Goodreads | The Return of the Native (Modern Library)

Erin rated it:

(review of isbn 037575718X)

04/01/08

Read in March, 2008

Crushed by Things Beyond Control: A Review of The Return of the Native
Poor Thomas Hardy. He was pursued by a fate almost as cruel as that which crushes his characters. As a boy he was too well educated to pursue a quiet life on the heath, when he grew up to his novels were too mercilessly condemned by Victorian moralists for him to live in peace as a writer. He turned exclusively to poetry (depending on your stance that can also be counted as tragedy) and his estranged wife died, and altho...more Crushed by Things Beyond Control: A Review of The Return of the Native
Poor Thomas Hardy. He was pursued by a fate almost as cruel as that which crushes his characters. As a boy he was too well educated to pursue a quiet life on the heath, when he grew up to his novels were too mercilessly condemned by Victorian moralists for him to live in peace as a writer. He turned exclusively to poetry (depending on your stance that can also be counted as tragedy) and his estranged wife died, and although he married again he continued writing poetry about his other wife, the dead one. Fortunately for Mr. Hardy the fate that buffeted him throughout his life was a kinder one the preternaturally punitive fate that tends to crush the characters in his novels. Return of the Native is no exception.
The native is Clement Yoebright and his return to Egdon Heath is precipitated by his boredom with success in the diamond industry in Paris and his longing to lead a more meaningful life. He returns home hoping to make a satisfying life for himself by educating the poor Heath dwellers. Instead he becomes entangled with the beautiful and capricious Eustacia Vye for whom the word Paris signifies all the glamour that her life had been lacking. The arrival of Clym Yoebright therefor marks the end of Eustacia's affair with Damon Wildeve who promptly marries Thomasin Yoebright, something he had been promising to do for quite a while. Then the machinations of fate begin to move, and Thomas Hardy makes is clear that human loves and lives are merely grist for the mill and the millstone is crude and heavy. In some books the characters engage in a futile struggle to escape their fates but not so with Thomas Hardy; Clym runs madly into Eustacia's arms, Damon hurries from the house he shares with his wife and daughter to the carriage he will carry Eustacia away in, and a sobbing Eustacia rushes headlong through the driving rain to drown herself in Shadwater Weir. Of course her husband and lover throw themselves in after her.
The pleasure in reading Thomas Hardy comes from lavish descriptions of the heath, a tone that strikes the perfect chord between compassion and strict morality, and the grim precision of inexorable fate in action. While The Return of the Native deals ostensibly with Clym Yoebright and the events precipitated by his return it seems to me that Eustacia Vye is the true subject of the novel. The heath is her torment, the play between Hardy's compassion and morality reaches a fever pitch in regard to Eustacia, and it she who is the most cruelly smitten by the hand of fate. Eustacia's internal struggles are the most dynamic and the narrative dips into her thoughts and feelings more frequently than those of any other character. And it is Eustacia who rebels against cruel fate and gives voice to a sentiment befitting almost any of Hardy's greatest characters:
"How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot!" She cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. "O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!"
Not everyone likes an author who occasionally averts his gaze from the matter at hand to observe instead the movements of the clouds, or insects that herald the passage of seasons, or the difference between trees that grow unmolested in a sheltered hollow and those that grow exposed to the wind on a high and distant hill. I can understand why some might have an aversion to such lashings of rain and thrashing of branches, because in the hands of a lesser author it all turns into a purple mush of twilight followed by the obligatory fiery sunset. But Hardy is made of sterner stuff and so is his prose, so his well-executed landscapes are somber and his sunsets are full of foreboding. The heath reveals not only the state of mind of the characters living on it, it reveals what is within their very hearts:
"Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym. He gazed upon the wide prospect as he walked, and was glad."
And the heath represents an uncompromising morality that Hardy seems to regard simultaneously as overly hard but necessary.
Like many Victorian authors Hardy is concerned with morality but he surpasses many of them in that his concern is sincere and complex: he shows compassion for both those who have strayed from conventional mores but remain pure-hearted and good (Clym) as well as those who willfully exhibit clear moral failings (Eustacia.) His endless sympathy for the faithless Eustacia is indeed almost too much for my taste at times, but her immense inner torment and remorse render her redeemable at the very moment of her suicide, and the end she is a sympathetic figure. (When she lies dead "the stateliness of look which had been almost too marked for a dweller in a country domicile had at last found an artistically happy background.") At the crux of Hardy's work there is an interesting tension between two opposing possibilities: Are these people suffering all of these terrible calamities because God is punishing them for the error of their ways, or were they simply born into a world too cold and cruel for sensitive souls such as these?
Wether it is the hand of a vengeful god at work, or merely the random blows of a fate precipitated by the heedless actions of men, Hardy goes out of his way to lay his characters low. The lengths he goes to probably seemed more believable in a Victorian milieu, next to any single occurrence in any novel penned by Dickens the improbable events that litter Hardy's novels seem impeccably realistic, but to a contemporary reader the role of coincidence and accident can seem a little forced and artificial. But the importance of the minor details; the unopened door, the unopened letter, are necessary for Hardy because his characters are completed by their downfalls. Had Clym merely grown tired of Eustacia, or had Eustacia merely left then they would both seem superficial and petty rather than tragic. The immensity of their suffering as they grapple with their consciences proves that they were meant for better things had fate not trapped them with tests that they were doomed to fail. At the close of his brief preface Hardy writes that "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." It comes as no surprise that this was one of Hardy's pleasant dreams since King Lear exemplifies a distilled form of classic tragedy that is rampant in his work.
Occasionally I have come across novels in which compelling characters move convincingly through well constructed plots and yet, I feel somehow unsatisfied at the end, as if all those pages turned were just ephemeral paper after all and nothing had happened. This is never the case with Thomas Hardy, because although he has his faults he is a thoughtful serious writer who is worthy of his vast and somber heath.

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