48 pages • 1 hour read
The Woodlanders
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Chapters 33-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 33 Summary
With her father and husband away, Grace walks in the woods. There she encounters Giles, who explains he has once more made friends with her father. Grace is then approached by Mrs. Charmond, who has also been out walking, and they discuss their relations with Dr. Fitzpiers. From the way that Mrs. Charmond talks, Grace realizes that the woman loves her husband and is not merely toying with him. Mrs. Charmond denies this, but the two leave each other in a state of dispute. However, they both get lost in the darkening woods and find each other again, huddling together for warmth. Mrs. Charmond reveals that she does really love Dr. Fitzpiers and that they had been childhood lovers. They then manage to find their way to a nearby road.
Chapter 34 Summary
Dr. Fitzpiers returns to Hintock from London a few days later. He is troubled by the dwindling of his practice and a recent letter from Mrs. Charmond asking him not to see her again. When he arrives at the Melbury house, he finds that Grace is out visiting a friend in a nearby town. Dr. Fitzpiers uses this as an excuse to visit Hintock House and saddles up Darling. As he is leaving, Mr. Melbury returns home. When Mr. Melbury sees Dr. Fitzpiers leave, he guesses the likely destination and chases him to bring him back “by some means, rough or fair” (207). Getting to Hintock House after Dr. Fitzpiers, he spies him with Mrs. Charmond before departing. While trying to track him again, he discovers that Dr. Fitzpiers has taken Mr. Melbury’s own horse Blossom rather than Darling. Riding off, Mr. Melbury then finds Dr. Fitzpiers on the ground further on, unsaddled by Blossom, and decides to pick him up and ride back holding Dr. Fitzpiers on Darling.
Chapter 35 Summary
Dr. Fitzpiers, who is drunk from the rum that Mr. Melbury gave him, doesn’t realize the man helping him is in fact Mr. Melbury. He starts ranting about life in Little Hintock and how he is “quite wasted there” (210). He then talks of his love for Mrs. Charmond, and how he would be “free—and my fame, my happiness […] ensured” (211) were Grace to die. Angered, Mr. Melbury throws Dr. Fitzpiers from the horse. Earlier, when Dr. Fitzpiers had initially fallen from his horse, a young boy had seen him and began spreading exaggerated stories of what happened when he reached the village. This leads Suke and Mrs. Charmond to show up at Mr. Melbury’s house, where Grace has also returned. They think Dr. Fitzpiers is dying because of the child’s exaggerated stories, and Grace shows them Dr. Fitzpiers’s empty bed. They then overhear Mr. Melbury, himself back, announcing that Dr. Fitzpiers’s injury was not as bad as previously described. His revelation prompts the two women to leave. Dr. Fitzpiers, however, does not return that night.
Chapter 36 Summary
Mrs. Charmond returns to Hintock House and, shortly after, an injured Dr. Fitzpiers knocks on her window. He is covered in blood from being thrown from the horse by Mr. Melbury. Mrs. Charmond lets him in and helps wash the blood from his face. Due to Mr. Melbury’s actions, Dr. Fitzpiers resolves to never return to Little Hintock. He asks Mrs. Charmond if she can shelter him before making his escape, and she agrees. Dr. Fitzpiers then writes a letter to Grace explaining that their “parting is unavoidable” (221), and that he is “starting on a journey which will take me a long way from Hintock” (221).
Chapter 37 Summary
A week later, Dr. Fitzpiers leaves Hintock House in disguise, going first to Sherton then to a southern port, before crossing the channel to the Continent. Three days later, Mrs. Charmond makes the same journey to join him.
Mr. Melbury meets a local lawyer, Fred Beaucock, who tells him there is a new law (The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857) that will allow Grace to easily divorce Dr. Fitzpiers. Mr. Melbury goes to London with Mr. Beaucock to get Grace’s case heard and obtain a divorce. Some days later he then writes to Grace, based on his optimism regarding her case. He tells her that “she would shortly be a free woman” (227) and to encourage Giles. Conversely, he sends Giles a missive saying that he was now free to pursue Grace and had his blessing. Unfortunately, the legal situation is more complicated than Mr. Melbury anticipated.
Chapter 38 Summary
Giles is suspicious of Mr. Melbury’s letter about Grace’s divorce and decides not to act too quickly. Nevertheless, when he sees Grace at Sherton market, where she had gone hoping to meet him, he asks her if she would like to walk in Sherton Abbey. Giles holds her hand when they walk through the Abbey, and each notice how the other has changed. Both want a romantic relationship but are unwilling to go further until the divorce is confirmed. Giles then blunders when he organizes dinner for Grace in the rustic “Three Tuns” tavern. Grace finds this humiliating as she had gotten used to dining at expensive hotels with Dr. Fitzpiers. Still, she resolves to try and change her supercilious attitude on this point for Giles.
Chapter 39 Summary
Grace gets a letter from her father saying there has been a delay in her case. As such, Mr. Melbury urges Grace to be more forward with Giles in case he should grow cold in the meantime. Watching Giles work from her garden, Grace sees him opening a letter. This is a message from Mr. Beaucock written several hours after Mr. Melbury’s to his daughter, when he had new information, announcing that the attempt to get Grace a divorce has failed. Grace then talks to Giles, who cannot bring himself to tell her the news. When Grace encourages him, Giles kisses her. Shortly after, Mr. Melbury returns and, having found out himself, tells Grace the news about their failure.
Chapter 40 Summary
Several months later, at the start of autumn, Grace receives a letter from Dr. Fitzpiers. It states that he plans to return to Budmouth’s harbor in three days’ time. There she can meet him and go back with him to France. Grace does not want to go, but after the time for the proposed meeting expires, she receives news that Dr. Fitzpiers is on his way to Hintock. Mr. Melbury says that he will allow Dr. Fitzpiers to continue living at his house with Grace. Grace is mortified, and when she hears Dr. Fitzpiers’s coach approaching from a distance, she leaves and travels to Giles’s hut in the woods. She then asks Giles to help her escape Hintock and get to Sherton. She will then try to go on to Exonbury to stay with a friend.
Chapters 33-40 Analysis
When the inebriated Dr. Fitzpiers travels back to Little Hintock, aided by Mr. Melbury on his horse, Dr. Fitzpiers says, “those claws of yours clutch me rather tight—rather like the eagle’s, you know, that ate out the liver of […] the man on Mount Caucasus” (210). Dr. Fitzpiers is referring to Prometheus, which means he is comparing himself to a trapped, tragic hero. This idea is also present in previous conversations with Mr. Melbury, when he talks about knowing several languages, a familiarity with poetry, and also boasts that he has “read more in metaphysics than anybody within fifty miles” (210). Even while drunk, Dr. Fitzpiers plays the victim, believing that he is trapped in an insignificant and uncultured backwater. This is because, as he says, he is “tied and bound to another by law” (211): Grace. This, along with the suggestion that if Grace were to die then he would be free from his “bonds,” enrages Mr. Melbury. Though earlier analysis reveals just how much Grace feels like an object to her father at times, this scene reveals just how much Mr. Melbury cares for his daughter: He attacks a wealthy man—his daughter’s own husband—because of Dr. Fitzpiers’s selfish, violent words.
If Dr. Fitzpiers is “trapped,” it’s only due to his own hubris and not because of any malevolent fate. He mistook the safer and easier horse, Darling, for a more difficult one, Blossom. He then fell from the latter due to his own incompetence and lack of skill. Likewise, with his broader sense that he is trapped in Hintock and the slight to his spiritual and intellectual greatness, he’s equally trapped by pride. That he reads poetry or knows other languages seems irrelevant when he can’t even define/name his own idleness, vanity, and pride. Meanwhile, his claim that “nobody can match me in the whole county of Wessex as a scientist” (210) appears highly unlikely to be true. Dr. Fitzpiers, in fact, is an archetypal dilettante. While he has dabbled with science and done some experiments, he is no more committed to this path than to metaphysics or medicine, and he quickly forgets all three in his pursuit of various women. Even though he’s in a drunken stupor, the fact that he is confessing these things to a person whom he thinks is a local, uneducated farmer underscores how little he truly cares for those around him and how high he places himself in contrast to all others.
More broadly, his pretensions to a “trapped,” tragic pathos are contradicted by events in the narrative. It is true that he cannot immediately marry Mrs. Charmond, the one person who allegedly “appreciates” (210) him, due to his marriage to Grace. This does not stop him though from continually going to see her, on many occasions outside of Hintock, whenever he pleases. With Darling, he is literally and metaphorically free to escape most of the confines of marriage at a moment’s notice. Nor, unlike a tragic hero, does he come to any understanding of how his own flawed nature contributed to these circumstances. He simply expresses regret that he married “beneath” him.
The scene in Dr. Fitzpiers’s bedroom underscores the comic and absurd nature of the so-called tragic hero. When Suke, Mrs. Charmond, and Grace gather around his bed with “anxieties, affection, agony of heart” (216), they act as if they’re paying homage to a martyred hero. The fact that Dr. Fitzpiers is only mildly hurt makes this a parody of a tragic death bed scene. Similarly, when Dr. Fitzpiers knocks on Mrs. Charmond’s window, his face “corpse-like in its pallor, and covered with blood” (217), the scene resembles one from a romantic tragedy. That is, there is the dying, ill-fated lover crawling back to the house of his beloved for a final, stolen moment together. Yet context and subsequent events again contradict these “tragic” moments. Dr. Fitzpiers is not seriously hurt. As he admits, “it is chiefly loss of blood” (220), creating the impression, but not the reality, of harm. He’s quickly able to recover and devise a plan. And this plan is far removed from something one would associate with a tragic hero. He decides to hide away at Mrs. Charmond’s, so that no one will know about the incident with Mr. Melbury, thus avoiding scandal. The letter he pens, placing blame on Mr. Melbury, and his later exit from town in disguise, further reveal Dr. Fitzpiers as disreputable and manipulative more than a hero. His actions thus far serve as a metaphor for his distinctly untragic inability to confront the truth about who or what he is.
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