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48 pages 1 hour read

The Woodlanders

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1887

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Chapters 17-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 17 Summary

The Melburys’ elderly female servant, Grammer Oliver, falls ill. When Grace is tending to her, Grammer explains that she had entered a deal with Dr. Fitzpiers, whereby she would allow him to have her brain for dissection after she died in exchange for 10 pounds. Now sick, she wants to revoke the deal and worries that the anxiety caused by it will kill her. As such, she persuades Grace to go and talk to Dr. Fitzpiers on her behalf, arguing that her youth and looks might help convince the doctor to abandon the agreement.

Chapter 18 Summary

Grace visits Dr. Fitzpiers’s house and is led by his landlady into a room where he appears to be asleep. She notices though in a glass reflection for a second that Dr. Fitzpiers has his eyes open and was merely pretending to sleep. This leads Grace to leave the house, but Dr. Fitzpiers sees her leaving and catches up with her on his garden path. There, Grace tells him about the request of Grammer Oliver regarding their deal, and the doctor agrees to revoke it. She also mentions the incident where he seemed to be feigning sleep to observe her, to which Dr. Fitzpiers says, “never could I deceive you” (110), to Grace.

Chapter 19 Summary

Out on a walk in the woods, Dr. Fitzpiers sees Mr. Melbury and his men, along with Marty, engaged in the practice of “barking” (112). This is the process of stripping bark from trees for the purpose of later sale. He notices Grace in a nearby horse and cart and rushes to her rescue when the horses are spooked and start “jerking about the vehicle in a way which alarmed its occupant” (114). Dr. Fitzpiers stays in the woods reading, while the others leave. Grace later returns to search for a purse that she had dropped in the earlier incident and speaks with Dr. Fitzpiers. She reveals to him that the purse was given to her by an “admirer,” Giles, but that she has refused him.

Chapter 20 Summary

Grace, and the other young women from Little Hintock, attends a ritual in the woods on Midsummer Eve, which by a “spell or enchantment would afford them a glimpse of their future partners for life” (120). This ritual involves throwing hempseed on the ground in a clearing on a ridge, then running down the ridge to meet their potential partner. Dr. Fitzpiers and Giles, knowing this ritual, position themselves in such a way as to meet Grace as she runs from the clearing. Dr. Fitzpiers steps in front of Giles as Grace runs down, thereby catching her, and announcing to her that he wants to be hers for life. After Grace has gone, though, Dr. Fitzpiers chases another woman, Suke Damson, who has run from the clearing. He then sleeps with her in a nearby haystack.

Chapter 21 Summary

After the girls at the Midsummer ritual dissipate that evening, Giles sees a gentleman looking for Hintock House. He tells Giles how Mrs. Charmond has returned home from her travels in Europe, and he was planning to meet her at her house. As he also explains, he is an Italianized American who left America after the defeat of the South in the Civil War. Giles suspects the man is the much-discussed lover of Mrs. Charmond.

Chapter 22 Summary

Mr. Melbury visits Dr. Fitzpiers’s house to ask the doctor’s advice about a cough that Grace has been suffering from since the events of Midsummer Evening. Mr. Melbury wonders whether Grace should be sent away to a seaside town to recuperate. These questions prompt Dr. Fitzpiers to deny that there is anything wrong with Grace and to ask Mr. Melbury’s consent to court his daughter “with a view to marriage” (129). Mr. Melbury happily agrees, in part because Dr. Fitzpiers belongs to an old, distinguished family. Mr. Melbury returns home and tells his daughter about the news, and the importance of encouraging Dr. Fitzpiers.

Chapter 23 Summary

Dr. Fitzpiers makes numerous visits to the Melbury house over the summer to see Grace. Charmed by Dr. Fitzpiers and his intellectual pretensions, as well as the arguments of her parents, Grace agrees to marry him. However, one evening at dusk, while out walking together, Dr. Fitzpiers upsets Grace by saying that they should get married at a registry office rather than a church in Hintock. This is so that his future reputation will not be damaged by association with Hintock, an association he believes would become a certain fact with “a noisy, bell-ringing marriage at church” (137).

Chapter 24 Summary

One morning close to the day of their marriage, Grace sees Suke Damson leaving Dr. Fitzpiers house, with him in his dressing gown. Suspecting an affair, Grace tells her father she wants to call off the marriage. Dr. Fitzpiers is then summoned, and he lies to Grace, telling her that Suke had only called at his house to have a rotten and aching tooth removed. Grace agrees to proceed again with the marriage, provided Dr. Fitzpiers consents to having it in a local church. He complies, and the couple gets married.

Chapters 17-24 Analysis

In many ways, Dr. Fitzpiers is the antithesis of Giles. He is a man of “good professional station and venerable old family” (129). Unlike low-born Giles, and much to Mr. Melbury’s delight, the Fitzpiers used to be lords of the manor in a village named after them: Oakbury Fitzpiers. And while he’s not yet rich, Dr. Fitzpiers will accrue wealth when his practice grows. He will then “go to a dashing town,” “keep a stylish carriage,” and allow Grace to “know a good many ladies of excellent society” (134). More importantly, from Grace’s perspective, Dr. Fitzpiers is proactive in pursuing her and seems to offer “the possibilities of a refined and cultivated inner life, of subtle psychological intercourse” (137). In other words, his intelligence and “cultivation” appear to present the chance for an interesting and cerebral relationship with a man, one that isn’t timid or passive like Giles.

Yet the very things which make Dr. Fitzpiers desirable also make him a risk. His family name, and profession, while appealing to Mr. Melbury, mean that he was always going to be dissatisfied with Grace’s family and Little Hintock. This is seen in his insistence that he and Grace avoid getting married in a church. Like Mr. Melbury, he is very concerned about perceived social standing. For Dr. Fitzpiers, however, his worry is that any association with Hintock would damage his social climbing. Indeed, he tells Grace that that when they go to Budmouth, “it will be far better if nobody there knows much of where you come from, nor anything about your parents” (138). Similarly, his willingness to take initiative, in a way that Giles was not, brings with it a problematic love of “the chase.” This is manifest most clearly in the events on Midsummer Eve. Dr. Fitzpiers is, symbolically and literally, willing to jump in front of Giles, taking action, to win Grace. But once he has “claimed” her (123), as he says, he quickly becomes bored and looks for something else to pursue. His unquenchable pursuit becomes manifest again when he spies the fleeing Suke Damson, with whom he sleeps with at least twice.

Dr. Fitzpiers’s actions also suggest a deeper problem. It is not merely that he lacks self-control, it’s that he easily gives in to physical desires and is thus prone to dangerous and manipulative actions that have already included infidelity and might continue to arise later in marriage. He appears pathologically disposed to multiple and transient indiscretions, including lying, infidelity, coercion, and gaslighting. His intellectual curiosity and imagination, which Grace admires so much, are both a symptom and a cause of this in some sense. As Hardy says, “one month he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature and metaphysics” (103). He is constantly falling into new diversions and hobbies, without ever remaining committed to one. This lack of commitment arises in relationships as well. Grace, then, radically misreads Dr. Fitzpiers when she imagines he wants Grammer’s brain as “a remorseless Jehovah of the sciences, who would not have mercy, and would have sacrifice” (102). He does not want the servant’s brain as part of a relentless exploration of human anatomy or its connection to consciousness. Rather, it is just another curiosity borne from boredom and idleness.

There is also no reason to assume Dr. Fitzpiers’s approach to Grace is different than his approach to life in general. Dr. Fitzpiers has allowed his desire for Grace to mould an idea, the ideal of an experience, around her. This is a continuation of his subjective understanding of love as “an idea which we project against any suitable object in our line of vision” (97). Yet it also means that once this particular “idea” has passed the “thing-in-itself outside” (98)—in this instance, Grace—it has no special power to detain him. This is especially the case if that object has been stripped of its novelty or mystery, as occurs with the familiarity that arises in marriage. Dr. Fitzpiers’s objective version of love gets summed up in Grammer’s comment that “he’ll carry home her living carcase before long” (121). Grace is likely to become another object of reified, and therefore passing, curiosity for Dr. Fitzpiers.

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