With the many details that fill Victorian realist novels, the frequent descriptions of scenic country views that interrupt and halt the action of the narrative could be dismissed as part of realism’s illusion of comprehensive and objective reporting. However, I suggest that the realist novel uses landscape depictions as a vehicle for exploring the tensions between its wish to relieve the suffering of the rural poor and its desire to preserve the countryside as a site to be enjoyed by the privileged. By representing the countryside in terms of landscape, the novels showcase what is pleasing about land that has not been developed for purposes of industry, yet landscape, as a representative and interpretative mode, is grounded in ideologies that validate and reinforce the oppressive power structures that are largely responsible for the hardships that the novels wish to alleviate. I argue that the realist novel attempts to solve this paradox by shifting the way landscape is represented and interpreted, thus changing the way the countryside itself is perceived, in order to posit a new understanding of the relationship between social leadership and control over the land. This project examines how mid-century realist novels employ landscape as a means of linking the pleasures of land ownership with a paternalistic obligation to care for the local poor in an attempt to solve the problems of rural poverty and social instability. These novels are sympathetic to the plight of the poor, yet they are also invested in the preservation of the country estate, not only in terms of maintaining the existing physical structures that make up an estate and its grounds, but also with regard to its roles as an institution of land ownership and as a seat of political power. I suggest that this problem drives how land is represented in many realist novels: by depicting the enjoyment of landscape as being linked with a paternalistic responsibility to provide for the poor, the novels attempt to mitigate the social problems of the countryside, which are rooted in the landholding institution, while still preserving the relative sociopolitical stability provided by the landholding model and the accompanying aesthetic properties of landed estates and undeveloped countryside. Chapter one examines Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as an example of how the landed gentry’s desire to manipulate the structure of private land through “improvements” resulted in their virtual appropriation of all open lands in the countryside. In chapter two, I claim that Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House depict the estate as a reward for good behavior as opposed to an indicator of lineage, and the novels work to change the meaning of landscape by infusing the enjoyment of scenic views with a sense of paternalistic duty; however, they are unsure of how to handle the large manor house, both as a physical entity in which the characters live and as a symbol of the estate in general. The third chapter argues that Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family presents the preservation and appreciation of landscape as being a crucial means of battling the ills of capitalism, particularly the gentry’s increasing loss of control over the land and the exploitation of the poor that stems from the free market, yet the novel ends up mobilizing the picturesque as a conscious fantasy in order to avoid rather than solve the problems it identifies. In the last chapter, I claim that Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley exposes how the layout and design of private estate grounds serve to restrict genteel women’s bodies and minds, whereas uncultivated areas are both visually and materially unstructured and thus do not restrict the women’s movements and thinking; but when the needs of the rural poor require that the open land be developed, women must sacrifice their freedom outdoors in the interest of the greater social good.
Read
