The “Poetic Justice” Done by Hardy to Nature in The Woodlanders (original) (raw)

In the diegesis of Hardy's novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal, mortifying. The letter 1 is imprinted on the real of human bodies, and it "killeth", as announced in the preface to Jude the Obscure. Tragedy often results from a linguistic error, "the fundamental error of taking figures of speech literally" (Hillis Miller 13), of conflating bodies and tropes. In Lacanian terms, we could speak of a deadly confusion between the Real and the Symbolic, or between nature and culture (Ramel 2015, 37-42). In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the bad bread made from the corn supplied by Henchard is said to be "unprincipled" (Hardy 1987, 32) because Henchard is an "unprincipled" man who sold his wife like a mare on a fair-a fact of which the Casterbridge people are ignorant: the moral judgment concerning him has materialized in the concrete essence of things, in the corn, and in the taste of the bread. The hypallage "unprincipled bread" is taken to the letter, its metaphorical function is lost, culture has left its inscription on nature. Similarly, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's "corporeal blight" (Hardy 1991, 129), which many Victorians viewed as a moral "fault", ceases to be a metaphor when it turns into the "sticky blights which, though snowwhite on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin" (127). The sexual act taking place in the forest of the Chase is a form of writing on Tess's body: "Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive?" (77). Nature here is impregnated by culture, bodies are "intextuated" (De Certeau) or, to put it the other way round, the sign is incarnated-for the incarnation of the sign and the intextuation of the body are two sides of the same coin, an idea which Elisabeth Bronfen condensed in her formulation, "Insigned Bodies-Embodied Signs" (Bronfen 66) 2. Tess of the d'Urbervilles ends with the triumph of the sign: the phallic tall staff, the "black flag" fixed on the tower of the Wintoncester prison, is a