The New Woman and Hysteria in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders

This chapter focuses on Hardy’s The Woodlanders and its connection to the ideas of degeneration and hysteria. With the emergence of the New Woman and changing societal roles for women, theories of hysteria began to overlap with ideas of degeneracy, creating the figure of the hysterical degenerate. Hysterical degeneracy was brought on by the nervous fatigue of fin de siècle life, and the result was impressionability and a powerlessness, in addition to other classic hysterical symptoms. The cure became a policing of so-called degenerate philosophies and modern behaviors. The Woodlanders explores this through the characters of Felice Charmond and Grace Melbury. A second plot of pathology focused on how a woman’s adoption of these new behaviors could de-sex her and render her hysterical to the detriment of herself and the posterity of the country. Hardy charts Marty South’s evolution into androgyny but her descent into bodily or mental illness is pointedly missing. Rather, Marty becomes emblematic of the “unsexing” that has to occur in order for English society to resist degeneracy. Overall, The Woodlanders uses the figure of the New Woman to challenge traditional ideas of marriage and call for a move toward more abstract humanism for men and women alike.