"Reinterpreting Hardy's 'child of the soil' : Tess of the d'Urbervilles as Phenomenological Green Writing"

Résumé En

In Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the heroin is referred to as a “mere child of the soil” by Angel’s mother who seems to be hinting at Tess’s humble social status and agricultural background. Understood from an eco-critical point of view, such a periphrasis — quite typical of pastoral literature — suddenly takes up a whole new meaning to reveal the organic dimension of the young woman and her embeddedness within the natural surroundings she wasn’t simply born from but made of. This particular study of the close “relationship between living organisms and their environment” is both at the origin of the word “ecology” (OED) and at the core of the phenomenological thinking, first theorised by Hardy’s contemporary Edmund Husserl in the early 20th-century. With Husserl’s theory of an embodied consciousness extended outward or Merleau-Ponty’s later concepts of the “chiasm” and of the “Flesh of the World”, phenomenologists have helped us rethink green writing in terms of how characters tend to be physically and mentally connected to their environment and how nature itself is included in the characters’ daily lives and ultimate fates. From a phenomenological standpoint, Tess of the d’Urbervilles cannot be defined as green writing simply because it is set in the countryside and it contains extensive descriptions of natural landscapes and rural lifestyle; rather, the novel goes beyond the pastoral genre to take up an ecological dimension as soon as the reader discovers how Tess’s “hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her” and how the Inn customers’ “souls expanded beyond their skins”. Drawing on phenomenological theories, I intend to shed a new light on Thomas Hardy’s famous novel and propose an eco-critical reading that will reveal his pioneering position as a Victorian green writer.