Hardy’s Trees

Maxwell Sater, “Hardy's Trees: Ecology and the Question of Knowledge in The Woodlanders” (pp. 92–115) This essay attends to one stranger episodes Thomas Hardy’s fiction: inexplicably linked deaths John South elm tree outside his house. I argue that this subplot is central importance Woodlanders (1887) ecological thinking more generally. Hardy posits an episode resists narrative accommodation: simply, it does not make sense. Its senselessness, contend, indexes a broader discomfort with, rejection of, what Stanley Cavell would call relations knowing as foundation ecology. By reading alongside Cavell, suggest develops mode relation dependent neither on knowledge nor continuity with nonhuman worlds but, rather, negotiation epistemological ontological limits inhering between, instance, humans trees. For Hardy, humane are possible spite those limits; fact, seeking transcend them, plot parodically demonstrates, can be counterproductive.