The End of the Farm? Thomas Hardy’s Agricultural Vision

Abstract

In his depictions of rural life in semi-fictional Wessex, Thomas Hardy has sometimes been charged with romanticising rural life and portraying the pastoral instead of the real. His characters frequently inhabit agricultural communities, which form the basis of their lives and livelihoods. In tension with the pastoral, romanticised village is the recognition of agriculture as a capitalist venture: Hardy’s writings capture the end of the old sense of land as a natural relative and the shift to land as an exploitable resource. With the industrialisation of agriculture in the late nineteenth century, the scale on which farming took place increased, both in the working of the land and in the raising of domesticated animals for consumption. This essay will attempt to mobilize a reading of Hardy’s agricultural vision in the context of changes to farming that have contributed to the current ecological crisis, with the goal of defamiliarizing the familiar concept of the farm by way of the alterity of the present – a present that has been in development for over 150 years. Hardy’s writings offer a dual perspective of the farm. Through one end of the telescope appears the sheep-shearing barn of Far from the Madding Crowd, a symbol of the farm’s enduring power as an entity transcending politics and religion, as steadfast as the human need for sustenance that drives an ongoing relationship with the soil, an image that feels familiar, close. Flip that telescope around, and one sees the weather-beaten barn that Jude climbs as a useful vantage point to look toward Christminster, an infinite distance between him and the farmland around him. Between these two barns, Hardy’s fiction depicts a moving picture of the emerging mismatch of functional scale between human and machine, the mechanisation of human and animal bodies – and the rendering of the landscape as an industrial resource and product – that launched a fundamental shift in what one might think of as the farm.