Return of the Native. Томас Харди

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      The anti-heroine of the story is Eustacia Vye, a shallow, vain young woman who imagines a high-society life in London and makes no effort to fit into the Wessex community in which she is immersed. She also happens to be exquisitely beautiful – a femme fatale to the eligible young men who cross her path. This is a trope often used by Hardy. His rather black-and-white view of attractive women was that physical beauty often masked inner ugliness –a beguiling combination to lustful men.

      Clement Yeobright, the central character, is an earthy school teacher who returns to the area having seen a bit of the world – he is the returning native of the title. He falls for Eustacia’s beauty, unable to see that his cousin, Thomasin, is better suited to his needs. Ultimately Eustacia shows her true colours when she realizes that Clement is content to remain living in Egdon Heath. She attempts to elope with Thomasin’s first husband, the womanizer Damon Wildeve, but both are drowned in a weir by Hardy’s pen. Clement continues life alone, while Thomasin marries Diggory Venn, an admirer who has protected Thomasin’s interests throughout the story.

      The novel was considered risqué in the 19th century because it dealt with marriage failure and sexual liaison out of wedlock, both of which were real-life issues, of course, but were brushed under the Victorian carpet. As values shifted during the 20th century, readers began to realize what a masterpiece Hardy had produced. Fundamentally, The Return of the Native is an allegory about what people can expect from life when they lack the wisdom to pursue what is best for them and choose instead to satisfy their primal desires and vanities. Hardy also rewards those who do have wisdom, and his themes still ring true today, which is perhaps why the novel is so highly regarded.

      In 1886 Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge. At a country fair, Henchard, Hardy’s tragic hero, auctions off his wife and daughter when he’s drunk. He spends most of his life repenting for this act and eventually becomes an upstanding citizen of Casterbridge, a successful businessman and mayor of the town. Impulsive and volatile, yet emotional and repentant, when his wife and daughter return to Casterbridge Henchard attempts to make amends. Throughout the novel, Hardy focuses on the importance of reputation and good character and demonstrates how the present is always haunted by the past and cannot be denied. Particularly Hardy-esque in nature is the great tension that is set up between Henchard’s public and private life in a small rural town where the community act as judge and jury on the flaws and mistakes of those among them.

      Hardy’s best-known novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, was published in 1891. The eponymous Tess starts out as an innocent peasant girl, but embarks on a tragic life tale that ultimately ends in her execution for murder. For Hardy the story was an examination of how the individual can wind up in such desperate and forlorn situations even when their beginnings are much the same as others people’s. Again, like Eustacia, Tess is physically attractive and her ambitions lead her into scenarios that make her life ever more complicated and unsettled. This includes a scene in the first chapter when Tess loses her virginity but is seemingly too naive to understand whether she consented or was raped.

      Hardy’s Literary Legacy

      In many respects the literature of Thomas Hardy is quintessentially English in tone and content. His stories are set in the deepest rural and bucolic southwest, where time attempts to stand still, preserving an English idyll that was worlds apart from the industrialization of the 19th century. For this reason his novels are described as belonging to the genre of ‘naturalism’.

      Hardy was primarily concerned with the innate nature of personalities in his literature. He ascribed each character with a personality type which largely predetermined their fate. While other authors, such as Charles Dickens, conveyed the idea that people can learn from their mistakes and change, Hardy showed the opposite. For Hardy, people never really learn the error of their ways and fate will deal them their hand in proportion to their level of selfishness, vanity, pride, foolishness, arrogance, unkindness or other failing. In some cases Hardy even resorts to having troublesome characters killed off or removed to prison in order to restore harmony. In this way he gives the more deserving the opportunity to alter their circumstances for the better.

      One might think that Hardy was religious, given this moral and ethical filter, but he wasn’t particularly interested in religion. He was more taken by the idea of allowing his characters to express superstitions and supernatural beliefs. In this regard he was really adopting the view of the anthropologist, who remains necessarily impartial on matters of belief, so that they can study people with neutrality. His work is also filled with subtle allusions to Classical references, which he used to underpin central characters.

      Hardy used to search for events reported in newspapers and often used them in his plots. It wasn’t so much that he lacked the imagination to think up ideas, but that he wanted to inject a sense of realism by introducing elements that simply would not have occurred to him. Real life can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Quite apart from anything else, Hardy had an eye for the tragedy of life. He was a humanist, who cared about the underdog and expressed this by dealing with those who were more privileged in his prose.

       PREFACE

      The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred may be set down as between 1840 and 1850, when the old watering place herein called “Budmouth” still retained sufficient afterglow from its Georgian gaiety and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to the romantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.

      Under the general name of “Egdon Heath”, which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought under the plough with varying degrees of success, or planted to woodland.

      It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose southwestern quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear.

      July, 1895.

      “To sorrow

      I bade good morrow,

      And thought to leave her far away behind;

      But cheerly, cheerly,

      She loves me dearly;

      She is so constant to me, and so kind.

      I would deceive her,

      And so leave her,

      But ah! she is so constant and so kind.”

BOOK ONE

       CHAPTER 1

       A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression

      A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

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