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3 The Rise of the State as a Sympathetic Liberal Subject in Hardy’s The Woodlanders To hear these two poor Arcadian innocents talk of imperial law would have made a humane person weep who should have known what a dangerous structure they were building up on their supposed knowledge. They remained in thought, like children in the presence of the incomprehensible. —Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887)1 The British did not fantasize only about Scots and Afghans, of course. The middle classes, to be more specific, entertained a robust set of fantasies about the rural working classes within Britain. As scholars of regional literature and of modern European nationalism have observed, the British middle classes had been fantasizing about rural folk for about as long as the British nation and the middle classes can be said to exist. While the Highlanders and insurgent Afghans came to embody the contradictory qualities of savagery and civility in the late Victorian period, England’s rural folk stood paradoxically for both physical baseness and metaphysical purity. Unable to vote because they did not meet property qualifications, agricultural laborers nevertheless represented iconic Englishness. In this chapter, my examination of modern state personhood moves from novels set in colonial and imperial zones to one set in the English countryside . Specifically, I focus on The Woodlanders (1887), Thomas Hardy’s rustic novel of thwarted love and living decay. Populated by dialect-speaking rustics , his rural novels fed a healthy appetite for picturesque scenes of the countryside. Hardy famously rebelled against this appropriative way of reading his tragic tales. In his 1883 essay, ‘‘The Dorsetshire Labourer,’’ a lament about the alienating and deterritorializing effects of agricultural capitalism, he took a jab at the bourgeois view of farm workers as timeless and outside of history and politics: ‘‘[Agricultural laborers] are losing their individuality, but they are widening the range of their ideas, and gaining in freedom. It is 85 86 The State as a Sympathetic Liberal Subject in The Woodlanders too much to expect them to remain stagnant and old-fashioned for the pleasure of romantic spectators’’ (1883, 181). In this chapter, I suggest that Hardy questioned a political and social climate in which the state was intervening more in citizens’ lives, but in unequal ways. In particular, he probed the implications of the fantasies and feelings that the idea of the state as a sympathetic person incited in rural subjects. Rural folk were not impervious to biopolitical management, but their experience of it, according to Hardy, differed from urban and semi-urban folks and was shaped by their marginal political status and geographic distance from the metropolitan centers of England. In the epigraph, ‘‘Arcadian innocents’’ refers to the rural protagonists Grace Melbury and Giles Winterborne. The ‘‘imperial law’’ they appear to be discussing is a distorted version of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which they tragically believe makes divorce easily available to all. Throughout the majority of the novel, Grace, the educated daughter of a timber merchant, has been locked in a disastrous marriage. When the village’s unof ficial counsel, Beaucock, a disgraced former law clerk, informs her distressed father, Melbury, about the allegedly democratic divorce law, he races off from Little Hintock to the courts of London to try to obtain his daughter ’s freedom. Before galloping away, Melbury enjoins Grace to renew her interrupted courtship with Giles, a virtuous if reticent yeoman farmer and also her childhood sweetheart. Now, as the two would-be lovers wait for news from London, they anxiously turn over the bewildering details of the divorce procedure: the ‘‘legal part’’ and whether it is done (‘‘not yet quite done and finished, as is natural’’) or almost done (‘‘But father said it was almost—did he not?’’); whether one signs a paper or swears an oath (‘‘Yes, I believe so’’); and how long the law has been around (‘‘About six months or a year, the lawyer said, I think’’) (282). In this scene, Hardy seems to be parodying the kind of political discussion that liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill argued were edifying for England’s disenfranchised classes. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill describes a form of debate and deliberation that lifts a manual laborer, ‘‘whose way of life brings him in contact with no variety of impressions, circumstances, or ideas,’’ out of his ‘‘small circle’’ and into the political nation, learning ‘‘to feel for and with his fellow citizens’’ and becoming ‘‘consciously a...

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