Wessex, by London: The Metropolitan Gaze in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay offers a sustained engagement with the urban component that is integral to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and in so doing aims to reorient the entrenched reading of Hardy as a “regional novelist,” a tag that risks erroneously downplaying the ways in which the familiar country for which his novels are recognized is already steeped in the process of being unsettled by encroaching change wrought by a proliferating city-based culture. To pay attention to aspects of the rural and the urban in tandem is to access a more dynamic, comprehensive understanding of the emergent shape of the urban process as it reconfigures Wessex. In this respect, my analysis departs from scholarship that presupposes a dichotomy between city and country, a guiding schema that further reinforces constructs of center and periphery, present and past. In what follows, I trace the process by which Wessex, and by extension the identification of Hardy with a distinctive regional culture and landscape, retroactively emerged out of the shift to a metropolis-based culture that intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, I underscore the ways in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) encodes from the outset the exogenous perspective through which the heroine and her village environment are mediated.
Hardy troubles and thwarts with the reader’s entangled complicity with this viewpoint from outside the prospect of an authentic relationship to locality: the terms by which we come to know Wessex are already urban.