The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's work, while fixated on the countryside, is rarely pastoral and idyllic. Rather, his is a world of determined, pervasive melancholy. Still, he provides instances of redemption, and his dramas are never tedious. The Mayor of Casterbridge satisfied me, so when I saw The Return of the Native at a library book sale, I capitalized on the opportunity to repeat the feeling.

Hardy opens with the heath. "Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity." Egdon Heath proves to be almost a character here in Hardy's novel. The heath does as much to alter the fates of the principal players as they themselves do. Its atmosphere, to some familiar and comforting, to others stifling and oppressive, permeates every scene and action. The plot is one of diametrically opposed lovers whose rash and desperate attempts to orchestrate events to suit their own whims end in tragedy. The heath bears witness to their futile drama, reflecting upon its face a "black fraternization" with its ill-destined inhabitants.

The story is winding and captivating; suffice it to say several intertwined individuals of the mid-19th-century English countryside become yet more closely and convolutedly related when the eponymous native, Clym Yeobright, interrupts the natural course of things and drastically alters life in Egdon Heath. Clym falls in love with Eustacia Vye, an idle, beautiful woman secluded in her grandfather's home, desperate for the imagined pleasures of the city. "The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."

She bewitches Clym, and they are soon wed. But her capricious dissatisfaction and blind selfishness have tragic consequences, ending ultimately in death, for her and two others. She rekindles a relationship with Wildeve, who is lately married to Clym's dear cousin. While harboring him in her house she neglects to answer the door when Clym's heretofore estranged mother comes to reconcile. Distraught, and believing Clym condoned Eustacia's refusal to admit her into their home, his mother wanders on the heath in the rain, and after being bitten by a snake, dies. Eustacia later determines to flee abroad, aided by her lover, but in a wonted fit of passion drowns herself. Wildeve perishes in an attempt to save her, and Clym just escapes with his life.

Eustacia destroys all that she touches with her self-absorbed ambitions. "Yeobright," however, "loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather that affluence." Why this astute, intelligent man fresh off the streets of 1840s Paris should be so deceived as to make such an unworthy alliance is hard to determine.

Clym dreams of opening a school to educate the villagers of Egdon, much to the chagrin of Eustacia. When his eyesight is temporarily strained, restricting him to "furze-cutting" on the heath to earn money, Clym is not daunted. He throws himself wholeheartedly into the endeavor. "He is set upon by adversities," says Hardy, "but he sings a song." While he is merrily serenading the heath in the glow of his exertion, Eustacia happens upon him. Furious that he could enjoy engaging in the work of a commoner while she too is living like one, she unleashes her wrath upon him, the touching portrait of a man afflicted and nonetheless happily laboring in what capacity he can slashed to shreds by Eustacia's vindictive ranting.

Eustacia, retaliating against Clym as the source of her unhappiness, decimates his chances of achieving anything but, though Hardy does grant Clym an epilogic career as a travelling preacher/moralist. Is beauty truly such an inescapable snare, that a circumspect scholar would fall victim to a conniving, vindictive woman whose chief, and perhaps only virtue, is her face?