The 20th Annual Book Report Competition For

Secondary School Students

The 1st Runner Up of English Senior Section

School: King’s College

Student Name: Tong Chun

Title: The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native is a story of extremes, of all-consuming passions and fierce ambitions, played out in the vast and overwhelming setting of Egdon Heath. It is a tragedy of ordinary lives: a family quarrel, romantic entanglements and the desire to escape are the elements which are brought together with a life-shattering intensity. Here, all life is a struggle for existence and the working of an apparently malign fate drives the story with a tragic inevitability. A foreboding atmosphere dominates most of the novel, and superstition and pagan rites contribute to the sense of the powerful forces which seem hostile to humanity, yet in control of human destiny.

The Return of the Native was intended to consist of five books, mirroring the five acts of a Greek tragedy, with a prologue and epilogue, and a chorus to comment on the action. It was to maintain the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, with the story being confined to a year and a day, events being confined to the heath (described in a places like a stage set), and the action following a cause-and-effect sequence. There are many references to acting and playing a role, and in places the dialogue of the characters resembles the speeches found in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Clym’s accusation of Eustacia is reminiscent of Shakespearean tragedy, and Eustacia’s final speech very similar to a soliloquy.

Repeated patterns add a sense of unity and harmony. The seasonal cycle and the traditional celebrations provide repeated social events between which the private drama develops. The similarity of scenarios and actions draws attention to the structure of the narrative development: Venn leading Thomasin home after her failure to marry Wildeve at the beginning is paralleled in the later scene of him supporting her and leading a cart carrying her dead husband, his mistress and Clym in Book Five. This scenario is finally echoed at the end when Venn and Thomasin depart together in the dogcart to their new life. There are also cyclical patterns in the novel, for instance Clym replaces Eustacia as the figure on the barrow, although her brooding dissatisfaction and longing for a future away from the heath contrasts starkly with Clym’s bitter resolve to do penance for his sins and to cherish the past. Coincidence is obviously a key factor in the plot development and often provides turning points in the narrative structure.

The Return of the Native is framed in such a way as to draw the Victorian middle-class urban readers into the world of the novel, and then gradually return them to their reality with a warning not to disparage Egdon Heath and its community. Comments in the first chapter bear a resemblance to the kinds of observations made by Victorian travel writers and so put the reader at ease wit this harsh landscape: ‘spots like Iceland’ in the future will be as familiar and appreciated as ‘the vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe’. The description of the fly driver’s attitude to the anachronistic life on the heath as ‘supercilious’ suggests that the reader is not to judge this community negatively, as he does. The inclusion of the viewpoint of an outsider does help, however, to bridge a gap between the world of Egdon and the world of the reader as the reader prepares to leave this fictional world.

The insistent and unlucky coincidence which seems to drive the narrative in The Return of the Native does reveal the important reality that Hardy wants to convey – that the universe and fate are indifferent, if not hostile, to humanity. Narrative foreshadowing creates the sense of the inevitability of fate, and we are drawn into the narrative by the tension that Hardy builds up. This sense of suspense is created at the beginning of the novel by the fact that the first book is comprised of a series of beginnings, with connections and narrative development only occurring gradually. This means that the unfolding of the narrative strands is deferred, and the reader is kept waiting. The story of Thomasin’s failure to marry is begun as she is carried in Venn’s van and the reader may expect that Captain Vye’s curiosity would lead to the unfolding of her story. Instead this narrative development is deferred, with suspense being built by hints and implications, until Chapter Five. The story of the figure on Rainbarrow similarly does not begin to be fully unfolded until Chapter Six. The gambling scene is another example of Hardy’s effective use of suspense (Book 3, Chapter 8).

References to time in The Return of the Native have a structural and thematic significance. From the first line of the novel it is clear hat seasonal time and festivities will be important. These seasonal celebrations organise the cyclical time scale in the novel, although with their reference to ancient and pagan rituals of the past, they also suggest the coexistence of the past and present. At the bonfire ‘[i]t was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages, and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar with this spot’. It is as if the past and present merge in such rituals, a blurring of time which other references in the text also suggest (Clym’s awareness of the past inhabitants of the heath, for instance).

The comic discussion of the heath folk about which measurement of time is the true one points to the futility of human attempts to exert control over time. We are told that ‘On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day’, and the heath itself seems to control diurnal and seasonal time, darkening the daylight, and prolonging the winter. The heath is described in terms of its ancient, unchanging and timeless qualities, and such description raises philosophical questions about human existence and evolution. The more specific time references in Book Five also work to increase the tension by reminding us of the rising heat as the summer months pass. The date of Mrs Yeobright’s death is one of the few specific date references in the whole novel and this demonstrates the importance of this event.

Thomas Hardy’s powers of description generate a vivid impression of this living landscape and its inhabitants. Images of great beauty and great horror convey the extremes of human experience, and we are drawn into this world by the imaginative and intellectual engagement that the description demands. Hardy’s use of language is poetic and stirs an emotional response in the reader, encouraging our sympathy for the characters and the pains and pleasures they experience. Hardy is at times also a master of suspense, involving us in his fictional world, and creating a sense of the mounting tensions the characters feel.

Hardy introduces his characters in a very gradual way; hints and snipers of information build our anticipation and provoke our curiosity. Our initial uncertainty about who is who not only sharpens our attention, but also involves us in the world of the novel; we are like a visitor to Egdon Heath, slowly getting to know its inhabitants. The road on which we first see the characters adds to this sense of entering the world of Egdon. The way in which Venn, Captain Vye and Thomasin are introduced, as distant figures on a landscape which come into focus as we move closer to them, is a typical technique used by Hardy. Unlike many other Victorian novelists, such as George Eliot, Hardy does not provide a psychological dimension to his characters – we do not see the inner workings of their minds. Instead, their psychological states are externalised in the symbols and metaphors used and in their actions. Critics have suggested that unlike the characters created by George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Hardy’s characters do not develop; rather we see the playing out of predetermined patterns of behaviour and responses.

This does not mean that Hardy’s characters are in any way simplistic; the main characters in The Return of the Native are complex and have a duality or contradictory self-division which complicates their actions and responses. For instance, Clym is both a naive idealist and selfishly ambitious, he is a progressive thinker with a nostalgia for the past; Eustacia is a goddess and a foolishly romantic young woman. There is also a sense of conflict and balance between the characters; characters seem to contrast with each other, but these contrasts are often undermined and it is impossible to make clear moral distinctions. For instance, Clym and Eustacia seem to be contrasting characters in many ways, yet ultimately both selfishly seek to fulfil their own ambitions and try to use each other to do so. The moral distinction blurs further in the dilemma about who is to blame for Mrs Yeobright’s death. It would seem to be a result of Eustacia’s actions, but Clym’s delay in seeking reconciliation implicates him equally.

Our response to the characters is also manipulated in a way which run contrary to the morality typically endorsed in Victorian fiction where, as the Victorian dramatist Oscar Wilde quipped, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’ (The Importance of Being Earnest). Eustacia’s selfishness and illicit relationship with Wildeve should make us despise her and feel that she deserves to be punished, but instead we feel increasingly sympathy for her. Although she and Wildeve are ultimately punished for their immoral behaviour, they are not condemned. Rather, in death Wildeve and Eustacia gain a luminosity, and Eustacia a ‘dignity’ and ‘stateliness’ which deliberately confuses the moral message.

The Return of the Native addressed many of the intellectual and philosophical concerns of the Victorian period: concerns about God and belief, origins and destiny, and male-female relations. In this novel Christian belief is eclipsed by paganism, God does not exist and any belief in Providence is shattered. Hardy’s characters live in an indifferent, if not hostile, universe. Victorian idealisation of Nature as synonymous with peace and innocence is likewise destroyed; Nature is ruthless and humanity is part of Nature. Hardy’s female characters often break form the cultural ideals of femininity and his representations of intelligent and passionate women provoked censure from the critics. Eustacia is an intelligent hedonist, bored by her entrapment on the heath and desperate, ultimately gasping, for life. Likewise Hardy’s depiction of illicit male-female relationships and his criticism of marriage made him a controversial figure, although he was always surprised when his writing was attacked for being subversive and immoral.

This points to an essential contradiction in Hardy; although he was radical in many ways, he also had a strong conservative tendency. This conservative tendency is clearly seen in his desire to record the culture of his native Dorsetshire; the depictions of life on Egdon Heath, the work, beliefs, festivities, superstitions, dialect and relationships between the heath folk in The Return of the Native intend to preserve ‘a vanishing life’. The Return of the Native was written during the happiest period of his marriage and with the sense of relief that he felt on returning to his native Dorset. It marked a departure in Hardy’s career as a novelist and is perhaps his most ambitious novel. It offers no easy solutions to the moral questions it raises, and the dramatic and passionate impression of life it creates is profound in its effect.