Table Of ContentThomas Hardy and Empire
The Representation of Imperial Themes
in the Work of Thomas Hardy
Jane L. Bownas
THOMAS HARDY AND EMPIRE
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Thomas Hardy and Empire
The Representation of Imperial Themes
in the Work of Thomas Hardy
JANE L. BOWNAS
First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © 2012 Jane L. Bownas
Jane L. Bownas has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bownas, Jane L.
Thomas Hardy and empire: the representation of imperial themes in the work of Thomas
Hardy.
1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Imperialism in literature.
3. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century.
I. Title
823.8-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bownas, Jane L.
Thomas Hardy and empire : the representation of imperial themes in the work of Thomas
Hardy / by Jane L. Bownas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4082-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—
Criticism and interpretation. 2. Imperialism in literature. I. Title.
PR4757.I45B69 2012
823’.8—dc23
2012010018
ISBN: 9781409440826 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315551043 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Colonies and Colonizers 9
2 Roman Invaders: The Rise and Fall of Imperial Powers 31
3 The Dynasts: Hardy and the Napoleonic Wars 59
4 The Primitive and the Civilized: Pagans and Colonizers in Woodland
and Heath 89
5 The Crossing of Boundaries: Race, Class and Gender as Articulated
Categories 117
Conclusion 149
Bibliography 159
Index 175
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Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank The Open University, UK, for enabling a scientist
to study the Humanities and to undertake research in Literature. Special thanks
go to my research supervisors Dr Sara Haslam and Professor Suman Gupta of
the English Department at The Open University for their encouragement and
constructive criticism. I am very grateful to Rosemarie Morgan, Phillip Mallett
and Angelique Richardson for showing interest in this project.
The Hardy Archive in the Dorset County Museum provided invaluable
assistance and I would particularly like to thank Lilian Swindall for her help in the
early stages of my research.
Special thanks to Ann Donahue at Ashgate for her patience and advice, and
their external reader for apposite comments and suggestions.
For permission to reprint material already published as articles, I thank
Rosemarie Morgan, The Thomas Hardy Association, Maney Publishing, and
The Thomas Hardy Society. Parts of Chapter 1 were published as ‘Exploration
and Post-Darwinian Anxiety in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower’, in The Hardy
Review, Vol. 11(1), ed. Rosemarie Morgan, The Thomas Hardy Association
(London: Maney Publishing, 2009), pp. 52–61. Parts of Chapter 2 were published
as ‘“The Very End of the World”: The Colonizations of Casterbridge’, in The
Thomas Hardy Journal, Vol. 26, ed. Phillip Mallett (The Thomas Hardy Society,
2010), pp. 100–115.
Thanks also to Dr Fran Brearton, Queen’s University Belfast, for providing me
with a copy of her unpublished lecture, ‘Hardy Superior’, given at The Thomas
Hardy Society Conference in Dorchester in 2008.
The cover illustration is courtesy of Lancashire Museums and Lancaster City
Museum, and I am indebted to Dr Stephen Bull for providing this image of a
recently discovered Roman cavalry tombstone.
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Introduction
The novel is one of those areas of British culture that always used to be thought
of as relatively empire-free; until that is, the cultural theorists cracked the code.
Before Said1 they had scarcely noticed the Empire. That was because the objects
of their researches – the ‘canonical’ novels of the nineteenth century, for example
– did not seem to do so either. The received opinion was that this was because
the latter were élitist, divorced from contemporary society; from which it could
be inferred that the researchers’ study of them was elitist and irrelevant too. That
may have been an incentive for them to discover some imperialism under the
surface of these cultural productions. If culture could be shown to be essential to
imperialism, it raised the importance of their field of study even more.2
While this strategy for containing the imperial experience has produced some
very impressive work, it has also tended to cement in place an unnecessary
wall, at least in literary studies, between the ‘imperial novel’ and its opposite
number – the ‘domestic novel’, as some critics have unfortunately termed it. If
the imperial experience of the nineteenth century had a truly profound impact on
English culture, the ‘domestic’ novel’ ought to carry some traces of its cultural
imprint.3
The extent to which British domestic culture was influenced by empire is a matter
of much debate amongst social and cultural theorists, and in this book I join the
debate by examining the work of an author not generally recognised as being an
‘imperial’ writer despite the fact that he was writing during a period of major
imperial expansion. My attempt to reveal the ‘imperialism under the surface’ in the
works of Thomas Hardy will no doubt be greeted with scepticism by some critics,
but will hopefully be endorsed by those many theorists who have endeavoured
to demonstrate the extent to which imperialism formed an integral part of British
social and cultural life in the nineteenth century.
Amongst the sceptics, and in fact referred to as ‘this king of the sceptics’4 by
social and cultural historian Catherine Hall, is the historian Bernard Porter. In his
book The Absent-Minded Imperialists, Porter criticises Edward Said for revealing
‘imperial traits’ in the works of authors such as Austen, Charlotte Brontë and
Dickens, ‘where they had hardly been noticed before’. He considers that Said’s
1 See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism [1993] (London: Vintage, 1994).
2 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 7, 138.
3 Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates
in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. vii.
4 Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan
Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 16.
