Review of Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy: The Body of Nature

Authors

Eithne Henson

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

At the heart of Eithne Henson's book is a comment made by George Eliot when she reviewed Ruskin's Lectures on Architecture and Painting in 1854: 'To a certain degree, all artistic interpretation of Nature is conventional' (p. 75). Henson's concern is with the precise nature of the conventions on which Victorian novelists were able to draw in their representations of landscape, and the extent to which those conventions were gendered. But Henson also asks: who is looking? From what position or perspective? The result is a rich study of what we might call the 'painterly' eye of Victorian narrative. Henson takes us through the aesthetic theories of the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque - which inform Victorian fictional landscapes. She argues that the preferred model is that of the picturesque, which adulterated 'the smooth' with 'the rough' and privileged the delights of the irregular, the rambling, the rustic, the antique: 'the desirable past is picturesque, softened, feminized, as opposed to the 'rational' symmetry of both the eighteenth-century past, and the mechanized present'(p. 7). This 'feminized' landscape is also a mediated landscape: copying drawings of picturesque engravings of rocks and ruins was thought to be the most suitable artistic activity for girls. Henson notes that Charlotte Bronte, although a prolific and accomplished artist, rarely drew landscapes from life, and in her analysis of the pictorial descriptions in lane Eyre Henson traces an ironic subtext in which Jane learns to 'see' nature for herself, to paint in her own words, and to determine how landscapes should be read.

Henson's work is a valuable contribution to the rapidly developing body of work on the literature of place. She has interesting things to say about the various ways in which the English landscape is defined in relation to different 'Others', about the garden as woman's domain, and about the psychological significance of hollows and dells. Henson follows Raymond Williams in looking at what pastoral leaves out as well as what it includes, and this prompts her to make a suggestive distinction between depictions of 'landscape' and depictions of 'land': 'landscape', as opposed to the intimate physical engagement of 'land', always privileges the viewer, offering up a prospect to be consumed by a detached observer. But the real strength of this book is in Henson's closely-focused, nuanced readings of some major Victorian novels. She is as attentive to the ways in which landscape was read as she is to how it was represented, and this alertness to perspective, alongside a corresponding alertness to precision of detail, leads to some fascinating and sometimes surprising interpretations of familiar texts. Many critics have discussed the transformation of Shirley Keeldar in Shirley from mischievous independent heiress to muted Mrs. Moore, but Henson demonstrates how this transformation is subtly, even subliminally, effected through the eyes of Louis Moore and the language of landscape: Shirley's 'irregularities' of behaviour identify her initially with the attractions of the picturesque, but Henson observes that as the narrative progresses, Shirley becomes 'a natural landscape to be walked up' seen from Louis' viewpoint as a 'natural hill, with its mossy breaks and hollows, whose slopes invite ascent, whose summit it is a pleasure to gain' (p. 214). Henson is alert, too, to the particular ways in which commonplace images - nature as woman, landscape as human body - may be transfigured and rendered strange. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles the inhospitable landscape of Flintcomb-Ash is figured as two featureless visages, the brown field and the white sky, confronting one another. Here the conventionalized 'face of nature' is disturbingly disengaged from its humanizing features, stripped of the power to think or feel.