Reading and Mapping Hardy's Roads (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

Studies in Major Literary Authors

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

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Studies in Major Literary Authors William E. Cain, General Editor The Artist, Society & Sexuality in Virginia Woolf ’s Novels Ann Ronchetti T. S. Eliot’s Civilized Savage Religious Eroticism and Poetics Laurie J. MacDiarmid Worlding Forster The Passage from Pastoral Stuart Christie William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism Paul Abeln Whitman’s Ecstatic Union Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass Michael Sowder Ready to Trample on All Human Law Financial Capitalism in the Fiction of Charles Dickens Paul A. Jarvie Pynchon and History Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon Shawn Smith A Singing Contest Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Meg Tyler Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst Reneé Somers Queer Impressions Henry James’s Art of Fiction Elaine Pigeon

“Somewhat on the Community-System” Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne Andrew Loman Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys Carol Dell’Amico Melville’s Monumental Imagination Ian S. Maloney Writing “Out of All the Camps” J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement Laura Wright Here and Now The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf Youngjoo Son “Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day” Philip Larkin and the Plain Style Tijana Stojković Queer Times Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity Jamie M. Carr Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception” Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels Paul J. Ohler The End of Learning Milton and Education Thomas Festa Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads Scott Rode

“No Image There and the Gaze Remains” The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham Catherine Sona Karagueuzian

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

Scott Rode

Routledge New York & London

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Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97838-6 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97838-5 (Hardcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2006007108 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rode, Scott. Reading and mapping Hardy’s roads / by Scott Rode. p. cm. -- (Studies in major literary authors) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97838-6 (alk. paper) 1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928. Return of the native. 3. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 4. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928. Jude the Obscure. 5. Roads in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR4754R76 2006 823’.8--dc22

2006007108

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Chapter One Orientation in a Disoriented Victorian World

1

Chapter Two Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native

19

Chapter Three Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles

59

Chapter Four Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure

89

Chapter Five Epilogue

121

Notes

127

Bibliography

133

Index

139



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Acknowledgments

I gratefully and heartily thank my program advisor at the University of New Mexico, Gail Houston, for advising, encouraging, and guiding me through the writing and revising of my dissertation upon which this book is based. Professor Houston has been a continuous inspiration to me regarding Victorian scholarship as well as a thoroughly wise mentor. Her critical insights and writing suggestions have immensely benefited this work. Thank you for generously giving of your time and expertise. My thanks to The Thomas Hardy Association’s kind permission to download from its web site a copy of Hardy’s frontispiece sketch map for The Return of the Native. Also, I would like to recognize W. W. Norton’s permission to use material from their Norton Critical Editions that include elements from James Gindin’s Preface (vii) to The Return of the Native (1969) edited by James Gindin, Mowbray Morris’s review from the 1892 Quarterly Review (382–83) from Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1979) edited by Scott Elledge, and the Bishop of Wakefield’s 1896 letter to the Yorkshire Post (393) from Jude the Obscure (1978) edited by Norman Page. In addition, a modified version of Chapter Three was originally published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 1 (Winter 2005); my thanks to Editors Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue for permission to print it here. The writing of this book would not have been possible without the unwavering support and unconditional love of my family that kept me going. Audrey and Jean, you always said I could do it, and at last, I believe you. I would like to dedicate this book to my father, William A. Rode (1919– 2003), and sister, Jill Rode Hunt (1947–1997), who already have taken the uncertain road before the rest of us. This one is for you both.

vii

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Chapter One

Orientation in a Disoriented Victorian World

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” —Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” 1855.

In 1865, a young architectural assistant for Arthur Blomfield’s London office was given the job of supervising the proper exhumation and removal of hundreds of bodies and coffins from the Old St. Pancras Churchyard (as narrated in The Life of Thomas Hardy 57–59). The cutting of a new line of the Midland Railway had disrupted the cemetery, and the parish contracted Blomfield to supervise the delicate undertakings. The parish held Blomfield in high regard despite a minor scandal on a similar removal job by Blomfield when the contractor was rumored to have foregone the expense of reburial and instead had reportedly sold bags of bones to fertilizer mills. Determined not to repeat any irregularities at St. Pancras, Blomfield decided to have his talented young assistant, who had only recently come from the country town of Dorchester, visit the site at night to check up upon the exhumation and removal process and thus keep the contractor honest. The young assistant wrote back home imaginatively describing the macabre night work. Accompanied by the lurid flare of lamps and with coarse voices, muffled curses, and gin breath, the gravediggers appeared ghoulish as coffins often disintegrated upon exhumation, and rotting skeletons tumbled out before being placed into new boxes. He recalled that one coffin that fell apart revealed only one skeleton but two skulls. Some “irregularity,” it seemed, had occurred in the past, but what it was remained only a narrative to be speculated upon. Years later, the young architect’s assistant joked with Blomfield on a chance meeting, reminiscing about finding the man with two 

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heads in St. Pancras. Besides renewing their lapsed friendship, such humor regarding a rather grotesque experience also provided thematic grist for the young assistant who had turned from architecture to writing to make a living. That young assistant was none other than Thomas Hardy. This biographical incident remains significant for three inter-related reasons. First, it illustrates Hardy’s lifelong interest in material history, especially that of archaeology, an interest by which he expands our understanding of the Victorians. Second, it shows how a single topographical space—a cemetery—can possess multiple values. A burial site of a community’s ancestors can be treated in three ways: as sacred and worthy of preservation, as the means for the unscrupulous to turn a quick, illegal profit (bones sold as fertilizer), or as an obstacle in the face of modernity’s rush to progress (the railway cutting). In other words, Hardy’s anecdote illustrates the friction between opposing responses to the past and to space: a cultural respect for the past that appears incompatible with either imperious disruption or self-serving exploitation of the past, an incongruity not easily lost upon Hardy. And third, the incident reveals the intimate connection between past and present. The past simply cannot be cordoned off and isolated from the present. By merely scratching the surface of today, one disturbs an underlying and often mysterious past that tumbles out into the light intruding upon the present in many different ways, ways often unexpected whose values conflict. Like him, Hardy’s fellow Victorians had one foot in the past and one in the future. Positioned between the momentous shocks of the French Revolution and the First World War, the Victorians were a people caught within forces of tremendous transformation, and they were extremely anxious about these monumental changes that destabilized their identity. Given the large-scale disruption in both the social fabric and the physical landscape as England developed into the world’s first fully-industrialized nation, individual Victorians often faced the danger of getting disoriented and lost, feeling powerless and dominated by immense forces beyond their control. They often looked to history for models with which to negotiate their present and prepare for their future. As the epigraph by Matthew Arnold that began this chapter intimates and Hardy’s St. Pancras incident illustrates, the Victorians considered their present unstable as they uncertainly wandered between a knowable but lost past and an unknowable but uncontrollable future relentlessly and sometimes dangerously thrust upon them. Because the society in which the Victorians lived was changing so rapidly in all areas of culture, Victorians grew skeptical about their ability to understand and therefore to operate satisfactorily within a society made incomprehensible to them by rapid change. In his essay “Thomas Hardy and

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the English Novel,” Raymond Williams has termed “the crisis of the knowable community” (124–25) those problems that arose when Victorians no longer understood the society in which they lived, their own place within this society, and their relationships to other Victorians. For Williams, the rapid growth of society in nineteenth-century England impeded the Victorians understanding their landscape, their society, and their cultural traditions and values. Material changes due to capital development, industrialism, the rise of a consumer society, empire, and urbanization saw parallel cultural changes, such as the changing role of women, the rise of science and simultaneous decline in religious faith, the redefinition of the upper class, and the gradual enlargement of the political franchise to the working class. Rural migration to urban industrial centers made Victorian England the first country in world history to find a majority of its population living in urban settings rather than rural. Williams claims that a “knowable community” is more than the mere fact of known surroundings and people; rather it “is a matter of consciousness . . . of finding a position, a position convincingly experienced, from which community can begin to be known” (125) either again or for the first time. Williams implies that the crisis includes not only the problem of known place but also the space of ideas—a space of consciousness—by which community (self as well as others) can be known with any degree of certainty. Pervasive changes—both scientific and material—disrupted the Victorian sense of historical continuity and tradition bringing them to a crisis of knowable community. In addition to the crisis of knowable community, individual identity was also destabilized. People seemed unable to know themselves. Relationships within a family—especially between wife and husband—were under review if not challenge. What it meant to be human was challenged by Darwin’s science while what it meant to be English was destabilized by England’s expanding empire, a process that exposed the British both to diverse peoples and to an official policy of what David Armitage in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire calls an “imperium” (11) within their own country. Increasingly, many Victorians found themselves defined and treated like a colonized other as their stable identities were disrupted. Class and gender identities were included in the values and institutions many Victorians viewed as changing significantly. While many middle-class Victorians were anxious about losing their middle-class status and slipping down the social ladder, many working-class Victorians desired a middle-class identity, a social position that seemed a way to manage and to survive these disruptive social shocks. In addition to the growth of the middle class, this destabilized period also saw the emergence of the British Empire in its final

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form and the rise of the novel as the dominant literary form. In The Idea of Spatial Form, Joseph Frank reiterates that the later Victorian period is characterized as a destabilized time. He maintains: If there is one theme that dominates the history of modern culture since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it is precisely that of insecurity, instability, the feeling of loss of control over the meaning and purpose of life amidst thecontinuing triumphs of science and technics. Artists are always the most sensitive barometers of cultural change; and . . . spiritual crisis. (58)

Addressing problems of varied cultural forces and differentiated power, Victorian writers employed the emergent art form of the novel to explore unknowable society, unknowable relationships, and unknowable self. In his 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire says that half of what concerns modern art is the changing, the transient, the ephemeral, the impermanent; the other half remains the eternal, the permanent, and the immutable (403). Yet Baudelaire insists that one of art’s defining characteristics as well as necessary functions is to deliver both the transitory and ephemeral and the permanent and eternal. If so, where is the artist to look for the eternal and permanent in an increasingly fragmented and uncertain present? One answer is the past: the history of patterns or ideas and the history of aspirations and ideals that change little or not at all. Given the large-scale transformation of Victorian culture as well as industrial changes in transportation and Hardy’s consistent discursive exploration of gender, I have asked myself why so many of Thomas Hardy’s novels exhibit a similar narrative: a narrative crisscrossed by roads that describes journeys of working-class Victorians trying to fulfill their desires of stable community and satisfying personal relationships. While roads occupy merely the margins of contemporary Victorian Studies, roads remain central both to the literary Victorian imagination, to Hardy’s major novels, and to the everyday, ordinary experience of those Victorians who read Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy is one of those writers sensitive, reflective, and expressive of the magnitude of the change his era was undergoing. Inhabiting past and present as well as the rural and the urban worlds, he hovered on the margins of each, conscious of not being fully a member of either. Hardy himself held an ambiguous social position, one that saw successful entry into

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the middle class coupled with a self-consciousness concerning his humble rural roots. His life and novels embody the desire and the fear as well as the hope and the anxiety that characterized his fellow Victorians and their age. Hardy’s Victorian characters and their settings anticipate the modern sense of alienation and dislocation. Hardy’s Victorians seem displaced, and they can be characterized most aptly as “travelers.” As travelers, Hardy’s characters use roads. Just as the road is the connective structure joining two places—a known point of departure and a recognized yet more uncertain destination—the road in Hardy’s novels embodies the focal point between a stable Victorian identity undergoing change and an unknown one in transition. If the Victorian era is recognized primarily for its transition, then as Hardy sees it Victorians are marginal figures living in a historical region bounded by definitions and representations both of the Enlightenment’s future and Modernity’s past. Hardy’s fiction uses roads in three ways: to invoke the past’s values in the face of disruptive modernity, to add narrative cohesion to destabilized setting and circumstance, and to perform the cultural work of stabilizing the identity of his fictive subjects. In other words, the Victorian subject lies embedded within the road; embedded within maps, geographic terrain, and layers of culture associated with road history resides the Victorian subject. Hardy employs the road and its residual histories as a trope for stable, gendered subjectivity, an identity that can be equitable, just, and satisfying or inequitable, unjust, and frustrating. At the synchronic point of time in the novel, Hardy uses the diachronic residual histories of the road to complicate his characters and the interpretation of his text. In particular, I argue that Hardy uses roads as a palimpsest by which to critique Victorian constructions of gender identities, class ideologies, and power relationships. Through his gendered constructions of roads, Hardy reveals a complex and often conflicted material understanding of the way Victorian culture constructs gendered subjectivity. This study interrogates Thomas Hardy’s treatment of the road within his narrative landscapes of Wessex and the cultural terrain of the Victorians. I argue that aside from an actual means of transportation, Hardy’s fictive Victorians use roads for three related reasons: first, to achieve a middle-class station; second, to secure love in the form of marriage; and third, to find a knowable, stable community. I analyze their pattern of departure-arrivaland return along roads from a spatial center found within each of three major novels: The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. I compare this literary pattern to the past purposes of older roads in historical Dorset.

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

For example, I discuss domination and desire in The Return of the Native in terms of the imperial Roman road. I consider the sexual politics of gender in Tess of the D’Urbervilles in terms of the ritualized practices of the ancient Dorset Cursus and the competing nineteenth-century transport technologies of road-using steam carriages and fixed-line railroads. And in Jude the Obscure, I analyze changing Victorian gender relations in terms of the archaic pilgrimage path called the Icknield Way. Hardy intertwines and integrates these histories that are sedimented in the road with that of his characters in order to underpin and reflect pressing issues of sexual desire, gender domination, and class inequality. For Hardy’s Victorians who consistently travel along the road, the residual histories of the road represent layered maps of power relations which they negotiate as they attempt to realize their desires. Hardy is a novelist “at the edges” since his productive life spans both the Victorian and the modern literary periods. Like a road, Hardy is a mediating link1 between locations—between literary spaces—because he narrates both the ephemeral and the eternal elements associated with Baudelaire’s characterization of the aesthetic of the modern. In Hardy’s novels, circulating Victorians are empowered by inscribing a mythic map upon their local physical landscape through their pedestrian travels along roads, an empowerment that balances if not resists the dominating forces of nationalism and imperialism. The multiple road trips of Hardy’s protagonists from central locations can be mapped as a significant though subliminal pattern: the shape of a cross—a pagan Celtic cruciform. Nigel Pennick states that the omphalos2, a centre of sacred order, for the ideal city should reflect the cosmos, standing at the centre of the land that it rules. It should possess four roads running towards the cardinal directions, quartering the enclosure, making the form of the Celtic cross upon the land. It is an image of completion, of wholeness . . . the holy city symbolizes cosmic order and wholeness. (117–18)

As a student of ancient Britain, Hardy was well aware of the cruciform as an archaic sign. While he did not necessarily believe in the Christian religious meaning, he recognized that the older meaning existed as a residual sign of a stable center for people inhabiting the same terrain in which modern Victorians moved in de-centered ways. The spatial centers of his narratives fix the intersecting points of the two perpendicular axes that form the shape of this cruciform. This “Celtic cross” is a spatial analogue for a historical

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knowable community, a palimpsest for the unity rather than the fragmentation of community. The mythic Celtic cruciform represents a stable community lacking the destabilization of the tumultuous Victorian period. If the teleology of the modern is that of de-centering and displacement, and persistent travels embody this modern teleology found in narrative, then layered beneath or integrated into Hardy’s narrative is the more archaic sign, a map of a more permanent ideal. As heterogeneous or hetereotopic space, the road enables the bodily inscription of a mythological pattern of stability and permanence in the form of a Celtic cruciform at the same time as it historically facilitates and fictively reflects instability and impermanence to traditional community for Hardy’s characters. As Joseph Frank says in The Idea of Spatial Form: Ever since the Renaissance, modern man has cultivated both the objective visual imagination (the ability to portray space) and the objective historical imagination (the ability to locate events in chronological time); both have now been abandoned. What has occurred, at least so far as literature is concerned, may be described as the transformation of the historical imagination into myth—an imagination for which historical time does not exist and which sees the actions and event of a particular time only as the bodying forth of eternal prototypes. (63–64)

These “eternal prototypes” of the archaic cruciform suggest Baudelaire’s sense of the “immutable” and “permanent” elements found within art. As long-term images or narratives, myths and mythic images coexist simultaneously with the more modern narrative written by Hardy within his novels. Joseph Frank in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” elaborates that the “objective historical imagination, on which modern man has prided himself . . . is transformed in these writers into the mythical imagination for which historical time does not exist” (653). According to Frank, this imaginative process transforms historical events bound by time into “eternal prototypes” and thus into myth. Frank insists that “it is this timeless world of myth, forming the common content of modern literature, which finds its appropriate esthetic expression in spatial form (653). Mapping the travel narrative found in Hardy’s novels suggests a different kind of teleology, one centered about one specific place, and one that subliminally inscribes the symbol of permanent placement and centered community—the Celtic cross. In other words, Hardy’s literary production produces two “texts”: a first order, one of narrative discourse; and a second order, one of spatial maps and mythic inscription.

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

While stories, myths, and folklore provide narratives of understanding and models for living in an unchanging society, the fixed narratives of the past proved of limited help to the Victorians. But Hardy’s narratives, while they may have provided few solutions, draw a reflective map by which Victorians (and we) could (and can) describe, explore, comprehend as well as model new relationships in order to navigate the changing Victorian cultural terrain. According to Robert Dainotto, the Victorians possess a cartographic obsession with places—surveying, mapping, charting, and cataloguing. Dainotto claims that literature often acts as a force to preserve a lost regional past, that is to distinguish the past from the modern in order to provide a culture with a sense of unity that is otherwise unavailable (56). In Landscape and Power, W. J. T. Mitchell asks us to consider not what landscape is or means, but rather “how it works as a cultural practice” (1). To paraphrase Mitchell, roads which exist in the physical terrain as well as in the representations of that physical terrain within maps and novels don’t just signify power relations; they’re instrumental in implementing cultural power. According to Mitchell, landscapes can be read ideologically as textual systems (1). Hardy resisted the monumental loss of a local, knowable community by weaving spatial centers throughout his narratives. From a topographic omphalos within his novels, roads radiate and his Victorians circulate toward a destination of knowability. After writing The Return of the Native, Hardy returns to Dorchester, builds a house—Max Gate—and uses this place as his primary residence for the remainder of his life. Max Gate becomes the spatial position—his omphalos—from which he wrote. Not surprisingly, three of his major novels also narrate the lives of his Wessex protagonists who radiate from a central spot or position—their omphalos—within their respective novels. The spatial center for Tess is her childhood home of Marlott; for Eustacia, it is Rainbarrow Hill; and for Jude, it remains the Brown Hill crossroads. These spatial sites are the stable centers from which Hardy’s destabilized protagonists move in order to create a narrative pattern of departure-arrival-return. Traveling upon roads that radiate from these narrative centers, Hardy’s working-class protagonists seek to fulfill their desires. Roads spatialize these desires, and roads embody the means to satisfy them. Through journeys from a central location, each protagonist explores a personal crisis of knowable community and modern subjectivity. As Hardy’s protagonists circulate upon the roads of Wessex in order to exchange their working-class identity for a middle-class identity, they negotiate and mediate a complex relationship between the mythic and material history of the road. Indeed, Hardy’s roads are embedded within the long history of the British road as an institutional structure. This road-structure

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reveals the complicated relationship between a dominating desire for middle-class hegemony as defined by Antonio Gramsci3 and that hegemony’s effects upon Victorians associated with the road. Roads reflect what Edward Said calls in Culture and Imperialism “the map of interactions, the actual and often productive [cultural] traffic occurring on a day-to-day, and even minute-by-minute basis among states, societies, groups, [and] identities” (20). This “map of interactions” can either reinforce or undermine fixed, stable Victorian constructions of identity. Hardy’s roads, therefore, mediate both containment and mobility. They allow permeability even as they reinforce isolation. Paradoxically then, roads are boundaries, cross boundaries, and facilitate human movement across boundaries. This idea and symbol of knowability and cohesiveness from the past is accessible and forms a part of the present. Joseph Frank claims in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” that it is “the peculiarly modern quality of all works we have before us—they all maintain a continual juxtaposition between aspects of the past and present, in such a way that both are fused in one comprehensive view” (652). Within his novels then, Hardy fuses the present’s failure to maintain knowable community with the possibility of the past’s partial realization of knowable community. Therefore, despite the failure of Hardy’s displaced protagonists to reach a stable middle-class prospect, their travels from spatial centers inscribe a mythic cruciform symbol of stability and harmony. Consequently in Hardy, roads are multi-valenced structures signifying both disorder and order, both destabilization and stability. To stabilize identity in the face of disrupted community, Victorians travel upon roads layered with conflicting maps. Roads reflect both the forces of cultural domination (homogeneity) and a resistance to this desired homogeneity. Roads channel not only hegemony’s desire to assimilate others but also the desire by these others to either integrate willingly with hegemony or to resist. According to David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, the “struggle to reconstitute power relations” (238) is a struggle to reorder space. Similar to the way that the road facilitated the interests of Roman hegemony in ancient Britain, Hardy’s narrative road acts as a trope to facilitate the attempted fulfillment of middle-class stability within his novels. In Hardy, therefore, roads function as a sign of transformation and a sign of power. Hardy’s protagonists become dominated, I argue, not only by their own single-minded focus but also by the residual and emergent history of the British road. The former reflects both the road’s imperial origins and its more archaic uses for trade, pilgrimage, and community solidarity while the latter reflects the parallel developments of the centralization of domestic road administration with the rise of empire abroad.

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

In tracing the steps of Hardy’s characters across the figurative and literal roads of personal and national identity, I argue that his characters use the road to solve problems of identity and subjectivity, and their mapped movements lead to a resolution of the problem of unknowable community posited by Williams. In particular, Hardy’s roads orient disoriented Victorians toward modern subjectivity. However, roads as over-determined cultural artifacts paradoxically complicate and resist such practice and orientation. As sites where class, gender, and cultural values collide, Hardy’s roads at first unsettle, and then attempt to secure cultural and psychological stability within the Victorian age of instability. I argue that an increased knowledge of the historical layers of the road generates a layered, more complex understanding of Victorian subjectivity. While we cannot deny the consequences of large-scale changes upon Victorian society, forces and elements formed in the past never completely disappear. Since roads were in use long before the Victorian crisis of knowable community, my perspective is informed by Raymond Williams’s notion of emergent and residual as articulated in Marxism and Literature (122–27). While emergent values, meanings, ideas, perspectives, and experiences can dominate a society characterized by rapid change, former values, meanings, ideas, perspectives, and experiences remain present although perhaps diminished or subliminal. These former elements remain influential and, perhaps, even keenly significant in some ways. Though often overlooked, these residual forces remain a significant factor affecting the present. The imperial beginnings of modern British roads suggest this process of emergent and residual: first conquest by an external empire and later domination through the centralized administration of the internal, imperial state. To use Williams’s terms, archaic British roads are transformed from local or regional trackways functioning primarily for trade and religious pilgrimage to pathways within an emerging imperial system (Roman). But over the millennia, this imperial institution recedes into a residual presence for the Victorians; consequently, the Roman intention and practice of domination and colonization that surrounds the road never is completely extinguished. Neither is the residual structure of previous roads; they form an archaic presence and palimpsest beneath the imperial Roman network and beneath the Victorian. Reinforcing the significance and validity of Williams’s sense of the emergent and the residual is Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of historical inversion that he discusses in The Dialogic Imagination (147). For Bakhtin, historical inversion is the notion that present ideas concerning not only self-determination and egalitarian cooperation but also imperial design and exploitive domination are

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Orientation in a Disoriented Victorian World

11

found in the past. What Bakhtin means by this inversion is that myth and art locate conceptions of stable community and harmonious relationships within categories of ideals like purpose, justice, and perfection as found and expressed in the past. In order to build the future, in other words, the past must be consulted, perhaps not the past’s actual reality but rather its vision and ideals. Following Bakhtin, we could say that the ordering principle of Victorian roads resonates not only with the Victorians’ valorization of their emergent empire but also with the residual Roman imperial intentions. That roads are associated with disruption and displacement seems no accident given the word “road’s” long and varied linguistic history. A brief background of the etymology of the word “road” at this point is appropriate and productive. The word “road” suggests a purposeful movement toward a destination and generally refers to a journey through the terrain of a nonurban landscape. The Latin word ire is related to the Latin and Italian via, derivationally identical with the French rue. According to Joseph Rykwert, the Anglo-Saxon root, ride, “denotes passage from one place to another” (15). For John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the term “road” is a relatively new one “becoming part of the language only in Shakespeare’s time, and it first meant nothing more than a journey on horseback” (21). In addition, according to Jackson, the contemporary landscape term, “odology,” comes from the Greek hodos which means road, way, or journey (21). Hodos is related to exodus— or departure from place—as well as method—meaning a systematic way of accomplishing a task. Derived from the Greek word hodos, odology is thus the science or study of roads. Yet the epistemology of hodos signifies not only the path inscribed in the landscape but also direction, manner, and perhaps the purpose of the path. Odology, then, properly includes not only the engineering details of the road, that is, the physical description of this everyday, ordinary social structure, but also implies a deeper cultural significance. Roads are collective enterprises built and maintained by societies; consequently, in complex and interesting ways, roads reflect the values and power structures embedded within a society. While an unambiguous meaning of “road” remains elusive, generally the term refers to a track ridden upon, and might have come from the Saxon verb “to rid,” as to clear a traveled track from obstacles (Jackson 21). However, we find a less pacific meaning embedded within the term. The Anglo-Saxon root (or Old English), ride, gives rise to ridan, to ride, which is associated with rad, or raid (Jackson 21). Thus though originally pacific in use, roads came to be historically associated with activities much more martial than mere travel. Raiding connotes a difference in power arrangements, a willingness to take and dominate through violence on the

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

part of the conqueror, and a lack of autonomy, even victimhood, on the part of the raided. This exchange produces a relationship of dominance and subordination and implies unequal power between the participants. The raider/victor acts while the vulnerable victim reacts. Besides fearing violence, humans possess many fears associated with place, among which is the primal fear of being “unplaced” (Casey xii), that is occupying an unknown place one cannot call one’s own. While people might feel placeless—that is, the place they currently inhabit is foreign or somehow not their own—the fact is that even “placeless” or homeless people occupy some particular geographic space as well as specific cultural place within the greater society of which they are even a marginal member. Humans are “place-oriented and place-saturated” (Casey ix) in that they always live in particular places rather than in some abstract no-place. But Victorians were coming to be acclimated to moving off places with which they were familiar. Roads were one of the major means by which de-centered Victorians changed physical places, and they often found themselves occupying a marginal cultural space within a traveling culture. Not really a place but a structure between destinations, the road figures as a marginal or in-between space much like the historical and cultural space that the Victorians-in-transition inhabit. While roads enable movement from place to place, roads also facilitate the transition of a culture from one stage of development to another—a sign for the Victorians of progress and civilization (Macaulay 131). Individuals don’t build roads. Societies do. A reliable and significant sign of civilization is always a road system. According to J.B.F Earle’s study Black Top: A History of the British Flexible Roads Industry, a “road system is always a potent sign of civilization” (6). Earle continues that “[w]here civilization, however crudely, has existed for centuries, it is inevitable that traditional routes and a corpus of land and road legislation have grown up” (6). In order to change the places that bodies inhabit, societies build and use roads. According to Heidegger in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” people dwelling within a specific place build particular structures that facilitate mobility” (147), structures like roads. No human culture exits without some kind of repeatedly-used pathways. To cultivate efficient and orderly mobility, human societies transform patterns of ritually-used routes into roads. Associated with transition and movement as well as change and uncertainty, roads are therefore a sign of marginal space, a space on the way to becoming some other kind of space. Building a road disrupts the stability of the spatial environment (a disruption to re-inscribe a new order) while using that road disrupts the previous relationship to time. That is to say, the ability to facilitate efficient movement across a familiar distance helps

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obliterate distance. Thus the road remains a triumph of time over space even as it signals the practice of a traditional community within local space. While fixed in the landscape, roads facilitate movement. Roads are “rooted” but also “run on” forever in two directions toward distant opposite horizons. One horizon is the fulfillment of personal identity; the other horizon serves another obvious but material purpose: the transport of people and goods. While different, these two horizons do not necessarily oppose each other. But more significant than Williams’s concept of emergent/residual and Bakhtin’s sense of historical inversion for this study’s spatial focus on Hardy’s traveling Victorians is Bakhtin’s notion of centrifugal and centripetal as analyzed by Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. According to Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin argues that culture “consists of both ‘centripetal’ (or ‘official’) and ‘centrifugal’ (or ‘unofficial’) forces. The former seek to impose order on an essentially heterogeneous and messy world; the latter either purposefully or for no particular reason continually disrupt that order” (30). Centrifugalism opposes centripetal orientation through plurality and diversity. Bakhtin argues that culture is composed of both centripetal and centrifugal forces. Centripetal forces orient culture toward the uniformity of a central authority and order; centrifugal forces orient culture away from a uniform center toward the diversity of the margins. This official imposition of order called “centripetal” by Bakhtin—forces oriented toward a center—tend towards homogeneity and hegemony. On the other hand, centrifugal forces embody an orientation away from some central core of homogeneity, and by definition, then, seem characterized as an opposition to homogeneity, an opposition variously termed heterogeneity, alterity, otherness, or diversity. In addition to his “chronotope of the road” (244) to signify the chance event upon the road, Bakhtin employs the terms heteroglossia and polyphony to express the opposition to single voices and absolute meanings that deny the validity of diverse voices or alternative view points. Furthermore, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and polyphony seem to be centrifugal forces that spin a multitude of perspectives away from a centered one. This movement away from the center disrupts or at the least counters the dominating monoglossia voice of hegemony. This multiplicity of voices parallels Foucault’s concept of the multiple meanings inherent and valid for a single space. In his essay “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault calls this heterogeneity of space heterotopias (24). For Foucault, then, “space takes the form of relations among sites” (23), that is, a place is constituted by an array of personal and social relationships that are “irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (23). Foucault’s sense of space is characterized by a sense of troubled

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

multiple values. These multiple relationships are represented simultaneously, often contested, and sometimes inverted within the same space (24). In short, rather than homogenous, space is a heterogeneous mix of resistance and conformity to hegemony while human experience of the world can be characterized more as a spatial network that connects and intersects multiple points of contention and conformity rather than as a monolithic space that develops through time (22). Through the use of these terms “centrifugal” and “centripetal,” Bakhtin spatializes culture. Because they orient forces either towards or away from a cultural “center,” Bakhtin’s cultural appropriation of the terms “centripetal” and “centrifugal” illustrates the departure-arrival-return schema of road travel. Hardy’s characters are spatially far removed from London, yet they internalize many values of the imperial center. Processes of departure are aligned with the centrifugal while processes of return are aligned with the centripetal. Roads facilitate both centripetal and centrifugal movement; roads work for forces that both place the body in circulation and that exchange the centripetal for the centrifugal. Yet the terms of travel aren’t absolute; they change (switch) with the return trip: the former destination (residual) becomes the new departure point (emergent), while the former departure location emerges as the new destination. This spatial actualization of a centralized and dominating ideology that Bakhtin names centripetal is characterized by imperial, technological sophistication and the accumulation of capital; on the other hand, the centrifugal opposes such a single, monolithic orientation through plurality and diversity. This slipperiness of definition coincides with Baudrillard’s notion of the illusion of homogeneity.4 Baudrillard insists that hetereogeneity, otherness, or diversity—that is, Bakhtin’s forces of centrifugality—continue to undermine and resist the centripetal or homogenous because the absolute attainment of homogeneity is illusory. But if it is true that the social order is hidden within what Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space calls “the order of space” (289), the complete order of space that hides beneath the surface of Victorian roads includes both the “residuum” of historical Roman hegemonic purpose and the more archaic Iron-Age purposes. While the pavements might have improved, the alignments and underlying foundations of Roman roads remained intact for eighteen hundred years as vital though dormant structures of colonization. In order to easily convey both notions of power relations and landscape structures, what Foucault refers to in “Of Other Spaces” as “an ensemble of relations” (22) experienced less as development through time than as an integrative

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network of points and intersections, I employ a trinity of concepts borrowed from landscape theorist Jay Appleton in The Experience of Landscape. Appleton provides a productive terminology of “prospect, refuge, and hazard” that effectively describes the function and meaning of the road for the Victorians in this study in a way that suggests a relationship of power in which dominant forces prey upon subordinate, vulnerable ones. Employing Appleton’s terms, this study looks at the road as a space of prospect, refuge, or hazard. For example, the road can be used and represented as a spatial structure that enhances the successful survival of an individual by increasing the vision in order to survey potential threats or benefits. A mountain peak, tree top, or ridgeline offers such a vista from which to survey prospects. Yet if the spatial structure is used to hide or shelter, Appleton refers to it as refuge. Again, organisms need shelter from predators and inclement weather, and such refuges offer warmth and safety, often community and stability. And if the spatial structure threatens the organism, that structure that increases vulnerability can be termed a hazard. What complicates an easy categorization of places into Appleton’s permanent order is that the same place or structure may be either a prospect, refuge, or a hazard depending upon circumstances and perspective. At different times, a place may assume any single characteristic, or routinely become one way rather than another, changing modes in a regular pattern based upon time or phenomenological perspective. For example, a stretch of road that conveniently conveys travelers during good weather—road as prospect—may become impassable and dangerous in wet weather or when exploited by highwaymen—road as hazard (perhaps prospect for the bandits). Or for example while a ridge may offer a prospect to survey a large area, it simultaneously may silhouette the viewer along the skyline to a potential enemy or expose to lightning strikes in a thunder storm hence making it a hazard. What is especially problematic is the introduction of cultural factors like class, race, or gender that render privileged or subordinate subject positions within the same space. Another complication remains a misreading as when the road is read as a prospect but in fact operates as a hazard. In order to orient the reader more fully towards the terrain that this project covers, let me unfold a more detailed road map of this study. Chapter One, “Orientation in a Disoriented Victorian World,” has first introduced both my subject and argument concerning the relationship between power relationships and roads, reviewed the literature associated with roads, outlined my theoretical perspective, and finally offers a summary map of the rest of this study. Chapter Two, “Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native,” explores Hardy’s spatial construction of his characters and their desires. By analyzing

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

the frontispiece map in which Hardy foregrounds the remains of a Roman road, I explore how Hardy creates an analogue for conflicting desires that dominate the narrative. In addition, I discuss the sense of the road as a hazard to the successful transformation of identity and fulfillment of desire. The Roman road’s residual power acts centripetally to contain feminine bodies and frustrate desire while Hardy as map maker inscribes his characters within both a feminized topography and a spatial grid of motivations antagonistic and at cross purposes to one another. By comparing the history of Roman road-making with Hardy’s construction of a map of the novel’s landscape, I consider the conflicting desires of Eustacia and Clym in imperial terms both through the residual values represented by the Roman road that runs through the middle of Egdon Heath and through Hardy’s own cartographic practice. In The Return of the Native, roads act as the boundary or container to Eustacia’s escape from Egdon Heath, marking the limits or margins of her desire’s fulfillment as well as the dominating (colonizing if you will) power of desire and cultural identity. Because her flight is foiled, the road suggests the frustration of desire that proves a hazard to its attainment. Chapter Three, “Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” looks at travel in terms of the disruption of the rural community, the displacement of the rural worker, and the use of the road as ritual. I compare Tess’s road travel to narrative and historic ceremonial walking, looking at the connection, for example, between her May Day club-walk and the Iron-Age ceremonial road of the Dorset Cursus. Through pilgrimage—ritualized body movement along roads—the working class reclaims and validates knowable community. By plotting Tess’s movement along roads throughout the novel, this chapter argues for Hardy’s clear inscription of a Celtic cross, an inscription that functions as a prospect and the means for the fulfillment of desire. In addition, this chapter looks at the competition between transport systems—road steam carriages, horse-drawn coaches, and railways—that emblematize emergent technology and discuss its effects upon the Victorian working class. This technological road competition is analogous to the sexual competition between Angel and Alec for Tess, and between Tess and each man. Angel uses the road as a tourist distancing himself from the realities of Tess while Alec uses speed along the road to seduce Tess who herself uses the road in a more sacred manner appropriate to ceremonial-like travel. Chapter Four, “Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure,” looks at the efforts of Jude to overcome his exclusion from the middle class and his isolation from a knowable Victorian community in terms of his road travel. This chapter considers Victorian desire and gender

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relationships in terms of the historical alternative to conventional Victorian gender values as represented by the ancient Icknield Way—a Neolithic ridgeway that inhabits marginal geologic space and historical residual space just as both Sue and Jude hover upon the margins of Victorian gender conventions. The residual history of the Icknield Way offers an alternative and more equitable mode of gendered relationship that can reconcile ideas concerning sexuality that the Victorians found irreconcilable. Instead of leading to a stable home, the road becomes the only stable home that Jude achieves. Jude knows no permanent home; he, Arabella, and Sue are constantly traveling, permanently displaced almost like permanent nomads. Without a stable home, the road becomes the only refuge that Jude will find. A map of Jude’s travels reveals a cross that is collapsing and remains in danger of being permanently lost. This collapse points to the fatality of desire for knowable community and equitable gender relationships with the road remaindered to the status of refuge—the only place Jude possesses in a long narrative of displacement. However, a look at the intersection between one well-traveled axis of Jude’s collapsed cross of travel and the perpendicular line of the ridgeway track—the archaic Icknield Way—re-establishes the cruciform sign of known and stable community as well as the harmony of equitable gender relationships. This cross overlays Jude’s collapsed cross, sharing an identical intersection of axes point of Browns Hill—Jude’s omphalos. Though Jude’s travels do not inscribe it, nevertheless, it still exists upon Hardy’s mapped landscape. This untraveled—and therefore unrealized—cross and Jude’s routine return to its central point suggests that although Jude has lost knowable community, such a community or consciousness is lost rather than destroyed. Finally, Chapter Five, “Epilogue,” briefly summarizes the major points from the preceding chapters and synthesizes the road’s connections to Victorian subjectivity, identity, and desire. In this chapter, I draw conclusions concerning the Victorian desire to order their disorderly roads and the implications of the road’s association with internal colonialism as well as the meaning of Hardy’s integration of the material with the mythic. These chapters argue that the road is simultaneously a chronotope of the “Becoming” of traveling culture, hybrid identities, transition, and unknowable community as well as a chronotope of the “Being” of permanent, knowable community, stable identities, and fixed culture. Both chronotopes suggest a balance of Baudelaire’s artistic elements of the fixed and the ephemeral that constitute the modern. As part of a mapped landscape, Hardy’s roads require that we read the signs of residual and surviving histories of previous roads in order to comprehend his Victorian subjects.

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Chapter Two

Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native

The Roman road runs straight and bare / As the pale parting-line in hair / Across the heath. And thoughtful men / Contrast its days of Now and Then, / And delve, and measure, and compare; —Thomas Hardy, “The Roman Road,” Gibson 264–65.

Hardy suggests three different elements in the above epigraph, an excerpt from his poem “The Roman Road.” First, he suggests a structure of everyday, ordinary life—a road; second, he suggests another part of everyday, ordinary life—the human body; and third, Hardy suggests a human intellectual endeavor that comes from methodical practice following rational thought—the concept of history. “Delve, measure, and compare”: necessary components of both historicizing (the contrasting “days of Now and Then”) and map making. Constructed in as consistently linear a fashion as possible, the Roman road seems associated with teleological thinking of a Victorian kind, a kind that saw social melioration through technological, moral, imperial, and scientific changes on a continuum of steady improvement, a linear rather than a cyclic process. The poem’s lines intimate that through imagination “thoughtful men” (ln. 3) reflect upon the historic Roman road and the proud “[h]elmed legionaries” (ln. 7) marching upon it. But in the lines that follow, the speaker presents no such vision of a distant past; rather than the haunting visions of Roman soldiers, the speaker—in the second stanza—remembers walking along the road with his mother. “But no brass-helmed legionnaire / Haunts it for me. Uprises there / A mother’s form upon my ken / Guiding my infant steps, as when / We walked that ancient thoroughfare” (ln. 10–14). For the speaker, then, the road forms a part of personal history and memory in addition to the 19

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

more objective yet distant Roman history. Interestingly, Hardy associates the Roman road with a feature of the body, “the pale parting-line in hair” (ln. 2). Not comprised of hair but rather an arrangement of it, the part that reveals the scalp beneath is an ordered structure of the body that crowns the center of rational thought without being part of reason. Just as a parting line of hair orders unruly hair, the Roman road that cuts across the surface of the terrain orders disorderly human relationships. In the poem, Hardy presents the road through a process of revealed sedimentation, peeling away multiple layers of past meaning and of past mapping to reach the modern. First the poem visualizes Roman soldiers traveling the “infant” or newly-made road presumably on their way to pacify and colonize indigenous Britons. Associating the road to the body, the speaker then invokes his own infant memories of the road while alongside his mother after reflecting upon later historians’ scholarship writing the road. These poetic memories were perhaps invoked by Hardy’s adult contact with the ancient thoroughfare after he had moved back permanently to Dorchester in 1885 (Millgate 256). Visiting his mother often in Higher Bockhampton from Max Gate, Hardy often walked along the Roman road. Thus individual and collective histories—as well as historical computations, cartographic representations, and personal memories—“haunt” the road adding to the accumulated layers of historical sediment necessary to render a full and rich description of the road. In his novel, The Return of the Native, Hardy follows the same practice of using the rich sediment of meanings associated with the historical road in order to give a comprehensive meaning to his narrative. In this chapter, I discuss the conflicting desires of Eustacia and Clym in terms of not only the conflicted ordering principles represented by the opposing dynamics of the Roman road and Egdon Heath but also through the spatiality of desire and the spatial dynamics of Hardy’s map of Egdon Heath. While the Roman road is only peripherally mentioned in the narrative, it dominates Hardy’s map of Egdon and bisects a human figure outlined by other roads. In order to argue the significance of Hardy’s narrative and mapped roads, this chapter explores the integral relationships between Egdon Heath’s mapped roads, the spatial construction of Hardy’s characters’ desires, and the Roman road antecedents that subtly but forcefully influence the former two. As a human-built structure, the Roman road is a foreign intrusion upon the heath terrain, in particular, irreconcilable to the spatial center of the narrative: the heath’s Rainbarrow tumulus. Hardy constructs the heath anthropomorphically as an organic being that possesses desires beyond human understanding. On the other hand, roads exist as human-built structures

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 21 that facilitate known human desires. As a way to order human desire, roads impose order upon a nonhuman, unruly terrain that is essentially uncontrollable and alien to human intent. Thus terrain and road stand in opposition to one another. Just as the Roman road pierces and divides both the actual and the cartographic landscape, conflicting human desires invade the human imagination and divide Hardy’s Victorians from each other. Through the opposition between Rainbarrow and the Roman road, Hardy emphasizes conflicting desire in two ways: first, by human bodily movement that recurs continually throughout the narrative; and second, through two pairs of spatially-constructed relationships or orientations: verticality and horizontality, and fixity and mobility. While Eustacia is characterized by fixity and horizontality, Clym is characterized by mobility and verticality. As the spatial center of the novel and associated with both Eustacia and pre-Roman pagans, Rainbarrow focuses these spatial themes of horizontality and verticality, intrusion and control, and mobility and fixity either by opposing them or by reinforcing them. From this spatial center, Eustacia’s desire radiates centrifugally. While Eustacia focuses her vision away from Rainbarrow, Wildeve and Clym focus centripetally inward upon Rainbarrow and Eustacia. While Eustacia views Paris as an arrival point and Egdon as a departure point, Clym conceives of Paris as a departure point and Egdon as his arrival location. While Eustacia refuses to know the Egdon Heath community, Clym attempts to embrace it. Yet despite his representation as the returning heath native, he misjudges and misreads the community (including Eustacia who arguably does not consider herself part of the rustic community) by a myopic focus upon his own ideals and desires. The novel builds the case for the spatial construction of identity through the spatial orientation of its characterization: Eustacia with horizontalness and immobility (containment within space) and Clym with verticality and the mobile. Despite Eustacia’s containment within the boundaries of Egdon Heath, both she and others practice a primacy of the body consisting of movements across but within the heath. Their movements collide with past residual histories of the road. Thus we find a tension between the Roman road associated with Clym and the Rainbarrow tumulus associated with Eustacia. The former represents invasive, disruptive, destabilizing change, and exposure to “foreign” domination; the latter represents repose, traditional value, and stability. The roads that are carved into the narrative landscape of the novel and the roads that are represented in Hardy’s cartographic landscape literally fix Eustacia and Clym to the heath and have the paradoxical ability both to fulfill and to frustrate desire. While Clym uses the road to return to Egdon,

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

Eustacia is unable to use the road to escape the heath. Preferring to wander the wild heath waste far from roads, Eustacia’s reticence to use roads at all culminates in her inability to successfully use the road to escape Egdon. Despite her disdain for the heath and her desire to escape it, she is very closely associated with Egdon Heath. In a manner similar to Egdon’s, Eustacia’s aloofness and opposition to the human community and its activities increases her inability to use roads to flee the place. Hardy’s map of Egdon Heath outlines with roads an image of Eustacia and fixes this figure in the landscape by the Roman road that runs through its center. Consequently, I argue that the Roman road emerges as a residual structure within The Return of the Native that frustrates Eustacia’s desires to leave Egdon because it pins her to the landscape and because it represents Clym’s single-minded will and idealism to stay and “improve” Egdon, a will and ideology that opposes Eustacia’s desire to leave. While roads limit and pin her to the heath, they also define her cartographically as a figure of masculine design, desire, and spectacle, a process like the imperial construction of the Roman road. Hence the road and the heath are spatial analogues for Hardy’s characters’ conflicting desires, a conflict that destabilizes their relationships, a theme that resides at the core of Hardy’s narrative. Hardy’s novel narrates the difficulty if not impossibility of moving out of the historically embedded pathways of past traditions and constructions. Eustacia and Clym are circumscribed by the roads of Egdon Heath that form the heath’s boundaries, roads as represented on Hardy’s frontispiece map. Egdon Heath’s roads form the margins of their world, a world to which Clym returns, but from which Eustacia, who is associated with Hardy’s cartographic figure, cannot escape. As the outlined figure in Hardy’s map reveals, roads often isolate people and tend to foil the fulfillment of desire by fixing the limits to movement, not only that of physical travel and relocation but also that of social mobility. Thus the representational matrix outlined by roads on this map can be read as a mixed sign for a cultural and individual identity that is fluid for some and inflexible for others. According to J. Hillis Miller in Topographies, “The Return of the Native is the reading of such a map, the retelling of a story latent in it” (46). In addition to the story of Clym’s flight from middle-class security and Eustacia’s aspiration for it, another story that runs through the center of the novel just as it runs through the center of Hardy’s map of Egdon heath is the story of the Roman road’s residual power over the Victorians. As a manifestation of imperial will, the Roman road suggests gender relationships ordered by principles of dominance and subordination even as it implies a disorderly tension between Clym’s return to an unchanging

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 23 working-class past and Eustacia’s aspirations for mobility toward a middleclass future. In order to assist the reader, let me unfold a road map of Chapter Two. First, I describe Hardy’s sketch map of Egdon Heath in terms of the imperial signs and mythic codes which it symbolizes and analyze its influence upon the narrative. Then, I discuss the significance of the Roman road that bisects the gendered topography of this map as well as the imperial function of mapping. Next, I briefly review the history and construction of the Roman road in order to underscore and clarify its significance and longevity as a dominating dynamic within Hardy’s imagination and The Return of the Native. And last, I discuss The Return of the Native in terms of Hardy’s spatial construction and distribution of his characters’ desires as well as the realization and the frustration of these desires as it relates to their movement along or away from roads. Before the narrative properly begins, Hardy presents the reader with a map of Egdon Heath—his self-drawn “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story”—situated between the title page and the table of contents before the author’s preface and narrative chapters (Figure 1). In part through the construction of this map, I argue, Hardy authoritatively establishes a feminized landscape and a desire in Eustacia that though defined by roads, contained by roads, and transfixed by the “masculine” Roman road, is antithetical to the road. Hardy’s map orients the audience in two ways: first, toward a feminized topography of the physical terrain as outlined by roads; second, by grounding the reader in a topography of empire and its attendant principles of domination and subordination through the centrality of the represented Roman road. Providing a simulacrum of the landscape (much like Faulkner’s map of Yoknapatawpha County), the map grounds the reader in a landscape that seems tangible and realistic rather than merely fantastic and fictional. Through the place names like Mistover, Bloom’s End, and Quiet Woman Inn, Egdon Heath as the fictional landscape for the novel acquires a substantiality and presence equivalent to a real world that actually exists. After all, if a reader can hold and see a map of the landscape in which events occur that reader might believe that the events themselves as well as the motivations behind them are real. Through the map, Hardy suggests that the experiences of society and its members simply do not exist outside of geographic and physical place, spaces that can be represented both narratively and cartographically. He elaborates upon this use of mapping in his poem “The Place on the Map” (Gibson 321–22) in which the scrutiny of a map invokes in the poem’s speaker the memory of a difficult episode with a former lover. Hardy writes: “So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time / And the thing we found we had to face before the next year’s prime” (Gibson 322). Like the poem “The

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

Figure 1. Hardy’s Sketch Map

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 25 Roman Road,” the map sparks the speaker’s memory of past events as well as of the painful emotions associated with a lost lover. Not only does the map depict a local coastline, but it represents to the speaker all of the speaker’s feelings regarding a past relationship. The “place on the map” is a sign for the wounded “place in the heart.” The memory of gendered relationship is spatially configured since the speaker “reads the sign” of the former “biographic encounter” through the map. In these lines, Hardy integrates physical place, representational space (the map), history, and gendered relationship—an integration that depends upon each constituent element. To focus exclusively upon time (history) is to possess an unbalanced perspective because history simply doesn’t happen in a vacuum but creates changes in people and places across a landscape primarily visible and tangible. By drawing a sketch map of Egdon Heath for the frontispiece of the 1878 first-edition of The Return of the Native, Hardy the novelist also plays the role of Hardy the mapmaker. In an October, 1878, letter to his publishers, Smith, Elder, and Company, Hardy notes that he had enclosed a sketch map to be placed as an engraving as frontispiece to the first volume. Hardy writes in the letter: Unity of place is so seldom preserved in novels that a map of the scene of action is as a rule impracticable: but since the present story affords an opportunity of doing so I am of the opinion that it would be a desirable novelty, likely to increase the reader’s interest. (Hardy The Life 160)1

Not only does this correspondence point to Hardy’s acute commercial senses regarding publication success, but also it points to Hardy’s focus upon “unity of place” that integrates spatial concerns with temporal ones in order to provide a balanced literary representation. He adds later in the letter that a critic once remarked to him “that nothing could give such reality to a tale as a map of this sort” (The Life 160). With these words, Hardy reveals an awareness of the blurred boundary between representation of reality and the ontological status of reality’s creation through cartography. Hardy’s cartographic and narrative authority stems from his literary aesthetics. In his 1887 essay “Observations, On Life, Art, and Poetry,” Hardy articulates an aesthetic characterized by distortion. He claims that art is a “disproportioning” (Cunningham 811–12). That is, art distorts or throws out of proportion real life in order to show more clearly the features that an author’s “idiosyncrasy” chooses to illustrate. In other words, art focuses on some elements of life at the expense of other elements that remain of lesser artistic interest to the author, perhaps an emphasis bordering upon exaggeration but at the

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

least an emphasis beyond mere mimetic reportage. In Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Lubomir Dolezel maintains that “[f ]ictional worlds do not have to conform to the structures of the actual world” (19). This fictional nonconformity conforms to Hardy’s sense of disproportioning as well as to the relation of the map to its referent. Like Hardy’s conception of art in general and the novel in particular, then, his map is a representation that disproportions reality in order to emphasize certain elements of that reality, elements like the Roman road with its imperial characteristics. Upon reflection, such artistic selection remains obvious. Of course an author selectively chooses what to describe just as much as the author invents personality of characters, the situations and circumstances they experience, and their actions. With infinite descriptions available, authors limit themselves to finite expression based upon what they wish to emphasize. This distortion or skewed view parallels another of his claims about aesthetics. Arguing that “realism is not Art,” Hardy says that “Art is the secret of how to produce by a false thing the effects of a true” (Cunningham 812). Rather than strict or literal fidelity to “objective” reality and the “true” dimension of facts, art, according to Hardy, distorts the facts to better bring about a true effect upon the audience, a process parallel to rhetorical catharsis. Hardy’s aesthetic philosophy offers a rhetoric that functions much like the process of mapping. Disproportion, or difference in scale or exaggerated scale, is exactly what maps accomplish. In The New Nature of Maps, J. B. Harley maintains that a map’s content deliberately distorts, that is, throws reality out of proportion, a process identical to Hardy’s disproportioning (63). Some maps foreground towns, cities, and roads and show them out of proportion (Hardy’s act of disproportioning) to their actual scale in order to emphasize urban and transportation significance. In contrast to road and pictorial maps, a topographic map marks differences of regular intervals through its lines. No one really thinks that those exact lines appear in reality (like lines of latitude or longitude). In addition, scale and distance on a map do not coincide with the actual world. By definition, a map is never a oneto-one, or 1:1, correspondence of the reality that it depicts. In order to emphasize roads, Hardy signifies them on his map through large white lines out of all proportion to the surrounding landscape. The scale of their representation is increased relative to other elements within the actual environment. Also, the pictorial nature of his map emphasizes buildings or hills and foregrounds them at the expense of other characteristics like elevation or climate patterns. On most maps, towns and roads are the dominant representation, representations often larger in scale than warrants their corresponding physical manifestation in the terrain. By their

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 27 visual prominence in the hierarchy of representation, roads and cities visually dominate other maps, their importance magnified if not highlighted. Since they dominate the representation of landscape, they seem to embody the “natural” order of the terrain, downplaying if not ignoring the terrain of the heath. Hardy’s map reinforces the belief that the roads that connect human locales are the only entities worth caring about, or worse, that actually exist even though his narrative belies this view. Thus on the map, cartographic symbols assume a dominant position within the imagination as the only facts worth believing and considering, a process of reification. Thus authors and map makers highlight certain elements and ignore or downplay others. Cartographers act as creators with the power to give voice or to ignore. Herein resides the power of symbolic space, the power to dominate by selective focus and exclusion. The map lends authority to Hardy as a story-teller, one who seems to be relating a narrative rather than making it up. This mimetic orientation is supplemented by a symbolic one that orients the reader toward empire. The map’s Roman road reinforces the connection between imperial desire and narrative desire. Before the narrative properly begins, the map foreshadows the subtle yet inevitable influence of the road’s ancient character and purpose to the plot and action of the protagonists. This reification and symbolic dominance of the humanly-constructed seems to position the heath in an adversarial role with the road. As the sign of civilization, the Roman road inscribed along the heath’s surface remains a stark intrusion and superficial irritant to pre-imperial civilization. Thus, Hardy as map maker uses cartography to focus the reader on the issues that his text later develops: sexual desire, silence, and immobility—entities ordered through the Roman road’s central position on the map. Dominating Hardy’s map and bisecting it—running obliquely from the lower right-hand corner to the upper left-hand one as a dashed line—is a Roman road. Running through the center of the map, this Roman road’s prominent position would appear to emphasize its centrality to the narrative. At the upper end of the map, the dashed line of the abandoned Roman road intersects and crosses the parallel lines and represents the more modern road between East Egdon and Anglebury. However within the lower right map quadrant, the Roman road merges into a road in modern use, one that turns into the Anglebury road which is represented by two unbroken parallel lines that form the margins of a white ribbon. The point where the two roads merge is a point near but equidistant from the Quiet Woman Inn and Rainbarrow. Whether this intersection point is characterized as one where the Roman road merges with or separates from the newer Anglebury one depends

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upon the direction in which the traveler is going. Perspective or orientation that includes human intention and desire gives meaning and definition to the space. At this particular spot where the road changes character, one views it as meeting a well-worn road or departing from the more modern one depending upon the direction the traveler faces and intends to travel: in this case whether the walker has arrived where the Roman road diverges from the well-worn Anglebury road, or whether the traveler has arrived at the point where the Roman road merges with the Anglebury road. That the roads are connected yet distinct points to a complex relationship of interconnectedness or mutual influence that the narrative seeks to explore if not to unravel. By Hardy’s own account, according to biographer Michael Millgate, fictional Egdon Heath is primarily drawn from the heath land just east of his birthplace, Higher Bockhampton (199). Given that Hardy’s map remains a representation of the actual heath to the east of Higher Bockhampton, this map is not presented in the usual manner with north oriented at the top of the page. Hardy’s map has rotated the landscape 90 degrees so that actual east is at the top of the page. This displacement draws attention to something important that he wants to emphasize: a sexualized topography. By rotating the map’s orientation 90 degrees from “true north,” the roads appear to form an outline of a feminine torso, a torso without head and arms—very much like the Venus de Milo statue. By relaxing the eyes and using a little imagination, the viewer can see that cartographic components form anatomical elements: below, a girdlelike road that connects Mistover with the Quiet Woman Inn; Black Barrow emerges as the pubic area; the Anglebury road (the continuation of the abandoned Roman road) runs down and to the right within one dark valley that forms a leg; the other valley with Blooms End at the bottom forms the other leg. The undulations between the two roads that frame the torso above the pubic area can be imagined as protruding ribs, and a pair of the larger hills suggests breasts. The physical terrain recedes into the background as the roads that connect towns carve the blank white space of the map and achieve a representational prominence in cartographic space. Although the map portrays hills and valleys, tumuli and barrows in shaded relief, and a handful of roads and tiny houses, the outline made by roads feminizes and sexualizes the topography. Denis Wood in The Power of Maps claims that if this “map is accepted as a window on the world,” these boundary lines of the body “must be accepted with the ontological status” (19) of houses, hills, and streams. Wood further maintains that once the map reader acknowledges that the map creates boundaries, the

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 29 representational status as opposed to the actual status of the creation can no longer be casually accepted (19). At the center of Hardy’s map stands a pagan tumulus: Rainbarrow (the Blackbarrow of the map2)—a natural hill and pre-Roman tumulus. Constructed by different peoples for different purposes, the tumulus exists as both a vantage site to gain a commanding view and as the burial site for some long forgotten chieftain. Rainbarrow is a spatial center or unifying place in the narrative. The narrative begins and ends here, and this spot is the one identified with Eustacia, the place to which she (and others) return again and again. Since Rainbarrow approximates the pubic mound of the mapped figure, Eustacia’s sexuality and sexual attraction to men stand out as the central driving forces of the narrative. This forceful intention and restricted focus comprise the opposition between the masculine Roman road and the feminine tumulus. This opposition also suggests that femininity is paradoxically desired and feared; feminine mystery resists comprehension by men yet is subject to masculine gaze and control. While Rainbarrow stands for the heath as a whole, the way Hardy’s map writes place names emphasizes the tension between Roman road and heath especially Rainbarrow. While the name “Egdon Heath” is represented by a large and sinuous calligraphy, the other place names are presented horizontally as conventional text. Paralleling the Roman road’s linearity, “The Remains of the Roman Road” calligraphy is also linear yet written obliquely following the orientation of the dashed line. Tellingly, the script for the heath and that of the remains of the Roman road are the only scripts which intersect or merge with one another. This calligraphic intersection suggests that pagan Rainbarrow and the civilized Roman road spatially collide with one another, a collision analogous to the conflicting desires of Eustacia and Clym that makes their relationship irreconcilable. Outlined and bounded by roads, the feminine figure of Hardy’s map is without a head. This absence suggests both a feminine lack of voice and lack of reason. The map’s headless figure shares the same disfigurement as the woman represented on the sign of The Quiet Woman Inn, a woman who carries her head beneath her arm. Beneath the inn’s gruesome sign reads the couplet: “SINCE THE WOMAN’S QUIET / LET NO MAN BREED A RIOT.” Both representations of women speak of a silence imposed upon the feminine by masculine image-makers and what Hélène Cixous terms a phallocentric writing tradition (Richter 1098). Speaking to the unequal power relationships within gendered discourses, Hélène Cixous notes in “The Laugh of the Medusa” that for women, “personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history” (Richter 1095).

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Also, without a head (without reason) but transfixed by the Roman road, the map-figure signifies Eustacia’s “reasonable” (that is reasonable from hegemony’s perspective) but single-minded focus upon middle-class integration, an obsession that borders upon irrationality but nonetheless forms the core of her motivation and her desire. It is no accident that The Quiet Woman Inn is owned and run by Wildeve who, as her means of escape from Egdon Heath, becomes the focus of her sensuous desire and her dependence. Like a sutured line, the old Roman road bisects the Eustacia figure of the map. As scarification, sutures or stitches are the surface sign of a body’s wound, now closed. If the feminine body (Eustacia) has been stitched back together, does this imply that she has been wounded? A wound, fresh or old, points to vulnerability. Twice in one day, Eustacia is bodily wounded. First, Susan Nunsuch stabs her in the arm with a stocking-needle to end Eustacia’s perceived bewitchment of her son Johnny (139–40). Second, Eustacia cuts her hand at the well while Clym is retrieving her bucket (146). These two physical injuries as well as the disparaging rumors of Eustacia’s “witchly power” increase Clym’s sympathy and attraction to her. Just as Eustacia’s woundings attract the gaze and consideration of Clym, the transfixed feminine figure pinned to Hardy’s map by the Roman road invites the gaze of the map reader. Like a bodily wound itself that penetrates flesh, the penetrating eyes of the map’s audience gazes upon the naked and immobilized femininity of the landscape’s surface, perhaps to penetrate that terrain’s (and femininity’s) mysteries. This invitation becomes another form of vulnerability. In a similar vulnerability of heath to Roman road, the figure is vulnerable to the map maker. In The New Nature of Maps, J. B. Harley insists that “cartographers manufacture power: they create a spatial panopticon” (244). In Feminism and Geography, Gillian Rose adds more specifically that geographical knowledge—that is the knowledge represented on maps—means “to occupy a masculine subject position” (4). According to Rose, then, maps and geography are male oriented and serve masculine interests. Male cartographers inscribe their marks and write across a cartographic landscape conceptualized in feminine terms. Hardy maps his landscape along similarly gendered lines in order to make the terrain navigable for masculine use. This use reduces woman to the level of use value or exchange value, a reduction according to Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One that reduces women to the level of a commodity (31) and as objects of the male gaze. While Hardy’s narrative seems to question the legitimacy of this hegemonic gaze, his map seems to invite it. Hardy was not the only writer to construct a sexualized map authoritatively. Rider Haggard, a lifelong friend of Hardy with whom he often

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 31 corresponded according to biographer Michael Millgate, also presents the reader with a similar map in his 1885 novel, King Solomon’s Mines. In its early pages, King Solomon’s Mines contains a treasure map that is explicitly sexualized. According to Anne McClintock’s analysis in Imperial Leather, the map roughly sketches the terrain that white men must traverse in order to claim a treasure to which they maintain no legitimate right, a found surplus of capital which seems to be theirs only through the power of white patriarchy. If this map is inverted, the path within the terrain reveals a spread-eagled, truncated female body; however, the only parts that are drawn and named are those that “denote female sexuality” (3). As in Hardy’s mapped feminine figure, Haggard’s map is a figurative representation of female anatomy. If we accept the claim of Brian Jarvis in Postmodern Cartographies, dominant ideology enforces its conception of the spatial in service to its control of the social (44) since cartographic space contains stories “of an ongoing [cultural] struggle over meaning and value” (7). Haggard’s map complements the story of this gendered struggle as his narrative traces the travel of his adventurers across this feminine body/map from the south or bottom of the map moving north towards the top of the map. They begin near a shrunken pool of bad water representing the head of the feminine figure, a depiction according to McClintock that seems to degrade feminine intelligence and rationality, an omission oddly reminiscent of Hardy’s headless torso. At the center of the map, the travelers pass between two mountains called Sheba’s Breasts topped by nipples, proceed over the navel koppie, and plunge into the pubic mound of three dark hills which conceal the entrances to two passages simultaneously topographic and anatomical: the vaginal entrance to the treasure cave and an anal escape route from which the men laden with diamonds must crawl. Such reference on Haggard’s map to the feminine body and maternity, according to McClintock, “hints at the hidden order underlying industrial modernity: the conquest of the sexual and labor power of colonized women” (3). McClintock implies that the very nature of maps is an imperial one by assisting in the illegitimate, masculine invasion and dominance of feminine terrain. The fact that a Roman road cuts across Hardy’s map only strengthens the association between Hardy’s text and imperial practice. Beside the spread-eagled form of Haggard’s feminine figure is drawn the logo of the compass. Not only reflecting the magnetic lines of force, the compass also reflects a cultural orientation; the cross is an icon of Western rationality and expansion—a sign that marks the woman as contained by the twin axes of industrial technology and male militarized violence. As McClintock notes, it is possible, then, “to view cartography as a discourse,

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a system which provides a set of rules for the representation of knowledge embodied in the images we define as maps and atlases” (4). McClintock points to a paradox that the male map inverts the woman and stands her on her head; yet, if the map is rotated 180 degrees to right the female figure, the names and therefore the entire imperial enterprise become incoherent. Each reading of the map is dependent upon the other, a “contradictory liaison” (4) between power and resistance. Haggard’s and Hardy’s maps show that this discourse system is problematically gendered. Imaginative maps like those found at the beginning of The Return of the Native and Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, therefore signify more than a disproportionate orientation and out-of-scale focus. They signify a gendered and authoritative relationship to the landscape, a relationship that suggests that terrain and sensuality are feminine spheres while representation of terrain and abstraction are masculine (admittedly, a reductive formulation). However, the fact remains that Victorian cartography was a masculine prerogative. To the extent that women aren’t map makers, control of their representation is left to men. According to Annette Kolodny in The Lay of the Land: “As soon as the land is experienced as feminine, no masculine activity in relation to it can be both satisfying and nonabusive” (142). In other words, feminizing the landscape reinforces and increases the vulnerability and victimization of both women and terrain since both are conceptualized as subordinate and virgin and therefore available through masculine discourse for appropriation by masculine practice and use. With an “imperial” will, Hardy willfully manipulates the landscape with his map. To the extent that terrain and the intimate knowledge of that terrain are feminine places while cartography and geography—the representation of place—are masculine activities, Hardy the male map maker and novelist assumes control over Eustacia’s story. As the female protagonist of the text, Eustacia is consistently associated with not only Egdon Heath but also with the map’s feminine figure that defines the very terrain upon which the narrative moves. As the central feminine figure of Hardy’s novel, Eustacia Vye is also the feminine figure represented by Hardy’s map. Hardy positions Eustacia as central to map and narrative; yet while the narrative allows her to speak, the map does not. Associated with the heath’s paganism, Eustacia remains distant from its human community—superficially in it yet not from it or part of it. If paganism is opposed to civilization’s trappings of maps and roads, the map colonizes both her and the terrain through its authoritative control of representation. The roads form an insurmountable barrier around her world. But like a pin that fixes a butterfly within its display case, the Roman road

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 33 transfixes the map’s figure in place. Given Eustacia’s association with both map-figure and the heath, the roads that outline the margins of Hardy’s map-figure spatially embody the limits (and failure) of Eustacia to realize her desire and move off the map. Therefore, Hardy’s purpose “to provide unity of place” acts in two ways that seem to be strategies of containment and interdiction: while it focuses the narrative, it nevertheless constrains his characters’ movement. As the figure outlined by roads on the face of the terrain of Hardy’s map, Eustacia is unable to escape because she is part of the topography. Hardy’s map is emblematic of woman’s place in Victorian society and Eustacia’s place in the novel. Confined by the inscription of the map maker and novelist, the woman’s position reinforces Hélène Cixous’s claim that women have “always functioned ‘within’ the discourse of man” (Richter 1098), that is to say, feminine representation is appropriated by phallocentric writing “where woman has never her turn to speak” (Richter 1093). The map suggests that Eustacia is pinned to the topography of male discourse, unable to write herself either onto the mapped landscape or off of it. While Clym isn’t under any illusions as to Eustacia’s desire to escape Egdon, he does hope he can change her mind. But after they’re married, he unhappily realizes that Eustacia’s desire is unwavering though often hidden. “It was the first time that he had confronted the fact of the indirectness of a woman’s movement towards her desire” (193). Cixous maintains: “Women must write through their bodies” (Richter 1097). Since a woman, as Cixous claims, must “write herself . . . by her own movement,” (Richter 1090), Eustacia’s desire would follow a non-linear pattern different from masculine linear trajectory. If she is to become Cixous’s “I-woman, escapee,” (Richter 1093), her path must transgress masculine linearity. Such reliance upon one particular mode of spatial practice finds metaphorical expression in Cixous’s valorization of feminine nonlinear movement in opposition to masculine linearity. As primarily a military measure to invade, conquer, and rule a recalcitrant indigenous population, the Roman road can be seen as another example of male writing that mirrors Cixous’s claim that male control of the discourses, writings, representations of women, and sexuality reinforces a power relation “meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a ‘dark continent’ to penetrate and to ‘pacify’” (Richter 1091 n. 2). The Roman road inscribes itself across indigenous and disorderly terrain in a way analogous to the way Victorian masculine discourse and representation turns women into “trampled spaces” (Richter 1092). In order to write her own story through her body since neither rational masculine discourse nor autonomous representation are available to her,

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads

Eustacia resists hegemonic control and centripetalism through her body’s centrifugal movement away from roads despite being pinned to the map by both the Roman road and the feminine figure outlined by the other more modern roads. Her spatial analogue is the feminine figure of Hardy’s map, a figure that comprises the very landscape of Egdon Heath but is also defined and bounded by roads. She seems to intuit the inequitable power arrangements signified by her embeddedness in the map. But just as the heath remains resistant to masculine civilization’s intrusion as the Roman road, Eustacia is resistant to men and masculine desire, acting as a powerful and incomprehensible opposition through her spatiality and her body. Through cartographic inscription, the map reveals how the narrative world is disciplined and how in the novel Eustacia is contained within its cartographic grid. Clym has moved away and returns, but Eustacia does not leave. While we hear about Clym’s life in Paris or Eustacia’s prior experience growing up in Budmouth or Thomasin’s and Wildeve’s wedding in Anglebury, these events do not take place within the present narrative time of the novel nor are they told through a first-person narrator. Narrator and narrative remain as confined to Egdon Heath as is Eustacia. Neither Wildeve, Thomasin, nor Diggory Venn moves off the map; yet, neither are they inscribed upon it cartographically as is Eustacia. Therefore, cartographic confinement is not unproblematically gendered. In addition to containment, mapping reveals how little importance time has for Egdon Heath. Just as the map contains narrative movement, the map also provides a “snapshot” of local space, “freezing” Egdon Heath in time; mapping immobilizes the terrain enabling it to defy change. While the greater world is becoming more dependent upon reliable conformity to time management, Egdon exists beyond time. Such an emphasis upon the timeless quality of this particular space is reiterated in the first chapter’s description of the heath as “an ancient permanence” (5). As permanent as tradition in a changeless terrain, a map fixes the terrain permanently despite its later changes. Similar to the permanence and changelessness of Egdon Heath itself, the map of Egdon Heath is a cartographic “snapshot,” a permanent record of a landscape frozen at a particular time. A snapshot doesn’t show subsequent actual changes to the landscape like the altered shape and course of a river, the construction of a new road, or the addition of buildings in an urban center. The map doesn’t represent these changes, another way that a map does not correspond to the reality it proposes to depict accurately. To record changes, a new map would need to be drawn. Despite Egdon Heath’s essential changelessness from a human perspective, Hardy juxtaposes seasonal and ancient changeable elements within the

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 35 heath that contrast with Egdon Heath’s essential unchanging character and the map’s changelessness. Paradoxically, the narrator claims that this space was once covered by the sea, a sea that constantly renewed itself every year, every day, every hour (5). Yet after the sea receded, “the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained” (5). In Hardy’s Victorian world, railroad schedules and factory working hours required broad agreement and faithful adherence to time’s rather than space’s dictates. Not so in the heath. Hardy narrates that on “Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day” (102); each hamlet believes and adheres to a slightly different time. Therefore the players practicing their play parts for the Yeobright’s Christmas party arrive at widely different times. Like the railroads that encircle but do not penetrate the heath, the outer world exists only as an ambiguous sign for heath residents whose terrain is unchanging, the land that time forgot. Instead of time in the novel, Hardy concentrates upon spatiality. For example, he employs two long paragraphs to set the spatial arrangements for the Yeobright living room at Bloom’s End for their annual Christmas party (108). Hardy renders a thick description as to where furniture was positioned to facilitate dancing, where tables were placed to facilitate the distribution of food and drink, where the musicians would be placed, and where chairs were located for those not dancing. While these spatial arrangements are noted to occur only once a year, like the November 5th hill bonfires, the significance of the spatial ordering coincides with the importance of recurring seasonal events that are celebrated as a longstanding annual tradition. While movement, especially walking, characterizes Hardy’s characters, the pace along Egdon’s roads appears neither frantic nor frenetic. No one drives a cart or wagon recklessly; the pace is the measured stroll or stride of a walker. According to Roberto Dainotto, this remains so because Egdon Heath is Hardy’s idealized version of a past rural England upon which the modern accelerated pace never intrudes. Clym has escaped cosmopolitan Paris for the slower and simpler life of Egdon, the life of a disappearing English rural past. For Dainotto, “Clym emerges, slowly but surely, as the symbol of a modern generation of Victorian humanists”(56), one who valorizes, even romanticizes, the rural countryside and the past. The modern, the city, and even the railroad remain “off the map” of Egdon Heath since they map technological, social, and perceptual changes in consciousness unavailable and unknown to heath inhabitants. For Dainotto, Hardy’s mapped landscape of Egdon Heath with its inscribed roads remains an imaginary place. The contrary notions of change and changelessness of the heath point to the complex notion of movement. Despite Eustacia’s containment within

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the map, she and the other characters move quite a bit within its borders. As Michael Wheeler notes in English Fiction of the Victorian Period, Hardy maps “the relationships between characters by tracing the intersections of their routes between Egdon locations” (205). According to J. Hillis Miller in Topographies: “The text of the novel might be defined as a reading of the new map” (51). The road-inscription of the feminine outline reinforces the merging of the human with the topographic. The human superficial inscription upon the surface of the terrain in the form of “lines of roads, paths, and fences” (Miller 51) remain topographic seams “that are connecting filaments and also rifts” (Miller 51), a double nature. While roads facilitate movement within Egdon Heath—a quest that seeks to gain the object of one’s desire— the very same roads simultaneously form the insurmountable boundaries to an escape from the heath and the consequent limit to the successful fulfillment of desire for those who dream of moving off the map. While roads function to facilitate mobility within the map and the confines of Egdon Heath, the roads on the map primarily represent immobility. Hardy’s characters and narrative are dominated by a map that holds them in place. Hardy forces them to enact their dramas within the borders of Egdon Heath. Like Eustacia’s dream of sitting in a sunny room of the Louvre, Clym returns from an “imaginary” place. Neither Mrs. Yeobright nor Eustacia, nor any of the heath rustics comprehends the bourgeois Paris that stifles Clym’s ideals. Beyond the borders of Egdon Heath, the world is unknowable to the heath community. As the figure of the map outlined by roads, Eustacia is thoroughly dominated by her desire to leave Egdon; yet, she is intimately associated with the Egdon Heath terrain, its brooding, its sensuality, its power, and its mystery. Since Hardy associates Eustacia with Egdon Heath, the very landscape becomes anthropomorphically sensual (note its moans and sighs). Hardy’s first chapter, “A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression,” that follows the frontispiece map establishes the heath itself as a major character through personification (before any human character enters the narrative). Far older than the ancient Roman road, Egdon Heath’s primal character will be integral to the narrative. The wild waste that is Egdon Heath remains humanized as ancient and brooding, permanent and watchful, breathing out darkness, and listening to human affairs. On a colossal scale barely registering on human consciousness (except for the narrator’s), mysterious Egdon Heath possesses the storm as a lover and the wind as a friend. It embodies “midnight dreams of flight and disaster” (4). The heath’s lover—the wind—whispers in its ear and then flies off to Paris. The heath remains behind, implacable and unable to comprehend the report of the wind that freely moves across and beyond Egdon.

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 37 Unlike Haggard’s narrative landscape, Hardy’s Egdon Heath becomes a key character in and of itself. As Dainotto argues, Egdon Heath remains the rhetorical trope for personification in which people are extensions of an idealized landscape, “an outgrowth of the land itself ” (43). While the novel begins as an extended prosopopoeia—that is, the geographic described in terms of the human—according to Dainotto, “Hardy’s characters become the expression of a topography laid out in the map” (43). Just as the map draws attention to the feminine form, Hardy’s narrative focuses upon Eustacia’s material and sensual desires as associated with the form of feminized landscape. The heath ignores the civilized and purposeful incursions of the road and remains essentially unchanged despite the transition of the seasons. The heath—that is, Nature and terrain—possesses its own purposes, purposes often mysterious to human consciousness and, from Hardy’s perspective, often indifferent, malicious, or opposed to human endeavor. Like the heath, Eustacia possesses desire little known to the human community upon the heath. She is a mystery, a witchly power. Eustacia has instincts that run toward “social nonconformity” (57). Rather than the domestic dutiful woman like Thomasin, Eustacia is portrayed as a strangely powerful witch wandering the heath on moonlit nights, a woman whose overweening concerns are mad passionate loves and escape from Egdon Heath toward a more fulfilling life. While Thomasin is content with Egdon Heath, Eustacia chafes at its limitations. Tellingly, Hardy describes Eustacia’s mood in terms of horses turned out to pasture who gaze at other horses in the distance hard at work pulling a load along the road (57). The narrator characterizes Eustacia’s independence and will (her non-conformity) as well as her idleness as the difference between those horses turned out to pasture leisurely on the heath grass and those work horses upon the road. Eustacia scorns the purposeful work and workingclass occupations of others. She dreams of Clym sight unseen and what he could do for her plans of escape from Egdon. She half-way falls in love with an image of him while Thomasin dutifully picks apples from storage for her aunt’s homecoming pie to her son (57). Unlike Clym or Venn, indeed unlike any other person of the heath’s rustic community, Eustacia does not work at all. Like a Byronic hero, she wanders the hills, brooding in her passionate loneliness and adolescent dreams. Without work, Eustacia spends much of her time day-dreaming and unaware of her surroundings. The narrator tells us that the “subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapors” (57). At her home, aptly named Mistover, Eustacia’s dreams are as ephemeral and insubstantial as the fog. Unlike the rustic community’s solidarity to living in a

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harsh environment by traditionally lighting fires on November 5th, Eustacia rebels against her entire social and physical situation. From the heath’s perspective (molded by geologic time and stretched infinitely and more unimaginably to human consciousness than historic time), Clym’s return to his native landscape parallels the arrival of Roman road-builders. Both remain invasive with colonizing purposes, both bent upon imposing a single-minded will upon the human community that already inhabits the land. Yet the heath can never be understood through the human comprehension or imagination. Like human desire, the terrain remains just as inexplicable. Clym’s single-mindedness finds its spatial analogue in the Roman road that orders imperial desire as it intrudes and cuts across the terrain. On the other hand, Eustacia is the unruly terrain upon which male desire attempts to inscribe himself. Military and masculine, Roman road-building was a gender-specific mode with which to engage a feminized topography and native population. Besides facilitating imperial practice, the road provides a stable perspective from which to overcome the fear of being swallowed up by the unruly other. Through its history, representation, and residual power, the Roman road can also be read as a textual system, and in Hardy’s novel it certainly functions that way. In order to clarify and elaborate upon the residual power that the Roman road holds upon Victorian culture in general and The Return of the Native in particular, I would like to turn to a brief summary of the historic Roman road. Through such an overview, we can better understand the magnitude and longevity of the Roman achievement regarding their road, its spatial significance as an institutionally-constructed structure that literally changed the face of Britain and the lives of its inhabitants for the next eighteen hundred years, and the road’s hold on Hardy’s imagination as both a permanent feature of the landscape and as a residual power that continued to order social relationships. The development of Britain’s road system by the Roman military during its conquest and subsequent occupation of the British Isles clearly demonstrates a conception and practice in which roads are planned, designed, and built to serve the imperial ends of an organized state authority. Roads, therefore, were one of the means by which imperial ideology was carried out and materially realized. In the effort to create Pax Romana and construct a grain-producing province on the northwest fringe of the Roman empire, Roman road-building emerged as an institutional structure that assimilated native Britons into the Roman empire, erasing cultural difference by facilitating Roman hegemony and homogeneity.

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 39 The achievement of its Roman builders was the single most significant force to underwrite the later road system of England according to Christopher Taylor in Roads and Tracks of Britain (2–16). The Roman network of roads was an engineering marvel for the time. Its foundations not only survived but also formed the road bed upon which rest the surface pavements that today’s vehicles travel. Simply put, the Roman-constructed road system “formed the core of the British road system until this century” (Earle 6). Yet the building of roads remained part of Roman imperialism; that is, roads provided the means to facilitate the invasion, the pacification, and the subjugation of the indigenous peoples of Britain. In short, without roads, the Roman imperial project would not have been as effective and perhaps would have failed (which it ultimately did despite its efficient road network). Landing in East Anglia in 43 a.d. and moving quickly west and north, the Romans conquered the southeastern part of Britain in just four years (Taylor 2–16). They operated with a large army of four legions and auxiliaries—nearly forty thousand soldiers. This massive army needed to be fed and equipped while on the move. Forty years later, by 83 a.d., all of Wales, northern England, and lowland Scotland were in Roman hands. By 130 a.d., a final military frontier was established by Hadrian’s Wall, and having over reached themselves in the attempted pacification of highland Scotland, the Romans withdrew behind it. Within forty years as a result of the construction and use of Roman roads, most of Britain lay within the authority of the Roman Empire, and as a Roman province, Britain assumed the trappings of Roman civilization. When they left five hundred years later, the Romans had built over eight thousand miles of roads, with the number likely closer to ten thousand miles (Taylor 50). Making use of the existing system of tracks and ridgeways,5 the Roman system crisscrossed the country linking forts and settlements, farms and fields. Established first to invade, then to conquer and to pacify the indigenous population, Roman roads brought Roman civilization and Pax Romana to even the remotest parts of Britain. This amazing Roman road infrastructure—the surveyed alignments and foundational aggers or stone foundations—provided the foundation for the Victorian road system and benefited commercial transportation and civil communication. The Roman infrastructure still exists and is used today.6 The Roman achievement in the introduction, construction, and daily use of roads has not been exceeded until the twentieth century (Wilkinson xvi). To argue the residual effects of the Roman road upon the modern, one need only consider the resilience and longevity of this Roman road foundation based upon its original construction.

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The key to the Roman road’s longevity remains the foundation upon which it was built, a fact that remained surprisingly lost until the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Centuries later following the Roman example, innovative engineer and road-builder John McAdam insisted that roads could be built along any terrain as long as the road was dry and well-drained. After the Romans abandoned Britain as a province, as Brian Hindle claims in Roads, Tracks, and Their Interpretation, the next significant development in road building was General Wade’s construction of military roads in mideighteenth century Scotland (99). Wade’s roads maintained a purpose identical to the Roman one: the subjection of native populations by an invading empire, in this latter instance, England’s. The first step in Roman road construction was to clear brush and trees in a wide swath from the proposed road alignment. According to West’s study of the historical and technical development of British roads: “The purpose was tactical, namely to provide a safeguard for troops on the road from ambush or surprise attack” (29). Second, a foundation called an agger (29) or basal layer of large stones was laid flat along the alignment. In order to build the agger, two deep continuous ditches were dug on either side of the road and the spoil from the ditches thrown into the road center and compacted over the stone basal layer with wooden tamps. While the ditches drained water from the road in order to keep the compacted causeway dry, they also were tactical: “it was to give troops on the road an advantageous defensive position if attacked” (29) because the Romans found the terrain already heavily populated with indigenous tribes. For Taylor, the Roman Empire’s purpose in subduing and dominating Britain (like their later Victorian counterparts of the British Empire) was three-fold (41). First, empire meant political aggrandizement. Second, new lands meant new resources to exploit and peoples to tax in order to increase the wealth of Rome. But besides a political and economic reason, a third and ideological element formed the basis for imperial expansion. Much like the Victorian imperial mission of commerce and Christianity articulated by Brantlinger in Rules of Darkness (24–26) and Clym’s idealistic mission to bring progressive ideas to a backward hinterland, the Romans believed they were bringing civilization to the barbaric and benighted peoples of the world thereby fulfilling Roman destiny. These powerful three aims combined with a nearly unstoppable military machine, a highly developed bureaucratic organization, and (for the times) a very high level of technological achievement that changed the life of ancient Britons virtually overnight (Taylor 42). In short, Roman roads facilitated the integration of land, resources, and people into a larger system, an imperial and colonial system, a system imposed violently upon foreign terrain.

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 41 The early Britons paid a price for the Roman road-building achievement and the subsequent colonization. Roman roads intruded upon local cultural order, disrupted and destabilized it, forcing those cultures to submit to Roman rule and accept the values of a new culture. Roman roads, therefore, are potent spatial signs of dominance over both the physical landscape and the social terrain. Where roads go, hegemony follows (as well as resistance to hegemony). While Britain lay on the margins of the Roman Empire, roads were central rather than peripheral to the Roman success. The fact remains that Rome’s aggressive military machine needed such an ordinary structure of everyday experience like the road in order to succeed. Although Britain’s archaic paths and ridgeways were used primarily for trade and pilgrimage, roads have acted also as conduits for a collective imperial desire throughout Britain’s long history. The simple fact is that Britain’s modern road system is a product of domination, that is, of conquest and colonization. According to Christopher Taylor’s Roads and Tracks of Britain, the Roman legions immediately upon arriving on Britain’s shores at Dover in 43 a.d. quickly built roads to advance into the new and hostile landscape. Within twenty years, they had inscribed upon the landscape a network of roads radiating out from London to all parts of their newly acquired province (2–16). Not only did the roads facilitate the invasion and conquest of the Iron-Age tribes already occupying this heavily populated, settled land, but roads also facilitated the communication and travel necessary for the Romans to keep their subjugated peoples pacified. As Roman colonists settled in Britain and indigenous tribes adopted Roman ways, roads unified the Pax Romana of this northwestern-most colony of the Roman Empire and consolidated the provincial life of its inhabitants. However, British roads stayed relatively unchanged for over 1300 years after the Roman achievement and before the advent of revolutionizing construction techniques that resurfaced roads at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Taylor 32–40). The progressive network of Roman roads constructed between 43 a.d. to 453 a.d. remained unsurpassed by any significant development in roads until the paving techniques of Telford and McAdam improved upon road surfaces, according to Taylor, improvements built over the foundations of roads that the Romans surveyed, aligned, and constructed (50). However, during subsequent English history, the technologically advanced road-building methods of the Romans were forgotten and lost. Britons simply failed to maintain or develop the Roman road system after the Romans left. Roadbuilding techniques were lost, and the network of roads instituted by the Romans were co-opted and used by successive waves of invaders including the Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Normans (160–61). As a network for travel

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and communication, the road system constructed by the Romans was never improved upon until Telford’s and McAdam’s surfacing techniques were employed on a large, national scale. Indeed, the Roman era was the first significant development in British roads, and Telford and McAdam remained the second and the third (and last) major development of British roads until the end of World War I and the proliferation of motorized transport, particularly automobiles (173). We need only give a cursory glance at British history to see what a mistake it would be to dismiss the force of colonization upon England itself. In his recent monumental work, The Isles: A History, Norman Davies reminds us that the lands of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales have historically been contested lands. “From the start,” Davies says, “therefore, union went hand in hand with empire” (695). According to Davies, British history is the history of two islands and three kingdoms that finally become dominated and annexed by one of them: England. Wales had been a contested space since the twelfth century and joined England in the first Act of Union in 1536. The 1707 Act of Union joined Scotland with England and was followed almost a century later by the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland. These unions embody the notion, according to Davies, that the “united kingdom” is in reality England’s inner empire. The inner empire in the Isles served as a “springboard for the ‘outer empire’ overseas” (713). Like the Romans before them, the English saw the paramount importance of roads in maintaining their inner empire. In 1725, after two decades of Highland recalcitrance to union, General Wade moved north to build over nine hundred miles of military roads across the Scottish Highlands to complete and ensure the subjugation of Scotland’s people (Taylor 46–47). A century later, the English wasted no time after the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland to ensure strong and permanent ties with new territory. In 1801, Parliament commissioned Thomas Telford to re-grade and resurface Holyhead Road—the major highway link between London and Holyhead in North Wales, the major port for sea traffic to Dublin. The English saw the importance of road travel for rapid and reliable communication with Ireland as well as rapid military deployment should the need arise. Davies’s notion of “inner empire” corresponds to Michael Hechter’s discussion of internal colonialism. In Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, Hechter discusses the development and integration of the “Celtic fringe,” or marginalized, indigenous, subject peoples of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and their identity of resistence marked by spatiality. He characterizes the relationship between these hitherto independent kingdoms and England as one of “internal colonialism” (8).7 The term

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 43 describes a process of national development within Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as one of colonization. Hechter admits that the boundaries are blurred between the concepts of [overseas] colony, internal colony, and peripheral region; however, he effectively argues that “internal colonialism tends to arise naturally in the course of industrialization” (350).8 The Victorian era remains characterized by the rapid acceleration of industrialization. Victorian England remains the world’s first fully industrialized nation and London emerges as the first imperial metropolis that experiences both the benefits and the problems of an industrialized, capitalistic economy. As the history of the Roman road suggests, the surface of the Anglebury Road has been laid over the foundations of the pre-existing Roman road. As was often the historical case, the Romans incorporated and improved upon sections of ancient Briton track when it suited them. For centuries following the Roman withdrawal from Britain, succeeding generations of Britons built their road systems upon Roman foundations when it suited their purposes or more often through simple necessity. On Hardy’s map, the remains of the Roman road are a dotted line for part of its length (signifying abandonment) that merges with a useable highway. But like the gently curving, fat squiggles on Hardy’s map that represent contemporary highways, the Roman road that underlies the Wessex road retains what Hardy’s narrative calls a “white surface . . . almost as clear as ever” (5). While we know that roads actually exist in our material reality, more often than not, we rely upon representations of roads on functional maps only to get from one location to another. Roads are conceived as merely the means to get from place to place without seeming to be a place on their own. The road—as ordinary and used—is rendered as inconsequential or “invisible” and “clear” as the air we breathe—necessary but unnoticed and often forgotten. This transparency can mask the residual presence of a historical road like the Roman one that exerts its imperial dynamic within the text. Clym Yeobright is associated with the road just as Eustacia is associated with Rainbarrow. Although he is Egdon’s “native son” and certainly not as violently exploitive as the Romans, Clym “invades” Egdon to change it (for the better in his view). Clym’s native status is compromised because he has, in fact, worked and lived in Paris for years. He appears to be a hybrid kind of native exposed both to a local (indigenous) culture and a more worldly (foreign other) one. Clym escapes modernity by returning to rustic Egdon as a peculiarly modern “native,” and he throws himself headlong into the cult of the past, enthusiastically participating in archaeological digs of Wessex’s Neolithic and Roman past. In short, Clym behaves like an imperially-minded tourist. No one who lives on Egdon (except Clym) idealizes the place or

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finds it charming and picturesque. Clym would teach the heath residents to see and appreciate Egdon as he and his urban sensibilities view it: as pastoral idyll. Although familiar with his birthplace, Clym seems unable to really know it, and his new relationship with Egdon Heath reflects his difficulty in achieving what Raymond Williams calls knowable community. This problem he shares with Eustacia who has never seen herself as part of the human community there. The limitations of this view are only enhanced by Clym’s blindness. Both Eustacia and Clym would and do use the road to advance their opposing desires, as the means to facilitate antithetical ideals. Clym’s single-minded purpose to educate the heath’s children and elevate the population out of its backwardness finds spatial expression in the Roman road’s linearity. The characteristic feature of a Roman-built road was its straight alignment according to Crosher in Along the Chiltern Ways. The linear trajectory of their roads embodies the Roman will to get somewhere quickly, efficiently, and safely. Unlike the pre-conquest roads that followed the natural contours of the landscape through repeated generational use, the grid of Roman roads was imposed upon the landscape relatively quickly and with only a relative regard for ease of travel. The primary purpose was always to move soldiers, provisions, and communications quickly. This straight-line alignment remains the main feature by which Roman roads are identified today. Quite simply, Roman surveyors and engineers found it much easier to work in straight-line increments than curves (Crosher 50–56). Yet the Romans weren’t slavish to an abstract ideal of linearity. If the topography demanded it, the Romans altered this straight alignment to find the easiest way across difficult terrain or to maintain the appropriate gradient. Roads winding out of steep valleys or moving across boggy bottom land were often laid out in a series of short lines that negotiated the obstacle before resuming the original alignment. A series of straight lines also overcame another obstacle: steep grades that proved to be an impediment to wheeled traffic that had to ascend or descend. In the uplands, therefore, short straight-line sections as terraced zigzags or switchbacks with manageable grades climbed out of valleys or over mountain passes. In order to bend around some swampy or mountainous impediment, these straight alignments resembled a series of geometric chords that connect points along a circle’s geometric circumference rather than a gentle curve of the circumference itself (Crosher 50–56). Once the hilly or swampy obstacle was surmounted or bypassed, Roman road-builders most often returned the road to its original straight alignment heading towards its destination in the shortest distance possible between points. Unlike the straight Roman road lying horizontal upon the surface of the terrain, Rainbarrow is characterized by its verticality. It does not exist

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 45 synchronically within a single point or layer of time but rather acts diachronically influencing the modern through its multiple sediments of residual histories. A spatial and historical opposition therefore exists between structures like the civilized Roman road and pagan Rainbarrow. Rather than facilitating movement like the road, Rainbarrow epitomizes fixity. Not uncoincidentally, Clym seems associated with a vertical orientation (depth) while Eustacia is associated with horizontality (breadth), an orientation that I will describe more fully later. The opposition between both historical structures reflects the opposing motives and desires of Hardy’s characters within the novel. This opposition takes the form of the tension between Eustacia’s immobility or fixity and her desire for mobility and flow (escape from Egdon Heath to Paris, or at the least, first to coastal Budmouth) as well as the difference between her desire to leave Egdon and Clym’s commitment to stay. Hardy’s use of historical spatiality is complemented and dramatized by the spatial construction of desire within the narrative. Narrative events, that is, the deeds and desires of the characters, become a matter of place in that historical use underpins modern use. Roads facilitate the relentless and restless movement of characters within Egdon Heath. Hardy’s characters (though not Eustacia) usually travel along roads to reach “in-between” places not dominated by roads in order to enact deep human rituals (pagan rituals) that are more satisfying if not more effective in assisting human desire than the more Victorian purposeful journey along roads. Yet those who move also remain oriented to another location beyond the map, a location to which they are unable to go. Thus, Wildeve “stood and looked north-east” (41) in the direction of Rainbarrow while Eustacia’s interest shifts “in the direction of Blooms End” ( 87) after hearing of Clym’s return. Clym’s interest shifts towards Rainbarrow and Mistover (150) after seeing and inquiring about Eustacia. Rather than a linear journey as mapped in Haggard, Hardy’s characters traverse the landscape erratically although relentlessly, an energetic yet non-linear trajectory that contrasts with the purposeful and successful movement of Haggard’s characters. While the first chapter begins with a characterization of Egdon Heath, the human narrative of The Return of the Native begins on the Anglebury/ Roman road. At the start of the second chapter, Captain Vye, Eustacia’s grandfather, is returning home along the road and overtakes Diggory Venn by chance, an event reflective of Bahktin’s chronotope of the road as the space for chance encounter. Within Venn’s van, Thomasin, Clym’s cousin and Mrs. Yeobright’s ward, lies hidden. Venn is transporting Thomasin Yeobright home from Anglebury after her failed wedding to Wildeve, Eustacia’s former lover. Wildeve had arranged the marriage license in Budmouth, a fact

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that makes the license valid only in Budmouth. Its validity determined by place, the marriage license cannot be used legally in Anglebury, an institutional contingency spatially constructed (in part). Thus the narrative begins on the road and the device of the marriage license, like other human formulations, emerges as a spatially-determined dynamic, one that drives the plot and can be seen as the cause of future events and their fatal consequences. At this moment, the road which was to have ensured Thomasin’s marriage prospect now becomes a hazard: an embarrassing public site of spectacle to her humiliation since she looks like she has been jilted haphazardly. Yet Venn’s wagon remains a refuge for her upon the road. Although he is not associated with the Roman road like Clym, Diggory Venn is consistently and intimately associated with the roads within Egdon Heath. After his own marriage proposal fails (his conjugal prospects deflated), he leaves the fixed stability of farming for a more nomadic way of life. The narrator simply notes: “Rejected suitors take to roaming” (65). He spends much of the year traveling, obtaining, and selling reddle—the red dye used to mark ownership of sheep. The road seems to act as a space of refuge for this lonely man in which to brood. Choosing this nomadic life after his offer of marriage is rejected by Thomasin, Venn knows all too well the traditional stories associated with his trade. Indeed, Johnny Nonsuch mistakes him for a gypsy as well as a traditional heath boogeyman, fiendishly red, said to kidnap children. In an occupation explicitly associated with “the folks of the road” (63), Venn remains even isolated from this community of nomads by keeping to himself (much like Eustacia). Hardy references a specific Roman road named “the great Western road of the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Icknield Street” (5). His footnote reads: “The road, originally built by the Romans, running due west from London to Land’s End. It is also sometimes referred to as Watling Street, or, by rustics, as the London Road or the Milky Way” (5). The allusion to the Milky Way points both to the whiteness of the road’s chalk surface as well as to its representation on Hardy’s map as a white, ribbon-like figure stretching across the cartographic landscape. But in addition, the reference to the Milky Way points to the road’s terrestrial configuration to the ancient Celts as a mirror and analogue of the heavens. Hardy seems very self-conscious about the road’s use as an analogue, a self-consciousness that underscore’s the road’s significance to my argument. The road upon which these early narrative events transpire is the region’s major thoroughfare represented on Hardy’s frontispiece map—Anglebury Road—which coincides with part of the great Western road of the Romans. While Hardy notes that this highway seems almost a natural product of the

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 47 heath’s landscape because of its antiquity and long use, he notes one telling difference. While the heath is described in terms of shade, gloom, and darkness—a swarthy place resonant with images of the mysterious, the mystical, the indigenous, and the emotional (very much like Eustacia’s characterization)—“the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever” (5), a civilized product made understandable and orderly through science, law, and empire. This clearness implies knowledge, vision, or certainty which characterizes Clym, but remains a condition or consciousness opposed to the heath’s inscrutable and antagonistic (to human) “personality.” The road as a human structure of coherence contrasts with the heath as a nonhuman form of incoherence (since inscrutable and a resistant mystery). Unlike the road, Hardy constructs Eustacia as mysterious and associated with the organic heath, and he invites the reader to view her through this perspective. Eustacia has absorbed many of Egdon Heath’s qualities: loneliness, paganism, darkness, isolation, dignity, and sensuality. She remains a figure of the open heath hills rather than a figure associated with the human-built road. Through her heath habitation and her association with the landscape itself, Eustacia has “pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light” (53), although paradoxically she considers the heath a prison and remains oblivious to local Druidical stones until Clym points them out to her. (She tells Clym that she dreams of Parisian boulevards.) Yet Eustacia’s disdain for the heath and desire to leave complicates this essentialist view. Her sensual attraction to men remains more implied, acknowledged, and described rather than explained as is her association with Rainbarrow. An elevated vantage point from which Eustacia surveys her prospects (both of locale and of men), this lofty prominence of the November 5th fires is contrasted to the heathery valleys that the rustics usually inhabit in their villages and dwellings and where run the roads. Yet they climb the hill and light their fires—as do other communities of the heath—precisely because of the elevation. Once the fires are lit, people around each fire can see other distant fires and feel part of a larger community of shared ritual, important to Hardy since shared ritual helps sustain knowable community. Such recognition comes from the observers’ elevated positions on the tops of hills and barrows, a mode of spatial prospect. Thus early in the novel, Rainbarrow is associated with stable community bonding established through shared ritual. Yet while the barrow top becomes emblazoned by the fire, the valley below which contains the road remains in shadow and darkness as night falls. These elevated sites ablaze with fire around which the residents dance are contrasted to the dark “vast abyss” (11) of the valleys, lower sites temporarily vacated. While the living move upon the summit of Rainbarrow, immo-

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bile bones of the prehistoric dead rest beneath the surface in this ancient site of burial. The barrow is a structure of history connecting past and present as surely as the Roman road. The residents of the heath maintain the pagan custom of the hilltop fire, which is, in effect according to the narrator, a resistance to the dark of winter night, a “Promethean rebelliousness” (12) against the harsh nature of the winter heath, rebelliousness consistent with Eustacia’s nonconformity. If Egdon Heath renders darkness, the human inhabitants insist upon illumination (and warmth) as Eustacia insists upon a passion near to madness. To the extent that light remains a metaphor for knowledge, the human insistence upon knowledge contrasts starkly with the darkness of Eustacia’s pre-fire vigil (her own and the heath’s lived space). The summit of Rainbarrow becomes the scene of contrastive “brilliant lights and sooty shades” (12), with people and their faces sometimes in light and sometimes in shade, unknowable, changing position, and thus unstable. “All was unstable” and “in extremity” (12–13). In such a chaotic and volatile situation, anything could happen. These early contrasts foreshadow how conflicting tensions drive characters and plot and how these conflicting tensions that seem to be natural are constructed and embedded culturally within subjectivity. While Rainbarrow is a sign of Eustacia’s powerful pagan omphalos, the lunar eclipse—a sign of feminine power—is a sign of her assignation with Wildeve. An enduring sign of romance and love, the moon’s very topography is named after human emotion: Sea of Crises, Ocean of Storms, Lake of Dreams, Bay of Rainbows (154). Eustacia signals the end of their rendezvous noting that time has slipped away through the changing shape of the lunar eclipse (157). Like the shadow revolving around the gnomon of a sundial, the passage of time that night is perceived spatially by the moon’s changing shape. Eustacia determines her power spatially through her own independent action in addition to masculine discourse’s spatial representation through the map. On what was to have been his honeymoon night, Damon Wildeve answers Eustacia’s summoning signal fire on Mistover. She relishes and triumphs in her ability to successfully call him up. Likening herself to the Witch of Endor, she crows to Wildeve: “I have shown my power. A mile and a half hither, and a mile and half back again to your home—three miles in the dark for me. Have I not shown my power?” (52). She remains a figure of extremes of instability rather than a figure of known parameters and stability, and as such, Eustacia resists being mapped, that is, being “known,” exposed, and controlled through male discourse. As he attempts to “win” her on her own terrain, Wildeve and his desire for Eustacia remain constructed spatially as well. Waiting for her by the

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 49 pool near Mistover for a late-night tryst, he idled “in his customary manner by walking round” (80). Like Wildeve, Clym is oriented spatially towards Eustacia when his desire has been sparked. He “walked much abroad” (150), hoping to chance upon Eustacia (a chronotope of desire and chance encounter) with the “direction of his walk . . . always toward some point of a line between Mistover and Rainbarrow” (150). With the frontispiece map orienting the reader, we can plot Eustacia’s and Clym’s axes of movement and desire upon the terrain. Clym walks to Rainbarrow during an eclipse of the moon to meet Eustacia where they engage in their first kiss and profess their love for one another (153). Clym tells her that his love for her is “past all compass” (155); that is, his love is beyond even the concept of direction and orientation as well as past mappable boundaries. Eustacia is beyond masculine understanding. Although she literally is unable to leave Egdon Heath and move beyond the map’s borders, she cannot be completely mapped. Dainotto misses an important point in failing to see the entire “map” surrounding The Return of the Native. In his 1895 Preface to a new edition of the text, Hardy claims that the narrative events occur between 1840 and 1850 (1). The text was serialized close to thirty years after this period and over forty-five years had elapsed before the 1895 new edition. Dorset had changed significantly in the nearly fifty years that had elapsed from the time in which Hardy had placed the narrative. Indeed, the railroad had arrived in Dorchester only in 1847 (Millgate 35), and Dorset residents would never again be as isolated from the larger world as they previously had been. For Hardy’s Victorian readers, Egdon Heath was a lost rural experience. But within the narrative “unified by the map,” it is the outer world beyond the boundaries of Egdon that remains imaginary and incomprehensible. Clym as the modern generation of humanist does intrude upon the changeless character of the heath, and his return excites Eustacia’s dreams of that imaginary outer world. Even Wildeve is not consistent with Dainotto’s vision of an idealized Egdon. Educated as an engineer but with aspirations as a colonist in the new world, nomadic Wildeve does not embody the timeless rusticity of heath residents like Christian Cantle, Susan Nunsuch, or Timothy Fairway, but rather seems associated with the more modern characteristics of exile and alienation. Both Thomasin and Diggory Venn skirt the boundary between timelessness and change through their real and anticipated changing circumstances. But by novel’s end, they both return to the heath’s stable community content and without aspirations of leaving. For them as well as all the heath rustics, Egdon is the mapped and knowable community while the greater world is perceived as dream-like and imaginary. Although focused upon a dreamy wish, practically-minded Eustacia realizes that the fulfillment of her desire needs to happen in spatial increments; thus

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Budmouth, a coastal Dorset town from which to sail to France, becomes a tangible location that gives form to her desire. The world is wrong to Eustacia because she remains on Egdon (227), and she believes Egdon rather than Wildeve has ruined her (265). Living on Egdon Heath out of necessity, she considers Budmouth—the fashionable seaside resort on Dorset’s coast—her native place. She enlists a willing Wildeve (although married to Thomasin) to help her escape. When he asks her heart’s desire, she answers that it is to leave Egdon. Wildeve asks where. Eustacia responds that “I have a place in my mind” (266). The language is telling. Ironically, both Mrs. Yeobright and Eustacia conceive of Clym’s happiness in terms of a return to Paris (190). While Clym loathes speaking of Paris, at Eustacia’s insistence he describes in detail a sun-filled room in the Louvre which he claims is a fitting place for her (156). Eustacia becomes fixated upon this particular space, and through Clym’s description has narrowed the focus of her obsessive desire to escape Egdon and replaced a large, remote, unknowable Paris, for the more particular knowable Galerie d’Apollon. But Eustacia and Clym simply are not compatible because their desires run antithetical to one another’s. Although Eustacia and Clym both view the road as prospect, their prospective destinations are diametrically opposed: Clym employs the road to return to the heath, leaving Paris and his past behind while Eustacia would use the road to escape the heath to Paris, her destination and future. Their diametrically opposed desires are spatially associated: Clym with verticality and Eustacia with horizontality. These spatiallyoriented, conflicting desires correspond to the horizontal diachronic axis of Eustacia’s horizon of desire that is linked to changing places and to the vertical synchronic axis of Clym’s desire to uncover a chain of substitutions fixed in one place, Egdon Heath, that change through time. While Clym has grown to despise the idle rich of Paris to whom he sells his diamonds, Eustacia’s goal remains to become one of these decadent Parisians lolling in luxury. For all of her sensuousness and perceived witchly power (of which Eustacia is fully aware), her goals are primarily materialist and middle-class. She later accuses Clym of deceiving her, of presenting himself as belonging to one class but secretly desiring to leave that class. She accuses: “You deceived me—not by words, but by appearances” (256). She fails to realize that although Clym has always been honest as to his intentions and aspirations his status and appearance as a successful diamond merchant are what count for Eustacia. Before she meets him, Eustacia respects Clym’s education and Parisian accomplishments, and she associates Clym with a new and grander life in bourgeois Paris. While she may as yet be unsophisticated in the ways of the

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 51 greater world, Eustacia knows men. Her past experience with Wildeve and future plans with Clym (as yet unrealized) point to the limited means to improve her station at her disposal, that is to say that Eustacia is limited in the social terrain she can know and navigate. Having met and courted, Eustacia comes to love Clym, yet she feels degraded by Clym’s new chosen occupation of furze cutting. Eustacia feels socially demeaned, and she despairs that Clym’s soft diamond merchant hands and unlined face have given way to a sun-darkened visage and rough manual-labor hands. These concerns point to her focus upon surface appearance rather than internal realities, an association with the depthless horizontal. She implores Clym: “Never mind what is—let us look at what seems” (162). Despite a passionate depth of feeling, Eustacia consistently focuses upon the appearance rather than the essence of things. She tries to soothe a troubled Clym by advising him to ignore the depth of his feelings and to settle for surface (horizontal) appearances rather than to inquire into the way things are in reality. Eustacia’s obsessive desire—to be loved to madness—seems a shallower and superficial focus rather than one associated with depth and insight. Contrary to Eustacia’s association with the horizontal is Clym’s association with the vertical. Clym seems consistently associated with vertical retrieval and with moving back into his own boyhood past through his return to Egdon. Clym descends vertically into the earth on two occasions. In one of his walks after his return to the heath but before his relationship with Eustacia blossoms, Clym wanders over to Mistover where he sees a knot of rustics attempting to retrieve the bucket Eustacia has dropped into the well. Clym takes over the grapnel hook and rope, leans over into the well, and snags the bottom-broke bucket (142). Clym’s desire to meet and do a good deed for the fascinating Miss Vye takes the form of his willing engagement with vertical and subterranean depths. While he does not actually descend into the well, a concerned Eustacia admonishes the other men to tie a rope around his waist to prevent his accidental fall into the well’s depths, to keep him on the surface. A short time later, Clym is present at the excavation of a prehistoric burial chamber; the scene visualizes Hardy’s own archaeological interests in the sedimentations of culture. The narrative implies that Clym descends into the opening to gather artifacts (150). His mother is disappointed that he gives a retrieved burial urn to Eustacia rather than to herself. After his marriage with Eustacia and with his idealism regarding Eustacia tarnished, Clym regards the heath vista as an “oppressive horizontality” (164). He had conceived of his return to Egdon as both socially and individually progressive, a movement toward development and improvement, a realization of the ideals of truth and freedom. But he foresees a stormy future

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with his new wife; his feelings mimic a storm over the heath that tears the trees yet merely waves the lower grasses and furze (165). The vertical dimension— the height of the trees—is seen as vulnerable to destruction while objects closer to the horizontal plane of the earth are more protected thus safer. Antithetical to the “depth” of Clym’s intellect, Eustacia’s distrust of language and focus upon material appearance renders another major spatial contrast of the novel, that is, the body’s circulation through space. Without the norm of time on the heath, the body’s movement through space becomes significant as a means of empowerment. Eustacia looks at life in terms of the body (and Hardy reinforces this stereotype through his cartographic construction of her), an explicitly feminine perspective as opposed to the perspective of the mind associated with the masculine. All artistic achievements and human actions like poetry, music, and war that give life its vitality, Eustacia metaphorically equates with the human pulse and beating heart—the movement of the life-force through blood vessels just as roads are the arteries of civilization within the world (221). Clym’s thoughts are etched on his face, but the modern experience is etched on the body (109). Yet as the headless and therefore faceless figure in the landscape, Eustacia is unable to find self realization. Even Mrs. Yeobright’s nature and limitations through experience were “written in her movements” (150). Clym’s strong attachment to his mother is put in terms of a bodily simile: “their discourses were as if carried on between the right and left hands of the same body” (149). Thus where the mind is insufficient, the body must be relied upon. Heath residents employ their bodily skill in negotiating the terrain. While a visitor needs to see the white surface of the road for both orientation and travel, heath residents are able to use indistinct paths and barely discernible tracks for local travel even at midnight. Not limited to vision alone, the heath residents employ a nearly instinctual yet community-learned bodily sensitivity to navigating the heath. Local residents are able to find, feel, and follow a faint path beneath their feet, a path invisible to the heath visitor. The locals can feel the path even through the sole of thick boots (45). For the heath rustics, “the whole secret of following these incipient paths, where there was not light enough in the atmosphere to show a turnpike-road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling in little-trodden spots” (45). The heath rustics have no need of maps. The narrator tells us that in the isolation of Egdon, “mere walking had the novelty of pageantry” (84), a valorization of ritual display for such a common activity, a process associated with Eustacia’s focus upon appearance. This reliance upon sense associates heath residents with a “feminine” use of the body rather than with a “masculine” use of logic. They use

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 53 a sense of touch, a sensuous practice feminized through its primacy of the body rather than the masculine-related, more abstract and distanced sense of vision or levels of conceptual abstraction corresponding to the mind necessary to interpret maps. Heath residents require sensuous contact with a reality upon which they walk rather than a cognitive contact with representations of reality. A frequent heath walker herself, Eustacia can use all her senses to orient herself. At night, she uses her ears as if they “were performing the functions of seeing as well as hearing” (91). Such intuitive knowledge speaks to the unconscious primacy of the body’s knowledge rather than the mind’s. In her chafing at containment within Egdon, Eustacia frequently walks the hills, often in the moonlight (116). And we have seen Eustacia walking in the direction of Blooms End to force her chance meeting with Clym (87) as well as Clym’s reciprocal wandering in the direction of Mistover and Rainbarrow for the same purpose. In addition to the associations with the horizontal and the vertical, Eustacia is also associated with fixity (despite her frequent heath walks) and Clym with mobility, a parallel consistent with Eustacia’s association with the unchanging, unmoving landscape and Clym’s association with the road’s destabilization of the heath and his own ability to move freely. Ironically, her very fixity mobilizes her desire for a change of place—for movement—but such movement fails. On the other hand, Clym is mobile having returned to Egdon, but in a sense by returning to his boyhood landscape he is fixed in place. Transporting Thomasin home after her unsuccessful marriage to Wildeve, Venn first spies Eustacia atop Rainbarrow standing immobile as fixed as the heath itself. The narrator suggests that for Eustacia to move would entail her confusion (9). The mobility of Thomasin, Captain Vye, and Diggory Venn in this scene is contrasted later with the immobility of Eustacia. Stopping to rest his horses after delivering Thomasin to Mrs. Yeobright, Venn—going from mobility to immobility—sees Eustacia standing on the top of Rainbarrow, a place off the road from which to see far and wide (prospect). The narrator notes how her standing figure remains so “strangely homogeneous” with the “entirely motionless structure” (9) of the hill itself. Eustacia is strongly associated with the darkness and immobilty of the heath. However, a strong contrast exists between Eustacia’s melodramatic but motionless presence and her desire to flee from Egdon. Diggory Venn recognizes Eustacia at dusk on the summit of Rainbarrow only when she moves and her body is silhouetted against the sky (9–10). Only when Eustacia moves is Venn able to see that the figure is that of a woman. It would seem as though Eustacia’s femininity is determined by her movement but her

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fixed association with the permanent landscape is determined by her mapped figure’s outline by roads and immobilization by the Roman road. Seeking to isolate herself from the heath community (another comparison with the heath’s attitude as distanced from human community), she leaves after being seen by Venn but before heath inhabitants arrive to light the customary November 5th fire. Returning to the top of Rainbarrow after the fire dancers have left and the fire burnt out, Eustacia again assumes a position of “extraordinary fixity” (42), an immobility associated with “conspicuous loneliness” (42). Despite her heath wanderings, she consistently uses Rainbarrow—a location far from roads—to survey the heath. Inscrutable and mysterious, possessed of “pagan eyes,” Eustacia later calms herself at home by brushing her hair, softening her temper and anxiety, sinking into Sphinx-like stillness (53). On the other hand, Clym is described as being unable to maintain stillness. The narrator states that the “only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in the circumstances amid which he was born” (132). His travel abroad and back home to his native place appears to reinforce this narrative description. In addition, his restlessness with middle-class conventions and values pushes him to engage and practice progressive ideals. During the night of Eustacia’s and Wildeve’s flight, an anxious Clym walks restlessly through the rooms of Blooms End at the absence of Eustacia (278), his restlessness and anxiety taking the ritualistic form of pacing his familiar home terrain. Clym has sensed the eloping pair’s plan, and upset but unable rationally to understand Eustacia’s reasons and unable to figure out what to do, his energy is manifested in the restless movement constrained by the house. Wildeve had heard of Eustacia’s marriage to Clym from a passing remark of a carter while on the road; and the road figures prominently in Wildeve’s and Eustacia’s plans for their illicit “elopement.” Wildeve stands ready with his wagon on the road awaiting the arrival of Eustacia from Mistover so they can journey to Budmouth and from there, sail on to Paris. Despite Wildeve’s waiting with his cart to escape with Eustacia to Paris via the road to Budmouth, their plan comes to naught. Roads therefore connect places without being destinations or places themselves. Coming to meet Wildeve for their midnight escape, Eustacia stops for a last time on the summit of Rainbarrow on a fierce, wind-swept, rainy night. Wildeve waits on the road below, ready with cart and horses to whisk them to Budmouth. She reflects upon her desperate situation. She realizes that Wildeve is not good enough for her and that she does not actually love him. By becoming his mistress, Eustacia realizes that she destroys her marriage to a good man.

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 55 But she has no money to travel alone. Wildeve provides the money through his inheritance. The “harmony between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without” (275) increases her bond with Rainbarrow. But she suddenly feels all alone, “isolated from all of humanity except the mouldered remains inside the tumulus” (275). Realizing the absence of Wildeve at the Quiet Woman Inn, Thomasin asks Diggory’s aid in finding the eloping pair. In the rain and dark, they use the looming prominence of Rainbarrow to orient themselves. Diggory “looked over his shoulder to gain some idea of the position of Rainbarrow above them, which it was necessary to keep directly behind their backs to preserve a proper course” (285). As in the November 5th bonfire and dancing, Rainbarrow again becomes the geographic marker that orients the community toward conventionally-accepted behavior, behavior that stabilizes rather than destabilizes community bonds. Thomasin’s and Diggory’s destination is the road to Budmouth to which Thomasin believes her husband will go. The road is the interception point. For Wildeve and Eustacia, the road is the departure space and means to leave Egdon Heath, while for Thomasin and Diggory, the road is the arrival point. Rainbarrow marks the way for both purposes. In despair at her restriction and available choices, Eustacia resolutely makes a decision to commit suicide by throwing herself into a man-made pool, Shadwater Weir, a body of water which “formed the boundary of the heath in this direction” (287). Shown at the edges of Hardy’s sketch map, this body of water will prove to be the topographical limit which Eustacia reaches in writing herself off the map. Ophelia-like, Eustacia drowns in Shadwater Weir located just north of the inn, a final event that effectively silences her forever. Shadwater Weir is the same distance away from the Roman road’s intersection with the Anglebury Road as Rainbarrow but in the opposite direction. She is unable to move beyond the confining pull of the Roman road and male discourse and thus escape successfully off the map. Hardy allows her no other alternative escape except suicide. At the time of writing the novel, Hardy was reading an 1876 article, “The Ethics of Suicide” and Matthew Arnold’s lecture, “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment” (Turner 61). The article contrasts the Christian view of suicide with a pagan one. While Christianity condemns suicide as a sin, the pagan perception of suicide was one of proud admiration of a noble and courageous alternative. Although Hardy does not allow his heroine to succeed in moving off the map, his treatment of her firmly cements Eustacia’s association with the pagan, with Rainbarrow, and with the past. Even after the tragic drowning of Eustacia and Wildeve, Hardy’s characters continue their pattern of restless bodily movement. In a place without

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time to which they’re confined, walking assumes a significant place over mental mapping. Clym often walks alone on the heath (296) and also walks almost daily to the cemetery where his mother and wife are buried (304). Restarting their previous courtship, Thomasin and Venn meet and talk alongside the old Roman road (303). Walking the road after the double tragedy seems to facilitate the restless energy of those de-centered by the deaths of Wildeve and Eustacia, and seems to resonate with memory and history, and even foreshadows a happier future for Thomasin and Venn. The novel ends with Clym’s return to Rainbarrow, the place where the novel started. He preaches upon the summit of Rainbarrow to the heath folk who walk towards the place to hear him (314–15). They walk along Egdon’s roads to hear a man speaking about ideals gained through experience with the outer world, the world off the map, a world which the heath residents will never reach. Mobile yet contained, the circumscribed heath residents use the heath’s roads to mark their limited progress. While Paris had acted centripetally upon Eustacia and the younger Clym, Rainbarrow maintains its centripetal force upon the inhabitants of the heath. To sum up, roads in The Return of the Native remain associated with culturally constructed desire—a desire that can be either fulfilled or unfulfilled through journey upon the road. The road acts to channel desire and to give it form. This functionality or channeling contrasts sharply with the heath’s uncontained space of free-floating sensuality, a desire that has not yet taken human purposeful form as has had the road. Like marriage, the road’s purpose or function is to provide the means either to legitimize desire through authorized forms like marriage or to provide the means to fulfill illicit desires like adultery or imperialism. Just as the roads in Hardy’s frontispiece map cartographically render form to the feminine and implicitly associate feminine desire with heath topography, so do roads give shape to desire, a desire to penetrate, subjugate, and control. But as masculine representation, the map traps Eustacia by outlining her with roads, roads that turn from prospect to hazard for Eustacia. Yet Eustacia resists authorized masculine domination and control through her association with pagan Rainbarrow and through her emphasis upon the body. Her bodily movement through the heath space that’s associated with her but that contains her is her means of empowerment. The spatial center both for the narrative and for Eustacia in particular is Rainbarrow. Both the aged Roman highway and the burial barrow upon which Eustacia stands and the Egdon rustics dance are so old that they have assumed the appearance to the heath inhabitants of the natural and the permanent. Standing upon the map’s hub, Eustacia has been oriented both west to Mistover (the home that she shares with her grandfather), then east

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Figuring the Map in The Return of the Native 57 towards Wildeve and the Quiet Woman Inn; with Clym’s arrival, her orientation then turns south; after their marriage, they turn to reside north at Alderworth. Eustacia’s movements and orientation towards these four coordinates suggest a cruciform inscription. The burial barrow—Rainbarrow—“formed the pole and axis of this heathery world” (9) which is Eustacia’s primary perspective that forms the topographic intersection point for the vertical and horizontal lines constituting the Celtic cross inscribed upon the landscape, an implied map that anticipates Tess’s more explicit inscription through her road travels that the next chapter elaborates. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Tess walks the road to improve her social station and circumstance, that is, to exchange her working-class identity for a middle-class one much like Eustacia. Roads function as a prospect to achieve this goal rather than as a hazard. Tess fully embodies the traveling pattern of departure-arrival-return that corresponds with Bakhtin’s cultural forces of centripetalism and centrifugilism. Radiating out from her central place—her birth home and known community of Marlott—Tess inscribes a patterned Celtic cruciform with her four distinct road travels to the four cardinal directions. In addition, her walks along roads take on the aura of ancient initiation, ceremonial rites that make meaning of self and surroundings through the bodily movement of walking along roads. Her road journeys resemble residual pilgrimage as she encounters emergent Victorian technologies in the form of lovers that compete with her and each other for the space of the road.

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Chapter Three

Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Social relations, including, importantly, gender relations, are constructed and negotiated spatially and are embedded in the spatial organization of places.” —Nancy Duncan, Bodyspace, 4–5. “In the evolution of Wessex over a twenty-five year period Hardy was not merely creating a distinctive landscape. He was creating a mythical kingdom which dislocates not only place but time. It involves everything that was and is inscribed in the landscape: layers of history, events, and artifacts.” —Patricia Ingham, Authors in Context: Thomas Hardy, 103. “And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our minds by a road.” —Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel, 243.

As Duncan claims in the above epigram, gender relations are both created and “negotiated spatially” within a society’s organization of specific places. Within his novels, according to Ingham, Hardy creates “a mythical kingdom” of Wessex comprised of the layered histories of events and artifacts. And Stevenson suggests that a road subtly renders to the imagination a particular outlook of anticipation, “that sense of prospect.” In Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, movement along roads integrates these sensibilities into symbolic meaning regarding Victorian sexual identity. In the novel, the road is a space upon which sexual politics is written and upon which Hardy grounds his critique of Victorian gender construction. This chapter argues that the 59

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sedimented layers of road histories deposited in Hardy’s fictive terrain—particularly the traditional May Day club-walk and the archaic Dorset Cursus associated with Tess’s prospects—conflict with the emergent road practices of Angel’s touristic idealism associated with Boydell’s “Endless Railway” (that used existing roads) and Alec’s domineering use of speed associated with the railroad (that used new fixed iron rails). By drawing upon the transhistorical uses of the road based upon his anthropological and archaeological knowledge of them, Hardy creates a palimpsest for his criticism of the Victorian construction of sexual and social identity. Competing road practices parallel the conflict within Victorian sexual politics and points to the irreconcilability of Victorian gender constructions. The preceding chapter explored how upward social mobility and middle-class standards of success vex Eustacia and Clym. This chapter discusses how varied modes of road travel are analogous to competing Victorian constructions of sexuality, a competition which ultimately defeats Tess although she symbolically self-defines herself through her road travels. Alec and Angel—rivals for Tess—are associated with competing modes of transport: the railroad versus the road-traveling steam carriage. These competing technologies oppose the more ancient and slow-moving pedestrian way that Tess utilizes to move from place to place. These technologies oppose as well the ritualized processional as embodied by the Dorset Cursus, a Neolithic road of ritual. While the former emphasizes isolated individuality and modern efficiency, the latter emphasizes knowable community and the ritualized experience of place. Modernity and modern constructions of the road not only limit but also destroy her mythic path. By having contrary orientations, Hardy’s road as Foucaultian heterotopic space constructs Tess in terms of both the restricting Victorian and the enlarging mythic, and hence balances Baudelaire’s aesthetic measures of the modern and the mythic (403). Tess mythically maps herself through her road journeys simultaneously as she is mapped by Alec’s and Angel’s competing cartographies of sexual identity that attempt to dominate her. Plotting Tess’s four important journeys along roads produces a larger pattern, a map by which we see Tess mapping herself onto the terrain rather than being mapped by others. Therefore in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the road is that space upon which sexual politics is written and where Hardy creates a palette for his impressions of Victorian gendered constructions demonstrating what Doreen Massey terms “the sphere of a multiplicity of trajectories” (119)—the road as heterogeneous space where diverse practices and values of technology and gender coexist and the site where these practices and values negotiate their conflict.

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 61 Like Victorian gender identity, the Victorian road exists as contested space, that is, as a contested historical and literary space, a space where liminal traces of what Raymond Williams calls the “residual” co-exist uneasily with what Williams refers to as the “emergent,” and what I like to call sedimented road histories. Emergent technologies like road-traveling, steampowered tractors and fixed-line railroads competed to successfully supplant older more traditional modes of transport. A mixed blessing, emergent technologies offered benefits like speed, reduced costs, and increased load capacity while also presenting drawbacks such as increased physical risk, social displacement, isolation, and sexual and economic exploitation. Victorian sexology finds an intriguing parallel between the masculine construction of femininity and gendered modes of travel and the dynamic changes in transport systems and emergent uses of the road. I should say that my perception of the gender relations in this novel coincides with traditional critical assessment: Alec remains the reprehensible, lust-filled seducer of young women—a rake—while Angel is characterized as a romantic idealist who adheres rigidly to the sexual double standard—a hypocrite. Tess remains sympathetic, innocent, mythic, and associated with both nature and rural community. Yet what is interesting to me is Hardy’s connection at the very beginning of the novel of three different ways of travel associated with each of the three main characters. Like the sexual construction of identity, these different historical modes of travel do not coexist peacefully in parity and tolerance but instead compete for dominance. These three contested historical modes—ritualized processional, aesthetic voyeurism, and exploitive speed—are embodied respectively by Tess, Angel, and Alec. While Alec and Angel are associated with emergent and competing modes of transport but with residual perceptions of gender, Tess is associated with traditional and residual means of transport as well as with what I consider Hardy’s choice of more favorable and equitable gender relations. Tess’s journeys not only associate her with a wandering, destabilized life, but according to Tim Dolin, “Hardy repeatedly figures Tess’s journeys as pilgrimages . . . ironical journeys to sacred places to redeem the family name and the fallen woman” (421). Hardy goes to great lengths to associate Tess with the historic terrain. In describing Tess’s approach to Talbothay’s Dairy, the narrator comments that the Vale of the Great Dairies was a “landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten,”1 a place in which the “world was drawn to a larger pattern” (87). Hardy has not forgotten this larger pattern, a pattern constituted in part by the multi-layered histories of preceding generations of inhabitants, a landscape pattern, as Dolin suggests, with something of the sacred about it.

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I suggest that a map of Tess’s four major journeys along the Wessex roads forms not only a “spatial story” but also inscribes a particular sacred pattern across the terrain, a mythic pattern of ritual passage: the pattern and inscription of a Celtic cruciform. The Celtic cross with four arms stretching to the four cardinal directions is an image of cosmic order and wholeness, community wholeness, and egalitarian gender relations. Hardy shows the inclination to look backward rather than forward for viable alternatives through the pattern Tess’s four journeys inscribe upon the Wessex landscape: the pattern of a Celtic cruciform—a pre-Christian symbol of equitable and orderly relationships as well as harmonious community (Pennick 117–18). According to Nigel Pennick’s Celtic Sacred Landscapes, many modern cities owe their origin to the Celts, including such well-known capital cities as London, Paris, and Vienna. Pennick states that the Celtic “ideal city should reflect the cosmos, standing at the centre of the land it rules. It should possess four roads running towards the cardinal directions, quartering the enclosure, making the form of the pre-Christian cross upon the land” (117). Pennick goes on to say that wherever the Celtic sacred city is laid out in this orderly spatial pattern, the community symbolizes cosmic order, “an image of completion, of wholeness” (118). This use of roads and places as well as the evocation of the ancient symbol for contained, stable, knowable community is how Hardy not only recovers but celebrates knowable community and stable identity in the face of the disorientation and the disruption of a rapidly changing society that eliminates knowable community, destabilizes identity, and defeats Tess. In Tess’sWessex, the community has become destabilized and disrupted, and in the process has become unknown to its members. Tess must journey to the cardinal directions and return several times from the center of her knowable community—Marlott—in order to re-inscribe knowable community. Yet both she and community become lost and disappear by novel’s end. Thus the cruciform pattern of her travels appears as a kind of palimpsest signifying the lost wholeness that Tess cannot recover and an idealized New Albion that engages Hardy. Plotting each of her four major journeys in the novel, the resultant map shows a pattern of departure and return from a central spatial point— Marlott—alternately departs to one of the four cardinal directions before retracing her steps back to her birthplace. In Journey One, Tess travels due east from her home in Marlott to Tantridge where she is seduced by Alec, then returns from Tantridge back home to Marlott. In Journey Two, Tess walks due south from her home in Marlott to Talbothay’s dairy in the Great Vale of Dairies; she returns to Marlott after her disastrous honeymoon with

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 63 Angel Clare. In Journey Three, Tess travels southwest from Marlott to farm work at Flintcomb-Ash, and later walks due west from Flintcomb-Ash to Emminster to get support from Angel’s parents; she walks back to Flintcomb-Ash and later returns to Marlott. In Journey Four, Tess leaves Marlott for the coast and later flees north from Sandbourne with Angel after murdering Alec; the pair reach Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain where they are apprehended by the police. Tess is taken east to the prison at Wintoncester. In all four journeys, Tess travels, usually walking, along the road. Because she returns to her home community, Marlott, in her first three travels, her round trip journey at each stage completes a departure-arrival-return process. With Marlott as the center, if one were to draw a circle with a compass connecting the limits of Tess’s travels to the four cardinal directions— Tantridge: east, Talbothay’s: south, Emminster: west, and Stonehenge: north—the resulting process inscribes a circle around the cruciform that encompasses her world. The inscribed circle not only reinforces the sense of wholeness and knowable community but also a sense of a sacred landscape. This circle represents the limit (or rather margins) of her travels and the geographic boundaries of her experience. The single instance when she leaves this circumscribed margin is her incarceration and subsequent execution in Wintoncester, an event that happens “off stage” or, rather, beyond the narrative’s margins. Unlike the simple linearity of the Roman road, Tess’s pattern of oscillating centripetalism and centrifugalism produces a larger pattern that is both linear (straight-line travel in the four cardinal directions to produce a cruciform pattern of horizontal and vertical axes) and circular. Through the iconography produced by the mapping of such an inscription, Hardy allows that in a primal prelapsarian world Tess’s travels would have meaning. Such meanings associated with local tradition and knowable community characterize the world Tess inhabits at the beginning of the novel. Like Baudelaire’s dialectic between the eternal mythic and the transient modern (403), Tanner explores in Tess a tense dialectic between repose and motion (17), a tension symbolized by the spatial markers of vertical repose and horizontal travel. Usually placid, Tess “recoils from rapid movements” (Tanner 18), and when given a choice, chooses slow pedestrian movement to speed. But uprooted, displaced and homeless, Tess’s wholeness disintegrates. Note the well-used quote concerning Tess’s loss of margins making her identified and assimilated into the fields. Equally displaced and homeless, both Alec and Angel exploit her in different ways according to Victorian predatory modes of patriarchy. Taken together (or unified), a single vertical axis and horizontal line form a cruciform (or cross-like pattern). Hardy finds an alternative ideal

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not within the emergent modern but within the residual past: an idealized mythic space where gender inequality can be resisted if not transcended. Feminist writing on nature has thoroughly explored the association between gender and terrain. Texts like Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature and Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land argue that landscape conceptualized as feminine remains vulnerable to masculine domination and patriarchal exploitation. In a similar vein, this chapter makes two associated assumptions concerning gender and landscape. First, if the human relationship to nature and landscape is exploitive, then the relationships between people—people within an imperial system and capitalist society with differences defined by gender and class markers–tend to be exploitive and inequitable. Second, if the human relationship with landscape and nature is non-exploitive on the other hand—for example as found in mythic scenarios or sacred relations—human relationships along class and gender lines tend to be non-exploitive. To put it more simply, the way or mode of negotiating the terrain marks the nature of gender relations. As both Rosemarie Morgan (85) and Joanna Devereux (118) point out, Tess’s ostensible weakness and passivity mask a stronger and deeper resilience and “powerful force of anger” (Devereux 118) to throw off the “fears and fantasies” (Devereux 118) projected onto her by Alec and Angel. Rather than only a “finely drawn figure” (Sadoff 150) of weakness and passivity—available and vulnerable to the narrator’s and reader’s gaze—Tess is a character who finely draws herself, writing herself onto the cultural terrain and symbolic landscape. She maps herself (unlike Eustacia) rather than merely allowing her self to be mapped by others: narrator, reader, Alec, Angel. The narrator claims that Tess has “somehow lost her margin, imbibed the essence of her surroundings, and assimilated herself with it” (74). Consequently, she has solved Knoepfmacher’s problem of “finding a feminine space capable of annulling gender and rendering sexual difference immaterial” (108), a move that allows her some room beyond the gender constructions created for her by others without having to adapt Devereux’s sense of male-centered point of view or masculine heroics (118–19). Tess as only tragic, victimized, and vulnerable simply would not be engaging, compelling, or even sympathetic to the reader—only pathetic and pitiful. Her own inscription upon the landscape redeems her, a mapping that rejects the modern and returns to the mythic, an idealized space where Tess writes a pattern larger than the tragic. Although anticipating modern works in many ways, Hardy’s novels don’t exactly enthusiastically embrace the image of the New Woman. Indeed, through Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, Hardy constructs the New Woman as uneasily caught between expressing her own sexuality in an

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 65 erotically-charged atmosphere of relational freedom and intellectually neuroticized in a nerve-fraying, emancipatory but unstable urban society, what Hardy refers to inTess as the “ache of modernism” (105). If Sue Bridehead is Hardy’s characterization of the New Woman, she is hardly one that succeeds in either finding happiness or acceptance. Rather, she becomes even more of a societal outcast marginalized by the communities in which she and Jude choose to live. Published about four years afterTess amid vociferous criticism, Hardy does not appear to look toward the New Woman as a viable answer to his own criticism of gender relations. Rather than into the future, Hardy looks to the past for models and examples of equitable gender relationships hence his protagonist—Tess—is associated more firmly with a distant but stable past than with an emergent but unstable future. Hardy’s critique of emergent modes of transport parallels his critique of present and future gender relations. Unhappy with the present and uncertain of the future, Hardy explores the past for viable models of both community and relationships. Although independent-minded and strong, Tess is no New Woman. She isn’t supposed to be one. As Bruce Johnson says in True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy’s Novels, Hardy senses that the antidote to modernism’s ache “lies in understanding the past in a new way” (50). According to Michael Millgate’s biography of Hardy, Hardy “returned to Dorchester precisely to be in close touch with all the traditions and customs and values of his family and his region” (247). The house he designed, built, and occupied in 1885—Max Gate—took its name from the gatekeeper’s name—Mack— whose former house sat upon the adjacent road. During its construction, Hardy relished the Romano-Neolithic finds unearthed, and remained a student of archaeology and history his entire life, joining the local preservation of antiquities society and even publishing an article about the need for preserving Stonehenge. Hardy’s interest and knowledge of Dorset’s prehistory was both studied and experiential; his library contained the most up to date archaeological texts, and he made friends with several local landowners who financed digs upon their land. Consequently, his interest and knowledge of local history and archaeology engages and enriches the thematic content and subsequent meanings of his fictive narratives. Hardy’s fictive concerns regarding gender relations resonate with his own marriage.The marriage of the master of Max Gate was becoming increasingly strained and unacceptable to him. Despite the new house, Hardy’s wife Emma was unsatisfied, expecting to live in London rather than in Dorchester’s “semi-isolation” (Millgate Biography 312). Although cordial even affectionate in public with his wife as well as loyal to her, Hardy’s divisions with

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Emma inevitably stemmed from the rift between Hardy’s Bockingham family and her (Millgate Biography 312). Hardy’s sisters Mary and Kate were banned from Max Gate for over twenty years while Emma could not bring herself to even speak to Hardy’s mother Jemima. Hardy felt divided. Emma’s social inadequacies and eccentricities in London’s social milieu as perceived by Hardy increasingly made him leave her behind in their semi-rural home. Consequently, intellectual and emotional intimacy between the two diminished to the vanishing point. Perhaps this explains why to Rosamund Tomson, who wrote about meeting Hardy about three years after the publication of Tess, Hardy’s appearance presented “a curious combination of force and fragility” (Millgate Biography 322), a blend of characteristics that apply to one of his most distinctive protagonists: Tess. InTess of the D’Urbervilles,a text whose publication according to Penny Boumelha in Thomas Hardy and Women placed Hardy on the literary map “as a writer with a philosophical-cum-moral axe to grind” (119), Hardy continued what he started inThe Woodlanders and continued in Jude the Obscure: a consideration of gender themes—marriage and children, divorce and sexuality. Boumelha adds that the contents of New Fiction, that is novels dealing with the New Woman and sex, were no longer unique in the 1880s (119), and Hardy as a “well-established (if slightly controversial) author” (119) seemed by many critics to be writing polemic by coming down hard on one side of the discussion concerning changing sex roles and the sexual double standard. In short, Hardy seemed to be offering a “moral argument” (Boumelha 119) even with his subtitle to the novel: “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” even though he insists in his preface to the fifth and later editions that the novel “is an impression, not an argument” (Hardy 2). Yet despite Hardy’s “recanting,” his project in this novel seems to be both “to dismantle clichés about masculinity and femininity” and to criticize “stereotypes of class” (Higonnet 14). Critics have produced a fair amount of criticism analyzing Tess’s weaknesses—her fragility at the hands of Hardy, his narrator, the male protagonists Alec and Angel, and even the reader. A fair question to ask is whether a male writer firmly embedded in patriarchy can write a feminine protagonist and actually criticize Victorian gender relations despite insisting that he merely was putting down in a narrative “what everybody now thinks and feels” (Boumelha 93). Dianne Sadoff agrees with Penny Boumhelha that “the narrator’s fantasies of penetration and engulfment violate Tess as fully as do Alec’s actions” (149). In her essay concerned with Tess as spectacle in both Hardy’s text and Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of the novel, Sadoff effectively argues that Tess is constructed as an object for the scrutinizing if

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 67 not erotic and appreciative gaze of the reader/viewer. Such a subjugated subject position only seems to make Tess more vulnerable and a likely candidate for victimhood, a sacrifice to patriarchy’s sexual mores in the face of masculine desire and control. Blinded and obsessed by their own self-narcissistic desires, the male protagonists are unable to see Tess’s humanity as she focuses upon others rather than herself—a characteristic that ennobles Tess, establishes sympathy from the reader, and makes her narrative of sexuality tragic. Yet a focus upon the victimhood (the vulnerability or fragility) of Tess fails to account for her force. Tess commands our sympathy as a compelling character. Readers are not usually engaged with or compelled by chronic victimhood or entertained by a litany of abuses alone. The act of mapping—while generally an act of masculine representative power—is here appropriated by Tess by her cumulative plotted journeys. Hardy contrasts Tess’s gendered difference from Alec and Angel within the first section of the novel—“Phase the First—The Maiden”—where almost all the multiple uses and different values of the road are represented: commercial, ritualized processional, aesthetic voyeurism (tourism), social advancement, and exploitive speed. Three of these uses—ritualized processional, aesthetic voyeurism, and exploitive speed—are embodied respectively by Tess, Angel, and Alec. Both Alec and Angel use the road for personal gain: Alec is enamored by the seductive nature of speed while driving his cart recklessly and later by the road as the means to facilitate his proselytizing, while Angel uses the road as an idealistic and touristic place that distances him from convention and community. Where Alec uses speed, Tess values slowness. Where Angel practices touristic distance, Tess values proximity and community. The characteristics of both speed and touristic distance are associated with Victorian patriarchy’s construction of the feminine while slowmoving community represents an ancient and more traditional use of the road. Alec and Angel construct Tess’s sexual identity and locate her on their own sexual maps. The tragedy of the novel resides in the irreconcilability of these road practices due to the ignorance in understanding the other, a failure that ultimately overwhelms Tess. Besides signifying the construction of sexual identity, the road also signifies the construction of social identity. Hardy’s characters—his Victorians—are characterized by their nomadic movements and condition of homelessness and uprootedness. Tess takes to the road and throughout the novel moves from place to place to find work. This search fulfills a material and a social desire, a desire by which her mother means for her to marry well, and by which Tess means to escape her past as well as help her family. Tess maps desire—desire to help others—through her physical movements across the

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landscape. Consequently, she makes her trip to Trantridge and completes the tragic liaison with Alec. Like Eustacia Vye fromThe Return of the Native and Jude Fawley from Jude the Obscure,Tess is a refugee, an exiled outsider who often seems homeless as well as excluded from conventional rewards: first she is forced into exile by Alec’s sexual rapaciousness; later, she is cast away by her husband, Angel. Tess exists as a displaced person. Forced onto the road, Tess uses the road first to relocate and improve her social position, then later merely to survive. Like Tess, both Angel and Alec also exemplify social displacement. Angel first aspires to and later becomes an émigré farmer, and Alec exchanges his nouveau riche, aristocratic decadence for that of the repentant, wandering evangelical before returning to his former status. This blend of displacement, alienation, and outsider status emerges as the subject position for many late-Victorians, a condition Hardy refers to as the “ache of modernism” (105). However, Tess walks the road to re-enact her connection to community and to help her family, a position at odds with the motivations of Alec and Angel. Like the hedgerows that border country roads which constrict sight, masculine construction of femininity limits Tess. She is hemmed in by the opposing and mutually exclusive binaries of the Victorian conceptualization of middle-class women either as a feminine ideal of purity to be placed upon a pedestal or as a whore to be despised and cast off. These twin poles of Victorian patriarchy’s conception of womanhood constrain Tess and limit how the men in her life see her. Both Alec and Angel are limited by their perspectives; their views of Tess reduce her to a container of their own cultural views. Alec plots Tess as a sensual object, first to be taken and used, and then, as an individual worthy of respect and admiration; Angel has idealized Tess as the perfect virginal vessel with which to fill his husbandly energy and to help him as his colonial farm-wife. Both men agree on the idea that because Tess first had sexual relations with Alec, he is her legitimate (natural) husband despite the later social ceremony which legally marries her to Angel. Like The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles begins on a road. A chance encounter involving the search and recovery of identity drives the plot. Returning home from a nearby townmarket, Tess’s father meets Parson Tringham who casually (though perhaps erroneously) informs him that the Durbeyfields are descended from the ancient and noble lineage of the d’Urberville family, wealthy landowners of Norman stock. After the exchange with Tringham upon the road, Durbeyfield plans to visit the pub to celebrate the revelation of this good news.

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 69 Enroute he passes the Marlott villagers engaged in a ritual procession: May Day club-walking. Hardy invokes this ancient ritual along the road to reinforce the notion that the road is rich in sedimented meaning and remains a conflicted space because of the many historical, cultural, social, and mythical meanings embedded within it. The ceremony stems from an ancient fertility ritual in which women—mostly girls—dress in white and carry a willow wand while walking as a group to an adjacent field to dance with men. The annual public event of the village is a residual ceremonial practice left over from a more overtly pagan time. The narrator claims that observing the club-walk has died out everywhere except Marlott; however, the Marlott rustics are unclear about the club-walk’s origins and significance. Reinforcing gendered roles for the community as well as reinforcing community bonds, the May Day clubwalk and dance on the green are residual practices whose power to consolidate the community is waning if not altogether lost. But Tess’s participation in this processional associates her with ritualistic road use and the significance of traditional community. As a ritualistic movement along a road, the processional—Marlott’s May Day club-walk—is a collective response to the uncertainty created by rapid change. That all the women wear white dresses and wield willow wands signifies the collective unity of the ritual processional. But its association with pagan community and feminine solidarity or gendered community and cultural roles remains apparent. The narrative is careful to keep Tess from being submerged in a faceless collective despite the communal nature of the walk. Unlike the other women, she has a red ribbon in her hair (a color frequently associated with Tess) and the narrator notes (though Angel is oblivious to) her striking beauty. While Tess is engaged in this ancient community ritual, Angel Clare encounters her for the first time. Angel and his two brothers come upon Marlott’s club-walk while “tramping” country roads to see the sights. Angel and his two priggish brothers use the road as the means for their walking tour, a kind of middle-class, healthy vacation suitable for young men. While Tess is in a traditional procession, the Clares are touring. The Clare brothers employ the road as the means for their hike along rural roads through picturesque landscape and sightsee—a widespread Victorian bourgeois activity. For them, the road is a recreation site from which the hiker as tourist and outsider can view the “indigenous” terrain and “native” population. They use the road not only as a space for physical exercise but also as a space for education-by-travel. While on their hike or recreational tramp across the countryside, Angel and his two brothers pass by chance the dancing village women.

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Angel’s suggestion to linger shocks his two elder brothers whose middle-class respectability is repelled by such fraternization with working-class rustics. Their relationship to the rural residents is that of observers; Angel’s older brothers choose to neither speak nor dance with the Marlott women who seem to belong to a different world. His brothers disdain to linger for even a moment. However, Angel does stop; yet he either ignores or does not notice Tess (the fact piques her). Overlooked by Angel, Tess hovers merely at the margins of his attention while Angel picks another with whom to dance for a few moments. So Angel briefly makes a kind of contact with Tess then withdraws. Angel’s interaction with the May Day club-walkers remains fleeting, only a superficial encounter, perhaps merely a lark by an obstreperous youngest brother to needle his older brothers. Like Clym Yeobright from The Return of the Native, Angel Clare is a tourist. His secular motivation contrasts strongly with the May Day club-walk’s possessive more mythic origins. So although they occupy the same physical space, Tess and Angel occupy ancient and modern time respectively, a diachronic difference. Rather than integrating with community and landscape through ritualized processional, Angel stands apart as an observer. The touristic travel of he and brothers enforces distance from traditional community rather than reinforcing integration with it. Associated with Clare’s attitude is Penny Boumelha’s assessment of the narrator as a kind of tourist guide who invites the reader to gaze upon and view Tess as spectacle, at times an erotic one (120) and Diane Sadoff ’s analysis in “Looking at Tess” of the narrator as almost a kind of pimp inviting the reader to appreciate Tess sensually. Yet examples of touristic distance and gaze remain closer to Hardy’s context. In his travel essay “Roads,” Robert Louis Stevenson extols the virtues of the road as the embodiment of “a quiet spirit of orderly and harmonious beauty” (227). In short, Stevenson aestheticizes the road, and like the Romantic poets, conjoins the character of the road—tranquil or tortuous, windy or straight, uneven or smooth—with the character of the walking traveler. This road-induced feeling is most operative when road walkers, according to Stevenson, “abandon” themselves “to the road itself ” (233), a loss of self without personal boundaries or margins. Stevenson claims that “sympathy of mood” (231) exists between the hiker and the road. This sympathy is not of the intellect alone but of feeling. The road is the space to gather dazzling impressions. The culminating emotion, however, is the thrill of uncertainty, of anticipation, of expectancy awaiting travelers who cannot see around the next bend or over the next hill. Stevenson characterizes this outlook as “the passion for what is ever beyond” (235)—a sense of prospect. This sense seems to set up a limitless appetite for the new, for the possible, for the romantic2 imagination of the wandering tourist. The

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 71 road exists as an invitation, especially as the freedom to satiate a male desire for individual pleasure. But it is a freedom contingent upon separation and distance. Hence, Angel is a Stevenson-like traveler longing for the freedom of the open road but lacking significant engagement with another person. The road for Angel, then, introduces the thrill of uncertainty combined with the safety of travel within stable, legitimate boundaries as well as the opportunity to aesthetically if not erotically appreciate the view. One basis for the May Day club-walk is suggested by a human-built Neolithic road-like structure termed the Dorset Cursus. Several large-scale processional roads lie within Wessex with two of the largest and most wellknown being the Dorset Cursus near Cranborne Chase—the scene of Tess’s violation by Alec—and Stonehenge Avenue, both of which figure prominently in Hardy’s narrative (Atkinson 4). The May Day club-walk and the Dorset Cursus are significant examples of the kind of residual history woven throughout Hardy’s works, residual elements called “survivals” by E.B. Tylor in his 1871 Primitive Culture. Regarded by some as creating “the founding document of modern British anthropology” (Radford 23) and referenced by Hardy in his Literary Notebooks (Radford 13, n. 86), Tylor names “survivals” those ancient modes or forms of thoughts and customs which resist change and remain residual to modern culture. Tylor’s notion of “survivals” seems to anticipate and resonate with not only the later idea of Raymond Williams concerning “residual” (122–23) but also with Bahktin’s notion of “historical inversion” (147). A Tylor “survival” is not merely dormant but acts as a residual force upon the present, an often inverted relationship that finds those residuals further in the past possessing more influence on the present than those closer in time. While Hardy’s integration into his fiction of historic folklore, ancient artifacts, and archaic pagan practices have often been cited as justifications for conceiving of Hardy as merely a “nostalgic” writer bent upon preserving fading rural practices and ideas, I believe that the presence of so many “survivals” in Hardy’s texts points to the over-determined cultural work that they perform in Hardy’s exploration of Victorian subjectivity. Characters like Tess are intimately associated with them while Angel and Alec, in contrast, significantly are not. Unlike the endless railway and Angel’s isolating and distancing “freedom of the open road,” the May Day club-walk is a residual processional activity that locates its participants within the tradition of a stable, knowable community. The kind of embedded history like the Dorset Cursus that finds its way explicitly into his novels and poems was based upon Hardy’s fascination with local ancient history. For example, Andrew Radford in Thomas Hardy and

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the Survivals of Time recounts that Hardy often visited the excavation sites of a good friend, Augustus Pitt-Rivers—who was often called the father of scientific archaeology for his precise field methodology (13–14) and became the first inspector of ancient monuments and president of the Anthropological Institute in the latter half of the nineteenth-century—acknowledged as the scientist primarily responsible for making archaeology a respectable science rather than a mercenary business (Page 12). Not only did Pitt-Rivers own the Cerne Giant, but his estate covered the immense Cranborne Chase, site of Tess’s violation by Alec and the remains of a Roman road as well as the present archaeological site of the Dorset Cursus at Downs Farm. Charles Darwin himself was among those who sponsored the election of Pitt-Rivers to the Royal Society (Page 12). Besides acquainting himself with secondhand archaeological finds as found in Charles Warne’s 1872 Ancient Dorset (Radford 14), Hardy was able to visit often Pitt-Rivers’s excavations as a member of the Dorset Field Club. While the Dorset Cursus was unknown to Hardy during the writing of Tess being revealed later only through aerial survey, Christopher Tilley in A Phenomenology of Landscape notes that it is over ten kilometers long, running in a southwest by northeast fashion, and over 100 meters wide. The height from the bottom center of the ditch to the top of either barrow on the sides must have been only five to six feet (170–72). According to Tilley, archaeological experts like Kenneth Brophy and Richard Bradley contend that the cursus—two parallel barrows formed by the fill excavated from a central ditch—was used as a ritual walk-way for processionals or initiations (173–80). It’s intriguing to speculate as to who used the walk-way: old or young, girls or boys, individuals or groups. Yet who used the walk-way remains unknown. Perception was restricted and the structure’s alignment across the landscape focuses the orientation of a processional walker in a particular way in order to render a particular experience or insight. But like the meaning of Marlott’s May Day club-walk, the exact meaning and purpose of the Dorset Cursus has been lost. The term “cursus” was first used by eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley (Osborne 31) when Stukeley described long linear parallel banks which he had found in the vicinity of Stonehenge. He speculated that these ancient structures were used as a kind of racetrack by the occupying Romans and ascribed to them a fittingly Latin appellation (perhaps to honor the Roman heritage). At the time, only three cursus monuments were known to exist. With the advent of aerial photography in the mid-twentieth century, cursus monuments have been discovered in most parts of England, Wales, and East Scotland. Ironically, while the Dorset Cursus appears as dotted parallel

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 73 lines on contemporary Ordinance Survey maps (similar to the Roman road representation on Hardy’s sketch map), all traces of the cursus structure have disappeared3 except for adjacent burial barrows. The early Neolithic Dorset Cursus enclosure is formed by two parallel long and narrow earthworks that, according to archaeologist Kenneth Brophy, possess only a few breaks in this continuous bank/ditch structure, possible entrances or exits. Because its primary feature is enclosure, when one is inside the cursus, sight is restricted laterally. Thus the shape and alignment of the Dorset Cursus seems intended to exclude outsiders from gaining a particular experience.4 Rather than totally isolating the cursus walker from the terrain, then, the cursus restricts or focuses perception in particular ways: either to follow the rising and setting of the solstice sun or to align a ritualized movement with moon and stars, or to concentrate the walker’s attention upon the dead within the barrows. The cursus walker’s perception of celestial elements is thus manipulated through this orientation and alignment of the structure (Paul Devereux 67). Mental and perceptual orientations seem the key.5 The Dorset Cursus simply had no meaning to an observer outside it (Tilly 197).6 But a directed or restricted view renders only a partial meaning to the Dorset Cursus. While Brophey has focused on “the processional theory” to explain its function in terms of community cohesion similar to the Marlott’s club-walking, Tilley suggests that the Dorset Cursus was a mysterious, exciting, and frightening place in which young initiates (probably young men but possibly women—we just don’t know) walked as a rite of passage. Tilley argues that the meaning of the structure resided in the experience of a walker walking northeast to southwest along its length. Thus the structure facilitates a certain kind of experience for the participant walker, and the meaning of that experience resides primarily within the walker’s own movement along and within the cursus. Tilley speculates that possible ceremonies such as initiation rituals or vision quests had meaning only within the movement of the participants themselves. Therefore movement down a cursus was designed for the development of individual but in order that the individual could more fully integrate into the social and natural community. Similar to Tess’s ritualistic club-walk processional, the Dorset Cursus’s initiation function and perceptual manipulation parallel not only Tess’s initiation into new stages of her life made by her four important roads journeys but also the restricted sight of Angel and Alec who cannot see Tess properly. Positioned outside the cursus, they see only the reflection of their own ideologies. While Alec and Angel restrict Tess through their own maps of sexual

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identity (which do prove fatal to her), Tess ultimately maps her own identity through walking the cruciform. The construction of cultural and individual perspective through the carefully enacted movement through a ritual landscape is mediated by that movement’s use of the cursus road. In other words, the road facilitates a certain kind of experience by which a particular meaning is constructed. This idea finds echoes in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. MerleauPonty says: “Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only of the geometrical synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which constitute the cultural world” (388). Because human bodies move through space in a certain manner, people gain a particular world view—a view open-ended to the construction of many possibilities—the expression of which constitutes a cultural value. Rather than a reductive geometric spatial attitude or relationship, the constituting subject orients itself toward possible worlds through the very structures it experiences on a daily basis, or at least on a regular basis. For Tess, this intermittent but consistent and regular structure experienced is the road. Tess orients her life through it, through what Merleau-Ponty calls, the road’s “already there . . . inalienable presence” (vii), a local presence designed, structured, and used to reinforce community through Tess’s “goddess step,” but one that proves irreconcilable to the authority of emergent Victorian travel technologies. Unlike the speed-using Alec, Tess hates to move rapidly through space; rather, she glides, often in an almost dream-like state. The narrator relates: “On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in” (72). Her mode of movement is opposed to speed. As Tony Tanner says in “Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” Tess’s intuitive response to movement “is placidity [as] she recoils from rapid movements” (18). Tanner insists that for Tess: “Life is movement, and movement leads to confusion” (18). Tess attempts to minimize life’s confusion by the more deliberate pace of her own walking. But throughout the novel, men and machines conspire to involve her in dangerous motion, a movement that she successfully, at times, resists. The reason that she’s vulnerable to Alec’s advances stems from the financial distress experienced by her family through the loss of their only asset, the family horse, killed in a disastrous midnight collision with the royal mail coach moving at break-neck speed. “Ever since the accident with her father’s horse Tess Durbeyfield, courageous as she naturally was, had been exceedingly timid on wheels; the least irregularity of motion startled her” (43). In an ironic but

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 75 significant sense, the speed embodied by this moving instrument of modern state authority proves the impetus for Tess to claim kin at Trantridge. Therefore, she has every reason to fear speed since it has proved so dangerous to her and her family. On the road, Tess more often trudges than rides, loaded down with her traveling baggage. The narrator reminds us that as Alec cunningly contemplates the reckless descent of the hill, Tess is apprehensive if not alarmed. Speed proves fatal to Tess. Not only is Tess’s deliberate pace associated with the cursus, but also her astronomical musing parallel the cursus’s astronomical design. Bradley claims that the Dorset Cursus is enhanced by its northeast/southwest orientation. Without such alignment, it couldn’t be used as a ritual landscape for the cursus makes use of equinoctial sunrises and sunsets which can only be observed by a specific line-of-sight by a walker traveling in a certain direction from the northeast to the southwest.7 A dogleg was even incorporated to produce a certain effect at a certain time and place. In effect, the spatial structures were carefully built with specific alignments, and participants appear to have been given particular orientation instructions in order to control the experience and produce a specific kind of cultural knowledge. The cursus’s astronomical alignment resonates with Tess’s conversation with her younger brother while making their ill-fated night journey in which the family’s horse, Prince, is killed accidentally by the fast-traveling mail coach. Gazing at the clear night sky and hemmed in by dark woods, they realize that the lonely night road has become their cursus. Her brother Abraham asks if the stars are worlds, and his older sister Tess responds that they are, although a few, like the one they live upon, are blighted. Reflecting upon the death of the family’s solitary capital investment, Abraham philosophically explains the event as due to their habitation upon the surface of a blighted star rather than a splendid one. However rather than walking roads to enact community like Tess or to integrate with or orient to the landscape like cursus walkers, Angel uses roads to flee community, maintaining distance and difference with a home landscape. Angel’s ideals tell him that his freedom from middle-class conventions and the inequalities of class can be realized only through his immigration abroad following an agricultural apprenticeship (separated from family) within Wessex. Like his recreational tourism, Angel’s life plan is predicated upon personal “freedom-of-the-road.” An appeal to a sense of freedom was not novel to England’s transport history. The appeal to freedom was one of the points in favor of expanding a system called Boydell’s Endless Railway, a successful steam tractor that ran upon existing roads. Like the rivalry for Tess between Alec and Angel, there was a fierce competitive struggle for dominance

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within England’s transport system: the struggle between the railroad and the steam tractor carriage. To understand the impact of this competition, let me offer a brief overview of this more modern history of the road. An emergent technology of road transport—Boydell’s “endless railway”—made an appeal to freedom in which productive horizons seemed infinitely progressive for its advocates and promoters. In a development simultaneous with the fledgling railroad lines, an experiment with steam tractors outfitted with paddles upon their wheels (for traction) was launched that hoped to counter the drawbacks of railroads. While previous roads with granite or other large stone surfaces produced a problem of traction for horses and proved slippery to both pedestrians and animals when wet, McAdam’s new system of crushed and compacted small stone surfaces (hence the term macadam) seemed to alleviate the problems of adhesion, friction, and traction (Adams 299), especially for the steam carriages. As Britain’s General Surveyor of turnpike roads, John McAdam gave his 1859 enthusiastic endorsement to Boydell’s steam carriage as did H. Browse, General Surveyor of the Metropolis, after watching a demonstration on London streets. As road experts, they both agreed that Boydell’s steam carriage—the most efficient and successful among several—would successfully aid the commercial and passenger transport on existing ordinary roads. In 1859, before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, McAdam testified that Boydell’s 1857 steam traction machine overcame all his own doubts about this kind of technology working practically as well as paying commercially. With McAdam’s as well as the Select Committee’s endorsement, the possibilities and advantages of steam-traction locomotion seemed so limitless that its promoters, including McAdam, called Boydell’s steam tractor the “endless railway.” Such terminology provided a real marketing windfall since it implied that steam traction possessed the potential to travel anywhere. Like Stevenson’s allure of the open road, Boydell’s Endless Railway’s prospects were also infinite, an image of freedom that resonates with Angel’s ideals. Perhaps the steam tractor’s most articulate advocate was Charles Young, a civil engineer and member of the Society of Engineers. In his text The Economy of Steam Power on Common Roads, Young also advocated Boydell’s traction engines in particular (the state of the art as it were) and the concept of the Endless Railway. Indeed, Young boasted, Boydell’s Endless Railway was the “only means hitherto invented by which steam can be used advantageously on ordinary roads under all circumstances” (267). Young’s argument about the feasibility of steam road locomotives rested as much upon an explicit cultural criticism of railways and the entire railroad system surrounding it as

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 77 it did upon the merits of the steam carriage’s technology. Appealing to free traders and reformers, Young maintained that because of its proven theoretical and practical success, steam traction on roads promotes “liberalism, free trade, and progress” (411). Young’s words have the ring of idealism consistent with that of Angel’s. Rejecting the Clare family’s middle-class conventions, Angel refrains from choosing the road of his two elder brothers: church and college. Rather, Angel plans an earthier and simpler farming life. He meets Tess during his apprenticeship with Farmer Crick to learn the practical trade of the dairy business in order to become a productive member of an overseas colony. Young advocated the integration of steam traction on roads into the technological infrastructure of the economy as a great and necessary economic boon. He maintained that if as much energy was placed in its advancement as is currently put into its retardation, this technology would benefit everyone (412). In short, Young says: “when properly carried out, steam traction on common roads is the most economical and advantageous system of transport with which we are yet acquainted (413). In a parallel fashion, Angel constructs Tess as an “economical and advantageous” helpmate to his plans. While Angel reads by himself at breakfast in Dairyman Crick’s kitchen refraining from conversation with his fellow dairy workers, Tess unintentionally attracts his notice with an astute metaphysical comment that appeals to his intellect. He instantly judges her superior to the other milkmaids and later quickly maps her as the embodiment of rural virtue and feminine purity. Similarly, Young also esteemed the virtues of the endless railway. He claims that steam traction can be adopted with “little evil, and be productive of great universal good” (417)—an appeal to Jeremy Bentham’s greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. For Young, the Endless Railway steps away from the darkness of selfishness and ignorance and moves toward the light of enlightenment and progress (416),8 ideals that register with Angel’s progressive horizons. However, unlike the endless railway and Angel’s isolating and distancing “freedom of the open road,” the May Day club-walk is a residual processional activity that locates its participants within the tradition of a stable, knowable community. But prior to Tess’s time spent as a dairy maid, the death of the Durbeyfield’s sole asset, their horse Prince, drives the marginally-living family to the brink of financial disaster. Unlike the orphaned Eustacia and Jude, Tess’s parents and family figure prominently in the narrative. Tess’s poor parents are determined to capitalize upon their newly-found lineage and perhaps gain materially from making themselves known to the only known d’Urbervilles in the area. Her mother connives to use Tess, that is, to exchange her body

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for the security of the family. Tess’s sexuality is to be exchanged for the Durbeyfield family’s financial security. To this extent, Tess’s mother commodifies Tess, and Tess circulates herself to accomplish this end—traveling to Tantridge to “claim kin.” Sacrificed to the desires of others, such circulatory exchange constrains the possibilities of her self. Tess agrees to go visit the d’Urbervilles, and takes the first of her journeys. Tess’s journey to Trantridge to exchange her traditional identity for a newer one parallels the d’Urbervilles’ own destabilized identity. Ironically, Alec d’Urberville’s deceased father—a Mr. Simon Stokes—had purchased the title and changed his name and his family’s in order to gain a level of prestige to correspond with the family’s nouveau riches. As wealthy landowners from the industrial north, the Stokeses appear to have acquired the title and name in order to add an aristocratic cachet or veneer to themselves (an act bordering upon the pretentious). The very identity of the upper class was changing during the Victorian era as the source of wealth changed from family blood lines and landownership to capital amassment developed through industrial investment. Although wealthy, Alec d’Urberville remains only superficially aristocratic as far as nobility is concerned and uses the road to seduce Tess—forcing her to embrace and kiss him to get him to slow his racing dog cart. He also uses the road to carry on as an itinerant preacher after his shallow conversion following his conversation and reflection with Angel’s father, Preacher Clare. Yet Alec’s conversion as a nomadic lay preacher is short-lived, his evangelical proselytizing and identity as a man of God merely superficial. His use of the road is a superficial one that reflects only a shallow identity fixated upon the greedy fulfillment of personal satisfaction and aggrandizement. Power, speed, greed, and lust seem the proper terms with which to describe Alec d’Urberville, a man who also uses deception to gain his purpose, a tactic that Charles Young claims insured the success of railroad ascendancy and dominance over road-using steam tractors like Boydell’s Endless Railroad. Alec uses the road to gain ascendancy and domination over the women whom he wishes to seduce. Such predatory road use contrasts with both Tess’s slow-moving club-walk and the Clare brother’s country walking tour. Alec’s sensual and superficial use of the road also contrasts sharply with Angel’s ethereal ideals and romantic use of the road. Like the railroad, Alec is obsessed with the seduction of speed and the deception of seduction. Conveying Tess from Marlott to Tantridge, Alec employs speed to begin his seduction of Tess. Driving Tess in his one-horse cart, he whips the horse to dangerous speeds when descending hills. Instructing Tess to hang onto him to keep from bouncing out of the rapidly moving gig, Tess is obliged to throw her arms around his waist to keep her seat. In answer to her request

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 79 to please slow down, Alec responds that his compliance comes with a price: a kiss. Alec attempts to bribe Tess to vouchsafe his own prudent driving at the cost to Tess of intimacy. Not satisfied with only one chaste-like, cousinly peck on the cheek, Alec whips the horse back up to dizzying speed, his not so subtle ploy to force Tess into another and perhaps more intimate capitulation. Later in the novel, we will see how the steam threshing machine forces her and the other workers to speed up their work in order to keep to its incessant pace. In this scene also associated with Alec, he confronts Tess with her abandonment by Angel. In effect, speed—that is, speed along the road in the form of Alec’s mode of movement—continually threatens Tess. Like the steam-powered threshing machine later, the speed of mechanism makes a claim upon her body. Not content with one kiss, Alec whips the horse to dangerous speeds on the downhill run in order to coerce Tess into kissing him more, the price for slowing the cart. Using her head, Tess unobtrusively but shrewdly disengages a hat pin, and her hat flies off her head behind them. She cries that she’s lost her hat. Responsive to the “loss of property” as a young man of nouveau property and responsive as a “gentleman” to the “need” of a young lady, Alec stops. Tess counts upon Alec’s shallow gentlemanly instinct to stop the cart in order to retrieve her headgear, and she promptly jumps down from the cart insisting that she will walk the rest of the way rather than submit to any more of Alec’s seductive shenanigans. She refuses to rejoin Alec in the cart, thus ending his game. Temporarily. Unlike Angel but similar to Wildeve fromThe Return of the Native, Alec is characterized primarily as a womanizer. Unlike Clym Yeobright ofThe Return of the Native and Angel who place their beloveds upon pedestals of purity, Wildeve and Alec take sexual advantage of them as wanton women. These men indulge in a blame-the-victim charade in which Wildeve claims that Eustacia has bewitched him and Alec makes Tess promise not to tempt him anymore. In addition, both seducers delude themselves about the validity of their desire through the projection of their own sexual predations upon the “witchly wiles” of their victims. While men like Clym and Angel deny female sexuality or are hopelessly confused and inept regarding sexuality, men like Wildeve and Alec (especially Alec) exploit feminine sexuality to not only satisfy their own desire but also to dominate. He considers satisfying his sexual need his privilege as a male member of the upper class. Alec—almost a stereotypical villain with a black pointy mustache—makes a game of seducing women, both knowing ones like Car Darch and inexperienced ones like Tess. Rather than conceiving of women as powerful equals, Alec uses women’s sexuality to dominate them. After the Trantridge affair,

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the domineering Alec gloats to Tess: “I am your master now” and “I will master you once more” (275). This critical characterization of Alec resonates with Young’s criticism of the railroad as the immoral opposite of the endless railway. He concludes that railway speculation was a “mania” and reflects an unbridled “lust for gain” (64). This greed had blinded railway speculators and investors in previous railway boom years to not knowing the difference between legitimate and illegitimate speculation, as well as the difference between gambling and trading (64). Young disparages the supporters of railways as morally compromised and blinded by quick financial gain rather than really malicious or dishonest. Like McAdam, Young points to the great expense of railways as a waste of financial resources. Land for right-of-way is purchased, according to Young, “frequently at an exorbitant cost” (69), expensive Acts of Parliament were procured to establish a line, and lobbyists were paid to overcome resistance and opposition. Young concludes that all this cost remains a colossal “waste of capital” (70). In short, Young and his many supporters characterize railway mania as a short-sighted worship of gold and get-rich-quick schemes that work against integrity and character. Young implies that such blatant greed remains morally reprehensible and thus not respectable. Yet despite its proven advantages and prestigious proponents, the Boydell Endless Railway never became more than a sideshow in Victorian transport history. Fixed line railroads quickly dominated the competition and the landscape. Young himself was no fool and clearly articulated the reasons as he saw them for this failure. He admitted that steam locomotion over roads hadn’t been successful to date for three reasons (411). First, the public had been prejudiced through misinformation and ignorance; second, turnpikes levied excessive tolls for the steam carriages; and third, excessive taxes on coal—the fuel for the steam tractor’s boilers—made the cost of operation financially unfeasible. Young claimed that Boydell’s Endless Railway was treated unfairly through inequitable turnpike tolls and coal rates. Only the richest or largest companies of steam engines could afford to use coal profitably, and these engines belong to railroad companies. This gave the profitable use of coal to railway companies who simply forced the steam-carriage trade out of business.9 The sense of freedom that public conveyance promised through a use of roads failed to materialize and instead was limited to what fixed rail lines offered. In a sense, raw power and speed won out since rail engines could move people and goods faster and in greater loads than steam tractors pulling on roads. Just as the railroad eclipsed alternative modes of British transport and introduced the intoxicating element of dizzying speed to travel,

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 81 railroads dominated if not changed forever the landscape of both Victorian and modern England, striating the terrain with fixed lines, cutting huge swaths through hills, and building immense trestles over declivities. Like the emergent railroad, Alec competes with a rival and temporarily triumphs using seductive speed in order to dominate Tess whom is changed unalterably by her relationship with him. During the speeding-cart scene of seduction and resistance between Alec and Tess, the road is described in terms of a splitting stick: “The aspect of the straight road enlarged with their advance, the two banks dividing like a splitting stick; one rushing past at each shoulder” (44). From Alec’s and Tess’s perspective, the speeding cart seems to be splitting the road, and the two banks peel back like waves from the prow of a ship or as earth from a sharp plow. Yet J. Hillis Miller in “Repetition as Immanent Design” adds another image: an image of grafting. This image figuratively captures Tess’s relationship with Alec. Just as roads are inscribed across the virgin landscape of Wessex through an act of cutting and placement—like an act of inscription upon a blank page—Joan Durbeyfield’s plans to cut Tess from her family and traditional community and graft her onto an ancient family line. The successful graft would close the social distance between families, cut the Durbeyfield working-class roots, and redirect the growth of Tess (and family) toward a new productive life. Yet this comes with a price: Alec’s sexual possession of Tess—his mastery over her. Through speed—emblematic of Alec’s modernity and seduction—the aspect of the road changes Tess’s perception of it from a white tape-like ribbon receding to a point in the distance to an aspect of splitting, the margins rushing past. The figurative description of the road changes from that of a binding or connecting ribbon to a divisive and violent splitting stick, a change that parallels Tess’s experience. Rather than assimilating into known and stable community through a May Day club-walk or Dorset Cursus initiation, Tess hurtles toward an unknown, unstable community. Another sense of grafting and splitting occurs along the road after Tess has been working for the d’Urbervilles at Tantridge. When Tess accompanies her Trantridge fellow-workers home from the dance at Chaseborough, the sensuously pagan intoxication of the dance is not left entirely behind: “They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessing of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other” (55–6). The formerly “dry white road, made whiter tonight by the light of the moon” (55) finds the residual remains of the Satyrs chasing nymphs in the pollen-charged atmosphere of

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the dance barn—the liquidity of desire overcoming the dryness of sobriety. The walkers form an organic whole with the landscape and glide along through the medium of the road luminous with a halo of fecundity around every head, an aura of spirituality, paganess, desire, exhaustion, and wine. There is safety in numbers—within a community of travelers—as “the roads were dotted with roving characters of possibly ill intent” (54). Despite Tess’s confrontation with Car Darch, she’s safe from Alec’s advances and machinations if she stays with the group, but she’s vulnerable when she separates from it. Vulnerability and danger await Tess when she becomes separated from known community. Alec arrives like a knight on a horse as in a dream-like fairy tale to spirit her away from danger only to ultimately imperil her even more so. When not in control of her own movements, Tess gets into tragic trouble as she exchanges self-propelled walking for Alec’s horse. Alec purposely gets them lost—loses the roadway—in order to prolong his time with her. Once off the road, they both become disoriented (but this could be Alec’s ruse, one that even fools the less than omniscient narrator), but, as one of her fellow Trantridge workers muses, Tess has leapt from the frying pan into the fire, and her disorientation proves much more disastrous to her than Alec’s disorientation does to him. He leaves her sleeping in a pile of leaves ostensibly to find a road out of the near impenetrable and now misty woods of the Chase, “the oldest woods in England” (60). He returns to take advantage of Tess’s exhaustion, disorientation, and coldness. Within Cranborne Chase lies the remains of a Roman road, a residual historical element associated with will and mastery as we have seen in The Return of the Native. As the scene of Alec’s sexual assault upon her in the Chase, the Roman road’s embodiment of imperial will is also associated with Alec’s rapacity as reinforced by his class privilege and his predatory sexuality. During an earlier scene, Alec had given her “the kiss of mastery” (45); after she runs away from Trantridge to escape Alec and her position as mistress, Tess ruefully acknowledges to Alec, “See how you’ve mastered me” (66). Just as the road figured as a splitting stick rushing past Tess on her initial journey to Trantridge, the narrator explains that after Tess’s violation, “an immensurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm” (63). She has split from the ranks of the respectable. She is now a fallen woman and must suffer the ostracism from the Victorian social code. The trip back home to Marlott (in disgrace) exposes Tess to religious authority as she reads the biblical slogans painted on gates, stiles, and walls.

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 83 Such conventional piety increases Tess’s own guilt at her previous behavior. These biblical slogans hem her in and keep the outside world from seeing her clearly as the slogans recognize her only through religious injunctions. She occupies the moral margins of Victorian values at this point. When she gives birth to an illegitimate child, Tess moves beyond the pale of middle-class values as conceived by people like the Clares. Yet the overwrought name— Sorrow—Tess gives the child only points to Tess’s association with the allegorical, to patterns larger than can be ascertained in a glance. On the face of it, Tess is sexually deviant and morally deficient according to the conventions of middle-class morality. Not only has she born a child out of wedlock, but she’s also a murderess. Hardy’s subtitle for the novel—“A Pure Woman Faithfully Represented”—infuriated readers like the Duchess of Abercorn who judged Tess a little harlot who deserved hanging.10 Tess’s actions spoiled the narrative for Mowbray Morris who concluded “that Mr. Hardy has told an extremely disagreeable story in an extremely disagreeable manner.”11 But Hardy paints a sympathetic portrait of this sexually deviant and morally deficient other by which the cultural hegemony defines itself and establishes its standards. It’s important to note that Tess appears to be accepted back into the rural community of Marlott while we can only speculate upon the shunning she would receive from the middle-class Clares. This moral ambiguity aligns with Tess’s ambiguous identity. The narrator consistently characterizes Tess as possessing a vague form, as having lost her margin or personal boundaries, because Alec and Angel possess restricted views of her. Initially without sexual experience, Tess is nonetheless sexually exploited as virgin territory by Alec who sees her in no other way. On the other hand, Angel maps Tess as an idealized and nonsexual feminine form. Prior to Tess’s revelation on their wedding night, he cannot see her in any other way. But Tess embodies mythic dimensions through her road-walking, an embodiment that goes unseen by Alec and Angel. As Virgil notes in the Aeneid, “The goddess can be recognized by her step” (Book I, ln.405), and we recognize Tess’s goodness through her prodigious walking. But the roads Tess travels possess distinct margins and often have vertical obstructions both to vision and to movement. Tess’s roads therefore reflect her loss of the boundaries of self that lead to her homelessness, her displacement, and her association with the landscape and with nature. Tess is unable to communicate her history to Angel prior to her wedding night—a sign of feminine silence also represented by The Quiet Woman Inn inThe Return of the Native; yet once Tess does locate herself in history and appears on the gendered map of Victorian patriarchy, she’s caught in the snare of the Victorian double standard and marginalized. As inThe Return of the Native where

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the roads of Egdon Heath form the boundary to Eustacia’s desire, Tess’s roads also mark a boundary beyond which Tess cannot move. In other words, roads form the margins of her experience in a similar way that the figure on Hardy’s map in The Return of the Native marks the limits of Eustacia’s travel and circumscribes the fulfillment of her desire. Hardy’s heroine suffers more and more from her walking as the novel progresses, tragically demonstrating the incompatibility and antagonism between residual elements like Tess’s association with community and her measured movement within tradition and the emergent forces associated with Alec and Angel. After her marriage and abandonment by Angel, a poverty-stricken Tess makes her third journey from Flintcomb-Ash to her in-laws in an effort to claim kin and receive some support from Angel’s parents. A winter walk of some thirty-six miles over hilly terrain, this seems more like a pilgrimage than a social visit, a desperate and tragic double of the club-walk. In order to salvage a measure of respectability as well as practically assist her walk, she wears her work shoes on the journey but carries dress shoes in anticipation of the meeting with Angel’s parents. Arriving in town, she changes shoes, hiding her mud-splattered walking shoes. Her journey is in vain because she fails to meet the Clares. As if to add insult to injury, Tess’s walking shoes are taken in Emmister by an unwitting Mercy Chant. Even through the name of Angel’s former fiancé, Hardy’s criticism of his society’s construction of femininity and the blindness of self-righteous piety confronts the reader as a stark contrast to Tess’s inherent goodness. As the embodiment of middle-class respectability’s ideal of purity and womanhood, do-gooder Mercy Chant unthinkingly appropriates Tess’s walking shoes for the local poor thus crippling the goddess’s step. Tess returns to Flintcomb-Ash in despair but soon leaves the dismal farm at the news of her father’s death. At the death of Tess’s father, the Durbeyfield family loses its life-lease on its rented cottage; this housing is needed by landowners for their agricultural laborers rather than to a rural cottage population slightly diversified and on a relatively higher social scale. In short, the entire family is evicted and forced out of their home community. The remaining Durbeyfields become part of “the general removal” (297). Those villagers not directly employed as agricultural labor are banished from the rural community. With the continued enclosure movement that consolidated rural land into the hands of a privately wealthy few, roads became conduits for migration within the social body for capital’s need for a ready and mobile labor force drawn to central manufacturing centers. Small freeholders and copyholders like Tess’s father are merely tolerated; when they die, their families have to leave. The remaining Durbeyfields must take to the road, leave Marlott, and

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 85 find accommodations elsewhere.12 Those “families who had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the depositaries of the village traditions” (292) were dispossessed and forced into the larger towns, thus destroying the traditional cohesion of village community. The narrative also associates the Durbeyfield’s eviction with the road’s image as a violent splitting stick, a sundering that breaks up community. A similar fate had come to the former copyholder of the Trantridge fowl-house—the former house coming into legal possession of the Stokesd’Urberville landowner who confiscates the property for his own use, all quite legally. The change in rural community is also emphasized by the difference between Rolliver’s Inn and the Pure Drop. Rolliver’s has now become an illegal public house, since the number of independent but licensed ale houses has been drastically reduced. The effect of these changes was to drive the established village middle class downward into the menial and dispossessed working class. This displaced population of rural Wessex—many residual middle-class elements degraded like the Durbeyfield family—emerges as the lowest of menial agricultural workers. Tess’s downward social spiral—middle-class daughter, fowl keeper, milkmaid, and turnip grubber—is not atypical for a sizeable percentage of the rural population. Tess is forced back into a relationship with Alec who promises to support her family in exchange for her assuming the role of his mistress once again. For her family’s sake, Tess accepts. The pair move to rented rooms in a fashionable sea-side resort town, but Tess is discovered and visited by a returned and chastened Angel. After their confrontation, Tess murders Alec and together with Angel flees north. The two fugitives purposely avoid traveling along roads in order to escape detection from any would-be pursuers: “To walk across country without regard to roads was not new to Tess” (324). She had previously avoided roads traveling to Flintcomb-Ash after being recognized by the cart-driving Farmer Groby (her soon-to-be employer) who recognized her as Alec’s former mistress and whom Angel had previously accosted at their honeymoon inn following their marriage. Tess and Angel intuitively appreciate the fact that roads are watched and patrolled by the police and assorted other authorities, and that she and Angel remain vulnerable to discovery and apprehension if they travel along them.13 Obliged to pass through Melchester (present-day Salisbury), the site with the only bridge across the river near them, they creep through deserted streets at midnight, “keeping off the pavement that it might not echo their footsteps . . . Once out of town they followed the turnpike-road, which after a few miles plunged across an open plain” (324–25). The pair unexpectedly stumbles into the stones of Stonehenge.

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Like the May Day club-walk processional, Stonehenge remains a spatial site for collective ritual or celebration. But despite the community connotations of this archaic monument, the pair is alone, and their first apprehension of Stonehenge is foreboding. The archaic stone circle hums, the noise usually associated with the distant background noise of the city, especially Dickens’s London, as well as the steam threshing machine of Flintcomb-Ash. Angel feels “the vertical surface” (325) of one of the Sarsen stones that form the outer ring of the structure. The sense of verticality contrasts sharply with the treeless horizontality of the Salisbury Plain, spatial contrasts that resonate withinThe Return of the Native. They enter the ring of pillars, moving within the inner horseshoe ring of massive vertical trilithons. The spatiality of the monument is a smaller scale version of the larger scale cross and circle mapped by Tess. In keeping with her goddess-like characterization, Hardy melodramatically places Tess—reconciled with Angel—at Stonehenge near the end of the novel at the culmination of their brief flight from Sandbourne. Tess significantly falls asleep upon the altar stone—Hardy’s overwrought symbol of Tess as sacrifice as well as her association with the pagan. In Hardy’s narrative, the subject position for Tess as sacrificial victim to Victorian gender relationships is conflated with the ancient spatial identity of Stonehenge within the Victorian imagination as a site of Druidic sacrifice. Lying sleeping upon one of the fallen stones perceived as a sacrificial altar within this heathen temple, Tess reflects that she has finally arrived home (326–28). At Angel’s recognition of the place as the pagan Stonehenge, Tess replies that one of her mother’s ancient relatives was a shepherd near the place. Tess concludes happily but wearily that she has finally arrived home. Seen together with her consistent association with nature and the pagan while at Talbothay’s Dairy, Tess continues to be associated with the residual rather than the emergent. Hardy’s narrative throughout the scene alternates between images of time and space consistent with his preoccupation with past structure, values, and relationships. Tess speaks of her individual past, the effect of the ancient lineage of Pagan d’Urberville upon her, their present condition, and the future. She solicits Angel’s promise to care for her younger sister ‘Liza-Lu in the event of anything unfortunate happening to her. Hardy intersperses the time narrative with evocations of the shape and magnitude of the Neolithic structure, and the play of light and darkness upon its stones and the surrounding space. Clare concedes the astronomical arrangement of the stones and reflects upon the view to the east as Tess sleeps, and night turns into dawn. He contemplates the landscape east, the “eastward pillar and their architraves stood up blackly against the

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Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 87 light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway” (327). Clare is looking east down the Avenue of Stonehenge—the ceremonial processional roadway, a straight road “marked by a low bank and ditch on either side” (Osborne 7). Hardy’s narrative Sun-stone is the historical Heel Stone that stands within the Avenue and marks one of the principal approaches to Stonehenge (just one upright pillar of stone remains of a pair, the other long missing) while the Stone of Sacrifice remains the fallen stone formerly standing called the Slaughter Stone also the solitary remaining stone paired with a vanished double that “formed a ceremonial doorway to the site” (Osborne 7), both existing halves of some original pair that made up an entrance at one end of Stonehenge’s ceremonial road. The setting echoes the function of Marlott’s May Day club-walk. Significantly, it is from the east (Tess’s misfortune with Alec begins after her journey east to Trantridge) that the first policeman appears approaching along the ceremonial road. Like the roadside biblical quotations, authority in the form of the police searchers is again associated with the road. The openaired structure—more a protected enclosure than a confining container—is violated by the police. The end of the chapter finds Tess waking, recognizing her flight is over with her apprehension by the police, and rising to go forward to meet her fate. Tess’s ritualized road-wanderings are now at an end, and her methodical search for a permanent home concluded. The novel ends as it begins—on the road. Angel and ‘Liza–Lu are leaving Wintoncester by the great western highway climbing the incline out of town, presumably after visiting with Tess just prior to her hanging. The highway “ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a measured mile” (328) and from the summit of the hill which the road climbs, the pair turns to gaze upon the beauty of the distant town. They see the black flag raised from one of its Gothic towers signifying the conclusion of the execution. Thus the association with the medieval and the road with which the novel started (John Durbeyville’s chance meeting with parson Tringham and the revelation of a possible association with the ancient d’Urberville line) is repeated at the novel’s conclusion. The narrative comes full circle along the road, a tidy formal device. Ironically, Angel gets what he initially wanted: feminine purity in the form of Tess’s younger sister. In conclusion, Hardy mediates Tess’s experience through residual road histories like the May Day club-walk while he contrasts such experience with emergent road technologies as expressed through Angel’s tourism and the endless railway and with Alec’s domineering speed and railroad technology’s triumph. They all use the road but they use it in different ways for different purposes. Yet for all their differences, the main characters in Tess of the

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D’Urbervilles are all displaced, traveling persons seeking knowable community in order to stabilize their personal and communal identity. Competing like the railroad and the steam-driven tractor, both Angel and Alec doom Tess because her mythic characteristics go rejected and therefore devalued by them. She resists (ultimately unsuccessfully) the narrow margins imposed by Victorian categories, and instead she draws her own through inscribing her road travel as a readable inscription. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy genders the mode of travel along roads and associates an older more mythic feminine mode that engages rather than exploits the landscape as do his modern and masculine protagonists. Although Hardy fuses gender into larger considerations of social displacement and technological disruption, through Tess he rejects the rigid, narrow, and dominating boundaries of both Alec’s and Angel’s definitions of her feminine identity. Hardy acknowledges the tragic nature of modern life because of the age’s inability to see and to use figurative meanings (as tropes) from the mythic past. Hardy would graft equitable gender relationships as posited through mythic residual forms rather than fully use emergent forms. If The Return of the Native introduces us to Hardy’s spatial focus with an emphasis upon spatial centers and mapping as integral to narrative meaning and Tess of the D’Urbervilles intuits a specific spatial pattern of the Celtic cruciform inscribed by traveling along roads as Hardy’s response to threatened knowable community, Jude the Obscure marks the impossibility of engaging mythic tropes within modernity. Although circulating around a narrative omphalos, Jude and Sue woefully fail to meaningfully and powerfully inscribe mythic meaning upon their terrain. They lose Tess’s power to walk the cruciform. Their collapsing-cross road pattern reflects that loss and a sense of the tragic alienation found within emergent modernity. But Hardy keeps the spatial form alive with the road not traveled rather than one completely lost to his Victorian readers.

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Chapter Four

Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure

“[A]ll the past things of my life that are interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road.” —Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 282.

Hardy’s library contained numerous scientific and cartographic texts including Pope’s 1906 Old Stone Crosses of Dorset, Curle’s 1911 A Roman Frontier Post and its People, and the ten-volume 1895 Chamber’s Encyclopedia of maps and cuts (passages dug through the terrain for railroads, canals, or rivers).1 Hardy’s possession of both Chamber’s multi-volume compendium of maps and Pope’s history of local ancient Celtic crosses points to his significant interest in some of the historic and cartographic matters that underlie his fiction. If a map of Tess’s four journeys inscribes a cruciform centered on Marlott, a map that plots the varied city and village residences that Jude and Sue establish through their road travel in Jude the Obscure inscribes a collapsing cruciform (more an X than a +), an image that represents the collapsed harmony of known community and the destabilization of conventional views concerning marriage. However, a map centered on the Brown Hill road intersection that uses the Icknield Way as the horizontal axis of a cruciform, I argue, re-inscribes a pre-Christian cruciform. At the margins of the mapped travels that comprise the narrative, the axis of the Icknield Way re-establishes a collapsed Celtic cruciform that represents stable, known community and thereby reconstitutes the representation of not only known and harmonious community but also new, workable, and more equitable forms of gender relations. As part of this cruciform, the Icknield Way acts as a counterpoint image to “the cross in the pavement which marked the spot of the Martyrdoms”2 at 89

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the center of Christminster where Jude and Sue meet for the first time. (It does not seem coincidental that Tess and Alec renew their destructive relationship after a chance meeting at Cross-in-Hand.) While the former symbolizes productive and viable relations, the latter is an icon of destructive divisiveness and death, part of the uselessness of knowledge and the decay of institutions like conventionally-conceived marriage that Christminster’s crumbling structures represent, ruins that foreshadow the tragic end to Jude’s and Sue’s relationship and spirit. Hardy was not so naive as to suggest that people could readily achieve the harmony of the Celtic cross. Although in many ways nostalgic for a lost rural past and perhaps an unrealized marriage to his cousin Tryphena, Hardy was under no illusions that the past could be readily recovered. Other maps of the cultural terrain complicate easy attainment of such balance and equality for modern subjectivity. In a novel that narrates the barriers to progressive thinking and the failure of a Christian ethos of sexuality and knowledge to address the actual needs and desires of people, the Icknield Way provides an echo of a past pagan perspective that might offer an enlightened alternative to the stale thinking represented by a stagnant intellect as decayed as the college buildings of Christminster. As a spatial focal point along the Icknield Way in Jude the Obscure, Hardy focuses upon the intersection of the modern Marygreen-Christminster road with the Icknield Way at the crest of Brown Hill and upon the adjacent mile marker along the road. This crossroads locus marks the omphalos—or spatial center—of the narrative. This intersection between modern and archaic roads is a center for textual movement similar to those of Rainbarrow in The Return of the Native and Marlott in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. As Jude and Sue incessantly travel throughout Jude the Obscure crossing and recrossing the landscape of north Wessex, this spot embodies Jude’s desire for self-education and social advancement and also his sexual experience and his sensuality. As a constituent part of the spatial center of the novel, the intersection between the Icknield Way and the road between Christminster and Marygreen on Brown Hill also represents the possibility of stable community and harmonious gender relations. Hardy intertwines the long history of place, forgotten tradition, and mythic associations with his protagonists’ search for satisfying identity. Jude’s quest for identity is suggested by his repeated confrontations with the image of himself (Peterson 78). As a young boy, he stares down into the village well and sees his own reflection in the telescoped view. The well shaft is the only surviving structure of the community coterminous with its ancient beginnings. As the narrator says, it is “the only relic of the local history that

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Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure 91 remained absolutely unchanged” (11). Everything else within the village had changed. Thus the well represents cultural beginnings while Jude’s staring at his own reflection within it allegorically represents a long view down the tunnel of history. Despite the physical transformation, the narrator reminds the reader that “every clod and stone” (13) of the field where young Jude works to frighten rooks possesses multiple associations from the past. Attached to the field are the songs and tears, work and play, cooperation and bickering, gaiety and weariness, and the joy of love-making and the sadness of promisebreaking of every person who lived there (13). Hardy embeds the narrator’s awareness of these generalized residual histories to highlight the possibilities for Jude and Sue at remembering the Icknield road’s residual meaning for their present cultural terrain. Unlike Tess’s Marlott, Jude’s boyhood village of Marygreen contains no residual folkloric tradition. No one performs a May Day club-walk or dances upon the green. Many of the houses have been torn down, as well as the original church whose dismantled stones were “cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane” (11) or used as pig-sty walls and field fences. Such destruction of a sacred structure and the profane uses of the remains suggest a glaring lack of folk custom and tradition within the text—an anomaly it seems, considering Hardy’s historical focus. The dismantled and crushed church stones that provide paving material for the road suggests a higher priority for the modern than either custom or myth: the efficient mobility provided by a good road. As a community center in a small village, the church’s destruction suggests a communal and spiritual loss as well. However, one archaic residue outside the village survives from the past—a road. This road, which connects movement within the novel and exerts its residual history upon the meaning of the text, is the Icknield Way. Its presence permeates the text and hovers on the margins of the narrative. In Jude the Obscure as in The Return of the Native, the ancient Icknield Way—an archaic road that runs perpendicular to the more modern and well-traveled road—functions as a trope for the unconventional but viable consequences that a pagan perspective and older pagan forms hold for gender relationships. Rather than symbolizing actual practice of everyday, ordinary archaic life, the Icknield is a trope for marginality, alterity, and equity—that is, the marginality of unconventional modes of gender relationship, the validity of alternative perspectives, and the possibility of more equitable class and gender relations. If in The Return of the Native, the road acts like a container marking the limits of achievement and fulfillment while in Tess of the D’Urbervilles the road acts as a habitable margin between threatening sites, the road in Jude

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the Obscure marks the failure to move across cultural barriers of convention, barriers that often enforce isolation into separate cultural spheres. Figuratively contrasted with the straight and imperial Roman road that represents orthodoxy (from the Greek orthos or literarily straight or right thinking), the sinuous Icknield Way represents heterodoxy. Jude and Sue cross and re-cross the Icknield road in their attempt to cross barriers of sexual and social conventions erected to promote conformity. Yet they are not able to follow its path toward a destination of acceptance or toleration by conventional cultural authority. Like Tess, Jude travels between cultural points, and his only consistently reliable companion is the road itself and the mile marker upon Brown Hill, the site to which he returns again and again on his road travels, a place of solace and hope, his only space of refuge. The hilltop intersection on the top of Brown Hill marks the spot where the young Jude first sights the distant spires and lights of Christminster (itself the spatialized emblem of learning and knowledge throughout the novel). An adolescent Jude inscribes his desire for education by carving lettering into the milepost here. This crossroads is where an older Jude meets and courts Arabella, the spot that adult Jude and Sue cross and re-cross on their many journeys to Marygreen not only to attend to Jude’s great aunt but also for Sue’s return to Phillotson who finds himself teaching at the same school as he had at the beginning of the novel. And finally, this is where Jude rests fatally exposed to winter weather in his last visit to see Sue. Indeed, Jude reflects that this “too familiar road towards the upland” is the place “whereon had been experienced the chief emotions of his life” (61). At the top of the ridge along the road, Jude first views a distant Christminster, a view that fires his imagination and encourages his intellectual ambitions. After this initial sighting of Christminster, Jude returns again and again to view the distant city in order to rekindle his dream of leaving his mundane boyhood world and embarking upon an academic life by which he can exchange a working-class identity for a middle-class one. “Whenever he could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or so . . . he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill and strain his eyes persistently” (20) for a brief glimpse of the university town’s domes and spires. Christminster is the spatial embodiment of the young Jude’s dreams and ambition. Yet there is an illicit element to Jude’s dreams as he steals furtive trips to view the distant town that holds his future. A college education is not only beyond the conception of his rural neighbors but also beyond the acceptable class boundaries that limit academic aspirants like Jude. This sense of the culturally illicit is also associated with Jude’s awakening libido, and he has difficulty reconciling his intellectual and scholarly

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Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure 93 pursuits with that of a healthy sensuality. Indeed, Arabella teases and flirts with the aloof young man so preoccupied by study that he seems oblivious to more earthy pursuits. As “a complete and substantial female animal” (34), she playfully throws a castrated boar’s penis at Jude to gain his attention along this stretch of road (33). The road remains the site of Arabella’s sensuality later in the text. She practices dimple-making while walking along this road as a means of entrapment. While courting, the pair walks for hours along the ridgeway track, often visiting an iron-age fort just west of the Brown House hill near the ridgeline north of Arabella’s home at Cresscombe (38–39). They wandered up the slopes till they reached the green track along the ridge, which they followed to the circular British earth-bank adjoining. Jude thinking of the great age of the trackway, and of the drovers who had frequented it, probably before the Romans knew the country. (46)

Through these walks, Arabella flirts with Jude and wakens a sexual desire within him as they touch and kiss. She vows to her friends that she plans to accomplish more than getting Jude to care for her. She plans to catch him as a husband, counting upon Jude’s honor after she feigns pregnancy. Clearly, Hardy has found in the Icknield Way a “residual survival” from the ancient past that forms significant connections to the present. Through the residual associations of this ancient track, the road suggests an alternative perspective concerning gender relations that reconciles the apparently irreconcilable opposition between sensuality and intellect. For Hardy, this road represents a particular memory, the memory of gender relations that tend toward integration rather than division. Rather than reflecting the nonintegrated marginality in which Jude and Sue live, the Icknield road contains the memory of the reconciliation of intellect and sensuality through their complementary unification framed within a tolerant community that accepts different viewpoints. For use as a symbol within his fiction, the Icknield Way’s history came readily to Hardy. Besides his literary aspirations, Hardy maintained an active, lifelong interest in recovering the history and antiquities of Dorset. In a letter on February 23, 1893 to the editor of the Dorset County Chronicle, Hardy argued that the original names for Dorchester’s streets should be re-painted on the curbs in order to restore a sense of history to the town in order to encourage summer tourist dollars from Dorchester’s fledgling tourist industry, a history now “sinking into oblivion” (Millgate Public Voice 125). He remained a member of the Dorset Antiquities Society for decades, and he often spoke at their gatherings and published several articles concerning Dorset’s ancient

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past. Because Hardy both walked and bicycled the Dorset countryside to a considerable degree, he was intimate with the actual landscape that forms the basis for the narratives found within his novels. While Hardy changed the place names in his novel, the topography and more importantly the histories of his fictive Wessex remained that of his local Dorset. The Icknield Way’s history is juxtaposed to Jude’s experience with the more modern one, and a comparison between these two modes of history helps to show the isolating nature of Victorian perspectives concerning gender relationships and marriage thematized in the novel. In contrast to Jude’s modern view, older pagan views (and these include both the pre-Christian Hellenistic ones of the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as those of the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons) represent a more tolerant, inclusive perspective in gender relations. As almost the only residual “survival” from the distant past in Jude the Obscure where folkloric tradition and mythic experience cease to exist within its modern world and modern subjectivity, the Icknield Way offers a stable cultural perspective and integrated identity in contrast to the many roads that offer only temporary places of memory for Jude and Sue and marginalized identity. Indeed, Jude the Obscure shows Hardy’s characters at their most unsettled and restless. A lack of permanent residence and even less permanent citizenship to a particular community constructs both Jude and Sue as “inbetween” people, rootless and displaced. Jude and Sue are unable to find a satisfying balance between their sensual desires, progressive ideas about gender, and conventional ideas about marriage. Neither of them can reconcile libidinal desire with intellectual pursuit since no models exist within the Victorian ethos that shows or permits sensuality and intellect to be held simultaneously within individual subjectivity. The barrier of cultural convention stands in their way. Therefore as “nomads,” their life of impermanent residence reflects a psyche vacillating between conventional and unconventional ideas, a process that ensures the destabilization of identity. To emphasize the destabilization of identity, Hardy narrates a patterned restlessness and lack of stable community as his characters return to Christminster and to Marygreen, the places from which they had started their lives together. At the beginning of the novel, Jude follows in the steps of his father figure, Richard Phillotson, leaving for Christminster for a university degree. However like Jude himself, Jude’s double and model, Richard Phillotson, returns to Marygreen by novel’s end having failed to earn a degree. Encountering him on the road between Christminster and Marygreen, Arabella reminisces to Phillotson about her beginnings in the village, how “all the past things of my life that are interesting to my feelings” (282) are interwoven with this road. In addition to Arabella’s life, the road is entwined with Jude’s

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Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure 95 and Sue’s nomadic histories as they move across the landscape where stabilizing myths and traditions have been forgotten if not lost. A prehistoric track originated from hunters following game trails and then developed into ritually-used cattle-drove roads, the Icknield Way remains England’s oldest surviving track, already ancient when the Romans landed in 43 a.d. according to Anthony Bulfield in The Icknield Way (11). Indeed, both of the major Roman roads radiating from London—Watling Street and Ermine Street—are intersected by the Icknield Way. Running from the coast in East Anglia southwest to Marlbourough in Wiltshire, the Icknield Way had many purposes (130). It moved trade goods like salt, stone axes, and cattle, it connected important Neolithic religious centers and moved pilgrims between religious festivals, and served as an ancient Briton warpath. The highland track to the south remains the path of the Great Ridgeway—today distinct from the lower Icknield Way which skirts Wantage3 itself at the foot of the chalk escarpment—the place on the ridgeway where Jude longingly gazed with intellectual desire north towards distant Christminster (Oxford). Indeed, the area is called Longing Hill on the Ordnance Survey map. Just to the west of Wantage lies Letcombe, or Hardy’s Crosscombe where Arabella lived. The Icknield Way along the Chilterns, according to Crosher, is among the oldest discovered instances of a road in England (1). Its name is “so ancient that the Place-name Society does not venture an explanation of its origin or meaning” (11). General philological supposition (12) places the etymology of “Icknield” as based upon the Iceni—the Iron-Age tribe living in East Anglia at the time of the Roman conquest (at the north-east end of the Icknield Way). Such place names as Icklingham, Ickleton, and Ickleford were believed to have been derivative. Edward Thomas maintains in The Icknield Way that while myth finds the road named after a woman named Icenhild, more compelling remains the ancient Briton term for wedge—iken—a term associated with the geological conception of the Icknield Way following the highland downs inserted like a wedge into the lowlands (34). A plethora of spellings have come down to us over the centuries: Ryknield (34), Icenild or Ikenild (44), Ikeneld (56), Hickneld and Ykenilde (67), and Ricning, Icknil, Rikenild, Rikneld, Ricknield, or Hickling (79). Icknield also was called “Akneel Way” (Margary 20), and Saxon monkish fanciful legend “declares it stretches from sea to sea, and extends all around England, or that it goes all around the world” (Margary 21). In short, no one can agree upon the origin or derivation of Icknield or even the extent of its mythical nature. Yet rather than through the etymology of its name, the ancient Icknield road serves as a trope for more progressive gender relationships in three ways:

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through its structure, purpose, and location. First, it runs as several braided strands reflecting not only its multi-purposed use but also toleration for individual inclination, one that takes a different path. Second, the Icknield road terminates at a sacred site with associations to pre-Christian gender complementarity that often reflect an egalitarian or matriarchal perspective rather than a patriarchal one. And third, this road is situated on the geographic margins between upland and lowland (that is, located on the verge between two terrains of contrasting geological character), a location of marginality parallel to the cultural margins lived by Jude and Sue. Whatever the origins of its name, the Icknield Way should properly be called the Icknield Ways. For much of its length, “the route is doubled on the maps: an Upper Icknield Way and a Lower Icknield Way” (Crosher 4). The most likely cause for the double track was that travelers used the upper one in winter and the lower one in drier months (Crosher 4): “Goring on the Thames is generally recognized as the southern starting-point of the Upper Icknield Way. The Way’s continuation along the Berkshire Downs, known variously as the Ridgeway, the Port Way, and on some maps as the Icknield Way, starts from Streatley on the opposite bank” (Crosher 29). Even this doubling doesn’t exhaust the possibilities, since in some sections a third and even a fourth track exists. The Icknield Way, then, was never simply a single or double track but an entwining of many paths (Crosher 5). Rather than a single track as it is today, the Icknield Way was historically comprised of several braided paths, the traveler’s choice. Several paths tended in the same direction. No one path was the path. What has been termed the Great Ridgeway—an upland track paralleling a lower one—can be argued to be part of the Icknield Way rather than a separate entity. While most historians consider the Great Ridgeway a continuation of the Icknield Way, others make little distinction between them, or sometimes distinguish them briefly as separate tracks that eventually intersect and merge as is the case between Goring and Swindon. Indeed, near the Ivinghoe Hills, the track splits into the Upper Icknield Way and the Lower Icknield Way (Bulfield 75). Bulfield speculates that these two Icknield routes were primarily seasonal choices—the lower one for the winter and the higher one for the summer (127). As either an intertwining of many paths or just two parallel tracks, the Icknield Way often covered a swath two miles wide leading in the same direction. Victorian antiquities scholar Charles Babington notes: “Until the enclosures and the metalling of roads the ruts and hoof-marks of the Icknield Way were probably spread over a width of from a hundred yards to a mile” (Babington 65)—and over the centuries, even more.

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Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure 97 The road’s geographic heterogeneity parallels the cultural wandering of Jude and Sue. Vacillating between physical places as well as viewpoints, neither Jude nor Sue is able to successfully integrate ancient pagan and modern Christian sensibilities. Instead, they alternate between these views, often not together, without being able to hold either of them simultaneously or harmoniously braid them together. They alternately and unprofitably focus on first one then the other. Neither Jude nor Sue integrates both sensibilities of the ancient pagan and the modern Christian. For example, prior to Sue’s marriage to Phillotson, Jude is grieved by her refusal to accept ecclesiastical discipline and authority while he himself desires the career of parish priest. He cannot understand her dismissal of the importance of the model Jerusalem which he finds so obviously central to his Christian faith. And he is shocked by Sue’s deconstruction of the New Testament, rearranging it to suit her own sense of chronological analysis. To Jude, this is blaspheming a sacred text. Yet Jude feels both guilt and consternation about studying pagan authors when his ideal is of a Christian station. At the death of her children, Sue reverts to a submissive and passive Christianity in which she suffers guilt and must pay atonement through her own degradation. She oscillates between the points represented by the north Wessex section of the Icknield Way. In addition to the variation found in seasonal use, the road’s structure reflects a multiplicity of purpose. The Icknield Way was used not only for commerce but also for pilgrimage (Bulfield 127). The higher route offers vistas and a more open traveling experience which might have been important for pilgrims going to religious ceremonies or engaging in some other unknown ceremonial rites that involved movement and travel (like the Dorset Cursus). In short, the lower tracks could have been for trade and migration while the higher way lent itself to summer pilgrimage. In addition, the higher Icknield Way was used militarily both to move troops and to defend terrain where the ability to view the distant terrain was strategically advantageous. The contrast between the Icknield’s different structures and varied purpose appears antithetical to the singularity of structure and purpose of the Roman road. Although the Romans appropriated and improved several long sections, most of the Icknield Way seems not to have suited their purposes, and were left unused and relatively intact. A contrast between Roman linearity and imperial purpose with that of the Icknield Way’s fluid sinuousness and multi-purposed, multiple-track character reflects the incommensurability of irreconcilable ideas. Using J.E. Malpas’s terms, these conflicting ideas that different roads symbolize can be called either “egocentric” or “allocentric” (53–4).

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Egocentric, or monocentric, ideas are grounded in and focused upon a single perspective rising from individual experience or focusing upon merely individual self-interest. On the other hand, allocentric, from the Greek allos meaning other, focuses upon another person and allows for multiple perspectives. Roads, then, can represent either egocentric space or allocentric space. Perhaps a synonym for egocentric space would be monocentric space. Monocentric space seeks to dominate and force into subordination, submission, or illegitimacy any way different from itself. On the other hand, allocentric space contains multiplicities and alternatives and in fact encourages the mutual and equitable existence of varied views, even opposing or seemingly incompatible ones. Allocentrism suggests something other than the self to serve as a guide to orientation and travel. Allocentric space is organized around some salient feature of the landscape (Malpas 54). Such a feature rises naturally from the terrain rather than being imposed arbitrarily from “above” by the self-interest of any group that seeks to dominate another. For example, an allocentric road goes around a steep hill in a curve while the egocentric impulse might be to cut straight through the obstacle to save the traveler time. Allocentric space works with “things as they are in fact” rather than with “things as they should be.” Such organization around a prominent or salient feature from the terrain like the top of Brown Hill helps orient a mobile traveler. For Jude, this salient feature, his omphalos, is the top of Brown Hill where the road between Marygreen and Christminster is intersected perpendicularly by the ancient Icknield Way. For both Jude and Sue, the intersection on the top of Brown Hill represents the “road not taken.” On one of their many trips from Christminster to Marygreen to visit Jude’s aunt, they linger for a moment at the intersection with the Icknield road and comment on its neglect and lack of use. They remark “upon the desolation which had come over this once lively thoroughfare” (110). The ancient road is forgotten and neglected by the Wessex inhabitants (though not by Hardy nor should it be by his readers). Hardly used and long neglected, the road represents pagan purposes and tolerant practices forgotten to Victorian sensibilities. Their decision to walk this way to see Wardour Castle and Fonthill Abbey, both constructed in the Gothic style, had been made the previous day. Sue first resists these sights because she hates the Gothic style, but Jude reassures her that there are many Corinthian elements to view as well. Sue consents to go to view the most ornate of the three orders of Greek architecture (109). Sue was “something of a riddle to him” (108) as she would rather sit in the railway station at Christminster than in Christminster’s great cathedral, which she claims had long

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Nomadism and the Road Not Taken in Jude the Obscure 99 ago relinquished its role as the center of town life to the station. She claims, “The Cathedral has had its day” (108). Jude responds with an admiration at how modern she is, but Sue answers that—if he only knew—she is “more ancient” (108) than medievalism. Despite her regard for the railway station, Sue associates herself with the pagan, and her reflection upon the pre-Christian Icknield road reinforces her pagan orientation. But because the Icknield Way is obscure, its message is left unheard by Jude and Sue and its purposes unfulfilled and invalidated. It represents a perspective running against the grain of the more modern one which they intuitively recognize but do not access. A utilization of its ancient purpose would provide them a complementary perspective to that of the more modern Christminster way, a complementary perspective more allocentric than egocentric. While the Victorian road facilitates and enforces an egocentric perspective, the Icknield Way, Hardy suggests, represents a more expansive and inclusive allocentric perspective that tends to dissolve monocentrism into compatible alternate views.4 Jude’s and Sue’s inability to use the Icknield Way and their culture’s inability to include alternative purposes marginalizes the pair by making no place for them.Jude and Sue are not so much complementary as they are identical. They are both orphans, both sensitive and intellectual, and they both oscillate between worldliness and religion though not at the same time. They both live under the Fawley family curse of unworkable marriage. Neither of them fits into their society, and they cannot successfully assimilate into a culture that has no room for them, that is, that possesses no allocentric space to represent unconventional views. Jude tells Sue: “Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours. Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!” (279). Pioneers live beyond roads or create new ones, and Jude and Sue haven’t found the road that will take them beyond roads. Jude and Sue realize that their society will not and cannot accept the terms of a relationship by which they live—whether within marriage or without. They will never be accepted. Jude laments that he’s “an outsider to the end of my days” (259).5 As Irving Howe notes, Jude and Sue are “lost souls” (139). There is no stable place for them. Rather, their constructed place is one of placelessness, a characteristic of the modern self constructed during the nineteenth-century. They are both homeless and restless; this restless mobility the narrator of Jude the Obscure attributes to the “spirit of the modern age.” Like the characters in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Jude and Sue possess neither certainty nor peace; rather, they are surrounded by larger ignorant forces colliding in the night, struggle and flee confused. Both Jude and Sue are sensitive and lonely, and, as Howe remarks, because of their fear and loneliness cling desperately almost pathetically to one another like

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children for solace and companionship that ends in their mutual destruction of the other (Howe 139). As perpetual outsiders, Jude and Sue find no permanent rest, and hence, the chapter titles of Jude the Obscure are the names of the towns in which Jude and Sue together or separate find only temporary residence. Ostracized by an unconventional gender arrangement and displaced, nomadic Jude also occupies an ambiguous position within the trades. Howe describes Jude as socially “somewhere between an old-fashioned artisan and a modern worker” (Howe 137). This is to say that he restores old churches with an acquired skill but that he hires himself out for wages in the more modern method of labor relations. Also, because he has learned his trade in the country as opposed to London, Jude consciously markets himself as a generalist: as able to carve many different kinds of carvings rather than sticking to one specialty. While Jude accepts and even is proud of this integration of specialties in stone carving, he is unable to accept the integration of Christian and pagan sensibilities within himself, “a man whose very being,” according to Howe, “constitutes a kind of battlefield” (Howe 141). Jude simply cannot accept himself as living between two antithetical worlds. Such a marginal state leaves him feeling hypocritical to both. Unable to find a place that accepts him, Jude is in conflict with himself. As Irving Howe comments, Jude “is in constant revolt against his own nature” (141). He alternately chastises himself for succumbing to the temptation of drink and sex, and at other times, chastises himself for being naive and stupid for following the more ethereal ideals of scholarship or religious calling. Suffering disappointments and failures, Jude maintains an appetite for sex and drink for which he later feels shame and guilt. When Jude first meets Sue, his concern is with studying the Christian masters while her focus is upon more pagan images. (This study conflates the pre-Christian paganness of Hellenism with that of the Icknield’s pre-AngloSaxon roots and offers it as a contrast to Arnold’s notion of the Hebraic roots of a Christian perspective.) Prior to her becoming involved with Jude, Sue leaves “the ecclesiastical establishment” (76) of her reliquary shop in Christminster where she works and takes an afternoon holiday walk in the country. She reaches the high ridgeline upon which runs the Icknield Way. Coming upon an itinerant peddler selling small pagan statues, Sue buys plaster images of both Venus and Apollo—classical figures of love—and displays them in her room. Later, her landlady discovers and smashes these classical but pagan images, evicts Sue from her lodging, and forces her employer to dismiss Sue from her clerk position at the Christian reliquary shop. While the archaic Greeks had a way to reconcile opposites or paradoxes in the form of the moon goddess Artemis (Diana to the Romans), the

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Victorians had no such model or mythic story with which to frame or even discuss the equitable existence of opposites into a unified whole. Apollo’s twin sister, Artemis, seems to embody contradictory positions, an embodiment that challenges Victorian sensibility. Like the various phases of the moon, Artemis seems to be either fully bright and soft or gibbous and sharp, both light and dark, contradictory qualities that seem irreconcilable to the modern senses. More importantly, while Artemis is both the unmarried and chaste goddess of virgins, she is also the goddess of fertility and child birth (Faum 37). That is, she represents the chaste maiden as well as the woman of sexual experience who yet retains a sense of virginity. This sense of virginity is characterized in Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern by Esther Harding’s phrase, “one-in-herself ” (103–5), the sense of independence and free-will that characterizes women who are not under the domination of any man despite their sexuality and sexual experience. Paradoxically, while Artemis embodies sensuality, she remains an equal partner rather than a subordinate one within a gendered relationship. Her role as huntress (Faum 37–8) brings her further to an egalitarian level by participating in the ostensibly masculine activity of hunting. Therefore, Artemis represents the feminine involved with the masculine but independent and non-subordinate to masculine authority. While the pagan Greeks seemed comfortable with opposing qualities embedded within one figure, the idea seemed totally foreign and incomprehensible to most Victorians’ gender sensibilities. Running “across the grain” of Victorian perspective and resolution that the Marygreen-Christminster road represents, the Icknield Way suggests a Hellenistic cultural perspective (Sue’s pagan associations are represented by her classical figurines) that tends toward gender complementarity and equity. A goddess-like Diana has different but equal powers and influence compared to those of her counterpart, the god Apollo. Though subject to the ultimate authority of Zeus, divine discourse and power resided within both the feminine and the masculine pantheon, unlike the Victorian (and biblical) separate and unequal gendered spheres. At this point in Wessex, the road represents the two poles of historical perspective, a continuum between the Christian and the pagan. The ridgeway track witnessed the historical antagonism between the pagan and the Christian at the battle site along the Icknield Way just east of the intersection of Brown Hill. Here the Christian forces of Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, defeated the invasion of pagan Danish forces in 821 a.d. (Peddie 94–9). Yet at the opposite or west end of the Icknield Way, the termination point resides in the monumental landscape of the Sanctuary, a Neolithic religious site from which the sacred West Kennet Avenue winds its way over a two mile stretch of monumental and

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spatially ritualized landscape to the Avebury stone circle, arguably the most sacred site of prehistoric Britain (Stonehenge notwithstanding).6 Hardy’s contrast between Christian and pagan views is not without Victorian precedent.In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold traces the development of contrastive social and ethical tendencies and world views, what he terms Hellenism and Hebraism. Arnold’s dialectic between Hellenism and Hebraism is a major theme in Hardy’s fiction: the opposition between the Classical (and pagan) and the Christian (or modern). For Carla Peterson, Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s “fictional gloss” (95) on Arnold’s opposition between Hellenism and Hebraism. While Hellenism is characterized by spontaneity and flexibility and accepts the instabilities and the difficulties of uncertainty, according to Peterson, Hebraism is much more planned and inflexible, with a greater sense of the obligations of work and duty, selfcontrol and moral earnestness, in short, a “strictness of conscience” whose counterpart in Hellenism remains “spontaneity of consciousness” (88). The embodiment, for Arnold, of Hellenism is Plato while the embodiment of Hebraism is St. Paul. The constituent societal values conform to a patriarchal perspective within Hebraism while Hellenism represents an idealization of more egalitarian gender relations. While the Platonic ideal consists in “seeing things as they really are, the uppermost idea in Hebraism is conduct and obedience” (Peterson 88). Arnold concluded that the problem within Victorian culture and society was that Hebraism had emerged as the dominant perspective while Hellenism had declined as merely a residual survival to counter the ascendant world view of Hebraism. Associated with Arnold’s Hellenistic and Platonic ideals is Plato’s theme of the human search for our missing primal half that Aristophanes articulates using the hermaphrodite myth in The Symposium. While Hardy didn’t believe in original unity in Plato’s sense, he does explore the theme of a matching self of the opposite sex existing somewhere in space and time for whom we search. For Hardy’s protagonists like Eustacia and Clym and Tess and Angel, life consists of a wandering across the space/time gap that distances them from their missing selves. Hardy’s heroes and heroines take to the road to facilitate their desire for the completion of themselves by finding the missing (or lost) other who complements them. The tragedy within Hardy’s fiction is that the search often fails—spectacularly and fatally. Sue and Jude fail not only because their Hellenism doesn’t conform to the Hebraic conventions of their society but also because they are so alike to the other. They double each other’s characteristics rather than complement them. But Jude senses this unity or complementarity of opposites when he views the setting sun and rising moon simultaneously from the road at the

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top of Brown Hill. The sight compels him to recite Horace’s “Carmen Saeculae” (29), a poem that invokes the moon goddess Diana (Artemis to the Greeks). While the sun is either present or absent, or can be predictably seen to be in a consistent daily series of positions through rising and setting, the moon, on the other hand, always shows a different face as it goes through an entire series of phases: full to half to crescent. Waxing and waning. While it remains the same moon, it certainly seems to possess much more variation than the sun as it travels across the sky. Although the moon is much more variable in its appearance than the sun, it would be a mistake to think it not the same moon. As the god of knowledge, Apollo reflects Sue’s intellectual curiosity and prowess. On the other hand, Diana (Artemis) embodies femininity unsubordinated to masculine and conventional authority. There simply is no legitimate room in Victorian society for a woman like Diana/ Artemis who is both sexual and non-dominated, a woman “one-in-herself.” Paralleling individual and social divisiveness, the Icknield Way’s geographic characteristic has been referred to by Bulfield as “the great diagonal chalk line” (13), a dividing line stretching northeast and southwest across mid and southern Britain. The Icknield Way follows the exposed line or wedge of chalk headlands that characterize this quadrant of Britain; below remains the boggy valley lowlands while above stands dense forest. That is, the Icknield Way follows the chalk escarpments across the landscape, generally keeping to the border of high open ground—downland—between highland forest and lowland marsh, bog, and fen. As a stretch, tract, or belt of downland turf that runs along the chalk line from East Anglia to Wiltshire, the road divides forest, fen, and marsh below from windswept highland above (Bulfield 13). Both highland and lowland terrains proved uninvitingly wild and posed dangers to the unwary traveler. Such a difference in environmental context is meaningless today because the land has changed and no longer resembles that which the prehistoric Britons inhabited (Bulfield 13). Most of the upland forests are long gone, and the lowland marshes and fens have been drained, filled in, or paved over. The Icknield Way is a border or boundary structure between the ridgeways proper—often forested and thin-grassed—and the lower and often boggy or marshy valleys. Hence, the Icknield Way remains a kind of boundary track—a verge like the gutter of London streets between walking pavement and carriageway—not really part of the lowlands and not completely part of the high ground. Following the strip of land along the foot of the Chiltern escarpment, geology had made it more fertile than the thin-grassed slopes and more readily cultivable than the heavy clay of the bottomlands to the north (Crosher 9). By analogy, it also seems akin to the middle-class position precariously

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balanced between the working class into which it might descend and the upper class to which it aspired. Characterized as it is by the rise of the middle class, the Victorian era also acts as a bridge or transition into the modern. This historical character and position between eras parallels the Icknield Way’s geographic border between the extremes of topographic “highs and lows,” influenced by each yet belonging to neither. Alternately conceptualized as a wedge, a verge, or a margin, the Icknield Way has also been seen as a causeway connecting islands. Chronicling his 1911 walking tour of the length of the Icknield Way, Edward Thomas’s book remains a text of observation, history, anecdotes, philosophizing, and etymology of the Icknield and its terrain. He notes the Icknield’s sinuous course dictated by the chalk line (ancient sea shores and sea beds) and views its tendency to stay close to the highland as a kind of island-hopping. Thomas thinks of southern England’s mountains as several chains of islands: the Downs, the Chilterns and Gog Magogs, the Mendips, Cotswolds, and Quantock. With roads crossing lowlands to reach and travel along higher ground, the early roads along ridges, according to Thomas, “closely resembled islands emerging out of the forest and out of the marsh” (9–10). In addition to its geographic marginality, the Icknield also inhabits a social border between the acceptable and unacceptable, a cultural verge that mirrors the conventional and the unconventional. Chiltern settlements along the Icknield Way have a history of the kind of nonconformity and independence of mind characterized by Sue. After the Toleration Act of 1689, independent-minded people gathered and settled in the Chilterns, giving the area an epithet for nonconformity at best or lawlessness at the worst (Crosher 25). Continuing a tradition of independence, the Chilterns resisted enclosure and most of the terrain remained public property. Religious dissenters, illegal alcohol producers, and even outlaws on the run gave the area a disreputable reputation (Crosher 26). The town of Shaston where a married Sue briefly dwells with Phillotson was “the resting-place and headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans, shows, shooting-galleries, and other itinerant concerns, whose business lay largely at fairs and markets” (159). These unconventional itinerants belong to what Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor calls “rural nomads . . . that large class who live by either selling, showing, or doing something through the country” (1). These folk belong to a Victorian underclass of show-people, peddlers like Dr. Vilbert, agricultural labor like Tess, and migrant tradesmen like Jude. Mayhew explains that there are two broad human divisions: “the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen” (1). Perhaps this disreputable lot felt Shaston provided a home since it

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was far from ecclesiastical authority. Although the house in which newly-wed Sue lives with Phillotson crushes her with its history (161), Shaston’s abbey had been destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries just as Marygreen had seen the destruction of its church. Shaston’s seasonal nomads who winter in the town are unlike the reputable full-time residents. They were against Phillotson’s allowing Sue to leave Shaston and enter into an adulterous relationship with Jude. Consequently, the town’s full-time residents force him to give up his teaching post. However, the unconventional itinerants comprise the group of Phillotson’s supporters who mob-like turn the town hearing into a “general scuffle” (198), breaking windows, pouring ink on a councilor, punching the rector in the nose, and dealing the church-warden “such a topper with the map of Palestine” (198). Such lawlessness brings the attention of police authority. Nomads are traditionally vulnerable to police authority. Nowhere else in Hardy’s fiction do policeman consistently and repetitively make an appearance as they do as in Jude the Obscure, and the police invariably appear while Jude is traveling along a road. As a youth in the vicinity of Marygreen, Jude regularly reads and studies while driving his bakery van on the road to make his regular deliveries. Jude reasons that the horse knows the way, and after all, the traffic is relatively light. But a neighbor “informed the local policeman,” insisting that the constable’s duty was to catch the boy and fine him for “dangerous practices on the highway” (29). Duly warned, the policeman waits for the delivery boy, accosts him, and cautions him against reading while driving the wagon. Jude isn’t taken to court or fined. But since Jude has no other time to study, he reasons “that if could not read his classics on the highways he could hardly study at all” (29). Consequently, he continues the practice but now much more cautiously, like a criminal with something to hide. His educational pursuits have become as illicit as his university ambition. He needs to hide his education from others. He must be vigilant to the informer’s and the policeman’s gaze, and therefore, he would “slip away his books as soon as anyone loomed in the distance, the policeman in particular” (29). Jude needs to subordinate his ideal of intellectual self-improvement to social authority in the form of the police. Thus the road is associated not only with the means to fulfill desire for scholarly self-improvement and education but also with the illegitimacy of desire made illicit by authority and the community. Three years later, after his unhappy marriage and separation from Arabella, Jude travels to Christminster with the idea of working to pay his way through college. He begins to study more intensely in order to gain entrance to the university. New to Christminster, Jude equips himself with a street

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map7 upon his initial arrival in order to orient himself and negotiate the warren of alleys and crooked lanes. However, Jude fails to negotiate the cultural map of Christminster and fails to read the symbolic/allegorical map the Icknield Way writes upon the terrain. Obsessed by books and learning, newly arrived here with a street map in hand, Jude explores “obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten” (64). Jude fingers the medieval stonework, breathes in “their extinct air accentuated by the rottenness of the stones” (64) and wonders whether “modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superceded chambers” (64). Jude muses that the place seemed haunted by “ghostly presences” (65) as he penetrates primal nooks and “dark corners which no lamplight reached” (64). Unable to see clearly, a disoriented Jude cannot decide upon a direction by which “to reach the heart of the place” (64), figurative language reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. With Jude and Sue as cultural explorers far from the borders of authorized gender relations, Hardy’s novel reflects the problems Victorians face as they negotiate a new terrain in which the old maps of culturally-acceptable conventions and ideas are inadequate. Significantly, upon his arrival in the city, during his first evening spent wandering the city streets, intoxicated by the luxurious sights, smells, and tactile sensations that the very buildings have upon his imagination—an explorer into the realms of knowledge—his first conversation is with a policeman who has observed the young man idling in the street staring about him at all the unfamiliar sights—the first step in the fulfillment of his desire. Suspicious of tramps, idlers, and vagrants, the policeman asks, “You’ve been a-settin’ a long time on that plinth-stone, young man. What med you be up to?” (66). The narrator reveals none of Jude’s response but merely indicates that Jude hurries back to his lodgings, reads, and goes to bed. In effect, the policeman has both silenced Jude and forced him out of the public view. This disciplinary action is starkly contrasted to Jude’s initial romantic first impressions of the place, impressions it seems the local constabulary does not share. Rather than viewed as an intrepid explorer with his map and the streets and buildings of Christminster as an unknown but compelling territory, Jude is under suspicion as an outsider, as one who does not belong. Later in the novel, long after all his illusions and pretensions to academic life have left him—though he’s still nostalgically drawn to the appearance of Christminster’s university life ironically repairing the exterior facades of the college buildings—Jude, Sue, and the children attend the arrival of the year’s university graduates and their families on graduation day at Jude’s insistence. In the open space between two buildings, the non-university crowd of

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onlookers can gaze upon the spectacle of graduates in gowns with their families in their finery arriving in coaches and carriages to attend the ceremony. Two lumber barriers border the edges of the sidewalk that leads from one of the buildings to a large round theater between which authorized attendees travel. The unauthorized Christminster crowd including the Fawleys stands beyond the barriers. Blocked by barricades separating spectators from graduation participants, Jude absentmindedly though knowingly translates Latin inscriptions on one exterior facade for fellow crowd-members as well as speaking at length about the histories of the many architectural styles, adding some general criticism. His eloquence earns him the warm regard of the crowd enthralled by his preaching. But Jude is impelled to speak further than his discourse concerning translation and architectural criticism, and he talks about his failure to be admitted to the college and the consequent suffering he has gone through since his early days at Christminster. Bitterly, Jude summarizes his failed desires, concluding that he has been “a paltry victim to the spirit of mental and social restlessness, that makes so many unhappy these days” (258). He refers to the wandering new ideas—progressive—and the migrations of the working class to and between urban centers. Jude is interrupted by a cab driver’s violence towards a horse, a rig hired by one party of graduation attendees. The horse failed to stop quite in the place desired by the driver whereupon the driver got down and began kicking the poor animal in the belly. Shocked, Jude says “If that can be done. . . . at college gates in the most religious and educational city in the world, what shall we say as to how far we’ve got?” (258). His discourse attracts the attention of “the two policeman at the doors” (256) of the theater. Overhearing Jude’s skepticism regarding the moral and scholarly progress current, the two police/gatekeepers significantly tell Jude, “Order! . . . Keep yer tongue quiet, my man, while the procession passes” (259). Oppressive authority silences opposition, allows no dissenting views, tolerates no complaints, and brooks no voicing of compassion or outrage at current events. 8 Leaving the crowd and ceremonies behind, Jude tells Sue, “Well—I’m an outsider to the end of my days” (259). Like an itinerant and unwanted peddler, Jude remains marginalized and bounded by cultural authority in the form of police and conventional class consciousness, unable to cross the threshold of barriers to realize his desire. The Brown’s hill intersection and Jude’s omphalos has historically been a place associated with trouble and authority. The spot has a Fawley family history that foreshadows trouble for Jude, a gothic influence wherein family history curses the people of the present. Millgate’s biography of Hardy makes

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a parallel association with Hardy’s thought that his wife Emma’s delusions and paranoia “were consistent with what he believed to be ‘the mad strain in the family blood’” (490). In addition, the hill at the Brown House had seen the bodies of criminals swinging from the gibbet as a crossroads was a traditional place to position a gibbet. The gibbet remains the disciplinary structure by which the executed criminal’s body was displayed in spectacular fashion for travelers along the road to gaze upon and reflect. Social authority degraded the criminal’s body to provide an admonitory lesson and to administer a “deterrent” effect upon the living bodies of those who gazed upon the lifeless one. Foreshadowing Jude’s and Sue’s disastrous inability to maintain a long-term relationship acceptable to Victorian convention, an ancestor of Jude’s and Sue’s was once executed and displayed at this spot upon a longgone gibbet. Widow Edlin relates events to Sue and Jude: She ran away from him, with their child, to her friends, and while she was there the child died. He wanted the body, to bury it where his people lay, but she wouldn’t give it up. Her husband then came in the night with a cart, and broke into the house to steal the coffin away; but he was catched, and being obstinate, wouldn’t tell what he broke in for. They brought it in burglary, and that’s why he was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House Hill. His wife went mad after he was dead. (223)

The lesson Widow Edlin wishes her listeners to understand is that tragedy follows upon the heels of pride and misunderstanding. Authority brooks no deviance from the “letter of the law.” Jude’s son, nicknamed Father Time by the narrator, tells them that the distant events should be a warning to Jude and Sue not to marry. The adults, however, nervously laugh off the tale. There are parallels between the unfortunate gibbeted ancestor and Jude. Both possess a troublesome sense of honor and high, and ultimately unattainable, ideals. Honor and ideals make both men obstinate, stubbornly pursuing their desire, a pursuit with fatal consequences. Ironically, the ancestor is charged and executed for burglary. If he had told his real motivation, would he have been spared? Perhaps. Why does he not tell? Ironically, it is a body—albeit a lifeless one—that dooms the man. Jude reflects that his own body’s sexual desires have thwarted his intellectual desires by interfering with his scholarly pursuits. And it is his own body’s social position as a mason that dooms him as well within the larger social body. The Christminster dons have no inclination to allow a member of the working class to enter the university no matter how bright, earnest, and enthusiastic. He is rudely told in a letter to work within the boundaries of his class.

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This specific site of conflict and violence on Brown Hill was perhaps inspired by Hardy’s knowledge of the conflict and violence surrounding actual places in his native Dorset. Not only did Hardy own the most contemporary texts concerning natural history and archaeology, Hardy wrote several essays concerning the preservation of antiquities like Stonehenge and the Cerne Giant (Millgate Public Voice 441). Already a member of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club when Dorset County Museum re-opened in its new (present) building on New Year’s Day 1884 (Millgate Biography 244),9 Hardy deplored the rapacious digging of a local antiquarian, Edward Cunnington, whose excavation of the Romano-Celtic temple in Maiden Castle Hardy found unscientific and unethical. Consequently, Hardy satirizes him in his short story “A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork.” During the construction of Max Gate, Hardy preserved a Neolithic standing stone to grace his backyard. He documented Romano-Britain coins and bones unearthed during the construction in another published essay, “Some Romano-British Relics Found at Max Gate, Dorchester” (Orel 191–95). In this essay, Hardy describes in minute detail three human skeletons as well as accompanying clay urns and bottles, Roman tile fragments, and blackened fire pits. Hardy speculates upon what their houses and gardens looked like as well as upon possible market activities and wonders to what extent they differed from those contemporary ones surrounding Max Gate. Besides the remains unearthed on his property, Conquer Barrow (Page 11) was visible from the front door of Max Gate, a constant reminder to Hardy that the past lived on and made the present come alive. Hardy delivered papers at the Dorset Field and Antiquarian Club and published prose essays in newspapers and magazines regarding antiquities. In cooperation with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Hardy published articles like “Shall Stonehenge Go?” (Orel 196–201) and “Maumbury Ring” (Orel 225–32). The Club had sponsored excavations at Maumbury Ring in Dorchester, a well-known ancient fortification within sight of his new house of Max Gate. Along with fellow club-members, Hardy was thrilled to learn “that the earthworks were of the palaeolithic or neolithic age, and not Roman at all!” (Orel 226). The ancient past is woven throughout Hardy’s work. For example in his 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy describes Casterbridge (Dorchester) as the spatial center of Wessex (Dorset) and as a place that announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct . . . It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of empire,

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Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years. (103)

Indeed, a Roman amphitheater, the Maumbury Ring (called simply The Ring in the novel) figures prominently as a rendezvous spot for Henchard and Susan. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Henry Knight slips and slides toward the brink of a seaside cliff. Desperately hanging on waiting for rescue, his face pressed against the fossil-embedded cliff, Knight reflects upon these Trilobites until “the life-time scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things” (213–14). Hardy became fascinated by the historic interplay between Maumbury’s varied uses as prehistoric council-gathering site, a Roman amphitheater for chariot racing and dramatic productions, an artillery post during the British Civil War, and the 1707 grisly execution site of two men and of a young wife convicted of killing her husband (Orel 228). While the men were hanged, the nineteen-year old girl was tied to a stake, strangled, and burned. Having witnessed two public hangings as a youth, Hardy became intrigued by firsthand accounts that this victim’s heart leapt out of her chest at the burning as well as “other curious details that cannot be printed here” (Orel 230). Musing upon the continuity of history within the same space as well as upon the contradictory purposes of the place, both benign and collaborative as well as violent and grisly, Hardy asks in the essay: “Was man ever ‘slaughtered by his fellow man’ during the Roman or barbarian use of this place of games or of sacrifice in circumstances of greater atrocity?” (Orel 230). Such reflection upon local history and historic spatial sites not only points to Hardy’s awareness of the continuity between his own age and that of multiple preceding ones, but also emphasizes his twin concerns: the role that memory plays within the national imagination and the national need to preserve structures and spaces of antiquity (Page 12). Hardy knew an ancient mile marker actually rested on Brown Hill near the intersection between the modern road and the Icknield Way. While it has no other information on it other than the mileage to Oxford, this is the mile marker upon which the boyish Jude had carved his initials and the word “thither” to indicate his future destination of Christminster. However, the mile marker does not reflect Jude’s orientation or progress. It rather measures Jude’s lack of progress, marking his disorientation and failure to realize his desires. If the road is a means of achieving success, a signification of hope, the mile marker signifies Jude’s despair at failure. The mile marker along the road becomes the anchor to which he returns again and again, a familiar reminder of his failure, his limit, and his marginality. After spending only a brief time with Arabella

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before she leaves him to accompany her parents to Australia, Jude remembers with irony and with regret the point upon the road where he first met Arabella (56). At this point, Jude’s possible path lay with either road, each leading toward different destinations in different directions. Jude chooses Christminster.He fails to remember the Icknield Way’s former purposes and intentions that run counter or across the grain of his anticipated road to Christminster where he plans to fulfill his academic ambitions, plans of which he rather quickly finds himself excluded. This hilltop intersection provides an additional but more recent foreshadowing of future tragedy for Jude’s and Sue’s relationship. According to Jude’s Aunt Drusilla, the spot had seen the argument and leave-taking between Jude’s parents, making it an historical place of unsuccessful personal relationships. She tells the young Jude that coming home from Alfredston “on the hill by the Brown House barn, they had their last difference, and took leave of each other for the last time” (58). Jude’s mother soon drowned herself and his father shortly thereafter deserted the boy and left for South Wessex. Aunt Drusilla warns and admonishes Jude: “The Fawleys were not made for wedlock” (59). The intersection at the Brown house literally stands at the spot of their irreconcilable difference. To legitimize sex, Victorian convention authorized only marriage, marriage in which a wife is subordinate to her husband in every way including sexually. Victorian duty dictated that a wife be sexually available to her husband at the husband’s bidding, not at the woman’s discretion. According to much conventional Victorian sensibility, women did not gain pleasure from sex. Rather, sex for women was a burden to be endured rather than enjoyed since they were not considered to be sexual creatures in the same way as men. Hence the masculine principle dominates the feminine principle within marriage, and the two genders remain in an inequitable relationship. As in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the polarity of possible orientation towards sexual fulfillment is embodied in two characters. But in Jude the Obscure, the roles are gender reversed. Instead of two men—Alec and Angel—Arabella embodies an unashamed sexual desire while Sue embodies obsessive sexual reticence. Where Arabella is sexually coarse and exploitive, Sue is intellectually curious and sensitive yet distanced from bodily passion. Sue’s sexual reticence reflects the aridity of Christminster’s intellectual life in contrast to the earthy sensuality of the pagan Icknield. After the death of her children, Sue chooses to embrace conventional Christianity as a penance for her sins rather than a more pagan perspective of progressive sexuality. A possible reason for Sue’s sexual reticence is her perceived loss of independence subsequent to sexuality. Sue holds that if marriage means the

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submission of a woman to sex, withholding sex not only keeps her “one-inherself ” integrity intact but also invalidates a marriage that has gone unconsummated. Sue’s last name—Bridehead—reflects a bride’s virginity. Rather than a “curious unconsciousness of gender” (119), Sue’s aversion to sex is rather her method to keep from losing self, which by Victorian definition exists as a subordinate within marriage. Jude ponders Sue’s sexual inexperience regarding her marriage to Phillotson and says: “She doesn’t know what marriage means” (136); he is only partially right. Sue understands what marriage means: the duty of the wife to sexually submit to her husband. Her refusal to submit marks her struggle to keep her independence. Physically repulsed by Phillotson (167), Sue begins to sleep in a closet beneath the stairs (175) rather than with Phillotson in the bedroom. Trying to understand his bride’s reticence, Phillotson agrees to more suitable but separate sleeping arrangements. But when he inadvertently enters her second-story bedroom waking her, Sue leaps out of the window in a desperate act to maintain her threatened maidenhood (180). Even after leaving Phillotson to live with Jude in Albrickham, Sue insists upon separate sleeping arrangements, much to Jude’s frustration. Although she is not physically repulsed by Jude, she refuses to consummate their relationship for the same reasons that she refused Phillotson: in her eyes, sex means a loss of control and diminishment as a woman. Only after many months and Arabella’s visit does Sue relent. Afraid of losing Jude to a fully sexually-charged Arabella, Sue agrees to sex with him (211) although she balks at getting married. She and Jude hesitate, stall, and postpone the ceremony several times over the course of the next couple of years. Like Jude, Sue exists in a marginal zone or “in-between” state: technically married to Phillotson by law but naturally married to Jude through an intimate relationship that later produces children in common (though significantly not married in conventional society’s eyes). As Sue ruefully says and Jude admits: “Women bear the burden” (252) of inequitable gender relationships, and they “gets the worst of it in the long run” (280). Even after Sue’s and Phillotson’s divorce is finalized as is Jude’s and Arabella’s and Jude is free to marry Sue, Sue cannot bring her independent spirit to submit to marriage. Ironically, Phillotson claims adultery on Sue’s part for his legal grounds for their separation and divorce (252). Yet the consequences to Sue’s long sexual refusal and her unmarried relationship to Jude are much more significant than simply Jude’s frustration at his thwarted sexual desire. Victorian conventions remain powerful shapers of the community. Sue is expelled from the teacher’s training school in Melchester at her spending the night with Jude. Phillotson loses his teaching post in

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Shaston after his superiors learn of his decision to let Sue go and join Jude in an adulterous relationship (185). Later because a visibly pregnant Sue is seen by the congregation’s moral guardians helping him at his work, Jude loses his church job restoring the Ten Commandments (240). Under the pressure of social disapproval, Jude even resigns his committee post for the Artizan’s Mutual Improvement Society (241). The gossip and rumors force the supersensitive couple to leave and begin a nomadic life for two and a half years in places where they are not known, as Jude literally becomes a journeyman stone mason (245). Authorized by cultural convention and legitimated by narrative models that sanction the experience of love and the practice of sex, the institution of marriage provided the only respectable road for erotic relations between Victorians. Only marriage could contain love and, more significantly, sex, if one wished to remain respectable in a culture that possessed a thriving prostitution and pornographic industry. However, newer notions of sexual and gender relationships that challenged “the prescriptive ideologies of bourgeois femininity” (Radford 205) emerged in late-Victorian society, in no small part, due to an active and emergent women’s movement that considered the marriage problem in terms of inequity. Marriage was beginning to be seen as not only an inadequate but also as an unfairly restrictive mode with which to address the real needs of actual Victorians who found themselves marginalized by either practicing sex or conceiving of marriage in unconventional ways, such as Sue and Jude living together despite both being married to someone else. Hence the struggle of Jude and Sue with these tendencies within themselves and the two qualities found within the other. Victorian culture was unforgiving to such a union of opposites as represented by Diana/Artemis. As Jude admits, they are all enslaved by the current form of marriage (318). But Sue’s form of enslavement has been to internalize the Victorian ethos of marriage and sex, mixing them into an unhealthy rather than an acceptable amalgam. Despite her best efforts, Sue remains according to the narrator “enslaved to the social code” (192). Sue decries the hypocrisy of conventional marriage that she sees as inherently unsatisfactory and unrealistic. Sue acknowledges to Jude that while some women submit to such institutionalized unhappiness, she kicks (171). She bitterly tells Phillotson that “the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star patterns” (163). In other words, the institution of marriage is inadequate to contain the actual feelings and needs of personal relationship. Sue claims that she is Mrs. Richard Phillotson in name only rather than in sympathy

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and reality. Consequently, she is “a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies” (163). While she is sexually attracted to Jude and physically repulsed by Phillotson, she must be sexual with Phillotson as her husband and deny sexuality with Jude. When she submits to her sexuality, she feels guilty, and both she and Jude are ostracized from the larger community and must move on. Thus Sue suffers from the double bind that holds her. Sue bitterly asks Jude: “When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say?” (171). Rather than waiting for a later age, Hardy condemns as unhealthy marriage without love and validates love without marriage—a shock to most of his Victorian readership. To the extent that both Jude and Sue have internalized the perspective of Victorian culture, the two world views prove incommensurate not only within and between Sue and Jude but also between them both and the dominant culture. Such explicit criticism of marriage touched a nerve in Hardy’s audience more so than the novel’s criticism of class and inequitable educational opportunities based upon class. These were not the reasons that invoked the fury of a majority of his Victorian readership. Bishop Wakefield didn’t throw the novel into the fire10 because of the injustice dealt to Jude’s academic ambitions. Rather, readers, editors, and clergy were shocked at what they saw as Hardy’s all-out attack upon marriage and what they perceived as Hardy’s utter failure of morality. The fact that Hardy narrated the story of a man and woman living together unmarried and conceiving children made Jude the Obscure neither obscure nor uncontroversial to them but rather shocking and obscene. Bending beneath the storm of controversy, Hardy insisted that his novel neither condemned marriage nor love. Rather, Hardy claims that he points to a balanced life which reconciles opposites through complementary integration, that explores love outside marriage and lack of love within marriage, and that explores human sensuality and the inadequacy of Victorian cultural forms to contain it. Hardy advocates an integrated life that balances divinity and humanity, the sacred and the profane, the material and the spiritual, faith and fact, reason and irrationality, the head and the heart. A balanced life shares space for intellectual abstract thinking with ordinary concrete practice. While Victorian intellectuals, artists, and progressive thinkers grasped the subtleties of Hardy’s argument and recognized the emergence of new modes of sexuality and eroticism, conventional Victorian sensibilities continued to be affronted. The savage criticism heaped upon Hardy was enough for him to seek new forms of

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artistic expression himself. He abandoned novel writing and returned to poetry, publishing several volumes over the next thirty years. Hardy never abandoned his concern about conventional marriage and enthusiasm for more progressive gender relations. At the request of Perriton Maxwell, editorial director of Nash’s Magazine, Hardy submitted a contribution to a 1912 symposium, “How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem?” prompted by the 1910–12 hearings of the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. In his submission under the editorial subheading “Laws the Cause of Misery,” Hardy accords that half of community misery results from outdated marriage laws that keep England “in a barbaric age” and the English as “the slaves of gross superstition” (MillgatePublic Voice332). Hardy envisions new matrimonial legislation in which “marriage is regulated for the happiness of the community . . . [and] of the parties themselves” (332). Hardy envisions changes that would make “a marriage dissolvable at the wish of either party, if that party prove it to be a cruelty to him or her, provided that the maintenance of the children, if any, should be borne by the bread-winner” (332). Perhaps Hardy had in mind his own unhappiness in his marriage with Emma. Paralleling Hardy’s egalitarian vision for human relations, Jude and Sue return “to Greek joyousness” (235), a pre-Christian state of happiness for a brief time. Sue revels in her unauthorized relationship with Jude. She says to Jude: “I rather like this . . . [o]utside all laws except gravitation and germination” (111). Her sense of freedom and independence is strengthened at the thought that she and Jude obey only natural laws like gravity and biological consequences of sex rather than imposed cultural law. As in property rights and travel, Jude and Sue see their relationship as one that should be authorized by convention. But they admit that “the time was not ripe for us,” that they and their unconventional ideas “were fifty years too soon” (318). Jude has shed his ecclesiastical bent, and he has seen Sue at the Agricultural Show as “a woman of an older civilization” (214)—one that contains the pagan Artemis. With the imminent arrival of Jude’s son, Sue criticizes the exclusive parentage of children and questions whether children would be better raised if under collective care (217). Such consideration resonates with Phillotson’s previous ruminations concerning women and children living together without a man (185). His friend Gillingham is shocked at the very thought as he cries, “By the Lord Harry!—Matriarchy!” (185). Such ideas flaunt received opinion, accepted convention, and respectable Victorian practice. Though only an idea, it is incommensurate with Victorian views. The appearance of convention is valorized; therefore, Sue returns to Phillotson, and Jude remarries Arabella. The social stabilization of the marriage convention seems more

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important than the happiness of the individuals within it. The heterodoxy and stable destination as represented by the Icknield Way is ignored, and Jude and Sue are left with a road merely being the means by which to move on. Such sacrifice is too much for a Jude who possesses self-destructive tendencies. He cares little whether he lives or dies. In poor health, his last trip to Marygreen to see Sue on a rainy wintry day fulfills his conscious suicidal wish. In the closing sections of Jude the Obscure, an unhappy Jude who has remarried Arabella and returned to live in Christminster decides to see his beloved Sue one last time. Sue has returned to her husband Phillotson and resides in Marygreen where the novel began. Jude takes a last journey back to Sue and his boyhood home in cold and rainy weather. He bitterly admits to Sue that his nominal remarriage to Arabella is “degrading, immoral, unnatural . . . [and] has been called doing the right thing” (308). Sue ruefully admits that through her own marriage, she has “nearly brought my body into complete subjection” (308). After their rendezvous, he returns home to Christminster. At “the crest of the down by the Brown House where the road to Alfredston crosses the old Ridgeway” (310), Jude rests briefly (and arguably fatally given the wet, windy, and cold conditions coupled with his already compromised health), leaning against a milestone. Before moving on, he “felt at the back of the stone for his own carving” (310), etched there decades before. Nearly “obliterated by moss” (310), the carved letters remind him of his earlier ambition to earn a university degree at Christminster. He walks on, passing “the spot where the gibbet of his ancestors and Sue’s had stood” (310), arriving home late at night; ironically, his final destination is the city that had embodied so many of his youthful dreams and desires. Like the carved letters upon the back of the mile marker now obscure that remind Jude of his unsuccessful academic aspirations, the novel’s epigram, “The letter killeth,” marks the failure of the letter of the marriage laws to provide a satisfactory framework for gender relations. Since legislation is provided by college-trained men, the epigram also suggests an indictment of letters, or formal education, the biblically-inspired knowledge gained from schools like Christminster that kills happiness for people like Jude and Sue by its inability to include a more tolerant (and workable) past perspective. The crumbling facades of Christminster’s buildings point to the outdated and unhelpful learning that occurs there. Jude spends many years learning Greek and Latin grammars and reading classics in the original. On the other hand, Sue reads many of the same texts but in translation. The epigram’s meaning questions the credibility and use of an educational system that focuses upon learning dead languages and memorizing irrelevant passages from them. Is

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this the ideal of schooling and learning one’s letters? The letter of the law— academic, civil, and religious—doom Jude and Sue, to what Peterson claims as the “uselessness of books in helping individuals deal with the complexities of modern life, in particular its emotional aspects” (91), a uselessness that obscures the Icknield road’s symbolic integration of emotion and cultural ethos. This deficiency of the current written word along with the savaging he received at the hands of some critics decided Hardy to abandon the prose literary form and seek out another structure: poetry. While Jude the Obscure isn’t autobiographical, the associations between Jude and Hardy are unmistakable. Both have a construction background particularly in stone masonry and the restoration of churches. Both yearned for a better life and a higher social position. Both men’s first marriages were unhappy: Hardy’s with Emma and Jude’s to Arabella. Yet both men fell in love with a blood cousin: Jude with Sue but for Hardy that meant Tryphena Sparks. Like the dispute between Clym and Mrs. Yeobright concerning his marriage to Eustacia, an altercation between Hardy and his mother, Jemima Hardy, erupted when she forbade the marriage between the two lovers. Hardy’s poem about lost love, “At Rushy-Pond,” has been associated with Hardy’s and Tryphena’s liason at the small heath pond on Bulbarrow Hill (the Rainbarrow of The Return of the Native). One Hardy scholar, Lois Deacon, believes that Tryphena was two months pregnant at the time she and Hardy considered wedding. Tryphena bore a son, Randy, and entered a teaching college—like Sue—when she was eighteen years old. Much of Tryphena (Tryffie) can be found in Thomasin, Eustacia, and Tess. One can only speculate about the effect upon his writing of such a union. Although Hardy’s marriage to Emma was a happy and affectionate one in its early years, in later years it turned difficult and unhappy. Always attracted to pretty ladies, Hardy carried on an “intense friendship” (Millgate Public Voice 133) with novelist Florence Dugdale (later Mrs. Florence Henniker) whom (widowed in 1912) he married shortly after Emma’s 1913 death (Millgate Biography 494–95). Perhaps Hardy’s enthusiasm for antiquities was a psychological need to recover the flame of earlier lost love, a happiness not confined by the limits of conventional marriage. Yet Jude’s road does not lead to success or happiness. By novel’s end, he still inhabits the spaces of his childhood residence of Marygreen and his youthful desire for Christminster. The novel answers the question: where can a person live who has no place to live? The answer is the road. The road is his only home, his sanctuary, his refuge. Jude’s only place is the road because he is permanently displaced. Unlike society, the road imposes few restrictions upon Jude, renders no judgments, remains always accessible, and bridges the

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disparate swings between his designs and desires. The road enables nomadism, and Jude connects with it in a way in which he cannot with either Arabella or Sue. While Jude tries to employ Sue as his other in human form, the road is his actual complement. Although completing Jude, the intersection of the Marygreen-Christminster road with the ridgeway track atop Brown Hill is a spatial structure external to subjectivity—or the egocentric space of identity—that remains more than the means by which the subject can locate self. Both Jude and Sue are unable to fit into the society to which they were born, unable to fit into the society to which they aspire, and finally, and most tragically, unable to fit with each other. More than outsiders, Jude and Sue are lost souls restlessly adrift and homeless in a culture which makes no accommodation for their desire and their way of life. They are paltry victims “to the spirit of mental and social restlessness that makes so many unhappy in these days” (258). Instead of complementing the other, Jude and Sue duplicate each other, an imitation of the other that creates a recipe for incompatibility. Because of this mirroring the other rather than complementing the other, Jude and Sue are unable to sustain a long-term and happily successful union. Consequently, Jude is rather more consistently wedded to the road than to either Arabella or Sue. The mile marker near Brown Hill reflects both of their inabilities to fulfill desire through an integrated subjectivity. Both Sue and Jude remain Victorians unable to achieve successful lives and fulfilling emotional relationships. Education and language, sexual compatibility, and friendship based upon a duplication of the other have all failed Jude and Sue. The road to Christminster has failed them. At the top of Brown Hill, a traveler turning aside at the intersection with the Icknield Way faces a different view than the decaying spires of Christminster and the crumbling walls of colleges. Instead, the turn down the Icknield road invites a view of multiple paths, an avoidance of extremes of topography, and a destination of more equitable relationships—Hardy’s version of loving-kindness. Using roads and places figuratively, Hardy not only recovers but celebrates knowable community and stable identity in the face of the disorientation and the disruption of a rapidly changing society, a process that acts to eliminate knowable community and destabilize identity. Hardy uses the road’s archaic history to provide a glimpse of newer gender relations even as he narrates the inability to achieve them. While pagan sensibility provides the means to reconcile opposites by creating a space of complementarities rather than antagonisms, Victorian culture reinforces division and dominance without the equality of differences that tolerates compatibility and encourages cooperation within the complement of opposites. While the Wessex road and the genius loci (the spirit of place) allow

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Jude and Sue a glimpse at the possibility of the reconciliation of opposing world views, the attainment of integrating the two proves impossible given Victorian constructions of social and sexual identities. The road, then, complicates identity in complex often ambiguous directions. For a lonely Jude who attempts to come to terms with himself, the road will always be a refuge as well as a tangle of conflicting maps that possess contrary signs of hope and tragedy as well as fulfillment and loss. Hardy’s roads, then, enhance community connection and individual isolation, integrate movement with stability, and reinforce resistance to conventional perspectives like marriage with conformity to conventional views.

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Chapter Five

Epilogue

Undismayed by the agricultural depression that hit Dorset in the mid 1880s, Francis Eddison turned his Dorchester Steam Plough Works from the steam ploughs he contracted to local farmers to the repair and maintenance of steam-powered road-making equipment. He concluded that the steam ploughs for agriculture had not been as profitable as he had hoped since not many Dorsetshire farmers could afford his new steam-powered technology. The depression convinced him that now was the time to change over especially since both town and county seemed willing to contract with him to maintain their roads. By the early 1890s, Eddison’s business was booming, so much so that he had his men working a twelve-hour day. He was amused that one of the neighbors who lived near his repair works just south of Dorchester complained about the shrill steam whistle that split the early morning silence six days a week at 5:45 am to begin work. His financial stability enabled him to disregard the numerous requests from the poet and novelist at nearby Max Gate requesting him to refrain from blowing the whistle so early in the morning (Kerr 241). Thomas Hardy continued to be irritated but resigned himself to the implacable but noisy sign of progress. Hardy was neither passionately nor adamantly opposed to modern civilization. He cannot be accurately termed an Anti-Modernist. He had been thrilled as a seven-year old when the railroad came to Dorchester in 1847 (Millgate 44) and had been one of the first Dorset residents to purchase a bicycle with which he and his brother toured the county. By the publication of Tess, the problems and debates of the first decades of the nineteenth century concerning transport possibilities had been solved, and the railroad dominated the landscape drastically shaping it with its cuts, viaducts, and thousands of miles of graded road bed. Imperial Britain was busily building railroads across its far flung empire from India to Africa. Yet the shrieking early-morning steam whistle 121

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was just one example of Hardy’s dislike for modern technology’s inescapable ability to intrude upon life unwarranted with its inescapable ability to dominate the landscape, perceptions, and, consequently, his experience of his environment. Hardy calls this dissatisfaction with the intrusion of powerful technology as well as the unsettled and alienated mood of unhappiness and isolation that accompanied the disruption of traditional community and the destabilization of personal relationships the “ache of modernism.” Hardy’s “ache of modernism” contains what Raymond Williams terms “the crisis of knowable community,” that is the inability to comprehensively understand one’s own community, neighbors, society, and self given the disorientation and disruption of sudden and rapid change. Given such a crisis, Hardy positions the ache and struggle of an emergent identity and modern subjectivity as the major theme of his fiction. As Bruce Johnson says in True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy’s Novels, Hardy senses that the antidote to modernism’s ache “lies in understanding the past in a new way” (50). Consequently, his interest and knowledge of local history and archaeology engages and enriches the thematic content and subsequent meanings of his fictive narratives. Hardy’s way of understanding the past takes a spatial turn. Hardy’s emphasis upon the spatial imagination anticipates Fredric Jameson’s sweeping claim “that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism” (16). Indeed, ordering his novels around spatial centers runs against the grain of modernism’s “inherent decentering of both people and place” (Olwig 107). Rather than a Modern or Postmodern literary landscape, Hardy’s re-centering writes what can be described as a “Nonmodern” (Olwig 107) literary terrain. The roads running throughout his novels that order meaning seem to deny that meaning and truths can be ascertained and perceived only through historical perspectives. Rather meaning and truths are located in particular spaces with particular orientations and characteristics—for example, structures like roads—that have existed historically. By foregrounding roads as structures of narrative coherence that contain both residual and emergent meaning, Hardy uses what both Lefebvre and Jameson term “a new kind of spatial imagination capable of confronting the past in a new way and reading its less tangible secrets off the template of its spatial structures” (Jameson 364–65). I would argue that reading Hardy’s roads exemplifies this “new kind of spatial imagination,” one that develops and complicates Bakhtin’s chronotope of the road: a chance encounter on the road (an element of the setting) that orders later

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circumstances and energizes the plot. Although Hardy’s novels are canonical works well-traveled by critical inquiry, a spatial emphasis that focuses upon roads provides a fresh way of looking at familiar material, a new way to see and appreciate well-known literary terrain. This study has explored one particular facet of the past—roads—and analyzed and interpreted three of Hardy’s novels through the residual sediments of road history with which Hardy layers them. Hardy’s characters depart from spatial centers within the narratives to circulate upon roads to arrive at a planned destination, that is, in order to exchange their workingclass identities for middle-class ones, to find suitable partners or love, and to recover a stabilized, knowable community. Roads facilitate their distribution across the landscape. A synchronic and diachronic perspective of the road reveals how conflicting centrifugal and centripetal forces of departure point and arrival location mediated by residual road histories push and pull the identities of Hardy’s Victorians. Not simply the place of chance meeting, therefore, Hardy’s roads are heterotopic spaces that can prove to be either hazard, prospect, or refuge. His characters’ contact with the sedimented histories and mythic associations of the road—through patterns of arrivaldeparture-return—constructs a palimpsest by which Hardy critiques the Victorian cultural constructions of class and gender. Because of the tragedies of their failures to realize their dreams, Hardy’s characters possess in common a disposition of unhappiness. They remain alienated from self and community; they lose stable and knowable community; they fail to realize material goals; and they are unable to recover a usable and satisfying past. They continue to be marginalized and alone—hence their unhappiness. Consequently, popular opinion of Hardy characterizes him as a pessimistic writer producing pessimistic novels. However, while Hardy is pessimistic about the ability to overcome the “ache of modernism,” he does offer the road as a figurative and residual symbol that suggests perspectives from which the emergent subject can be comprehended. Faced with outmoded cultural institutions like marriage, inequitable gender relations, and worn out narratives, Hardy looks to past and mythic perspectives to fill the vacuum of usable antidotes to his “ache of modernism” and Arnold’s “strange disease of modern life.” The way Hardy’s characters negotiate the terrain, map the cruciform of stability, harmony, and knowable community through roads suggests that past narratives and perspectives offer clues to guide the modern subject into the future. This study shows how the Roman road acts as an imperial dynamic in The Return of the Native. Associated with Clym’s return to his native heath community and to his progressive ideals, the Roman road pins Eustacia to

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Hardy’s map and frustrates her desire to leave as other roads fix her to the terrain. Her femininity remains unknowable yet ordered and controllable through cartographic and masculine discourse. Her immobility contrasts with Clym’s mobility, and her association with horizontality and synchronicity is irreconcilable to Clym’s verticality and diachroneity. The road that was to facilitate her prospects instead reveals itself as the hazard that impedes her. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the road acts as the site where gender politics and sexual identities collide and clash. Each character’s use of the road is associated with a significant element of character. Tess’s measured pace associated with traditional community and the archaic Dorset Cursus competes with Angel’s touristic distancing and Alec’s domineering speed. Vulnerable to emergent transport technologies, Tess’s connection to archaic and mythic experience and practice collapses. Her attempt to use roads to further her prospects fails and her topographic inscription to recover a prelapsarian past succeeds only symbolically. As a sign of cartographic power, she succeeds in mapping a cruciform pattern of community stability and gender equity through her road journeys, the traces of her body’s movement through space a sign of Hardy’s optimistic glimmer of prospect despite the tragic end of his sympathetic heroine. Paralleling Tess’s tragedy, Jude and Sue in Jude the Obscure travel the road to find a community that accepts their unconventional relations. Unable to do so, they live impermanent and destabilized lives on the margins of acceptable society. While Hardy obliquely exposes them to the prospect of more egalitarian gender roles through the Icknield Way—the road as an alternative perspective that might break the existing barriers of Victorian convention—their unrelenting nomadism ensures that the only stable home they possess will be the refuge of the road. Like Mathew Arnold’s “truant boy” (ln. 198) in “The Scholar Gypsy,” Jude experiences the repeated shocks which “exhaust the energy of strongest souls / and numb the elastic powers” (ln. 144–45). Despite repeatedly passing the ancient Icknield’s potential path as he practices Arnold’s suggestion to avoid and flee from “this strange disease of modern life, / with its sick hurry, its divided aims, / its heads o’taxed, its palsied hearts (lns. 203–7), Jude never turns to walk the alternative path represented by the Icknield Way. He fails to see its potential. His travels succeed in inscribing only a collapsing cruciform and fails at reestablishing a fully formed one. Consequently, Jude fails in his struggle to resist modernity’s conventions that restrain him and Sue, the ridgeway mile marker a sign of this failure. Like Jude, both Eustacia and Tess fail at achieving their goals and realizing their dreams. Despite their relentless travel upon roads to exchange

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working-class identity for a middle-class one, to find a suitable and fulfilling personal relationship, and to finally arrive in a knowable community, they in fact fail at realizing any of these goals. Hardy’s protagonists fail because roads are historically produced by the prevailing beliefs and ideologies associated primarily with dominant cultural values that resonate across time. Thus the imperial power of the Roman road fixes Eustacia upon the Egdon map and competing transport technologies and competing masculine desires prove more powerful than Tess. Roads cross and re-cross the terrain marking the landscape with lines of cultural force and often state power producing what Deleuze and Guattari call in A Thousand Plateaus closed or “striated space” (xiii, 385). Striated space has roads as the articulation of dominant exigencies and the means to service the needs of prevailing views. This grid-like inscription upon the terrain opposes open or “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari xiii), the space of the nomad. The trajectory of Jude’s collapsing cross results in a closed cross: a line establishing a landscape dominated by linearity (the closed space associated with imperial power like that of Roman road-building). On the other hand, the established cruciform (like that mapped by Tess) spreads its axes to form open space and establishes a landscape of more equitable relations. Yet it would be presumptuous to argue that Hardy consciously wrote a mythic Celtic cross into his fiction. But I would suggest that some preconscious or partially subconscious awareness of the power of this particular symbol, residual within, worked on Hardy and emerged. In her essay, “The Novels of Thomas Hardy,” Virginia Woolf articulates this inner process best. She says about Hardy’s works that “there is always about them a little blur of unconsciousness, that halo of freshness and margin of the unexpressed . . . as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did” (258). Without invoking Jungian archetypes or the Freudian unconscious as way of explanation, Woolf simply reminds us of Hardy’s self-professed literary philosophy that saw fiction as the leaving of impressions. Through his novels, she maintains, “we have Hardy’s impressions of life as it came to him without conscious ordering” (263). While Hardy was not so naive as to insist that the past could be recovered or that an idealized past even existed, he does insist that through the historical sediments of road history embedded within his fiction, a more productive approach today could be gained. Even if the past’s actual embodiment of productive alternatives is illusory, the glance back is worth the effort to improve the future. Perhaps by leaving to arrive at a destination informed by the past, the emergent subject can return to the present better equipped to negotiate the present and plan the future. To the extent that we find ourselves

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empowered through the Age of Information and travel along the electronic Information Highway, we would be well advised to consider the ways such contemporary road travels makes us vulnerable. The road runs in two directions, and the window remains two-way. Rather than only negotiating the terrain and simply navigating the map, we might find ourselves increasingly manipulated and mapped, the read rather than the reader. The power and freedom of electric nomadism, then, becomes another contemporary myth if not a self-deluding illusion. The force of striation simply overpowers us. William Blake famously wrote: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without / Improvement, are roads of Genius” (38). Hardy’s roads are neither straight nor improved. Their sinuousness and complexity reflect Blake’s notion of genius as Hardy balances the mythic and the material to improve the emergent modern subject and that subject’s path. Rather than exercise in imperial will and linear thinking, Hardy’s focus upon flexible alternates resonates with our contemporary calls to tolerate if not to celebrate plurality and diversity. Hardy’s spatial focus and the significance of his concerns for spatiality and matters spatial remain perhaps his greatest contribution: an alternative to today’s focus upon the virtual. Hardy’s spatial imagination returns place to space and grounds the human within the material world of past and present rather than aiming at transcendence of that world. The road is the destination rather than merely the means to leave.

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Notes

Notes to Chapter One 1. This author has found upon the wall beside the Hardy family pew in Stinsford Church a life-size bas-relief of a grinning skull surrounded by laurel leaves, a startling and macabre element with which to ornament a Christian church. While we might be reminded of Hardy’s St. Pancras Cemetery experience, this skull terrified Hardy as a child who faced the grinning icon during the service Sunday after Sunday for years. The skull image resonates on several levels. Not only a link between life and death, the skull also is associated with the more brutal ornamentation documented to have graced Celtic Briton habitations as well as to represent in Christian iconography the site of Christ’s crucifixion—Golgotha, or The Skull—at which transpires the event by which Jesus becomes the transcendent mediating link between humankind and divinity and the source of human salvation. 2. Omphalos: The center, core, or hub of something. From the Greek, literally: navel. In Greek mythology, the Omphalos Stone marked the site of the Delphic oracle in Delphi—the center of the known world. 3. A significant advance in Marxist thought derives from Gramsci’s reworking of the concept of hegemony. While in common usage hegemony refers to “uncontested political supremacy,” Gramsci’s work refers to “the power of a dominant class to persuade subordinate classes to accept its moral, political, and cultural values as the natural order.” In this sense, then, hegemony refers to the power of the internalization of dominant values through persuasion rather than to the submission to such values through the power of coercion by physical force. 4. Baudrillard calls the attempted transformation of alterity to homogeneity a “perfect crime.” The phrase “perfect crime” possesses two valences: the first implies a practice of illegitimacy, even criminal illegality; the other term implies an illusory absoluteness. After all, there is no such thing as the perfect crime. It would seem that as unchanging absolutes both centrifugal and centripetal are illusory. Furthermore, Baudrillard states: “Otherness

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Notes to Chapter Two and radical alterity will continue to undermine the systems of homogeneity because the strategies, devices and concepts of homogeneity are themselves, ultimately illusory.” See Cashmore and Rojek 41. Control over abstract space never remains absolute. Its total power remains illusory. Lefebvre states: “Abstract space is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, its orientation.” This space creates an illusion of homogeneity that suppresses but can’t wholly eliminate difference and resistance to homogeneity. See Lefebvre 287.

Notes to Chapter Two 1. Most critics acknowledge that The Life of Thomas Hardy was actually written by Thomas Hardy himself rather than his wife Florence and thus serves as more autobiography than biography 2. By the time the first edition of the novel appeared in book form, the name had been changed from Blackbarrow to Rainbarrow. After the first American edition appeared in December of 1878, none of the subsequent editions contained the map. See Hardy vii. 3. See Hardy 32, the Norton Critical Edition of The Return of the Native edited by James Gindin. Subsequent page citations from this edition of Hardy’s text will be rendered as parenthetical in-text citations rather than as endnotes. 4. Cixous’s words from “The Laugh of the Medusa” seem prophetic: “Now women return from afar, from always: from ‘without,’ from the heath where witches are kept alive.” See Richter 1092. 5. Peter Berresford Ellis’s The Celts: A History suggests that Briton indigenous road building was pervasive and extensive given the preponderance of Celtic wheeled chariots. Ellis suggests that many sophisticated roads have simply not survived given that they were built out of logs rather than stone. Only a few embedded within peat bogs provide archaeological evidence. Yet Ellis maintains that the extent of pre-Roman road building and indeed the entire Celtic transport system has been consistently underestimated (136). 6. These built-up foundations are visible from the ground and found everywhere in Dorset. Running straight for miles, these aggers can be walked today in many areas where dense thickets have not yet taken hold. This author has walked sections of former Roman roads near Bockhampton’s Puddletown Heath, Rainbarrow, and Cranborne Downs. In the latter instance, modern A 354 actually uses a few straight sections of the Roman road much as Hardy’s frontispiece map indicates. Looking like earthworks, sections of this agger were incorporated into the Saxon Ackling Dyke and used both as a Saxon property boundary marker and as a defensive rampart against invading Danes.

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7. The phrase is not a new one. Lenin “was the first writer to use this notion.” See Hechter 8. 8. The idea of internal colonization doesn’t disappear with the end of the Victorian era. Modern cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Hannah Arendt reiterate the proposition that modern nation-states may colonize their citizens. In his essay, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” Gramsci criticizes the economic exploitation of one group of people against another in 1920 Italy and characterizes as colonial the internal relationship between the two groups. Summing up his model of class struggle within his home country in spatial terms, Gramsci claims: “The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies” (Gramsci 171). As a spokesperson for the Communist Party in Turin, Gramsci erases the idea of national borders as impenetrable barriers to the dynamics of colonization. In a different internal condition found within Europe during the same tumultuous time of post WWI, ethnic minorities were deprived of rights within the countries to which they claimed citizenship. Unless these minority populations are granted some “national self-determination and sovereignty,” their very statelessness condemns them “to the status of colonial peoples” (Arendt 271) within the nation they call home. Consequently, often “the world of the novel is tied to the historical task of colonial, commercial, and cultural expansion” (Azim 7).

Notes to Chapter Three 1. See Hardy 92. Throughout the rest of this chapter, page references to Hardy’s novel will be given as parenthetical, in-text citations rather than as numbered endnotes. Unless otherwise noted, parenthetical page numbers cited in-text are from the Norton Critical Edition: Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Edited by Scott Elledge. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an angry letter to Henry James on December 5, 1892. He concluded that he disapproved of the morality in Tess of the D’Urberville and considered the text “the worst, weakest, least sane . . . book I have yet read.” Perhaps his indignation originated because he saw his own romanticism of the road criticized in Angel’s use of it. Though they carried on only a desultory correspondence, Stevenson didn’t speak to Hardy again for a year. Interestingly, James replied to Stevenson that Tess is “a vile” creature and Hardy’s “abomination of the language” seemed to negate “the author’s reputation for style.” See Laurence 164–68. 3. This author spent a day map in hand driving to various cursus segments in order to walk various segments of its length only to be disappointed. Unlike the ditches at Maiden Castle or at the Avebury stone circle whose depths while heavily silted in still remain significant physical structures, the cursus’s

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Notes to Chapter Three ditch-structure is gone. While remnants of a shallow bank exist just east of Down Farm, any traces able to be observed from the ground that form an overall pattern of the Dorset Cursus have been obliterated. Ironically, while invisible from the ground, a modern technology like aerial survey was necessary to view a mythic structure. In “The Bank Burrows and Related Monuments of Dorset in the Light of Recent Fieldwork,” Bradley says that the “fabric of everyday life seems to have been affected by their presence. In short, it became apparent that the past itself, and the features which represented it in the life of later generations, was a crucially important resource” (15). The Anasazi straight-line road system in and around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon as well as their pueblo wall orientation suggest both astronomical alignment and ritual processional. Despite the absence of wheeled transport, Anasazi builders constructed impressive roads miles long and 30–40 feet wide with regular mileage markers and “gatekeeping” stone huts. See Kathryn Gabriel’s 1991 Roads to Center Place: A Cultural Atlas of Chaco Canyon and the Anasazi and also Stephen H. Lekson’s 1999 The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest. Tilley puts it poetically as “the flow of movement is a flow of the mind” (202). Like the roads of Devon and Dorset upon which Hardy constructed his fictional Wessex, many low-lying roads were bounded by bank and hedge as well as sunken through decades of repeated use thereby forcing the visual attention of the traveler to the front and back obstructing any lateral vision. This design—both intentional and unintentional—lends many Wessex roads (significantly not ridgeways) a characteristic sense of confinement and of enclosure, open on either end and to the sky but nevertheless restricted. Ritually enclosed roads in Europe aren’t unique to Dorset. See Emilia Pászto’s “The Sun and the Rösaring Ceremonial Road” concerning early Viking Age forest-enclosed ceremonial road in Sweden. The Dorset Cursus appears to have a similar function and design as the early-Viking structure (early 9th c) 35 miles north of Stockholm—Rösaring Ceremonial Road—a linear, banked 540 meter long road suitable for wagon or sledge travel, perfectly aligned to maximize the play of light and shadow at noon on winter solstice during the time it would take for travelers to walk the its length. The lines of light and shadow in this forest-surrounded road not only focus the participants’ attention to the ends (as in the cursus) but also intensify the mystic nature of the rituals. At one end of the road is found the remains of some structure while at the other end a labyrinth of cairns and burial mounds that appears to make a suitable culmination or destination to a ceremonial procession. In 1860 the railway system was inefficient since it didn’t reach all of the small rural areas that it said it could serve. According to Young, “The railway

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

131

system, as it stands at present, is limited, exceptional, and incomplete” (69). Most districts were “totally unprovided with railway accommodation” (68). Railway supporters agreed that it simply wasn’t practical to run a rail line everywhere for ease of access to users; therefore, other means of supportive transport are necessary to make railways practical. By extension, if road transport is a necessary supplement to the present rail system, perhaps no rails are really needed at all. See Young 68–69. While Young appealed to the general public and legislators for a sense of fair play and a readiness to look at the facts objectively, his pleas fell upon deaf ears. Privately, Young complained that corrupt parish officials bribed by railroads set the unusually high turnpike tolls and, corrupt legislators—also bribed by railroads—levied the unequal coal rates. There was also too much money to be made in land speculation that sold right-of-ways to railroad companies. While the only viable Victorian transport system was steam, the inability of companies to financially utilize the existing network of macadamized roads relinquished public transport to a fixed and limited number of railroad lines. See Florence Hardy 6. See Morris 382–83. Note the similar circumstance of Giles Winterbourne in Hardy’s The Woodlanders. Note Jane Eyre’s similar feeling of vulnerability through observer’s appraisal while upon a road after leaving Thornhill after learning of Rochester’s marriage to Bertha. Traveling as far as her money allows by coach, Jane is deposited at a rural crossroads—Whitcross—and strikes off cross-country rather than becoming sighted by any chance traveler passing along the road. See Bronte 362.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. These represent the books recorded as sold on the first day of Hardy’s estate sale from the library at Max Gate May 26, 1938 nearly ten years after Hardy’s death. See Cox 194. 2. See Hardy 81. All following citations from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure will be from the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Norman Page, 1978 and will be parenthetically inserted in the text. 3. Wantage or Hardy’s fictional Alfredston is the birthplace of King Alfred of Wessex hence Hardy’s appellation of “Alfred’s town” as Alfredston in the novel. See Peddie 1. 4. For example, a single-use road like an interstate highway legitimates only motorized traffic moving within minimum and maximum speeds. Fences keep out animals and pedestrians, and cross-traffic is re-routed overhead through over-passes. Stopping unless for anything less than emergencies is

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

Notes to Chapter Four discouraged. With relatively few exit ramps, the purpose of this kind of road is to facilitate fast, long-distance travel. In the United States, the historical purpose for the formation of an interstate highway system in the Fifties was in part a military one, the impetus from the Cold War, to move military troops and equipment in the event of a Soviet invasion and perhaps to evacuate civilians from sites in the event of a nuclear attack. In contrast, a country lane is an allocentric road. Speed isn’t strictly controlled nor is access and U-turns. There are fewer and smaller road signs and often fewer lane markings to divide the road. Used by delivery trucks, farm equipment, hitch-hikers, local pedestrians, picnickers, mail delivery, wildlife, stock drives, and teenage-boys drag racing, this road has multiple uses and can be seen from a variety of perspectives. Interestingly, a 1996 collection of Hardy’s short stories gleaned from all four of Hardy’s short story publications is appropriately named Outside the Gates of the World. In southern England, the principal nexus or meeting place of roads was Salisbury Plain and the environs of Stonehenge and Avebury. Wilmington’s Long Man cut into the sod and sixty feet larger than the giant of Cerne Abbas holds two staves. One theory holds that the staves are sighting survey stakes used in the prehistoric laying out of roads and the figure is a holy ley-man, or surveyor. The staves remain “symbols of an important office in prehistoric times.” See Wilkinson 4–6. It has been suggested that Hardy himself used Valter’s street map of Oxford issued in 1891 when he explored Oxford in 1893 researching Jude the Obscure. See Hardy (Page) 362–63. Not uncoincidentally, in a parallel episode, Nietzsche collapsed on a Turin street after throwing his arms around a carriage horse and weeping in order to prevent the driver from whipping the animal. Nietzsche never regained his reason after the incident, living for more than a decade empty-eyed, addled, and silent. See Safranski 316. Hardy joined in 1881. See Millgate Biography 244. See Page 393.

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Index

A

Adams, William Bridges, 76 aesthetic, 6, 25–26, 60–61, 67 agger, 39–40, 128n. 6 alienation, 5, 49, 68, 88 alignment, 44, 72–73, 75 allocentric, 97–99 Apollo, 100–101, 103 Appleton, Jay, 15 archaeology, 2, 43, 51, 60, 65, 72, 109, 122 Arendt, Hannah, 129n. 8 Arnold, Matthew, 1–2, 55, 99–100, 102, 123–124 Armitage, David, 3 arrival, 5, 8, 14, 21, 55, 57, 63, 123 Artemis, 100–101, 103, 113, 115 Avebury, 102, 129n. 3, 132n. 2 Azim, Firdous, 129n. 8

B

Babington, Charles Cardale, 96 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10–11, 13–14, 45, 57, 71, 122 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 6–7, 17, 60, 63 Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 127n. 4 Blake, William, 126 Boumelha, Penny, 66, 70 boundary, 9, 16, 22, 25, 28, 36, 49, 55, 63, 70–71, 83–84, 88, 92, 103, 108 Boydell’s Endless Railway, 60, 75–78, 80 Bradley, Richard, 72, 75, 130n. 4 Brantlinger, Patrick, 40 British Empire, 3, 40

Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 131n. 13 Brophy, Kenneth, 72–73 Brown Hill, 8, 17, 89–90, 92, 98, 101, 103, 108–110, 118 Bulfield, Anthony, 95–97, 103

C

cartographer, see cartography cartographic, see cartography cartography, 8, 16, 20–23, 25, 27–28, 30–34, 46, 52, 56, 60, 89, 124 Casey, Edward S., 12 Cashmore, Ellis, 127–128n. 4 Celtic cross, 6–7, 16, 57, 62, 89–90 harmony, 17, 62 gender relations, 17, 62 centrifugal, 13–14, 34, 57, 63, 123 centripetal, 13–14, 21, 34, 56–57, 63, 123 chronotope, 13, 17, 45, 49, 122 circumscribe, 22, 63, 84 Cixous, Hélène, 29, 33, 128n. 4 class, 3, 6, 10, 15, 50, 64, 66, 75, 79, 82, 85, 91, 104, 107–108, 114, 123 colonial, 40, 68, 129n. 8 colonialism, 17, 42 colonization, 10, 14, 42–43, 129n. 8 colonize, 3, 16, 20, 31–33, 38, 129n. 8 commodify, 78 commodity, 30 contain, 31, 113–114, 122 contained, see containment container, see containment

139

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140 containment, 9, 16, 21, 23, 34–35, 56, 68, 87, 91–92 Cox, J. Stevens, 131n. 1 Crosher, G. R., 44, 95–96, 103–104 cruciform Celtic, 6–7, 57, 62–63, 74, 88–89, 123–125 collapsed, 89, 124–125 established, 125 pre-Christian, 89 Cunningham, Valentine, 25–26 cursus, 72–75, 129n. 3

D

Dainotto, Robert, 8, 35, 37, 49 Davies, Norman, 42 Deacon, Lois, 117 Deleuze, Gilles, 125 departure, 5, 8, 11, 14, 21, 55, 57, 62–63, 123 desire, 5, 9, 28, 33, 37, 45, 48–51, 56, 78, 90, 97, 108, 118 conflicting, 16, 21–22, 29, 50 failed, 107, 123 feminine, 56 for education, 92 frustration of, 16, 21–23, 124 fulfillment of, 4, 8, 16, 21–22, 36, 49, 56, 84, 105–106, 118 illicit, 56, 105 imperial, 27, 38, 41 male, see masculine masculine, 22, 34, 38, 67, 71, 79, 125 opposing, 44–45, 50 realize, 107, 110, 123 sexual, 6, 27, 79, 82, 111–112 social, 67, 90 to escape, 33, 47, 50 to leave, 45 destination, 5, 8, 14, 50, 92, 111, 116, 123, 125–126, 130n. 7 Devereux, Joanna, 64 Devereux, Paul, 73 diachronic, 45, 50, 123 Diana, 100–101, 103, 113 disproportioning, 25–26 Dolezel, Lubomir, 26

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 140

Index Dolin, Tim, 61 dominate, 2, 9–11, 16, 20, 27, 36, 40, 42, 79, 81, 88, 98, 111, 122, 125 Dorchester, 1, 8, 20, 49, 65, 92, 109, 121 Dorset Cursus, 6, 16, 60, 71–73, 75, 81, 97, 124, 129–130n. 3, 130n. 7 Duncan, Nancy, 59

E

Earle, J. B. F., 12, 39 education, 50, 92, 105, 114, 116, 118 egalitarian, 10, 115, 124 Egdon Heath, 16, 20–23, 25, 28–30, 32, 34–37, 43–50, 52–56, 84 egocentric, 97–99, 118 Ellis, Peter Berresford, 128n. 5 emergent, 10, 13–14, 61, 86 art form, 4 empire, 11 forces, 84 forms, 88 future, 65 history, 9 meaning, 122 modern, 64 railroad, 81 road practices, 60 subject, 123, 125–126 technology, 16, 57, 61, 74, 76, 87, 124 women’s movement, 113 Emerson, Caryl, see Morson, Gary equitable, 17, 61–62, 65, 88–89, 91, 118, 125

F

failure, 9, 33, 67, 92, 100, 110, 123–124 Faum, Eric, 101 First World War, see WWI fix, see fixity fixed, see fixity fixity, 13, 17, 21–22, 32, 34, 45–46, 53–54, 80–81, 124–125 Foucault, Michel, 13–14 Frank, Joseph, 4, 7, 9 French Revolution, 2

G

Gabriel, Kathryn, 130n. 5

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Index gaze, 29–30, 64, 67, 70, 108 gender, 4, 10, 15, 60, 64, 111–112, 123 arrangement, 100 construction, 59–60 identity, 3, 5, 61 inequality, 64 relations, 6, 61–62, 65–66, 89, 90–91, 102, 106, 116, 118, 123 relationships, 16–17, 22, 65, 86, 91, 94–95, 113 roles, 124 gendered, 30, 32, 34 community, 69 difference, 67 map, 83 relationship, 25, 101 roles, 69 struggle, 31 genders, 88 Gibson, James, 19, 23 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 127n. 3, 129n. 8 Guattari, Félix, see Delueze, Gilles

H

Haggard, Rider, 30–32, 37, 45 Harding, Esther, 101 Hardy, Thomas as mapmaker, 16, 25, 27, 32 as novelist, 4, 117 as poet, 117 Jude the Obscure , vii, 4–6, 16, 64, 66, 68, 88–92, 94, 99–100, 102, 105, 111, 114, 116–117, 124, 131n. 2, 132n. 7 marriage of, 65–66, 108, 115, 117 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 109 A Pair of Blue Eyes, 110 The Return of the Native, vii, 4–6, 8, 15– 16, 20, 22–23, 25, 32, 38, 45, 49, 56, 68, 70, 79, 82–84, 86, 88, 90–91, 117, 123, 128n. 3 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, vii, 4–6, 16, 57, 59– 60, 65–66, 68, 74, 87–88, 90–91, 111, 121, 124, 129nn. 1, 2 The Woodlanders, 66, 68, 131n. 12 Hardy, Florence, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1–2, 25, 128n. 1, 131n. 10

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 141

141 Harley, J. B., 26, 30 Harvey, David, 9 hazard, 15–16, 46, 56–57, 123—124 Hechter, Michael, 42–43, 129n. 7 Heidegger, Martin, 12 Hellenism, 100–102 heterogeneity, 7, 13–14, 60, 97 heterogeneous, see heterogeneity heteroglossia, 13 heterotopia, 13 heterotopic, 7, 60, 123 Higonnet, Margaret R., 66 Hindle, Brian Paul, 40 historical inversion, 10, 13, 71 history, 2, 19, 25, 48, 56, 59, 65, 91, 110 British, 42 cultural, 4 family, 107 Icknield Way’s, 94, 118 linguistic, 11 local, 90, 122 material, 2 modern, 4, 76 natural, 109 nomadic, 95 of Dorset Cursus, 71 of ideas, 4 of place, 90, 105 of roads, 5, 8–9, 76, 123, 125 personal, 29, 6 road-making, 16 Roman, 20 Roman road, 23, 38, 92 Tess’s, 83 homogeneity, 9, 13–14, 38, 53, 127–128n. 4 homogeneous, see homogeneity horizontal, 44, 50–53, 57, 63, 89 horizontality, 21, 29, 45, 50–51, 86, 124 Howe, Irving, 99–100

I

Icknield Way, 6, 17, 46, 89–101, 103–104, 106, 110–111, 116–118 identity, 10, 16, 21, 42, 61, 68, 90, 94, 118 ambiguous, 83 communal, 88 emergent, 122

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142 feminine, 88 gender, 3, 5 hybrid, 17 individual, 22 middle-class, 8 national, 10 personal, 10, 13, 88 sexual, 59–60, 67, 73–74, 119, 124 shallow, 78 social, 60, 119 stable, 62 traditional, 78 Victorian, 2, 5, 9, 17, 123 working-class, 8, 57, 92, 123, 125 ideology, 5, 14, 22, 31, 38, 73, 125 immobility, 21, 27, 36, 53–54, 124 imperial, 6, 10, 14, 22, 26, 31–32, 38, 40–41, 43, 64, 82, 92, 97, 121, 123, 125–126 inequality, 5–6, 34, 64, 80, 112–114, 123 inequitable, see inequality Ingham, Patricia, 59 inscribe, 17, 27, 34—35, 57, 62–63, 88–89, 92, 124 inscription, 7, 16, 34, 57, 62–64, 81, 88, 124–125 Irigaray, Luce, 30

J

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, 11 Jameson, Fredric, 122 Jarvis, Brian, 31 Johnson, Bruce, 65, 122

K

Kerr, Barbara, 121 Knoepflmacher, U.C., 64 knowable community, 3, 5–10, 16–17, 44, 47, 49, 60, 62–63, 71, 77, 88, 118, 122–123, 125 Kolodny, Annette, 32, 64

L

landscape, 8, 13, 22, 25, 28, 32, 34, 38, 41, 44, 57, 61, 64, 68, 70, 72, 80– 83, 86, 88, 103, 121–123, 125 actual, 94

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 142

Index cartographic, 21, 30 distinctive, 59 Egdon Heath’s, 34–36, 47, 52 mapped, 17, 33, 35 narrative, 5, 21, 37 native, 38 novel’s, 16 permanent, 54 physical, 6, 41 picturesque, 69 representation of, 27 ritual, 74–75 ritualized, 102 sacred, 63 surrounding, 26 unchanging, unmoving, 53 urban, 9 Wessex, 90

L

Laurence, Dan. H., 129n. 2 Lefebvre, Henri, 14, 122, 127–128n. 4 Lekson, Stephen H., 130n. 5 linear, 29, 33, 45, 63, 72, 126, 130n. 7 linearity, 29, 44, 63, 97, 125

M

Macaulay, Thomas, 12 Malpas, J. E., 97–98 map, 5, 7–8, 16–17, 25–27, 31, 34, 36, 52–53, 73, 89, 96, 105–106, 126, 129n. 3 Hardy’s, 16, 20, 22–23, 25, 28–30, 33–36, 43, 45–46, 49, 55–56, 73, 84, 124–125, 128n. 6 implied, 57 literary, 66 male, 32 of cultural terrain, 90 of interactions, 9 of power relations, 6 of Tess’s journeys, 62–64 reflective, 8 resultant, 62 road, 15, 23 spatial, 7 street, 132n. 7

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Index mapped, 48–49 feminine figure, 31, 54 movements, 10 mapping, 26, 56, 63, 67 maps conflicting, 119 sexual, 67 Margary, Ivan D., 95 margin, 4, 27, 33, 41, 63–64, 70, 81, 83– 84, 91, 96, 104, 124–125 marriage, 5, 56, 89, 123 conventional, 90, 119 Hardy’s, 65–66, 108, 115, 117 Hardy’s views of, 114–115 in Jude the Obscure, 97, 99, 105, 111– 113, 115–117 in The Return of the Native, 45–46, 51, 53–54, 57 in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 66, 84–85 license, 45–46 Victorian, 94, 111, 113, 115 Massey, Doreen, 60 matriarchy, 96, 115 May Day club-walk, 16, 60, 69–72, 81, 86–87, 91 Max Gate, 8, 20, 65–66, 109, 121 Mayhew, Henry, 104 McAdam, John, 40–42, 76, 80 McClintock, Anne, 31–32 Merchant, Carolyn, 64 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 74 middle class, 3, 5, 16, 85, 104 mile marker, 90, 92, 110, 116, 118, 124 Miller, J. Hillis, 22, 36, 81 Millgate, Michael, 20, 28, 31, 49, 65–66, 92, 107, 109, 115, 117, 121, 132n. 9 Mitchell, W. J. T., 8 mobility, 9, 21–23, 45, 53, 60, 91, 99, 124 modern, 8, 17, 20, 35, 45, 63–64, 91, 99, 102, 104, 122 art, 4 Christian sensibilities, 97, 102 culture, 4, 71 efficiency, 60 England, 81 experience, 52

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 143

143 generation of humanist, 49 history of the road, 76 life, 88, 117, 124 literary period, 6 literature, 7 man, 7 narrative, 7 protagonists, 88 quality, 9 road, 10, 27–28, 39, 41, 60, 94, 110 sense of alienation, 5 state authority, 75 subject, 123, 126 subjectivity, 90, 122 technology, 122, 129–130n. 3 teleology, 7 thought, 106 worker, 100 modernism, 65, 122–123 modernity, 2, 5, 31, 43, 60, 81, 88, 124 Morgan, Rosemarie, 64 Morris, Mowbray, 83 Morris, William, 131n. 11 Morson, Gary, 13 myth, 7, 97 mythic, 17, 60–61, 63–64, 126 associations, 90, 123 Celtic cross, 125 Celtic cruciform, 7, 9 codes, 23 dimensions, 83 experience, 94, 124 history, 8 images, 7 inscription, 7 map, 6 meaning, 88 origins, 70 past, 88 pattern, 62 perspectives, 123 scenarios, 64 story, 101 structure, 129–130n. 3 mythical, 59 meanings, 69 nature, 95

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144 N

Neolithic, 60, 65, 71, 73, 86, 101, 109 New Woman, 64–66 nomad, see nomadism nomadic, see nomadism nomadism, 17, 46, 49, 67–68, 78, 94–95, 100, 104–105, 113, 118, 124–126

O

Olwig, Kenneth, 122 omphalos, 6, 8, 17, 48, 88, 90, 98, 107, 127n. 2 Orel, Harold, 109–110 orientation, 10, 13–14, 28–29, 31–32, 45, 49, 52, 57, 60, 72–73, 75, 98–99, 110, 122, 127–128n. 4, 130n. 5 Osborne, Ken, 72, 87

P

pagan, 6, 29, 45, 47–48, 54–56, 69, 81, 86, 90–91, 94, 97, 100–102, 111, 115, 118 paganism, 32, 47 Page, Norman, 72, 109, 132nn. 7, 10 palimpsest, 5, 7, 10, 60, 123 Pásztor, Emilia, 130n. 7 patriarchal, see patriarchy patriarchy, 31, 63, 66–68, 83, 96, 102 Peddie, John, 131n. 3 Pennick, Nigel, 6, 62 Peterson, Carla, 90, 102, 117 phenomenology, 15 pilgrimage, 6, 9–10, 16, 41, 57, 61, 84, 97 Plato, 102 police, 63, 85, 87, 105–107 polyphony, 13 prospect, 9, 15–16, 46–47, 50, 56–57, 59–60, 70, 123–124

R

Radford, Andrew, 71–72, 113 railroad, 6, 35, 60–61, 76, 78, 80–81, 88–89, 121, 131n. 9 railway, 1–2, 16, 71, 76–77, 80, 87, 98–99, 130–131n. 8

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 144

Index Rainbarrow, 8, 20–21, 27, 29, 43–45, 47–49, 53–57, 90, 117, 128nn. 2, 6 refuge, 15, 17, 46, 92, 117, 119, 123–124 residual, 10, 13–14, 61, 71, 86, 125 effects, 39 element, 82, 84–85 forms, 88 histories, 5–6, 21, 45, 87, 91 history, 9, 17, 71, 91 meaning, 122 past, 64 perceptions, 61 pilgrimage, 57 power, 16, 22, 38 practice, 69 presence, 10 remains, 81 Roman intentions, 11 sediments, 123 structure, 22 survival, 93–94, 102 symbol, 123 values, 16 return, 5, 8, 14, 50, 57, 62–63, 92, 123 Rojek, Chris, see Cashmore, Ellis Roman achievement, 38–39, 41 army, 39 conquest, 38, 41, 95 road, 16, 19–23, 26–34, 36, 39–41, 43–46, 48, 54–56, 63, 72–73, 82, 92, 95, 97, 123, 125, 128n. 6 road-builders, see road-building road-building, 38, 41, 44, 125 road construction, 40 Rose, Gillian, 30 Rykwert, Joeseph, 11

S

sacred, 2, 6, 16, 61–64, 91, 96–97, 101, 114 Sadoff, Diane Fallon, 64, 66, 70 Safranski, Rudiger, 132n. 8 Said, Edward, 9 sediment, 6, 20, 45, 51, 60–61, 69, 123, 125

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Index sedimentation, see sediment sexuality, 17, 29, 31, 33, 60, 64, 66–67, 78– 79, 82, 90, 93, 111–112, 114 spatial, 31 actualization, 14 analogue, 6, 34, 38 arrangements, 35 attitude, 74 center, 5–6, 8–9, 20–21, 29, 65, 88, 90, 109, 122–123 concerns, 25 contrast, 52, 86 construction, 15, 20–21, 45, 48 dynamics, 20 embodiment, 92 emphasis, 123 environment, 12 expression, 44 focus, 13, 88, 90, 126 form, 4, 7 grid, 16 identity, 86 imagination, 122 increments, 49 map, 7 markers, 63 network, 14 opposition, 45 organization, 59 orientation, 21 panopticon, 30 pattern, 6 point, 62 practice, 33 prospect, 47 relationship, 74 representation, 48 signs, 41 site, 8, 86, 110 story, 62 structure, 15, 75, 118, 122 terms, 129n. 8 theme, 21 turn, 122 speed, 16, 60–61, 74–75, 78–81, 87, 124, 131–132n. 4 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 59, 70, 76, 129n. 2

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 145

145 Stonehenge, 63, 65, 71–72, 85–87, 102, 109, 132n. 6 subjectivity, 8, 10, 17, 71, 90, 94, 118, 122 suicide, 55 synchronic, 45, 50, 123

T

Tanner, Tony, 63, 74 Taylor, Christopher, 39–42 Telford, Thomas, 41–42 terrain, 6, 11, 20, 27, 30–32, 34, 36, 40, 44, 62, 64, 73, 81, 84, 88–89, 96–98, 103–104, 106, 124–125 cultural, 5, 90–91 fictive, 60 geographic, 5 heath, 20–21, 35, 37–38, 49, 52 historic, 61 home, 54 indigenous, 69 literary, 15, 122–123 mapped, 33, 49 physical, 8, 23, 26, 28 social, 41, 51 Thomas, Edward, 95, 104 Tilley, Christopher, 72, 130n. 6 tourist, 16, 43, 60, 67, 70, 75, 87, 124 touristic, see tourist trade, 9–10, 41, 95, 97 tragedy, 56, 67, 102, 108, 119, 123–124 trope, 5, 9, 37, 88, 91, 95 Turner, Paul, 55

V

Venus, 100 vertical, 50–53, 63, 83, 86 verticality, 21, 44, 50, 86, 124 Victorian, 19, 33, 35, 40, 43, 45, 49, 57, 63, 67–69, 74, 80–82, 88, 96, 124 culture, 2, 4–5, 38, 102, 114, 118 era, 78, 104, 129n. 8, 131n. 9 ethos, 94 gender relations, 6, 59–60, 66, 86, 101 identity, 5, 59, 61 imagination, 4 morality, 83, 111 period, 6–7

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146 perspectives, 94 road, 11, 39, 61 sensibility, 98, 101 sexuality, 60 society, 2–3, 102–103, 113 subjectivity, 5, 10, 17, 71 values, 83 Virgil, 83

W

Wessex, 5, 8, 43, 59, 62, 71, 75, 81, 85, 90, 94, 97–98, 101, 109, 111, 118, 130n. 7, 131n. 3

97045_Rode_05 17.indd 146

Index West, Graham, 40 Wheeler, Michael, 36 Wilkinson, T. W., 39, 132n. 6 Williams, Raymond, 3, 10, 13, 44, 61, 71, 122 Wood, Denis, 28 Woolf, Virginia, 125 World War One, see WWI WWI, 2, 42, 129n. 8

Y

Young, Charles Frederic, 76–78, 80, 130–131n. 8, 131n. 9

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