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What it argues
The Return of the Native opens with a description of Egdon Heath — the wild moorland of Dorset — so extended and so insistent that it becomes clear the Heath is the novel's central character before a human being appears. Into this landscape Hardy introduces Clym Yeobright, a diamond merchant who has returned from Paris to Egdon with idealistic plans to start a school, and Eustacia Vye, a woman of intense passionate nature who burns to escape the Heath entirely and who has been waiting for someone exactly like Clym to provide her exit.
The novel is a study of incompatibility. Clym wants to return to the place he came from and find meaning in simple rural education; Eustacia wants the world Clym has abandoned and married him on the assumption that he would take her to it. These misaligned desires are not the result of bad faith — both characters are drawn with full seriousness — but of two people who genuinely cannot see each other past the screen of their own needs. Hardy is writing about the tragedy of wanting incompatible things from the same person, and the Heath itself seems to enforce the verdict: every attempt to escape or transform results in a return to the starting point.
What it gets right
- 1.
Egdon Heath is not a backdrop but an agent — Hardy attributes to it a kind of indifferent power that the human drama plays out against rather than over.
- 2.
Eustacia and Clym marry not each other but their fantasies of each other, and the novel tracks the slow, painful collision with reality.
- 3.
Hardy's tragic vision in this novel is unusually unsparing: the environment doesn't just frustrate characters, it seems to actively resist their desires.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet born in Dorset, the rural county that forms the fictional "Wessex" of his novels. He trained as an architect before turning to writing, and his major novels — including Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure — are studies of rural life under pressure from modernity, class, and fate. After Jude the Obscure was attacked for immorality, he stopped writing novels and spent the last thirty years of his life writing poetry, which he considered his primary vocation.
