Ecocritical perspective on Waverley and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Literary ecotourism in Scott and Hardy: an analysis of Edward Waverley and Angel Clare, inveterate tourists.

Abstract

This thesis focuses on two novels, Waverley (1814) by Walter Scott and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy and aims at analysing the characters of Edward Waverley and Angel Clare from an ecocritical perspective. These characters are here studied as unwary tourists who get away from their habitual environment by taking refuge in places they do not belong to. The geographical locations they escape to present landscapes that are completely different from the ones they are accustomed to – Waverley hits the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands, while Clare gets to the English rural countryside first and the Brazilian plains afterwards – and which represent their dream of happiness and freedom, expectations that will nevertheless be disappointed. In fact, just like tourists, they will sojourn in those places only for a limited time; their plans will fail since they do not belong to those environments they so much celebrate – the hilly and mountainous Scotland, with its green pastures, steep slopes and clear waters, on the one hand, and the rural landscape of Southern England, with its green valleys and cultivated fields together with the misleading fantasy of a fertile and manageable land in Brazil, on the other. Interestingly these two nineteenth-century characters, heavily affected by civilization, struggle to establish a proper and healthy connection with the landscape in which they take refuge quite in the same way we westerners still attempt to do nowadays.