Study Guide to The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, arguably the most popular of Hardy’s 14 Wessex novels. As a novel first published in the magazine Belgravia, popular for its sensationalism, Hardy classified The Return of the Native as a “Novel of Character and Environment.” Moreover, themes from Hardy’s novels draw interesting conversations around the power of imagination. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Hardy’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO THOMAS HARDY

 

HARDY’S BIRTH AND PARENTAGE

Thomas Hardy was born in Upper Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, England, on June 2, 1840. His father was known then as a master builder (today we would call him a contractor) who employed up to ten or twelve men on his buildings. Hardy’s mother came of a family long established in Dorset as cultivators of the land. Ernest Brennecke in his Life of Thomas Hardy says she was ambitious in a literary way; her interests included the classical Latin poets, Virgil, French romances and tragedies. From her Hardy developed his love of reading. It was she who arranged what formal education Hardy received: first the village school; then her own tutoring in Latin; then a French governess for a year. Thereafter Hardy was his own tutor, teaching himself Greek, and reading eagerly and thoughtfully.

YOUTH

In 1856 Hardy, ages sixteen, was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect, whom he helped in the restoration of old churches. In 1862, at twenty-two, he went to London to work in another architect’s office. He won a prize for an essay, “The Application of Coloured Bricks and Terra Cotta in Modern Architecture.” During his time in London Hardy attended night classes offered by King’s College. In his spare time he wrote poetry. He spent much time at concerts and in the art museums. Hardy endured London for five years before he returned to Dorset in 1867 to work for the same architect who had apprenticed him.

LATER YEARS

Through his work on restoring a church in Cornwall, Hardy met the church organist, Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. During their early married years, after a honeymoon in Paris and Belgium, they lived in Dorset, London, and at times in a Paris flat. Although her preferred writing poetry, he turned to writing novels as a means of earning money. His novels were first published in installments in popular magazines. Between 1883 and 1885 he built, near Dorchester, his own home which he called Max Gate. In 1912 the first Mrs. rarely moved from his beloved Wessex country. In 1912 the first Mrs. Hardy died. In 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale. She was a writer herself, and after Hardy’s death, in 1928, she devoted her time to assembling his biography from his papers and her own reminiscences. Her Life of Thomas Hardy was first published in 1933.

HARDY’S PERSONALITY

Albert Guerard, a noted critic, speaks of Hardy as having the tenderness of a Saint Francis toward children, animals, and all unfortunates, Katherine Anne Porter, in an essay in Modern Literary Criticism, says that Hardy was painfully sensitive to what he believed to be a universal pervasiveness of needless misery for humans and animals. All his life he suffered underlying selfless discomfort for the suffering of all animate beings. H. M. Tomlinson, in an essay in The Saturday Review Gallery, believes that the only thing that could arouse Hardy’s anger was cruelty to humble and insignificant people or to animals. His greatness lay in simple, modest thoughts and concerns. He liked to talk of nature, the birds and the signs of the weather; he liked to ramble on about the village inns and the characters who frequented them. The little things of life interested him for he was a man of simple tastes and habits.

LITERARY CAREER

At the outset of his book on Hardy, Henry Duffin gives a chronology and classification of Hardy’s literary works. Hardy began writing as a poet and ended writing as a poet. Poetry was his favorite means of expression; but writing poetry did not provide a livelihood; so he turned to writing popular novels.

Hardy wrote fourteen Wessex novels between 1871 and 1895. The Return of the Native (1878) is the sixth of those novels. Hardy classified his fiction as: Novels of Character and Environment; Romances and Fantasies; Novels of Ingenuity and Experiment. The Return of the Native he called a Novel of Character and Environment. Mr. Duffin suggests another classification - Tragedies, Tragi-comedies, Comedies - and lists The Return of the Native as a Tragedy.

The last of the Wessex novels, Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, created such a furor in ecclesiastical circles that Hardy, a devout churchman, gave up writing novels and returned to his first love, poetry. The dates of the poetry volumes range from 1898 to his death in 1928.

Critics differ as to which of Hardy’s novels is his greatest: The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or Jude the Obscure. From the number of editions of The Return of the Native now published, it seems that this novel is the most popular at the present time.

WESSEX COUNTRY

Historically, Wessex was one of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Geographically, it first included what are now the counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon; later it annexed what are now Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Essex. The Wessex of Hardy’s novels encompasses Dorsetshire, Hampshire, and Wiltshire. On the map it describes a semi-circle southward with Oxford as the northernmost point.

Ernest Brennecke, in his biography, says that Hardy looked upon the heath country of Wessex as if it were a great stage upon which nature buffeted the animate and inanimate about in comedies and tragedies dependent upon the sum of all the long past actions of history as well as upon the present unpredictable moods of weather and vast solitude. Albert Guerard enumerates the important Wessex virtues as fidelity, simplicity, endurance, and tolerance. Wessex contains heath country unchanged over the centuries since the Romans buried their dead in the huge earthworks now known as barrows. Guerard calls Hardy the Wessex historian and further notes that Hardy’s rural characters are really not of the nineteenth century, but are characters out of Wessex history which they help to keep alive.

In his childhood, Hardy made his playground on the heath; his playmates were heath children. He learned early to talk the heath dialect, although in his home he was not allowed to use it. That his heart and soul were firmly attached to the Wessex country is shown by Max Gate, the home he built on the edge of the heath and rarely left. H. M. Tomlinson visited Hardy at Max Gate and writes of the place in an essay. Max Gate, near Dorchester, is like an island walled by trees from the vast expanse of Egdon Heath. The house is completely hidden from the road. Hardy probably planted the screen of trees to protect his cherished privacy. One could walk across the fields from the town and feel the dark mood of the brooding hill beyond fields of corn. Maiden Castle, an ancient Celtic earthwork or hillfort formed by men long before the Romans came, rises in the distance. Dorchester church with its square tower, and the chimneys of the town seem to float over the treetops which rise from the depression below the height of the town. This is real Hardy country, and you feel you must be about to meet the man himself, no matter which path you take.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

Hardy classified this work as a Novel of Character and Environment. Albert Guerard calls it a tragedy of cross purpose, which is universal and vast. Here we have the brooding heath, less concerned over human beings caught in its spell than human beings are concerned over the plight of ants in an anthill on its wild surface. Here we have characters, themselves strong personalities, playing upon each other and played upon by this imperturbable environment. Guerard says that Hardy believed literally in the power of imagination over the body and in the magnetic, compelling power of the strong mind over the weak. In The Return of the Native the heath is the ultimate strong mind.

THE STORY IN BRIEF

Eustacia Vye, a nineteen-year-old, sultry beauty, has one compelling desire: to marry a man worthy of her and to travel to exotic distant lands with him as her cavalier. Living on Egdon Heath, she has only one possible candidate: Damon Wildeve, keeper of the village inn, a former civil engineer who somehow failed in his profession. Wildeve and Eustacia Vye have equally uncurbed passionate natures. They seem to thrive on tormenting each other - now passionately loving, now passionately hating. Wildeve, however, has a roving eye which has been caught by the innocent simplicity of Thomasin Yeobright. She is not one to be trifled with, and he has asked her to marry him; but at church on the wedding day, whether by his intent, or by his mistake, the license proves invalid. Eustacia is overjoyed at the news, thinking Wildeve is so much in love with her that he cannot marry another.

Thomasin Yeobright, however, has a protector, Diggory Venn. Diggory is in love with Thomasin. He has earlier proposed to her but has been gently refused. Diggory determines that she shall have the man she wants. He and Mrs. Yeobright, Thomasin’s aunt, contrive separately and together, to bring about the delayed wedding.

Eustacia, confronted with an actual proposal of marriage from Wildeve, cannot bring herself to believe him good enough for her; neither can she bring herself to accept what she considers second place, since Thomasin received his first proposal of marriage.

The arrival of Clym Yeobright, Mrs. Yeobright’s son, stirs Eustacia’s spirit of adventure. Clym’s business is in Paris. Bright lights glitter in Eustacia’s mind. Clym is well-educated and well-to-do; he is her knight-in-armor come to rescue her; Thomasin, his earlier sweetheart, must not get him. Eustacia joins the schemers to bring about the postponed wedding of Thomasin and Damon Wildeve. Meanwhile Mrs. Yeobright, by telling Wildeve of another suitor who wants Thomasin, rekindles his desire for her. Diggory Venn, by admitting himself the other suitor, and Eustacia Vye, by spurning Wildeve’s proposal to her, send Wildeve, in a pique, to set a date with Thomasin.

Thomasin marries Wildeve. Wildeve thinks he is having revenge on Eustacia, but Eustacia is happy to have Thomasin removed as a rival for Clym Yeobright’s affections. When Clym marries Eustacia, despite his mother’s disapproval of the “hussy,” he has to move from his mother’s house because of the rift, and the wedding is without her blessing or presence.

Eustacia has heard Clym say that he wants to stay on the health and become a teacher, but she cannot believe that anyone who has been to Paris will not go back there. By the end of their honeymoon, however, she realizes his firm resolve never to go back. Clym plunges deeper into his studies to hasten his becoming a teacher, and thus ruins his eyesight. Unable to read for months, he finds in furze-cutting (cutting bushes on the heath) an occupation which enables him to keep his self-respect. Eustacia, however, is humiliated and in despair.

Clym’s mother, learning of his misfortune through Diggory Venn (the ever-watchful one), is persuaded to relent and go to call on the couple. Through a mistake, however, no one answers her knocks, though she knows her son, his wife, and another man are in the house. She stumbles back over the heath in the broiling sun, to be found later by her son in a state of exhaustion from which she dies.

Clym is ill and broken-hearted for weeks. He cannot understand how his mother could have been turned from his door thinking she was cast off by her son, as a neighbor boy reports. He blindly blames himself and will not be comforted. Finally he learns that it all happened while he was taking his mid-day nap. Eustacia has a visitor with her and, thinking Clym had roused to answer his mother’s knock, had not gone to the door. Clym demands to know who the visitor was. Eustacia will not say. Clym, beside himself with rage and grief, says things that drive Eustacia from the cottage back to her grandfather’s house at Mistover.

Eustacia meets secretly with Wildeve, who has now inherited a considerable sum of money. He agrees to help Eustacia escape to the seaport, inwardly planning to escape with her. She still has her dream of Paris; he relishes the thought of an illicit elopement with her.

Thomasin suspects the plan and goes to Clym, her cousin, for help. He sets forth to intercept the pair; Thomasin goes on to ask help of Diggory Venn. Diggory and Thomasin go together to the place where Clym and Wildeve have met - on the heath road beside the river. Suddenly they all hear a dull thud and soon discover that Eustacia, overwhelmed by the futility of it all, has slipped or flung herself into the water to drown. Wildeve and Clym Yeobright both swim to rescue her. All three are finally dragged from the water by Diggory Venn. Eustacia and Wildeve are dead, but Clym is revived.

Hardy’s sixth book of the novel, written at the demand of his public, has Thomasin, now a widow, marry her faithful lover, Diggory Venn. Clym Yeobright plunges on alone through life in his chosen professions of teaching and preaching.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

BOOK FIRST: THE THREE WOMEN

CHAPTER 1: A FACE ON WHICH TIME MAKES BUT LITTLE IMPRESSION

The time is November - a Saturday afternoon approaching twilight. The place is Egdon Heath, covered by a sky completely overcast. Imagine being in a vast rounded tent made of clouds with the heath as the floor. The dark brown heath and the whitish sky make it seem that night has come while day still lingers. “Looking upwards, a furze-cutter [furze is an evergreen shrub] would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot [bundle] and go home.” Thus the dark face of the heath could “hasten evening,” “intensify midnight,” “retard dawn,” and “sadden noon.” The approach of night seems to bring the heath to life. Darkness becomes a living, pulsing being, exhaled by the heath to meet the waning light from the heavens. As all else sinks to sleep, the heath awakens and becomes an intent listener. It seems to be waiting, “a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities,” friend to the wind, beloved of the storm. Twilight combines with “the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic . . . impressive . . . emphatic . . . grand”: a “sublimity” or appeal to the soul, often lacking in places famous for scenic beauty.

The human soul has suffered oftener from a place too smiling for its reason than from oppressive surroundings “oversadly tinged.” As our race has advanced in years, the more thinking among mankind have found “closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness”: “the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain” - or “a gaunt waste in Thule.” Egdon Heath answers to this call from the spirit of man. Its intensity is the sort “arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists.” It invites the illusion of strange phantoms - the wild regions which harass “in mid...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Thomas Hardy
• 2) Textual Analysis
• 3) Character Analyses
• 4) Critical Commentary
• 5) Essay Questions And Answers For Review
• 6) Bibliography