‘This is a sacred grove’: homosocial ecologies in Adam Bede

Abstract

Management of the woods is a labor of love negotiated between men in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). However, as a resilient and vital entity through which men enact the volatile pains and pleasures of homosocial desire, contest and reconciliation, the woods are vulnerable to becoming the primary vehicle through which Eliot naturalizes a sustainable, masculinist capitalism. Indeed, the discourse of Victorian forestry and ‘improvement’ becomes common sense in the novel, fostering purportedly long-term, sustainable prosperity as a consolation prize in the wake of the plot’s central trauma of class betrayal. But, the very greening of this pact obscures the fact that the plan for the woods, like some of those of sustainability even today, may benefit some more than others, with distinct human and ecological winners and losers.