Pockets of Change by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. The Maori term for white colonial.

2. Whare may refer to the Marae, or spiritual and social center of Maori life, but may also be used as another word for house, which is probably what Mansfield intended.

3. Mansfield refers to a kete, or small basket.

4. A Maori village or settlement, originally used to describe fortified settlements.

7

Imagined Villages and

Knowable Communities

Work and the Pastoral in

Thomas Hardy’s Poetry

Indy Clark

In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams remarks that, in the novels of Jane Austen, the country appears solely as the area of land relating to a country house, “weather or a place for a walk” (166). This idea of the English countryside as a spectacle of aesthetic consumption, devoid of work or workers, is the product of a particular pastoral tradition. For Williams, “[a]ll traditions are selective: the pastoral tradition quite as much as any other” (18). What is represented within a particular pastoral tradition depends very much on the social and political circumstances of those doing the selecting.

In discussions of the pastoral in his prose and poetry, Hardy has been read in many seemingly conflicting ways. In Thomas Hardy and Rural England (1972), Merryn Williams reads Hardy as a realist, representing a historical Wessex. In Roger Lowman’s Thomas Hardy’s “The Dorsetshire Labourer” and Wessex (2005), and Owen Schur’s Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms (1989), the pastoral is read as metaphorical, foregrounding the forms and tropes of the mode with the country read largely as a symbolic space. Michael Squires’s The Pastoral Novel (1974), attempts to occupy the middle ground between the reality and metaphor of Hardy’s pastoral, describing it as “sympathetic realism” (16), but despite noting that Hardy fused pastoral themes with realistic techniques, Squires adopts the view that the pastoral in Hardy’s novels was ultimately replaced by realism—the two unable to coexist. More recently, Stephen Regan has written incisively about Hardy’s “darkening pastoral” in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which “functions” in “unsettling ways,” incorporating the traditionally counter-pastoral aspects of “destitution, misery, and violence” and an acute class-consciousness. Regan also notes how Hardy’s shifts in perspective and mixing of genres create a complex realism, which is able to coexist with an equally complex pastoral.

Hardy’s pastoral is neither purely metaphorical, nor wholly realist; instead it occupies the border country between the two—a different but related border country to that which Williams describes as being “the real Hardy country” between “custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change” (English 81). It is this positioning between “educated observer” of and “passionate participant” in his community that leads to the complex construction of Hardy’s Wessex (87); an imagined landscape, but one that has a close relationship with historical Dorset and its surrounds. Whether it is represented in his poems, short stories, or novels, Hardy’s Wessex is a community and, as the work of Simon Gatrell in Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex (2003) has shown, an imagined space that Hardy developed throughout his long writing career.

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