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BOOK REVIEWS
Woman as Nature,
Nature as Woman
Tracy Hayes
Henson, Eithne. Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George
Eliot and Thomas Hardy: The Body of Nature. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.,
2011. 225 pages. Hardcover. $119.96.

Eithne Henson’s stated aim for this book is to “look at a wide

range of representations of physical and mental landscapes in
the work of three nineteenth-century novelists” while also “ex-
ploring the way in which gender attitudes are expressed, both
in descriptions of physical landscape” and also in the idea of
Nature itself (1). In this her study of novels by Charlotte Brontë,
George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy is largely successful. Her read-
ings of all three authors probe what constitutes the experience
and perception of “Nature” as a gendered construct, exploring
the multitude of both positive and negative connotations but
never losing sight of the idea that “looking at landscape gives
pleasure” (1). Both cultivated and uncultivated landscapes are
explored within Henson’s chosen novels, with attention duly
being paid to the recurring theme of industrial encroachment
and despoliation, particularly as represented in Brontë’s Shirley.
“Literary landscape implies a viewer, whether a narrator
or a character” (5), and, of course, in Hardy’s The Return of the
Native Egdon heath itself becomes a character, imbued with a
physiognomy and personality that pervades the novel. Henson
points out that such literary landscapes imply an aesthetic theory
of construction and evaluation, a theory that in the nineteenth
century differed greatly from that of the Romantics of the

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preceding century. With the coming of the railways, agricultural

mechanization, and the mass movement of populations from
rural to urban settings, “changes in aesthetic and scientific
approaches to the countryside” resulted in a “change in
definitions of Englishness” (4) (and Henson’s book does indeed
concentrate solely upon the English countryside rather than the
British countryside).
In common with the tradition of the idyll Henson notes
that the pastoral often proves a moral indicator for the reader:
country life is always represented as innocent, the symbol of
an easier past, contrasted with the inherent corruption of the
city or court. For nineteenth-century novelists and artists alike,
the countryside, or “Nature,” directly opposed “the dynamic,
mechanized, inventive present of the industrial city,” serving to
highlight “the filth and misery concomitant upon such ‘prog-
ress’” (6), a trope employed with particularly powerful effect in
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.
Henson’s idea of Nature as gendered relies heavily upon psy-
choanalytic theory and the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and her
decision whether or not to capitalize the word “nature” through-
out the book depends upon whether it appears as “a personified
entity” or as more generally representative of “the biological or
geological worlds” (9). She quotes from de Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex: “woman is related to nature, she incarnates it” (9), and she
informs us that such metaphors as the sea as “archetypal mother
of all life, enclosures represent[ing] the female [and] verticals
the phallic,” will be adopted as interpretations throughout her
study (9). Henson is also careful, however, to refer to Edmund
Burke’s theory of the sublime, William Gilpin’s observations on
the picturesque, and John Ruskin’s writings on the perception
of landscape and how these equally impact upon critical analysis
of the nineteenth-century realist novel.
Hardy is the only male novelist Henson has chosen to discuss,
specifically because he writes from the point of view of both
sexes when describing “the physical labour of cultivation” (20).
84 PLL Tracy Hayes

Brontë’s female characters are usually “observers and recorders”

of the landscape, and Eliot’s female laborers “are hardly more
than part of the rustic chorus,” their indoor life linked with “the
economics of farming,” female agricultural work playing little
or no part (20).
In the chapter on Brontë Henson begins by noting Charlotte’s
imbibing of Gilpin’s notions of the picturesque in her many copies
of nature engravings and also of the influence of John Martin’s
“sublime and apocalyptic landscapes” (27) (indeed Martin was
a painter particularly favored by the Reverend Patrick Brontë
for his powerful depictions of morality and punishment), along
with her reading in 1848 of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which
praised the work of J.M.W. Turner. Charlotte visited exhibitions
of Turner’s work in London, and Henson points to the Brontë
biographer Heather Glen as arguing that “much of the mental
landscape imagery of Villette borrows from Turner’s paintings”
(28). Henson provides readings of Jane Eyre and Shirley and
briefly touches upon Villette; The Professor remains conspicuously
absent from these pages, one assumes because the narrator of
the novel is male, though this would have somewhat boosted
her arguments for the gendering of Nature.
Jane Eyre arguably contains the most fertile ground for explo-
rations of the gendering of landscape of all the Brontë novels,
including those of Anne and Emily. The use of pathetic fallacy
pervades this narrative, but it is elevated to the sublime as early
as the opening paragraph with the (adult) narrator’s invocation
of Thomas Bewick: the child Jane reads Bewick’s description of
the Arctic Zone, “the accumulation of centuries of winters” (29),
the imagery of this harsh landscape perfectly encapsulating her
own desolate childhood. Henson describes Lowood School as a
“symbolic enclosure confining child and woman,” but rather than
acting as a site of womb-like refuge, the occupants are instead
“cold and starved” (32). It is when Jane sets out for Thornfield
in the capacity of governess, “engag[ing] with the landscape in
the male narrative mode of the quest,” that she matures (37),
“Woman as Nature, Nature as Woman” PLL 85

and images of Nature as woman and woman as Nature prolif-

erate. The moon is a “warning mother” (46), but there is also
Thornfield itself, the thorns in the meadow “‘strong, knotty
and broad as oaks’, and thus belonging with what are reliably
male symbols” (37). Finally, with Jane’s entrance into Ferndean
where the now lame Rochester has taken refuge, the trope
of the enclosure as female is inverted, for it is now Rochester
who is “constricted and powerless,” and Jane’s final quest sees
her “penetrate” the space where he has become emasculated,
“reduced to the condition of female stasis and isolation” (54).
The section on Shirley is inevitably shorter than that of Char-
lotte’s most famous novel, and Villette is only referred to fleetingly
when comparing Charlotte’s female protagonists. Henson tells us
that in Shirley there are “few constructions of women as nature . .
. and the women in the novel do not read each other as nature”
(69). Instead the novel is situated between two sites: Hollow’s
Mill and Nunnwood. The first is the domain of Robert Moore,
representing a male industrial world of “control and prescription,
machinery and science, utilitarian calculation, virtuous diligence
and self-help” (56); it is also the scene of social and political
unrest and male violence, the Luddite riots, with which Char-
lotte’s father Patrick was very familiar. In contrast, Nunnwood,
its very name conjuring images of the cloistered world of the
convent, “embodies the world of the female imagination, of the
romantic past of enchantment . . . read and mediated through
the consciousness of . . . Caroline, Shirley and Mrs Prior” (56).
Where Shirley begins the novel as an independent, forthright,
and somewhat masculine character (in the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth century ‘Shirley’ was in fact
a male name), she acquiesces to the somewhat feminine Louis
Moore, renouncing her power to command, her status as “li-
oness,” tamed in order to marry. As Henson reminds us, “it is
the reversal so common to women’s fiction in the nineteenth
century: the woman who is seen to have freedom of action and
utterance, must be restored to dependence and status” (73).
86 PLL Tracy Hayes

The chapter on George Eliot begins by acknowledging the

debt Eliot owed to Ruskin’s Modern Painters series and to what
was known as The Dutch School of art (indeed Hardy was also
influenced by this movement, the subtitle of Under the Greenwood
Tree being ‘A Painting from the Dutch School’). According to
Henson, Eliot was praised for being the first author to portray
rustic life realistically, but she also gave “herself the pastoral
advantage of setting her novels in the historic past” (80). Henson
provides in depth readings of five Eliot publications: Scenes of
Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and
Daniel Deronda. It is pleasing to see Clerical Life, a book that does
not receive a great deal of critical attention, the subject of detailed
analysis. In this chapter Henson concentrates upon “womens’
economic relationship to the landscape” and is “particularly
interested in Eliot’s construction of a male narrator in the early
novels, and ‘his’ presentation of women” (82).
In “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story” the reader is presented with
Foxholm, a landscape lacking any pretension to gentility such
as that exhibited by Cheverel Manor; it instead “conforms to
the reassuring Gainsborough or Stubbs ideal of well-fed, clean,
contented country people” (87), with Dorcas and her children
all red chubby cheeks, signifying their harmony with the rustic
idyll. In “Janet’s Repentance” the home of the Dempsters is
misleadingly picturesque in description, suggesting innocence
and fruitfulness in its Tudor vernacular. But as Henson observes,
“It seems to promise fruitfulness and rustic happiness, but is
instead the setting for Dempster’s brutal tyranny and Janet’s
despairing drinking” (88). She goes on to state that as early as
this, Eliot’s first fiction, the author is already providing remark-
able representations “of women as nature, whether benevolent
or malevolent” (89). The section on Adam Bede of necessity con-
centrates upon the characters of Hetty and Dinah, one flighty
and girlishly erotic, the other studious and caring. But as Hen-
son notes, “the simple opposition of selfishness and altruism, of
instrumental sexuality and asexual spirituality, is complicated
“Woman as Nature, Nature as Woman” PLL 87

by a number of factors” (96). She believes that this happens

because the narrator is “insistently male,” which allows Eliot to
“play ironically with traditional languages of approval, in which
woman is objectified as nature under the male gaze, but at the
same time, to create an erotically convincing image” (96). Hetty
Sorrell is presented as curvaceous, undeniably sexual, yet the
narrator compares her beauty to that of kittens, a “beauty with
which one can never be angry” (in the words of Eliot’s narrator).
Henson asks if this is a male attempt “to minimise the woman’s
power by de-sexualizing her as nature,” which is made all the
more ironic by the author being female.
The discussions of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch both
mention Eliot’s use of pathetic fallacy, female subjectivity, and
the inextricable link between the women of the novels and the
landscapes they inhabit. Daniel Deronda, however, is a much more
political novel, and, consequently, Henson draws attention to
the two worlds presented: the English country house “and the
‘Jewish’ river Thames” (115). In this novel there “is no reassur-
ing pastoral” (115), rather the “English establishment feudal-
ism” of Brackenshaw Park (120) and Mordecai’s humble room
“looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows” across
Blackfriar’s bridge in London (122). These are male-dominated
spaces in a predominantly male quest narrative, thus rather than
featuring analyses of gender and landscape, Henson’s reading
of this novel concentrates more upon the Jewish diaspora and
its impact upon notions of “Englishness.” One quibble with
this chapter is that Henson refers to Eliot and her partner G.H.
Lewes as “the Leweses” (76) when in fact they famously never
married, causing Eliot’s family to disown her: an incongruous
mistake to make when discussing the work of such a prominently
independent female author.
The chapter on Hardy is by far the longest, providing excel-
lent readings of Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the
Native, The Woodlanders and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. By choosing
these four major novels it is surprising that there is no discus-
88 PLL Tracy Hayes

sion of Jude the Obscure or The Mayor of Casterbridge, both of which

present numerous instances of gendered landscapes. As Henson
herself states at the beginning of the chapter, “His landscapes are
intensely visual; they are heavily loaded with symbolic meaning;
they are physically instrumental to the plots, and, above all, they
are inescapably gendered” (127). Again her arguments would
have benefited from the balance provided by readings of these
two male protagonist led narratives; as Henson goes on to note,
however, she has concentrated on novels “which most obviously
present . . . women as Nature” (128).
According to Henson, “For Hardy, woman is nature, among
whose binary opposites could be culture, reason, art, adulthood,
activity and the masculine, as well as the urban and corrupt”
(130). This provocative statement comes just after proclaiming
Bathsheba Everdene’s ownership of land as endowing her with
“a masculine power,” which Henson sees as both “disturbing to
the plot and to [Bathsheba] herself” (129). Bathsheba’s char-
acter is indeed complex, being at times presented as vain and
flippant, as in the case of her Valentine to Boldwood, but also
as strong and fiercely independent, witnessed in her speech
to her predominantly male employees upon taking control of
Weatherbury farm, but always she remains under the male gaze.
In common with the Hardy critic Rosemarie Morgan, Henson
describes Gabriel Oak as a voyeur, emphasizing the “subjectivity”
of his responses to Bathsheba (131), but, refreshingly, Henson
does not vilify Oak for his “clandestine gaze,” for Bathsheba in
fact connives in a “culturally determined acceptance of male
mirrors” (133). She knows that her beauty affords her more
respect for her position as a manageress in a predominantly
male business world than would have been the case if she had
been physically unattractive. It is also gratifying to see the char-
acter of Fanny Robin dealt with at length, a protagonist who is
all too often sidelined in critical analysis of the novel. Fanny is
an integral part of the plot, intricately connected to both the
landscape and the use of pathetic fallacy. As Henson points out,
“Woman as Nature, Nature as Woman” PLL 89

Fanny “is neither the fieldwoman nor the pastoralized milkmaid,

nor has she Bathsheba’s disturbing autonomy. For her, to be
outside is not to be free, but to be alienated” (133). Until her
death Fanny is only ever seen “outside” and always presented as
diminutive. It is not until she is in her coffin, her dead baby ly-
ing alongside her, that she finally inhabits the domestic interior,
and it is at this point that she is triumphant in her innocence,
purity, and beauty.
In the section on The Return of the Native, Egdon heath is
rightly dwelt upon at length. Henson believes that this particular
landscape is gendered male, rather than being a part of “Mother
Nature” (144). She compares the heath to a Titan, which for her
“affirms” its “masculinity.” The heath is described as “inviolate”;
Henson observes that “in the familiar image of colonial conquest
. . . virgin land is female, raped and impregnated by the male
pioneers, but here, the body not only resists rape, but also resists
becoming female” (149). Indeed, rather than earth as nurturing
Mother, Egdon is responsible for the death of Mrs Yeobright.
In fact, the question of masculinity pervades this novel: Henson
points to Christian Cantle’s questionable sexuality (he is viewed
by the other characters as a hermaphrodite) and to Damon
Wildeve’s effeminacy and inability to conquer his landscape.
Then there is Diggory Venn, viewed by many feminist critics as a
voyeur and instrument of moral repression; gratifyingly, Henson
instead describes Venn as a “warden,” protecting the occupants
of the heath (150). She sees him as “the most conventionally
masculine of the men in the novel” (157), as opposed to Clym
Yeobright (the returned native of the title), whose masculinity is
constantly called into question by both his mother and his wife.
Henson’s reading of The Woodlanders contains many
observations already familiar from previous critical analysis: the
Hintock Woods are female and fecund, and Grace Melbury and
Felice Charmond have rejected the landscape for superficial
feminine attainments and are thus ultimately rejected by it
in turn. The only two characters who are truly a part of their
90 PLL Tracy Hayes

surroundings are Marty South and Giles Winterborne, both of

whom receive extended treatment from Henson. Both Marty’s
ungendering process and Winterborne’s position as a fertility
God are mentioned, though more could have been made of the
irony that these two nurturing characters who provide succor
to the landscape are ultimately themselves barren. Henson
finishes by discussing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, again reiterating
observations previously made by others: the action of the novel
is “faithfully mirrored in the landscape” (188), and Tess stands
out in literature as being the female figure “most associated with
nature, whether the images are animal, fruit or flower” (189).
Henson’s conclusion is a thorough summation of the book
along with extra observations, such as “soil and women [being]
interchangeably fruitful or barren” (207), and Charlotte Brontë’s
ability to render landscape as a “synaesthetic perception of
sound and distance” (208). An extensive bibliography running
to fifteen pages is followed by an exceptionally helpful index,
but one is left with a startling question: in a book devoted to the
intricacies and intertextual nature of landscape, why are there
so very few illustrations or photographs? This quibble aside,
Henson’s book is an important contribution to a subject that
still has many avenues of exploration available.
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CONTRIBUTORS

Jill Kirsten Anderson is Associate Professor of English

Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, where she teaches courses in early American
literature and directs SIUE’s English Education program. Her
research focuses on American novels in the early national period,
and she contributes to The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, an
exploration of the reprints of Susan Warner’s bestselling novel,
edited by Jessica DeSpain.

Joseph Cunningham is an English instructor and Coordinator

of the Academic Writing Center at the University of Cincinnati.
He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Studies and specializes in critical
theory, particularly Marxism.

Tracy Hayes’s PhD thesis with The Open University investigated

representations of masculinity within the novels of Thomas
Hardy. She is the student co-ordinator for the Thomas Hardy
Society in the U.K., the Checklist Director for the Thomas Hardy
Association in the U.S., and has published a number of essays
and book reviews on Hardy’s work

Sabine Sautter-Léger (Ph.D, McGill University) is a professor

of English at Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, where she
specializes in modernist and contemporary literature. She has
published works of short fiction as well as articles on twentieth-
century poetry and prose.

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permission.