Microbial Matters: Form and Process in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders

This essay reads Thomas Hardy’s 1887 novel, The Woodlanders, alongside nineteenth-century fermentation science in order to make a case for the value of ‘process’ as an interpretive keyword complementary to traditional questions of form and progress. In examining Hardy’s emphasis on maintenance work, it offers an interpretive path through the divergent poles of ‘new’ and ‘old’ materialism. Looking to the novel’s lively descriptions of consumption, fermentation, and decay, I suggest that attention to The Woodlanders’ processes offers both an alternate to modes of reading dictated by the assumption of an organic whole, and insights into Hardy’s politics of interdependence. To make this case, I begin by examining the way the woodlanders’ bioregional consumption patterns both index the entanglement of humans and their environments and reveal the precarity that exists within seemingly stable rural lifestyles. In the second section, I argue that reading the precarious processes of rural life alongside nineteenth-century fermentation science offers a surprising account of preservation through change: the decay of old socio-ecological relations opens possibilities for catalysing new ones. The third section builds on the second by reading The Woodlanders along with Marx’s theories of societal metabolism. Rather than a vision of social purity or boundedness, this conjunction yields a model of the social body that sees interdependence as a condition of continuity.