Thomas Hardy’s Brazil

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy imagines a Brazil that functions as an established settler colony and as a more informal zone of economic influence. This imperial anachronism that played out in an ostensibly sovereign Brazil, as my reading will show, physically and ideologically deforms Angel and his fellow colonists. Angel’s moral awakening accompanies a body ripped apart by the competing demands of settlement and movement aligned, on one hand, with older models of imperial expansion and, on the other, with newer modes of economic dominance driven by infrastructural investment and speculation. As a site of Britain’s economic influence, Brazil becomes a potent symbol of the dangers of pursuing an anachronistic imperial model and a fatal warning back home that attempting to replicate older models of colonial governance cannot remedy England’s provincial woes.