The Return of the Native

Hardy personifies Egdon Heath when he titles the first chapter of The Return of the Native “A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression.” The face of the heath can “retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms” (9). It assumes an appearance and has watchful intentness and intensity. In winter, Hardy writes, “Egdon was aroused to reciprocity. The storm was its love and the wind was its friend” (11). With its human attributes, the heath becomes one of the characters in the novel. It creates conflict, hides, teases, tempts, and even embraces.

Hardy has a gift for designing highly intense dramatic scenes. Just the sight of Venn and his reddleman van or Eustacia etched against the dark sky provides drama enough. Yet there is also Wildeve creeping up the path for his clandestine meetings with Eustacia at Blackbarrow, and Johnny Nunsuch and Venn hiding in the bushes to overhear conversations. The church provides drama too. Susan Nunsuch sticks Eustacia with a pin and she faints. Thomasin dresses in her pale blue dress and braids her hair in seven braids to proceed to her wedding there, and Eustacia, lingering nearby, her face hidden, lifts her veil to sign the wedding book. Eustacia drifts past Susan’s cottage at night when Johnny is ill, prompting Susan to create the effigy from beeswax to burn in the fire.

Two scenes in particular stand out. First, the mummers attend the Yeobright Christmas party with the room arranged for dancing, the guests making merry. They perform Saint George, and Clym discovers Eustacia’s disguise as a man playing the Turkish Knight. Second, the dice wager between Christian and Wildeve for 100 guineas takes on a frantic energy. Then Venn enters, wins the money back from Wildeve, and the newly married Eustacia and Clym pass by in a carriage. The narrator says, “Wildeve forgot the loss of the money at the sight of his lost love” (229). Venn waits by the side of the road to hand Thomasin the money he has just won.

Had Hardy concluded the novel with Part 5, he would have provided a five-act structure based on the Aristotelian three unities of time, place, and action. The novel takes place solely in Egdon Heath within one year and a day, centered on November 5. The one prevailing action, Eustacia and Wildeve’s passion for each other, ignited again and again, ends with their death by drowning. Hardy distorts this, however, with the attachment between Clym Yeobright and his mother and Clym’s blindness. Clym recovers from blindness and comes out into the light as an itinerant preacher, not at a moment of cataclysmic Aristotelian “recognition,” but rather as an introspective, narcissistic, impotent whiner who finally pulls himself together enough to emerge from Blooms-End as a preacher.