[astrangerhere]

:cracks knuckles: Okay…here we go.

First, in the interest of full disclosure, I did not like this book. At all. I always struggle with romance, straight romance, and especially romance from the point of view of a man who merely needs to take the woman to make her his. But I understand history and context, so I know what I am getting when I read a book from certain eras. Ditto on the horrendous racism both explicit and implicit. Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, onward!

I find it interesting that Hudson did not like being termed an artist of any kind. He preferred to be known as a naturalist (one supposes the book was written to fund his actual scientific pursuits). He told Ford Maddox Ford: “I'm not an artist. It's the last thing I should call myself. I'm a field naturalist who writes down what he sees.” Odd thing to say given that Green Mansions is not an ode to Nature in my mind.

His descriptions of nature are lovely. Of course, his descriptions are lovely only to the extent of his cultural vocabulary. In the first chapter alone, he refers to the indigenous population as “savages” or “savage” 19 times. One of my favorite descriptions is that of the snake:

It was a coral snake, famed as much for its beauty and singularity as for its deadly character. It was about three feet long, and very slim; its ground colour a brilliant vermillion, with broad jet-black rings at equal distances round its body, each black ring or band divided by a narrow yellow strip in the middle. The symmetrical pattern and vividly contrasted colours would have given it the appearance of an artificial snake made by some fanciful artist, but for the gleam of life in its bright coils.

Though he had no interest in being an artist, Hudson believed that artists and naturalists had a joint pursuit in unraveling the mysteries of nature. Amy Ronner wrote an entire article on the subject for the Twentieth Century Literary Criticism Journal (citation* at the end for those who care). She notes that Hudson believed that “[t]he new naturalist should strive to transcend both the spheres of art and science, should work to be “united, unconfined in a groove, free and appreciating his freedom, intensely interested in life in all its aspects and manifestations,” and should aspire to worship Nature and imitate its infinitude.

All that being said, I tend to agree with John Galsworthy, in his 1927 Forward to the text, when he called Green Mansions a “pure romance.” I did not feel like this was an ode to nature so much as it was about a man who is having a very hard time keeping it in his pants, as it were. He has seen a beautiful woman, savage though she is, and is driven the rest of the novel by obtaining her. I was particularly bothered by this passage:

But the shame was as nothing in strength compared to the impulse I felt to clasp her beautiful body in my arms and cover her face with kisses.

He has arranged to take Rima to Riolama, but he seems to be holding out for some hope of trading this duty for having her bodily. After he has already promised to take her, he still says

Touch my face with your hand--only that, and I will go to Riolama with you, and obey you in all things.

Didn’t you already promise that, buddy? That is what made the book so disappointing for me. The only men in the book (Rima’s grandfather, the villagers, etc.) are all evil save our dashing protagonist. But there is very little in the way of plot once Rima comes into the picture. Sure, there are some dangers for the hero, but they will be overcome in time. The tragic ending actually seems tragic to me only in a Pocahontas way. What would have come of Rima if he had been able to take her back to the city? She likely would have wilted and died once he removed her from Nature. Would he really have been able to resist going back to that life?

All in all, I don’t regret having read it, but I really did not enjoy the process.


*Ronner, Amy D. "W. H. Hudson: The Man, the Novelist, the Naturalist." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Dennis Poupard, vol. 29, Gale, 1988.