The Woodlanders

Giles is “pure and perfect in his heart” (268). This assessment by Grace in many ways sums up the dilemma and problem of Giles’s character. Woodsman, cider-merchant, and apple farmer, Giles is like one of his trees: honest, dependable, and, as Marty says, “a good man” who “did good things” (305). These qualities form a counterpoint to the duplicitous and self-serving Dr. Fitzpiers, making the men foils to one another. While Dr. Fitzpiers always puts his own desires first, Giles instead considers the perspective and interests of others. This straight-forward, natural, considerateness is what attracts Grace to him after Dr. Fitzpiers’s affairs. Indeed, it is what leads her to imagine Giles as a “fruit-god” and “wood-god” (230) before he starts courting her for the second time.

However, his concern for others and their feelings can also be problematic. Most notably, it often spills over into an exaggerated respect for property and propriety. This is seen most egregiously in the issue of the life-leases on which his own property depends. When considering whether to prune a tree in John South’s garden, his main thought should be doing everything he can to save his home by saving John. Instead, he hesitates, checked by the thought that “he was operating on another person’s property to prolong the years of a lease by whose termination that person would considerably benefit” (78). He does not reflect on the fact that “that person” is the already wealthy Mrs. Charmond, nor that the “life-leases” are unfair to begin with. In fact, this unwillingness to consider his own interests and feelings plagues him throughout the novel. It leads to inertia, as seen when he does not come down from the tree he is pruning, at a moment where to do so would have won back Grace. It also contributes to his demise, when he puts Grace’s comfort ahead of his own physical suffering and critical need for proper rest and shelter.

The development of Grace’s character in The Woodlanders is defined by the tension between nature and “cultivation,” or between the rustic life and the “cultured” one. Returning from boarding school, she is immediately plunged into that conflict by the clash between her newfound education and the uncultured Giles’s lack of it. Encouraged by her father, she is then pulled into the orbit of the cultured Mrs. Charmond and Dr. Fitzpiers. The former, for a moment, expresses a wish that Grace travel to Europe with her and record her thoughts. The latter she ends up marrying, despite never being entirely comfortable with his “intellectual” interests. Nonetheless, as she says, “she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a cultivated man” (144).

Finding that both these educated people are having an affair leads Grace to revolt against culture. Identifying cultivation now with artifice and deception, she tells her father, “I wish you had never, never thought of educating me. I wish I worked in the woods like Marty South” (185). This also affects her sense of what is romantically desirable. She comes to believe that “manliness, tenderness, devotion […] only existed in their purity now in the breasts of unvarnished men” (183). This inevitably pushes her back toward the rustic Giles. However, when the impossibility of a divorce, then Giles’s death, blocks the realization of this ideal, she again starts to lean toward culture. Dr. Fitzpiers’s penitent return, and her sense that she “might make of him a true and worthy husband yet” (293), forces a “modus vivendi” (279) or compromise. She sees it is possible for the values of culture and nature to coexist without fetishizing either. This idea, and Grace’s now more pragmatic view, is comically symbolized at the novel’s end with her preference for the luxury of the Earl of Wessex hotel over the humbler accommodation of The Three Tuns tavern. 

Mrs. Charmond is a wealthy woman who lives in Little Hintock. She is emblematic of the leisure class, suggesting herself that her purpose in life is to just flit about with no real objective. Though once an actress, she spends most of the novel in an affair with a married man. In addition to fitting the archetypal role of the haughty aristocrat, Mrs. Charmond is a foil for Grace. Mrs. Charmond is jealous, selfish, and frivolous, where Grace is (mostly) selfless and, as her name suggests, gracious. Mrs. Charmond initially likes Grace so much that she wants Grace to be what essentially amounts to a secretary while abroad, yet Mrs. Charmond cools to Grace when she sees the younger woman’s beauty next to hers. Mrs. Charmond also refuses to update the life lease, causing Giles to lose his home. She also begins an affair with Dr. Fitzpiers, an old lover, and admits to Grace, his wife, that she loves him. Mrs. Charmond shows no real growth in the narrative, and she dies at the hands of an ex-lover off-page. She serves as a reminder to others that wealth doesn’t make people happy or gracious. Her character flaws contrast with others to underscore how the rich eat the rich and the poor, and how women can harm other women as well.