[In the following essay, Kerridge maintains that if Thomas Hardy were seen as an important author in the canon of environmental literature, ecocriticism would become more concerned with individuals and society and less with withdrawing into the wilderness.]

Thomas Hardy is an obvious candidate for the ecocritical canon. The best known of English rural novelists, he is intensely responsive to the natural world and human relations with that world. Some of the most exciting passages of English nature writing are in his novels, integrated with a complexity of cultural, political, economic, and emotional life. I suggest that the ecocritical canonization of Hardy would help to produce an ecocriticism (and a nature writing) less preoccupied with deep withdrawal from society. Hardy is concerned with the multiplicity of uses—material, cultural, and emotional—that human beings have for the natural environment. He writes of nature as seen, variously, by the agricultural laborer, urban visitor, Romantic poet, lover, naturalist, young country‐dweller longing for city glamour, ambitious entrepreneur, prosperous or struggling farmer, and many others. If we are searching for narrative procedures that correspond to ecological principles, Hardy's novels are a good place to start.

The natural world does not appear in these novels as wilderness to be reached only by crossing a difficult threshold. Since long before Hardy's time England has not possessed any remote wilderness. The area he named Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878) was the nearest thing southern England could offer even then. Today the heath survives only in patches among roads, quarries, and suburbs. An ecocriticism that canonizes Hardy will be one concerned with crowded environments.

MAPS FOR TOURISTS

Most editions of the novels have at the beginning a map of southern England entitled “Thomas Hardy's Wessex” or “The Wessex of the Novels.” Real place names such as Portsmouth and Stonehenge appear alongside fictional names (in different typeface) such as Casterbridge and Egdon Heath. Many of the fictional names clearly designate real towns. According to Michael Millgate, the first of these maps was “specifically authorized by Hardy” (Biography 250‐51, 361) for the 1895‐1897 edition of the novels, while the map used in the Wessex edition of 1912 was adapted from Hardy's own drawing (Career 397).

Some editions add a glossary identifying Hardy's fictional places. Hardy sometimes teased his readers about the real identities of these places. His 1912 preface to The Woodlanders (1887) declines to name a real village as the model for Little Hintock, but in it he identifies the locality by naming several real landmarks. Hardy tells us that he “once spent several hours on a bicycle with a friend in a serious attempt to discover the real spot” (Woodlanders 36). While preserving the idea that readers might actually visit the ground of the novel, he mocks the pedantry of a searcher more interested in finding the real place than in accepting the characters' experiences as realistic.

That idea has been the basis of the Hardy tourist industry in Dorset ever since. Perhaps Hardy would have viewed it with distaste, but the tourism is consistent with his practice of commodifying the scenes of his rural childhood for a mainly urban and middle‐class readership. After his first manuscript, “The Poor Man and the Lady,” had been rejected in 1868 because of its inflammatory politics (Millgate, Biography 110; F. E. Hardy 58‐59), Hardy turned to more conciliatory modes of fiction. His first published novel, the melodramatic Desperate Remedies (1871), had a mixed reception but was praised for its rural scenes. Then came his first commercial and critical success, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), a novel set in a Dorset village and likely (despite its subtle complications) to be received as elegiac pastoral. Yet as Hardy became more successful, he grew increasingly determined to confront his readers with their complicity in the sufferings of his characters.

Hardy started from a class position immediately above that of the rural laboring classes. Peter Widdowson has traced in Hardy's work a complicated alternation between anger on behalf of the rural poor and disavowal of personal identity with them. Roger Ebbatson finds the same ambivalence in “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” Hardy's essay of 1883 (129‐53). These critics discern a pattern in which Hardy's intimate knowledge of rural working‐class life becomes at once extremely valuable and profoundly shameful to him. The effect was to equip Hardy superbly as a commentator on the intricacy and eroticism of class relations and relations between city and country and to make him subject to severely conflicting desires and loyalties.

Sometimes Hardy demands that his readers should feel trapped by these pressures in an almost bodily way. “Where are you, in relation to these people?” is often an implied question. The idea of chance intervention, of a random passerby arriving to offer help at crucial moments, frequently is flung almost accusingly at the reader. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), a gossipy remark by one of the villagers, months after Tess's rape, suggests that passerby might easily have happened on her in time to save her. “There were they that heard sobbing one night last year in The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had come along” (119). At the moment of the rape, when Tess is most in need of intervention, Hardy forecloses the narrative. As our sense of her danger intensifies, the narrator seems mockingly to cast his gaze around for someone who might come upon the scene as rescuer. The only witnesses present are “primeval yews and oaks,” “gentle roosting birds,” and “hopping rabbits and hares” (101): ironic, useless mock witnesses. A human witness, present in body, would have to intervene or be guilty of intolerable complicity. The reader is not permitted to become a ghostly voyeur, free from this responsibility. Without bodily presence, it seems, we have no right to look. As Alec d'Urberville materializes above Tess's sleeping body, the narrative leaves her to his mercies, abandoning description (relinquishing narrative, in effect) and ascending into a series of rhetorical questions and generalizations in the present tense. A break follows. When we next encounter Tess, several weeks have passed.

Early in Jude the Obscure (1896), the working‐class boy Jude lies weeping by the roadside, having looked for the first time into a Latin grammar. “Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does” (55). This switch from past to present generalizes Jude's plight, undermining the sense of distance that absolves the reader of responsibility. Despite its fatalism, the present tense insists on a present need for remedy and on the reader's membership of the social system that has no use for Jude's desire to read. Readers, in the act of reading, are made to see that activity in the context of an economy in which Jude's reading is superfluous waste.

The idea of crossing the space that divides us from Jude is held out too late. Only in seeing that nobody did come do we recognize the possibility that somebody might have. And, of course, none of us could have come upon Jude, because Jude is a fiction. The principal function of Jude's fictitiousness at this point is that it means we can do nothing to help him. He is in the novel and we are outside it. Hardy often forecloses abruptly in this way, as if readers, because they are unable or unwilling to intervene, should forfeit the right to watch.

At the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Michael Henchard walks out of the town to die. One of his laborers, Abel Whittle, follows him. This is Whittle's report: “And I followed en over Grey's Bridge, and he turned and zeed me, and said, ‘You go back!’ But I followed, and he turned again, and said, ‘Do you hear, sir? Go back!’ But I zeed that he was low, and I followed on still” (330‐31). “You go back!” might be a command to the readers also. Henchard turns his back on the world. In his humiliation, he does not wish to be an object of scrutiny, whether the eyes belong to Whittle or anyone else. Whittle persists, however, and if the narrative had taken up Whittle's viewpoint here, the reader might have had access to the scene of Henchard's death. Whittle would have become the reader's proxy. But Whittle, as his dialect shows, is socially too far beneath the implied reader for such a merging of identity. His speech could not be integrated acceptably with the vocabulary of the narrative voice. He is excluded from the consensual viewpoint the narrative implies, and we are shown that exclusion unsparingly. Whittle follows Henchard, but the reader may not, and Henchard is permitted to walk out of the novel, away from our consuming gaze.

Henchard's request in his last note, his will, is “that no man remember me” (331), a wish that the whole narrative has flouted, as we now realize. The novel ends. Too late, we see our readership as a scrutiny that Henchard seems to have felt and flinched under. Henchard's note momentarily transfers some of the shame to the reader, who has been watching the scene without accepting the responsibilities of bodily presence.

Hardy demands that readers should take seriously the way their presence is implied by the narrative. They should acknowledge that a visitor is not a ghostly, free‐moving figure who watches and leaves no imprint but a bodily presence engaged in an act of consumption that will have material consequences. Tourists are not external to the economy or ecosystem they visit; they are part of it, engaged in an activity likely to transform it.

An ecologist studies forms of life not in isolation but as parts of a system, an economy that sustains them and that they constitute. Hardy's narrative forms bring interdependency to the fore. He has a distinctive way of introducing characters that shows how they ceaselessly make and remake each other's identity. Gabriel Oak at the beginning of Far from the Madding Crowd is a floating signifier whose perceived “character” varies not so much because of his actions as according to the mood of the perceiver. “Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper‐and‐salt mixture” (41). The same formula introduces William Dewy in Under the Greenwood Tree. “Character,” here, means not the person occupying his physical space but the various impressions people have of that person. Oak's “character” has no hard boundaries but is always in flux, always a product of relations with whatever surrounds him.

This remarkable manner of introduction allows the characters to be at once elusively singular and the product of shifting popular opinion. A contrast is drawn between the physical, vulnerable body that must always be somewhere and the “character” as perceived by others, an endlessly changing procession of ideas. To other people, the narrative reminds us at one point, “Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought” (Tess 119). The character is clearly located in time and space but open to unlimited interpretation. Description is denied the power to stabilize character. The meanings people have, that constitute their “character,” are shown to be the product of an environment, a field of meaning in which both readers and characters move.

A similar emphasis is given to the material interdependencies between places: the flow of goods, information, and travelers. A moorland in Far from the Madding Crowd is marked by “forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing, and without more character than that of being the limit of something else” (113), rather like Oak's “pepper‐and‐salt mixture.” And in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess and Angel Clare deliver milk one morning to a train: “‘Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts tomorrow, won't they!’ she asked. ‘Strange people that we have never seen. … Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how we drove two miles across the moor to‐night in the rain that it might reach 'em in time?’” (Tess 215). Tess experiences a Wordsworthian pleasure at this glimpse of the profusion of interconnected life, but Angel mildly patronizes her and the moment passes. The reader may be more responsive to Tess's vision, for this is tantalizingly close to a moment of reciprocity: she might almost be imagining the life of her reader. These narrative forms are especially right for novelists responsive to ecological concerns, since ecology is the study of relationships and interdependencies within shared local environments and of the relation of such environments to larger ecosystems.

SITUATED OBSERVERS

A pointer to an ecocritical theory of narrative is provided by Donna J. Haraway's influential essay “Situated Knowledges,” in which she criticizes the stance of objectivity that scientific writers assume. Hardy's narrative does more than most to meet her requirement that every viewpoint should be “embodied” and “situated”: “I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (188). The marked body is “situated”; it always occupies a particular place and time and is identified in its gendered, racial, and cultural particularity. The unmarked body is ghostly and irresponsible, claiming “the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation” (188). Haraway argues that in Western scientific traditions the white male body has normally been endowed with this unmarked status. White masculine subjectivity has been able to disembody itself and masquerade as a viewpoint of scientific objectivity. Haraway calls this the “god‐trick” (189, 193): a rhetorical assumption of godlike externality, objectivity, and freedom of movement. She proposes that scientists who are responsive to feminism and ecology should renounce the god‐trick, and instead place themselves, as embodied observers, marked bodies, into the descriptions and narratives they produce.

Haraway is asking writers of science to adopt narrative strategies similar to those of novelists who abandon omniscient narrative for a “situated” narrator who is both storyteller and character. Hardy shows that this need not be a restrictive movement from the social and consensual to the inward and individual. Narrative in his novels is not yielded up to unreliable character‐narrators, whose viewpoint is closed and clearly differentiated from that of the implied reader. Hardy retains an impersonal narrative voice, but one that is constantly changing position, moving from one proxy observer to another and drawing on various genres of public address: sermon, newspaper editorial, academic lecture, scientific article, literary essay, and topographical guidebook.

He uses this public domain to construct the readership as an implied moral community. The phantom interventions that, had they happened, might have rescued characters from distress are presented as random interventions (“somebody might have come along that way”) and therefore as potential communal interventions. There is a community of villagers and a much wider community of readers, any of whom might have happened along that way. The narrative commentary on Tess's rape breaks off after these words, “As Tess's own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: ‘It was to be.’ There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine's personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother's door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry‐farm” (Tess 101‐2). “Tess's own people,” of her locality and class, are differentiated from the wider community of readers proposed in that possessive pronoun “our.” It is “our heroine” but “their fatalistic way.” The “we” precariously constituted is middle class, cosmopolitan, and mobile (at least, it does not live down in those retreats). “We,” it seems, are expected to respond to Tess's story with feelings other than the fatalism attributed to her own people. Yet the image that follows, of “an immeasurable social chasm,” deters us from seeing ourselves as more enlightened than her immediate community. We have no right to claim possession of Tess (“our heroine”) in the name of a generalized community while we remain physically distant from her—and while we preserve that social chasm.

Soon, Angel Clare will chance upon Tess and become her middle‐class lover, embodying (and eroticizing) the readerly fantasy of rescuing Tess. In this role he will fail her catastrophically. His failure might be called a tourist's failure. Drawn to her because of a cultural fantasy he projects onto her, he recoils when she reveals her difference from that fantasy. “I thought I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks” (Tess 263‐64).

Communities may be sheltering or punitive. Refuge from them may be sought either by appeal to a still wider circle or by retreat into privacy. Tess, Jude, Henchard, and others are exposed, throughout the novels, to a rich mixture of local commentary that is gossipy, joky, sympathetic, and scornful. Many of these comments are clearly distanced from those of the narrator and from the viewpoint of the implied reader, but some comments are indeterminately placed, possibly both “ours” and “theirs,” so that the distance between the village community and the community of implied readers alternately widens and shrinks.

Henchard's feeling that he is under scrutiny apparently persists even when he is alone. About to throw himself into a river, he sees floating beneath him his own effigy, discarded by the crowd that has mocked him (Madding Crowd 300). He encounters his own gaze, as if he has himself joined the circle of his accusers. Eventually he is permitted to walk away from our scrutiny, but he seems unable to escape the shaming narrative he has internalized, the public crowd inside his head, until he dies. Insistently, these novels remind us that the most private stories inside people's heads are of external origin, that each anecdote told in public has private repercussions, and that public and personal narratives are as interdependent as country and city.

Haraway asks for a “commitment to mobile positioning”: a practice of science and writing in which “one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement. Vision is always a question of the power to see—and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices” (192). Hardy's narrative begins to answer these requirements, repeatedly pressing us to account for the multiple and shifting positions in which it places us. Haraway asserts, “Positioning is, therefore, the key practice grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision, as so much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is organized. Positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices” (193).

In Hardy's narrative it is the frequent shifting, in spatial and social terms, of the reader's perspective that brings to life such a sense of responsibility. The reader may be positioned close to a character and then made to retreat to the perspective of a passing tourist. Suddenly, after long, intimate knowledge of them, we are shown how Tess and the other milkmaids might have seemed at first glance. “Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they did, they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row—automatic, noiseless; and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane might well have been excused for massing them as ‘Hodge’” (Tess 167). This move places the reader in an intermediate position, distanced both from the dairymaids and from this insensitive observer. Yet at times Tess might have found sanctuary precisely by losing herself in the identity of a group. Conspicuousness is often her undoing. Twice, Angel picks her out from among her peers. Camouflage might have protected her. Each shift of the narrator's position asks us to reassess our own.

TWO WAYS OF LOVING NATURE

Two forms of pleasure in the natural world appear in Hardy's novels. The unalienated lover of nature inhabits; the alienated lover of nature gazes. The first is a native, deeply embedded in a stable ecosystem; the second is a Romantic, a tourist, a newcomer, and a reader. The conventional assumption is that the transition from preindustrial to industrial society abolishes the first and engenders the second. Many of Hardy's characters are enmeshed in the technological and social changes that produce this transition. His novels are appreciative of both ways of loving nature and intent on exploring the relationship between them. Environmentalists hope it may be possible to break the sequence in which estrangement from nature is followed by Romantic regret and desire. They believe in the possibility of sustainable forms of development that will not estrange communities from their natural environments. Environmentalists seek to build alliances between tourist and native, hoping for an eventual society in which everyone will move between these positions.

The alienated observer tends to see unreflective happiness in the lives of the unalienated. In a journal entry dated 1889, Hardy takes this to a point of splendidly gloomy absurdity: “A woeful fact—that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment. Even the higher animals are in excess in this respect. It may be questioned if Nature, or what we call Nature, so far back as when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission. This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences” (qtd. in F. E. Hardy 218). Happiness is attributed sardonically to “lower” animals, such as the maggots Mrs. Yeobright watches “heaving and wallowing with enjoyment” in a heathland pool (Return 285). Deep in their immediate ecosystem, they have no horizon beyond it.

The Romantic subjectivity of the lover of natural history is here taken to an uncomfortable extreme. More usually, the turn of attention to nature in the form of small‐scale life at the margins of human affairs brings relief from the pressure of events. This is the naturalist's pastoral: a diversion from the unhappiness that burdens “higher existences.” Concentrated in a moment, the effect can be obliquely erotic, suggestive of intense focus on small areas of a person's body. Hardy sometimes places these moments of diversion at points of extreme pressure. Grace, in The Woodlanders, sheltering in Giles Winterborne's cottage, is becoming uneasy about Giles's failure to reappear. She hears a rustling outside the window, the sound of a newt moving in the fallen leaves (322). Her heightened, expectant senses catch a sound she would normally miss—an example that is almost hallucinatory in its extension of normal perception. The moment registers a peculiar mixture of ennui and apprehension, as Grace holds off her growing anxiety. The emotional function of such a glimpse is foregrounded, not concealed.

Lawrence Buell asks why nature writers so often “create landscapes in which obscure or overlooked objects become magnified or more densely rendered than they would be in the ordinary experience of them?” (103). He argues that the purpose of this “deliberate dislocation of ordinary perception” is to remind us of neglected nonhuman perspectives and move us toward “environmental literacy” (104, 107). An ecocentric vision seeks not only to assert the value of these perspectives but also somehow to accommodate them in the human sphere, in “plot,” since they are constitutive of human life. It is not fanciful to credit Hardy with similar aims.

Jude is the character with the most highly developed sympathy for nonhuman creatures. He is punished for allowing hungry birds to feed (Jude 39). He tiptoes to avoid crushing earthworms (41). He pities his pig and sacrifices some of its economic value by killing it swiftly (86‐89). In all this he is an ironically ineffectual version of an omniscient God who sees even the woe of a sparrow. Jude attempts a godlike compassion without the advantages of God's position. Jude's determination to take account of the feelings of small creatures—interests for which the normal human economy has no room—is a benign, quixotic version of Haraway's god‐trick. Jude's human attempt at godly omniscience is a reproof to a supposedly loving God who has not provided an economy merciful to all forms of life. Unlike Christ's intercession, Jude's is ineffectual: he takes the punishment onto himself without saving others.

Jude's concern for all creatures is scorned, like his aspiration to study at Christminster, as foolishness or vanity. At the pig killing, Arabella tells him with moral force, “Poor folks must live” (88). Jude may be one of those “higher existences” whose nerves have evolved to a degree that unfits them for life on this planet, but he does not himself draw this conclusion, despair of the planet, and retreat into private concerns. Even at his most weary, Jude rejects the flattering charge that he is unworldly, preferring the idea of incremental progress. “It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one,” he says (336). “Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us” (405).

Jude's concern for the natural world is ineffectual because it is not a shared, communal concern. His gaze is anguished while the tourist's is delighted, but both gaze from outside. Unalienated pleasure in nature occurs, by contrast, neither in distress nor leisure; it happens in the course of daily work. “Winterborne's fingers were endowed with a gentle conjuror's touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth” (Woodlanders 93). To outsiders such as Grace and the reader, Giles's unalienated labor seems a kind of magic or lovemaking. His is the communal knowledge that comes from growing up, living, and working in a stable ecosystem. It is lost when social mobility carries a person away from their community and work, as Grace is sent from Little Hintock to learn the manners of a higher social position. On her return, she has forgotten the names of the apples grown around her home (72). After Giles's death, Grace feels wistful amazement when she discovers how Giles and Marty used to work together in the woods. Theirs was a knowledge of minutiae that was neither eccentric nor self‐conscious. “From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces when brushing through them in the dark either could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough either could in like manner name its sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay; and by the state of its upper twigs the stratum that had been reached by its roots” (340‐41). To this narrator, their work, hard as it is, possesses the undividedness of mind and body, self and environment, that is the object of so much Romantic longing. The reader stands outside the book, but Giles and Marty inhabit the woods. The novel's very tribute to their culture is an act of commodification.

Giles and Marty have a practical knowledge of the woodlands of the type that Ray Dasmann attributes to the communities he calls “ecosystem people.” These are communities “totally dependent, or largely so, on the animals and plants of a particular area” (21), deeply accustomed to that area and in stable, sustainable relation to the local ecosystem. Gary Paul Nabhan explores the interdependency of work, play, and story that enables such communities to live in practical intimacy with their environment. Nabhan's examples are the O'odham people of Arizona and the Australian Aboriginals of Alice Springs. Hardy's Wessex villages are not exactly indigenous preindustrial communities, but they are the nearest thing to what Nabhan identifies as a “culture of habitat” still to be found in late‐nineteenth‐century England. Little Hintock, in its wooded enclave, is the most secluded and unadulterated of Hardy's communities: the most deeply engrossed in its immediate environment. The plots often turn on the disruptive arrival in such places of forces from outside. Characters arrive or return; new technologies are introduced. Giles and Marty's close association with trees signifies deep‐rootedness but also vulnerability. Like trees they are unable to flee.

Yet each newcomer is only relatively new. Grace returns to Little Hintock as an alienated outsider, but to Fitzpiers she seems indigenous to that community while he stands outside it. The continual shifts of perspective make it difficult for the reader to see intervention merely as destructive. Each change of perspective itself marks an intervention: a moment of arrival. Such narrative mobility is incompatible with a simply conservative attitude to change. True, the ambiguity of Grace's social position causes disastrous confusion. True, Tess's calamities follow from the indeterminate position that makes her both aristocrat and laborer, while Jude's misfortune comes of his unrealistic aspirations. But in Hardy's novels the message that social mobility brings disaster is as bitterly ironic as the suggestion that nature would have done better not to progress from invertebrates to vertebrates. To read Hardy as conservative and hostile to social mobility is to misrepresent him brutally. His novels are profoundly—one might say dangerously—unreconciled to inequalities of wealth and power. Restless desire for advancement and novelty is the source of vitality and pleasure as well as tragedy. The novels show the havoc wrought by such desires but also the mortifying effect when they are thwarted.

The conservatism that depicts an idealized preindustrial past as a natural way of life is still strong. Environmentalism is often confused with this nostalgia, sometimes by environmentalists. Ecocriticism may have been slow to gain recognition in England because of a prevalent assumption that nature writing cannot escape this conservatism. The ruralists of the interwar period, most of them admirers of Hardy, brought nature writing in England into grave disrepute. Writers such as H. V. Morton, H. J. Massingham, and Henry Williamson sought in villages and farming communities the ideal England for which British soldiers had fought. Authentic rural life, free from encroachment, was the antidote to the modernity that had produced the war. In Williamson's case, the conservatism became fascism. After 1945, public enthusiasm for “nature” was evident in the popularity of natural history books and the emergence of television wildlife documentaries, but literary nature writing remained heavily tainted.

Environmentalism calls for a new nature writing, clearly differentiated from the conservative tradition and aware of its appeals and dangers. To ecocritics, Hardy's great value is that he shows the possibility of a nature writing not always in search of stability, not simply hostile to change and incursion. His abundant relativity shows nature writers an alternative to the genre's most menacing traditions: Nietzschean admiration of nature's amoral power and conservative nostalgia for mythical feudal harmonies. Against these, Hardy offers the endless generation of meaning as the vivid life of a place, produced by its human, animal, and plant life: a creative life that newcomers enhance if they come with an awareness of relative positions. Hence the suggestion that we might visit his places now.

A vision Nabhan expresses with eloquence is that a creative relationship may be possible between indigenous cultures of habitat and postmodern cultures of technology. Such a relationship would bypass the familiar sequence in which industrialization destroys the culture of habitat that then becomes an object of nostalgic desire: the perversity that catches so many characters in Hardy and compromises so much nature writing. In this utopia (to sketch it a little flippantly), a postmodern Giles Winterborne would not die of exposure, nor would he lose his dwelling because of a feudal property law. He would retain his native understanding of the woods and continue his sustainable forestry, protected by a modern health service and enjoying access to the wider world through television and the Internet. Indigenous culture would no longer stand as the binary opposite of modernity and would no longer be the lost golden age, the innocent primitive, or (the flip side of that) the narrow, ignorant, and brutal primitive. Frail as this hope seems, it does attempt the difficult task of properly valuing three things often seen as incompatible: natural environments as loved by tourists and other alienated romantics, indigenous cultures of habitat, and the material benefits of modernity.

This utopia would require of its inhabitants a high degree of self‐consciousness about their own continually shifting positions. Such self‐consciousness is required of environmentalists who wish to avoid simple nostalgia for an idealized preindustrial culture. Nabhan duly situates himself, in Cultures of Habitat, telling a story of himself as an Arab American adolescent lover occupying a complex cross‐cultural position (89‐96). He suggests that we might value our own shifts from position to position as a sort of rich diversity, as necessary as biodiversity. A famous passage from The Return of the Native shows us some ways of doing this.

Clym Yeobright is working as a furze‐cutter on Egdon Heath:

This man from Paris was now so disguised by his leather accoutrements, and by the goggles he was obliged to wear over his eyes, that his closest friend might have passed by without recognising him. He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive‐green gorse and nothing more. Though frequently depressed in spirit, when not actually at work, owing to thoughts of Eustacia's position and his mother's estrangement, when in the full swing of labour he was cheerfully disposed and calm.

His daily life was of a curious microscopic sort, his whole world being limited to a circuit of a few feet from his person. His familiars were creeping and winged things, and they seemed to enroll him in their band. Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze‐flowers. … The strange amber‐coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips. … Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin‐fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood‐red transparency in which the veins could be seen. None of them feared him.

(Return 262)

This is nature as paradise temporarily and inadvertently regained. Yeobright's damaged eyesight has forced him to give up his studies. In training to be a schoolteacher he has already taken a step of deliberate, downward social mobility. Now he descends even further and finds an unexpected happiness. Reading represents his aspiration to see beyond his immediate surroundings; deprived of this, Yeobright discovers, in work rather than contemplation, a release from self‐consciousness and alienation. He has literally come closer to nature. The move is symbolized by his absorption into the landscape. Simultaneously, Yeobright is the man from Paris and a brown spot in an expanse of gorse. This juxtaposition does not merely show us the distance he has come; it positions us where we can see both Yeobrights. Neither perception is to be abandoned.

The capacity Yeobright has lost is tacitly compared to the knowledge Adam and Eve gained from the forbidden fruit, which caused them to feel shame and to be expelled from Paradise. Renouncing it, Yeobright is able to return to the Egdon of his childhood and to Paradise. In an unfallen world, the animals no longer fear him. Briefly he returns with a completeness never accomplished by others who return, such as Grace and Angel. But Hardy is insistent about the cost of return. This closeness to nature means loss of vision—loss, for example, of the longer scientific perspectives that may now enable us to foresee ecological disaster. Yeobright becomes as vulnerable as the animals and insects with whom he shares the heath.

That amber‐colored butterfly poses the problem in miniature. It is almost certainly the Lulworth Skipper, Thymelicus aeteon. Tom Tolman's Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe lists this butterfly as first recorded in Britain in 1832, giving its range as “in Britain restricted to the Dorset coast” (275). Hardy's narrator does not give the scientific name, nor even the English name, although elsewhere, as the narrative shifts in register, we have, with Ulex europaeus, just the scientific name (Return 89), and with the Cream‐Coloured Courser, just the English name (109). If we know the scientific name, we may also know that the butterfly's whole range includes much of southern Europe and northern West Africa. Its rarity is relative. The withholding of these names presents the butterfly as it is known locally, intimately. The narrative keeps both perspectives in play.

Buell identifies Richard Jefferies rather than Hardy as “Thoreau's English counterpart” (105). Hardy he finds problematical as an ecocentric writer because, despite the depth of his portrayal of such environments as Egdon Heath, “the heath is in the long run ancillary to Clym's story,” and the novel “is about people in place, not about place itself” (255). I have attempted to show that the special value of Hardy to ecocritics is precisely in the way he does not separate place and person. He will not allow anything, place or person, to stabilize in meaning; its meaning is always the product of a shifting set of relations and always seen in the act of generation by those relations. Paradoxically, this is to create a stronger sense of the elusive, excessive presence of places, since the descriptions and narratives they generate never cohere for long and are quickly exposed as relative.

Works Cited

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Dasmann, Ray. Wildlife Biology. New York: John Wiley, 1964.

Ebbatson, Roger. Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association, 1991.

Hardy, Florence Emily. The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840‐1928. London: Macmillan, 1972.

Hardy, Thomas. Desperate Remedies. 1871. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. Far from the Madding Crowd. 1874. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. Jude the Obscure. 1896. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. The Mayor of Casterbridge. 1886. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. The Return of the Native. 1878. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 1891. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. Under the Greenwood Tree. 1872. London: Macmillan, 1975.

———. The Woodlanders. 1887. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist. London: The Bodley Head, 1971.

———. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Nabhan, Gary Paul. Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1997.

Tolman, Tom. Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe. London: Harper‐Collins, 1997.

Widdowson, Peter. Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology. London: Routledge, 1989.