on his own horse. However, due to the dark, and drinking rum, Dr. Fitzpiers does not realize that the man who helped him is his father-in-law. Thus, he misguidedly criticizes Little Hintock and the people in it in front of Mr. Melbury. He also suggests the people there, including Grace, are unlike those in London, so they are beneath him.

“It was almost too much to bear in one day; but with a shaking hand she sponged the rail clean.”

Mrs. Charmond wipes the blood from the rails outside her house, stains from an injured Dr. Fitzpiers approaching her home. In reality, though, he was not that badly hurt, and this comment satirises her self-image as a tragic heroine. It also betrays her unfamiliarity with, and aversion to, physical work.

“Giles saw her secret reasoning, thought how hopelessly blind to propriety he was beside her, and went to do as she wished.”

Renewing his courtship with Grace, and after walking with her in an abbey, Giles suggests that they dine together. However, not yet officially divorced, Grace insists that she must dine alone, and Giles arranges for the food to be brought to her. This shows her continued, and meticulous, obedience to the rules of propriety, despite Fitzpiers’s treatment of her.

“While craving to craving to be a country girl again […] her first attempt had been beaten.”

This refers to the incident in The Three Tuns tavern. Giles had arranged for her to eat there following their walk. However, Grace had felt that the place was not dignified enough for her, and Giles had noticed. On a conscious level Grace wants to abandon such supercilious attitudes but finds that they are nonetheless deeply ingrained in her.

“How Grace performed that labour she could never have exactly explained.”

Grace carries the dying Giles from out of his wet hut into the safety, warmth, and dryness of his cottage. This shows how Grace was willing to abandon standards of propriety to save Giles. It also shows how her love for him imbued her with unexpected strength and initiative.

“The one thing he never spoke to me of was love; nor I to him.”

This quote is what Marty says to Grace about her relationship with Giles, after his death. In a more obvious sense, Marty and Giles were never romantically attached, and they never discussed feelings for each other. However, they shared a deep emotional bond through their common cultivation and love of the land and woods.

“It seemed to accord well with the fitful fever of that impassioned woman’s life that she should not have found a native grave.”

Following her death at the hands of an ex-lover, Mrs. Charmond’s body is not brought back to England. This, suggests Hardy, is in keeping with her character as a mercurial, and perpetually travelling, character. It also reflects the sense that she was always an outsider to Hintock.

“Boughs bearing such leaves hung low around, and completely enclosed them, so that it was as if they were in a great green vase.”

Having discovered that it was only Grace’s dress and not her body that was caught in the mantrap, Grace and Dr. Fitzpiers are romantically reunited. This is symbolized by their sitting together in the Hintock woods. This perhaps reflects a sense as well that Dr. Fitzpiers has now accepted that he can be happy in Little Hintock.