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“Fellow-man's gratitude”: una interpretación ecofeminista de A Pair of Blue Eyes de Thomas Hardy
Ariana De Jesús Pagán
Departamento de Inglés
Facultad de Humanidades, UPR RP
Recibido: 01/03/2024; Revisado: 04/03/2024; Aceptado: 01/05/2024
Abstract
My study seeks to relate the depiction of the landscape and the treatment of gender relations in the novel A Pair of Blue Eyes by the Victorian realist author Thomas Hardy. This is done by considering Val Plumwood’s critical ecofeminist concept of the Master Model as applied to the novel's love interest, Henry Knight. I argue that Knight's self-positioning as a rational male underline his simultaneous domination of women and nature, and that the novel’s famous cliffhanger scene momentarily undoes dualistic categorizations to suggest an ethical model wherein the relationship between humans and nature can serve as a model for gender relations.
Keywords: Thomas Hardy, critical ecofeminism, dualistic ideology, environmental ethics
Resumen
Busco relacionar la representación del paisaje y la representación de las relaciones entre géneros en la novela A Pair of Blue Eyes de Thomas Hardy a través de la consideración del concepto ecofeminista del “Master Model”, planteado por Val Plumwood. Planteo que el autoposicionamiento del personaje Henry Knight como un sujeto masculino fundamenta su dominación de las mujeres y el mundo natural. La escena en la que Knight cuelga de un acantilado suspende las categorizaciones dualistas para sugerir una ética en la que las relaciones entre los humanos y la naturaleza sirven de modelo para las relaciones entre los géneros.
Palabras claves: Thomas Hardy, ecofeminismo crítico, ideología dualista, ética ambiental
The Victorian realist author Thomas Hardy has often been considered an ecological writer. Not long after the publication of the anthology that legitimized Ecocriticism as a theoretical school within English Literary Studies, The Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty & Fromm's, 1996), Kerridge (2001) explicitly argued for Hardy’s “ecocritical canonization,” stating that his novels contained “some of the most exciting passages of English nature writing” (p. 126). In his view, Hardy’s novels depict a variety of characters’ shifting and multiform relationships to the spaces they inhabit in a way that ultimately suggests the inseparability of the human and the natural. He cites examples from Hardy’s major novels. According to Thomas (2009), the origin of this tendency is Hardy's division of his novels into three categories for the 1912 Wessex Edition of his works – “Novels of Character and Environment” (his so-called major novels), “Romances and Fantasies,” and “Novels of Ingenuity,” – perhaps to create a more homogenous idea of his oeuvre as realist writing. As a result, Thomas states that Hardy's so-called minor novels have been relatively understudied. This sentiment applies to Hardy's third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), one of his “Romances and Fantasies.”
A Pair of Blue Eyes tells the story of Elfride Swancourt, a curate’s daughter, who is caught in a love triangle between two men. The first, Stephen Smith, is a young architect of humble rural origins. After her father forbids her relationship with Stephen based on their unequal class positions, she initiates a plan to elope with him; however, she changes her mind before the two can reach London to be married. When Stephen leaves on assignment to India, Elfride sets her sights on Stephen’s teacher, Henry Knight, an older man who works as a writer in London. Knight admires Elfride’s youth and apparent romantic inexperience; hence, she must hide her failed elopement from him at all costs, starting a chain of events that ultimately leads to Elfride’s marriage to another man and death via miscarriage.
Many critics of A Pair of Blue Eyes choose to read it through a biographical lens, regarding it, in the words of Michael Millgate, as “...a kind of rag-bag of information, ideas, descriptive vignettes, personal experiences, fragments of the author’s brief literary past” (1971, p. 67). Dolin (2005), in his introduction to the novel, notes the similarities of its story with Hardy's courtship of his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford. The cliffside village of Endelstow, where the story is set, recalls the landscape of St. Juliot in Cornwall, where Hardy met Emma as an architect on assignment to rebuild an old church; additionally, their union faced disapproval from Emma's family, as Stephen and Elfride's did. Dolin, however, reads Elfride's choice as a metaphor for a crucial junction in Hardy's life: his decision to leave architecture for a career as a professional writer. Along with this biographical aspect, critics have noted Hardy’s treatment of the theme of gendered sexual standards, which serves as a precursor to later works such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Boumelha (1982), for example, which compares Henry Knight’s destructive idealism to that of Tess’s Angel Clare. All in all, the technical rawness of A Pair of Blue Eyes belies the richness of the novel’s themes.
My intervention is to consider the novel's theme of gender relations in tandem with Hardy's depiction of the landscape through a critical ecofeminist lens. Ecofeminism seeks to study what Donovan calls the “ontology of domination” a worldview “wherein dominators are thought to be of a higher order … than the dominated” (1998, p. 74). According to Val Plumwood’s seminal work Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), this logic is ideologically underpinned by what she calls a “network of dualisms” in Western rationalist thought (p. 2), that is, a series of dichotomous hierarchies. This worldview creates a duality between nature and culture that is then applied to men and women. Women and other marginalized others, such as people of color, are conceptually aligned with nature – which in a pattern of “radical exclusion” (p. 48) is defined as all that reason is not – and therefore become the object of subjection by the “white, largely male elite,” a relation that she calls “the master model” (p. 23). In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy illustrates this ideology through the character of the urbanite intellectual Henry Knight, who positions himself above both women and the natural world. This outlook leads to the dissolution of his relationship with Elfride and his fundamental dissatisfaction. Knight's failures, as well as the depiction of the landscape in the novel, can then advance a counter-narrative to the novel's superficially misogynistic discourse: Hardy is making an ethical proposition in which reciprocal interactions between humans and nature can serve as a model for relationships between men and women. Thus, Knight's failure to have an equitable relationship with nonhuman life-forms foreshadows his inability to connect to other people.
The first component of Knight’s identity as the master is his persistent narrative alignment with rationality. In Plumwood’s theory, rationality, a concept with “a confusing array of meanings...” is the primary attribute that distinguishes humans from nature and men from women (p. 19). A Pair of Blue Eyes references Knight's intellect or mental capacity. Stephen introduces him as “the best and cleverest man in England" (p. 49); the narration mentions his "robust intellect” (p. 318), his capacity for “rigid stoical meditation” (p. 196), as well as his “keen scrutiny” and “logical power” (p. 284). Metaphors of rigidity or hardness also enter this web of associations: Elfride calls him “severe” several times (p. 272, p. 279), as well as “sharp” (p. 182). This detail is especially pronounced when contrasted with the narrator's view of Elfride, highlighting her adaptability. She is a “palpitating mobile creature” (p. 171) with an “index of transientness of feeling” (p. 110) and is regarded by Knight as a “ductile woman” (p. 318). This duality of rigidity and fluidity, translated into the dualism of rationality and irrationality, is the paradigm that defines Knight and Elfride's relationship throughout the novel. His position as the rational male will underscore both his anthropocentrism and misogyny.
Knight's attributes manifest in his tendency to think of himself as separate from the world around him. For instance, he is characterized by his naturalist interests and described as “a fair geologist” (p. 200) who asks Elfride about the plants around her home “in quite a learner's manner” (p. 146). However, there are several scenes where he feels disconnected from and disquieted by the natural world. Upset over his feelings for Elfride, he takes a walk around the cliffside village and “failed to recognize that holding converse with Nature's charms was not solitude” (p. 162). On a trip to the Lakes of Killarney, he “listened to the marvellous echoes of that romantic spot; but altogether missed the glory and the dream he formerly found in such favoured regions” (p. 176). Hardy's use of the word “converse” implies a certain reciprocity between Knight and nature; nevertheless, the conversation is cut short because Knight does not recognize nature's consciousness and is limited by his perspective. In Knight's introductory scene, Hardy notes that he keeps an aquarium in his office filled with “many-coloured zoophytes” (p. 122), among other marine life forms. The aquarium is described as “a dull parallelepipedon... for living creatures at most hours of the day...” except when the fish are warmed by the sun during the evening (p. 122). The mental image of the animals languishing in the enclosed bowl serves as a metaphor for how Knight sees other beings, human or nonhuman: knowable, classifiable, and confined. This impression gains more credence when one considers his attitudes towards other humans.
In the same way that he disregards nature’s consciousness, he also dismisses the individuality of his fellow human beings, especially that of women. He states, “All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the sweltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a crow might; no more...” (p. 124). One of the characteristics of dualistic thinking, according to Plumwood, is that of homogenization, that is, the tendency to deny the individuality of members within otherized groups. “To the master,” she writes, “all the rest are just that: 'the rest', the Others, the background to his achievements and the resources for his needs” (p. 54). Knight's words echo this sentiment. He proudly regards women as a set of stereotypes, not individuals with agency or equal partners. His self-fashioning as a crow is particularly telling. It is a positional framing in which he is flying above the rest of humanity—“the periphery,” in Plumwood’s words (p. 54)—looking at the indistinguishable mass below with disinterest. This way, it recalls the hierarchical element of dualistic thinking and ties Knight's rationality to a desire for male superiority. This ideology will be implicitly challenged by Hardy's construction of the landscape within the novel.
Hardy’s depiction of the landscape in A Pair of Blue Eyes does not draw a firm boundary between humans and the natural world. In this case, there is hardly a difference between natural and architectural structures: buildings become a part of the ecological portrait that Hardy draws in the novel. These 'naturalized' buildings are exemplified most potently by the crumbling church tower at Endelstow, the structure that the young architect Stephen Smith, Elfride's first lover, has been sent to assess. It is described as “a square mouldering tower ...a monolithic termination, of one substance with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon” (p. 23). The adjective 'monolithic' points to the tower's ambiguous status, as the word can describe both a naturally occurring geographical formation and a stone placed somewhere by humans. Perhaps due to age, the tower has become one with its environment. Not only that, but it also serves as a shelter for living beings, such as fungi—as the adjective “mouldering” (p. 23) suggests—and “owls” (p. 152). Rather than being a static, disconnected object, the tower has acquired an ecological function–the owls must abandon “this home of their forefathers'” when the time comes for the tower to be demolished (p. 152). As the tower, a relic of human activity, sinks into its surrounding environs, it blurs the boundary between human and natural spheres. It is at once part of the building where the villagers attend mass and part of the hill. Thus, it destabilizes the 'human' and 'natural' categories integral to a dualistic worldview.
The cemetery at Endelstow is another example of how Hardy bridges the division between the human and the natural. The village churchyard consists of bare, grass-covered mounds, with a stone stile as an entrance, “over which, having clambered you remained still on the wild hill–the within not being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open freedom” (p. 27). The graves are unmarked, divorced from any signifiers of Victorian mourning customs such as flowers, “which only raise images of people in new black crape and white handkerchiefs, coming to tend them” (p. 27). The churchyard is only “long wild untutored grass” (p. 27). It is a supposedly man-made place that has remained undomesticated, functionally indistinguishable from its environment. Moreover, the cemetery is a space where human bodies can decay undisturbed. Human bodies can then quite literally rejoin the ecosystem by nourishing the soil, thus completing the circle of life. The cemetery becomes a visual representation of the interdependence between man and nature in the novel. It adds to the general impression of the landscape that Hardy produces, eventually subverting Knight’s anthropocentric worldview by showing that the apparent separation between humans and nature is only illusory–and temporary.
These descriptions of the natural world of Endelstow contrast Hardy’s descriptions of urban spaces. A Pair of Blue Eyes contains one of the few depictions of London in Hardy’s body of work. His descriptions contain a sense of weariness about city life. For example, the first glimpse of Henry Knight in his office is preceded by this passage:
On this fine October evening on which we follow Stephen Smith to this place, a placid porter is sitting on a stool under a sycamore-tree in the midst, with a little cane in his hand. We notice the thick coat of soot upon the branches, hanging underneath them in flakes, as in a chimney. The blackness of these boughs does not at present improve the tree–nearly forsaken by its leaves as it is–but in the spring their green fresh beauty is made doubly beautiful by the contrast. (p. 120)
The sycamore tree illustrates the natural world's role in urban spaces. The tree is marred by the pollution of the city, here represented by the soot, and Hardy consequently compares it to a chimney. Surrounded by the crowded streets and edifices, the tree assimilates into the city: its form, to an extent, is corrupted by its urban environment. Similarly, Hardy likens the columns of smoke that fill the sky over London to “tall trees” (p. 260). In the absence of plants, the product of the city's pollution –the smoke– becomes a facsimile of a forest. The plants in the city, like the tree outside of Henry Knight's office, are few and far between. Note the use of "contrast" to describe the tree's relationship to its surroundings in the spring. Whereas the buildings at Endelstow are characterized by their integration into their environment, this description of the tree highlights an incongruence. Hence, the only way that nature can exist in the city is in this sequestered manner, springing up between the cracks. Hardy's view of London influences the characterization of Henry Knight. If nonhuman forms of life are a rarity in the London streets, then it makes sense that Knight views nature as something fundamentally unusual, contained, and –most importantly– separate from him.
The strongest manifestation of the confluence between Knight’s misogyny and anthropocentrism is A Pair of Blue Eyes' cliffhanger scene. The lead-up to this scene sees Elfride and Knight stroll along a ridge called the Cliff without a Name. Knight leans off the edge to retrieve his hat, which has been blown away by the wind, and slips off the stable ground. The chapter ends with Elfride going away to get help and Knight hanging off the cliff in a very vulnerable position. This life-threatening situation leads Knight to an encounter with the remains of the prehistoric life that once inhabited the cliff:
…opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their place of death. … The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name. (p. 200)
Knight’s interaction with the trilobite is predicated on two ideas: first, that the trilobite represents a lower form of life, and second, that Knight is nonetheless going to face the same fate. This sentiment echoes Gillian Beer’s (1983) influential Darwinian reading of the scene, wherein the passage expresses both the “incongruity” and the “kinship” of both man and fossil (p. 236). Hardy utilizes a variety of phrases that emphasize the trilobite's low position in the great chain of being, such as “this underling” and “a low type of animal existence” (p. 200). Because they form part of Knight's perspective, these phrases demonstrate that Knight believes himself to be of a higher order than the trilobite. However, in practice, Knight's presumed superior intelligence cannot get him out of his predicament. For all their differences, he and the trilobite are in the same situation: as Hardy states, “He was to be with the small in his death” (p. 200). The trilobite's eyes emphasize the extent to which Knight has been brought down. To say that the eyes “were even now regarding him” (p. 200) subverts the power of the gaze. It is as if the trilobite looks at Knight first, and he is now the animal specimen up for examination. When Knight stares back at it, they have a sort of mutual acknowledgment.
Knight then sees himself “at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously” (p. 200). Hardy goes on to list a variety of prehistoric life forms, such as early hominids “clothed in the hides of beasts” (p. 200), almost resembling the stereotypes of cavemen, as well as ancient mammals such as mastodons and other animals such as alligators and dinosaurs, such as the—recently discovered at the time—iguanodon. Hardy's narration draws a continuity between the animals through to Knight. He gains a sense of the generations of organisms that have lived and died on the cliffs, and he realizes that he is only one of the many beings that its ecosystem has nurtured. For that brief moment, Knight feels truly connected to the environment around him. However, this realization is impeded by Knight's domineering outlook. While he is still hanging off the cliff, he thinks “that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of good material; that such an experiment in killing might have been practiced upon some less-developed life” (p. 203). Knight ultimately has an overly high view of himself and his position in the universe. He is so close to understanding his marginal place in the universe, only for Hardy to recast him as a self-aggrandizing male once more.
Throughout the cliffhanger episode, Hardy demonstrates how Knight's anthropocentrism and misogyny coincide in his gendering of nature. Eithne Henson, in her study of landscape and gender in nineteenth-century novels, explains that nature as an entity has been personified as female in various cultural traditions, from the “beneficent fruitful mother” of classical myths to the “virgin land” exploited by American pioneers (2011, p. 9). Henry Knight is no exception to this tradition. When he finds himself hanging off the cliff, he thinks that “he could only look sternly at Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him and strive to thwart her” (p. 199). It is the first time that nature or the landscape is explicitly gendered by Knight, who personifies it as a treacherous woman that he must then defeat. The narration goes on to reflect:
Nature seems to have moods in other than a poetical sense … She is read as a person with a curious temper; as one who does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately, impartially, and in order, but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice … In her unfriendly moments there seems to be a feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in swallowing the victim. (p. 201)
It seems that Knight projects all his anxieties about women onto his characterization of nature, and, by extension, the Cliff without a Name. Hardy reportedly based this cliff on a real-life Cornwall rock formation named Beeny Cliff, but he leaves it unnamed in the novel (Clough 1988). The cliff's lack of a name points to both its ancient, paleolithic origins and its position outside of the reach of Knight's knowledge. It is no coincidence that the cliff Knight finds the most inscrutable is also one he characterizes as feminine. Knight has a recurrent concern about women's sexual fidelity and their ability to “practise wiles” (p. 251). Consequently, the natural world, in Knight’s view, adopts some of the qualities that Knight claims to see in women: cruelty, fickleness, and treachery. This view of nature also ties into his anxieties about his relationship with Elfride. While Knight is hanging off the cliff, he doubts Elfride's ability to deliver him from his predicament, asking himself, “what could a girl do?” (p. 201). His most immediate fear is whether Elfride will return to save him. However, it also applies to his fears that she will betray him, given that it is his first time pursuing a romantic relationship after stoically refraining from such pursuits. Hence, his ideas about gender are both projected onto nature and Elfride. Casagrande makes a similar point in his book Unity in Hardy’s Novels (1982) when he states that the cliff in the novel is characterized as feminine and that it appears to share attributes with Elfride. However, our readings of the scene diverge in that he interprets Elfride’s rescue of Knight as being indicative of how “human intelligence can triumph over nature” (p. 96), rather than having an ecological message.
For this reason, it is significant that when Elfride finally returns to save Knight—with a rope made from her undergarments, no less—he un-genders her:
His eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole diapason of eloquence, from lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude for a token of remembrance from one of his kind … It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who had mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance, thus thankful for a sight of her face. (p. 204)
Hardy's narration refers to Knight as Elfride's “fellow-man,” describing Elfride as the gender-neutral “one of his kind.” They are on equal terms as humans, not as a man and a woman. Additionally, while Knight delights in being the master to Elfride's student, their positions are reversed: in pulling him from the ledge, she is quite literally above him. This subversion is underscored by Knight's close third narration, which highlights his apparent domination of Elfride – he “had swayed her” and “mastered her” – only to negate it. The episode destabilizes Knight's identity as a rational male. Plumwood indicates that the identity of the master is concerted through a “relationship of denied dependency” (p. 41), whereby the dominator falsely asserts his independence from the dominated. However, this scene shows that Knight needs others to survive. Hence, Knight's gratitude represents what Freya Matthews calls a model of “relationality,” whereby beings are understood “in terms of their constitutive relations with one another” (Estévez-Saá & Lorenzo-Modia, 2018, p. 131, as cited in Matthews, 2007). Not only does he come to understand himself as a being in relation to Elfride, but as a being in continuity with the prehistoric life forms of the cliff. This understanding textually makes a romantic relationship between Elfride and Knight possible. His near-death experience, in which he accepted his part in a greater ecological reality than himself for a moment, facilitates his awareness of his and Elfride's mutual humanity.
However, this experience is not enough to undo Knight’s dualistic ideology. Before he has reached stable ground, he is already instructing her about the proper way to pull him over the ledge, “already resuming his position of ruling power” (p. 205). Throughout the novel, he continues to sanctimoniously lecture her on his ideas about women, delighting in Elfride’s “uniform submissiveness” in their relationship (p. 277). Their romance unravels when Knight receives a letter from a widow named Mrs. Jethway, a woman with a vendetta against Elfride who saw her and Stephen Smith on the train when they ran away together. From this missive, Knight learns about Elfride's elopement to another man, and he subsequently rejects her because his fantasy of her purity and inexperience has been shattered. However, the moral verdict of the novel sides against Knight:
It is a melancholy thought, that men who at first will not allow the verdict of perfection they pronounce upon their sweethearts or wives to be disturbed by God's own testimony to the contrary, will, once suspecting their purity, morally hang them upon evidence they would be ashamed to admit in judging a dog. (p. 311)
Knight can only conceive of Elfride, and women in general, as either perfect angels who can do no wrong or conniving temptresses, not as human beings who make mistakes. The idea that Elfride has an existence apart from his desires is utterly alien to him. Since his worldview is so dependent on rigid dichotomous categories, he cannot cope with any nuanced situations.
Even when Knight decides to regard Elfride favorably once again at the end of the novel, he does not let go of this ideology. Upon learning that it was his old student, Stephen Smith, whom Elfride had eloped with, he reflects on his feelings for her:
Knight blessed Elfride for her sweetness, and forgot her fault. He pictured with a vivid fancy those summer scenes with her… How she would wait for him in green places, without showing any of the ordinary womanly affectations of indifference! How proud she was to be seen walking with him, bearing legibly in her eyes that she thought he was the greatest genius in the world! (p. 337)
Knight's newly renewed affections for Elfride, entangled with a romantic view of the landscape of the cliffs—“summer scenes” and “green places” – do not evince any character development on his part. His 'forgiveness' of Elfride is predicated on restoring her to a former idealized state based on her unquestioning adoration of him. Knight does not dismantle his duality of good and bad women; instead, he decides that Elfride is once again a good woman. Nevertheless, his ultimate failure at repairing their relationship due to Elfride's untimely death demonstrates the failure of Knight's ideology. His belief in gender stereotypes and attachment to an ontology of domination are what cause his rejection of Elfride and ultimately spell her doom. Consequently, he does not get to possess her. She is now entirely beyond his reach.
I have demonstrated how a critical ecofeminist lens can help elucidate the intersecting modes of domination illustrated in A Pair of Blue Eyes. The novel shows that environmental destruction is not the only way to dominate nature. Instead, creating dualistic categories that forcefully sequester the natural from the human is another form of domination. Henry Knight's impulse to view himself as above and separate from the natural world is the same one that drives him to adhere to rigid gender divisions obsessively. Therefore, his attempts to gender nature and Elfride should be understood as attempts to control them, and Hardy shows that this desire is what leads him to isolation, disappointment, and unhappiness. Hence, A Pair of Blue Eyes anticipates Hardy’s ecological concerns in his more well-known works by dramatizing the ideological basis of the double exploitation of the environment and the female body depicted in a novel like Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). This is why an ecological or ecofeminist reading of the rest of his minor novels could prove to be a productive course of study, furthering the idea that they are as ecologically rich as his major ones.
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