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The Woodlanders
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Chapters 25-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Grace and Dr. Fitzpiers are staying in the best hotel in Sherton, following a two-month honeymoon. While Dr. Fitzpiers is out walking, Grace sees Giles working as a travelling cider maker in the hotel yard. Grace talks to Giles, rekindling some feeling for him, although the situation emphasizes her social superiority, especially the fact that as she says, “I could never have married him” (147). On returning to Hintock and the Melburys’ house, where the couple will now be living, Dr. Fitzpiers goes to visit his deputy in his old residence. He is upset to discover, when he gets back, that Grace is mingling with the local townsfolk, who have come to celebrate her marriage. Dr. Fitzpiers later tells Grace that they should move away from Hintock as quickly as possible. News also arrives that Mrs. Charmond has been in an accident, and Dr. Fitzpiers sets off to assist her.
Chapter 26 Summary
Rambling near his old house, which is now half-demolished, Giles sees a carriage containing Mrs. Charmond turn on its side. Mrs. Charmond notices him, after the carriage is righted, and asks Giles to send for a doctor to visit her. Giles does this, informing a servant at Mr. Melbury’s house. Dr. Fitzpiers goes to Mrs. Charmond at Hintock House and finds “that there was really nothing the matter with her” (156). However, Mrs. Charmond reveals that she had caught a glimpse of Dr. Fitzpiers while he was staying in the “Earl of Wessex” hotel in Sherton and recognised him as her partner in a brief adolescent romance. This was in Heidelberg, Germany, while Dr. Fitzpiers was a student. He recognizes her now, as Felice Charmond, as well. Mrs. Charmond asks Dr. Fitzpiers to come and see her again the following day.
Chapter 27 Summary
Dr. Fitzpiers visits Mrs. Charmond the next day and several subsequent days after. In this time, they discuss their earlier relationship. They imagine what would have happened if her mother had not forced her to leave Heidelberg, having opposed her interactions with the young Fitzpiers. New romantic feeling is kindled between them. As a result, Dr. Fitzpiers turns down a medical practice in the town of Budmouth, which he had previously been planning to buy, so that he can stay near Mrs. Charmond. Unfortunately for him, Mrs. Charmond reveals, when he tells her this, that she is immanently leaving Hintock to stay with a sick relative in Middleton Abbey. She also says that he should not contact her there.
Chapter 28 Summary
It is a week after Mrs. Charmond’s departure. Grace notices that her husband has become indifferent to her and “even was disposed to avoid her” (167). Dr. Fitzpiers starts taking “Darling,” the horse that Giles once bought for Grace, on long journeys and arriving back late. These journeys are, he tells Grace, to visit a patient who lives in a place called Vale several miles away. However, Grace finds a ticket for a toll gate in Middleton in his jacket, where she learns that Mrs. Charmond has been staying. Her suspicions that Dr. Fitzpiers is having an affair with Mrs. Charmond are confirmed when she sees Giles walking back into Hintock. He has come from Middleton Abbey, where he has been working. Giles explains that he has seen Dr. Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond together there.
Chapter 29 Summary
Grace notices Suke and her fiancé eating nuts. This leads her thoughts back to Dr. Fitzpiers’s claim before their marriage that Suke had been at his house to have a tooth removed. When Grace asks Suke if she has ever had a tooth taken out, Suke answers “no.” Grace now knows that her husband had been sleeping with Suke before their marriage. Mr. Melbury also finds out that Dr. Fitzpiers has been having an affair with Mrs. Charmond when he wakes Dr. Fitzpiers after the doctor has come back to their stables on Darling and, half-awake, the doctor whispers, “ah, Felice” (177), which Melbury knows is the first name of Mrs. Charmond.
Chapter 30 Summary
While on a walk, Mr. Melbury sees Mrs. Charmond, who is now back in Little Hintock, and Dr. Fitzpiers together by a country lane. The latter takes off Mrs. Charmond’s glove in a gesture of romantic affection. This causes Mr. Melbury to tell Grace that he knows about her husband’s affair, and he pleads with her to take action. This, he suggests, could take the form of appealing to the compassion of Mrs. Charmond and their “common womanhood” (184). However, Grace, who is depressed because she realizes “that her early interest in Giles Winterborne had become revitalised” (182-83), refuses.
Chapter 31 Summary
Plagued by anxiety over his daughter’s situation and the growing public scandal surrounding it, Mr. Melbury consults Giles, who is now living in a hut on the edge of Mrs. Charmond’s estate. Mr. Melbury tells Giles that he believes Grace should have married him after all. He also discloses that he thinks Grace might still love him. Discussing Mrs. Charmond, Giles tells Mr. Melbury about her mercurial personality, her alleged generosity, and that she was once an actress. All this encourages Mr. Melbury to believe that Mrs. Charmond might be persuaded to give up Dr. Fitzpiers, and he resolves to visit her himself to try.
Chapter 32 Summary
Mr. Melbury goes to Hintock House the next morning and is made to wait several hours while Mrs. Charmond gets up and finishes breakfast. When Mrs. Charmond finally attends to him, Mr. Melbury entreats her to give up Dr. Fitzpiers and forbid him to see her. He appeals to the friendship that once existed between Mrs. Charmond and Grace for this purpose. Mrs. Charmond, who was not aware that anyone else knew of her affair, is horrified and upset. When Mr. Melbury leaves, she bursts into tears. To gain some mental equilibrium, she later decides to take a rare walk in the woods.
Chapters 25-32 Analysis
At first glance, the affair between Dr. Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond appears to be neither surprising nor exceptional. As the honeymoon ends and the initial enthusiasm of their romance wanes, the practical and social realities of life with Grace start to dawn on Dr. Fitzpiers. Principal amongst these is the fact that he must live in the same house as Grace’s father, albeit in a separate wing. Second, and relatedly, is that Grace is “beneath” him socially. Such concerns are quickly brought to a head when Dr. Fitzpiers returns from checking on his deputy. He then finds, in their home, Grace celebrating with the locals, a party he is obliged to attend. This leads Dr. Fitzpiers to declare, “if we continue in these rooms there must be no mixing with your people below. I can’t stand it” (153). He also experiences a loss of respect from his patients. Having married Grace, he is no longer regarded as an Oakbury Fitzpiers, an “unfathomed gentleman of limitless potentiality, scientific and social” (153) but “in a degree only one of themselves” (153). In short, he loses the sense of distinction that comes from “a touching of hat brims” (153) and being treated as a superior.
In this context, it is not a shock that Dr. Fitzpiers should be attracted to Mrs. Charmond. She is not only someone new (a new interest), living in a novel, elevated setting, but epitomizes the ideal of the aristocratic outsider. This is the opposite, despite her education, of homely, country girl Grace. Yet it would be wrong to reduce Mrs. Charmond’s appeal for Dr. Fitzpiers to the allure of novelty or the desire to reassert through her an upper-class identity. In fact, their relationship and desire for one another is more specific and complex. Most obviously, they had met each other before as teenagers, in Heidelberg. Dr. Fitzpiers encountered “Felice” Charmond looking for a lost handkerchief in the dusk, and they struck up a romantic connection then. The fact that her mother forbade their love resulted in them never having a sense of closure.
As such, Dr. Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond’s fledgling relationship is already rooted in the powerful emotional bonds of youth and a sense of romantic fate. That they have been offered, by what some might call luck, the chance to continue something that seemed lost forever, exerts an irresistible pull. Moreover, it was a passion unfulfilled. As Fitzpiers says, “it was the merest bud—red, fresh, vivid […] a colossal passion in embryo” (158). Denied the possibility of fulfilment, their earlier romance, and its possible development, can now be idealized. As Hardy says, “the two or three days that they had spent together” were “stretched out […] to the length and importance of years; made to form a canvas for infinite fancies” and “alluring assertions which could neither be proved nor disproved” (162).
The lost handkerchief, found by Dr. Fitzpiers after his final meeting with Mrs. Charmond, symbolizes their hope. This “little morsel of damp lacework” (157) becomes the fetishized conduit for the young Fitzpiers’s desire for his beloved: Felice. It symbolizes the power that can be lent to innocuous matter by the imagination if linked to a certain non-present situation or person. Further, this event is perfect for Dr. Fitzpiers. A relationship built on imagination, not reality, need not commit itself to one idea or setting. Instead, it can flit between different fantasies and ideals, sampling at will whatever excites it. And Mrs. Charmond, in turn, is a perfect accomplice in this. Once a “play-actress” (189), and mercurial herself, she takes a delight in performance and in the adoption of different personas and moods. Based on these traits, she seems a perfect match for Dr. Fitzpiers.
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