Teaching Return of the Native

1. Teaching Return of the Native Dr. AbinChakraborty

2. Topics Covered • The Role of Egdon Heath • Hardy’s view of Life • The role of Chance and Coincidence • The tragic character of EustaciaVye • The role of the rustics • The character of Diggory Venn, the Reddleman • The character of ClymYeobright

3. EGDON HEATH • Egdon Heath as a self-animating primeval entity which resists the forces of time and redefines it according to its own will – a pillar of monumental immbolity. • “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment”. • “The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdonnow was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariablegarment of the particular formation.” • No wonder the heath is associated with bonfire-lighting, maypole celebrations, mummers’ play, the reddleman and so on.

4. Egdon redefining time • “The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.” • “…everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim.” • Egdon is both a psycho-space as well as a self-conscious spatial experience with a timeless dimension.

5. Tragic Possibilities • “It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragicalpossibilities.” • Egdon Heath thus acts as an apt setting for the novel, particularly since it is the near relation of night, awakens itself as evening settles and seems particularly at ease in preternatural gloom.

6. Egdon and Characters • EustaciaVye: “…"'Tis my cross, my shame, and will be my death!" • Wildeve: "I abhor it too," said he. "How mournfully the wind blows round us now!“ • The hostility of both characters to the heath spells out their eventual doom as the heath would devour anyone who dared to defy it – embodiment of ‘Immanent Will”. • Clym Suffers too and becomes purblind along with losing two beloved persons. His suffering may well be seen as a product of his attempt to change the heath through modern education. Eventually he becomes an itinerant preacher with humility and remains respected – probably a consequence of his love of the heath: “

7. Clym and Egdon • “If anyone knew the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odours. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images , of his memory were mingled, his estimate of life had been coloured by it: his toys had been the flint knives and arrow-heads which he found there, wondering why stones should "grow" to such odd shapes; his flowers, the purple bells and yellow furze: his animal kingdom, the snakes and croppers; his society, its human haunters. Take all the varying hates felt by EustaciaVye 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.”

8. Hardy’s view of life • The Return of the Native is a part of Hardy’s Wessex novels, built upon memories of childhood spent in rural Dorset (specifically Bockhampton Village, near Dorchester) in a close-knit static society with inherited age-old values and customs. • His knowledge of rural joys and sorrows was complemented by his knowledge of numerous ballads and stories. But that old world was swept aside by the industrial revolution. Hardy seeks to recreate that old world through his novels. • Herein lies the significance of the unenclosed wildness of Egdon Heath which represents Hardy’s own aversion to change and becomes the site of unchanging traditional activities of English rural life.

9. Egdon as Embodiment of Victorian Melancholia • Hardy’s mindset was also conditioned by contemporary crisis of faith and attendant scepticism and the naturalistic philosophy that identified man as a pitiable creature struggling against an indifferent or cruel universe. Hence the gloom of Egdon Heath • “Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdonappealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.” • Clym embodies a similar melancholia: “In ClymYeobright's face could be dimly seen the typical countenance of the future. The view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted as a new artistic departure.”

10. Fate as Chance and Love • Mrs. Yeobright’s death, Clym’s blindness, Eustacia’s death are all so many accidents which shape the novel’s plot. • Love too acts less as a guiding force and more as a force of destruction and chaos. Clym, Eustacia, Wildeve– they all fall to their deaths or miseries because they are swept into the vortex of love, even when the relationships are utterly incompatible. • Related to love is the predominance of female characters who are mostly portrayed sympathetically as they fall victim to different forces of chance and coincidence. Only Thomasin emerges as being relatively unscathed thanks to the interventions of Diggory Venn and his love for her.

11. Universality of Characters • It is because the characters are represented as being subjects of fate that they emerge out of their local conditions and through their elemental passions acquire gigantic universal statures which are unhindered by their typical Wessex origins. • Wayne Marion Davies: “The atmosphere of the Heath prevails over the whole book, as an environment; it repels some characters and absorbs others. Those who are absorbed achieve a sombre integration with it; but those who are repelled and rebel, suffer disasters.” • The Return of the Native, in this sense, parallels other novels like The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd, Mayor of Casterbridge or Tess of D’ Urbervilles.

12. Chance and Coincidence in the novel • The trajectories of the major characters in the novel are influenced by chance and coincidence on different levels. • 1. Thomasin and Wildeve’s marriage is delayed due to an accidental error regarding the marriage license and it is during their return that Thomasin meets Diggory Venn. He then meets captain Vye who guesses that the woman in his van in Thomasin which information then passes on to Eustacia who lights a bog bonfire that sets up her meeting with Wildeve. • 2. Johnny Nunsuch reports Eustaci-Wildeve meeting to Venn, he overhears their conversation, again proposes marriage to Thomasin through Mrs. Yeobright, she uses it incite Wildeve’s jealously, Wildeve again rushes to Eustacia only to be now rejected by her as the coveted bachelor has now become one even rejected by Thomasin whom Eustacia deems inferior. • Events thus continue to be shaped unpredictably by chances and coincidences.

13. Chance and Coincidence • Fifty guineas each for Thomasin and Clym given to Christian Cantle – he gambles and loses it all to Wildeve who loses it again to Venn who then gives it all to Thomasin. This leads to a meeting between Eustacia and Mrs. Yeobright which leads to a catastrophic quarrel. • Clym’s attempt to reduce Eustacia’s depression by expediting the implementation of educational plans only lead to his purblindness, he becomes a furze cutter and Eustacia’s gloom deepens further due to such lowering of status. • Eustacia and Wildeve meet by chance at the village festival at East Egdon, dance and renew their ties and thus begins another phase of the plot.

14. The closed door episode • Mrs. Yeobright’s visit to Clym coincides with Eustacia’s meet with Wildeve, she delays opening the door, thinks Clym will, Clym remains asleep, Mrs. Yeobright is cast away. During the return journey she dies from exhaustion and adder-bite. She is met by Clym while he makes his way to her only for her to die in his arms. Clym remains shocked and in absolute grief, especially when Johnny Nunsuch reports her last words. • Later Johnny also reveals that Mrs. Yeobright was not let in by Eustacia and that she was with another man. Confrontation ensues. Clymis vehement. Eustacia returns to Mistover Knap. • Wildeve comes into inheritance, Eustacia learns the news, together they plan to elope after meeting occasioned by Charley’s bonfire which Wildeve misinterprets as a signal for him. Both drown and die. • Timothy Fairway forgets to give Clym’s letter to Eustacia in time, Captain Vye also doesn’t give it to her immediately. The letter could have averted elopement and death. But fate prevents that.

15. Stretching Realism? • The entire plot thus remains conditioned by chance and coincidence and at times not only mars credibility but diminishes the aesthetic appeal of the text too. • However the chance events have disastrous impacts only because of the temperaments of the individual characters who remain stubborn with their love and hate. • Ultimately it is character that determines destiny and not the other way round.

16. Role of the Rustics • In the manner of Greek tragedy, Hardy deploys rustic characters as choric figures and as crucial agents for the development of the plot. They help to lend credibility to Hard’s representation and add solidity to his fictional chronotope of Wessex. • First encounter - rustics celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Night with bonfire – human dimension of Egdon Heath. They inform us about Wildeve and Thomasin’s imminent marriage, Mrs. Yeobright’s initial reluctance, eventual acceptance etc. Some of them also comment disapprovingly about Wildeve, deem him unworthy of Thomasin and prefigure their unfortunate marriage. • "Wildeve is older than TamsinYeobright by a good-few summers. A prettymaid too she is. A young woman with a home must be a fool to tear her smockfor a man like that."

17. Rustics’ role in plot development and their wisdom • 1. Eustacia- Clym affair: Sam and Humphrey speak of Clym’s excellence which Eustacia overhears; they even feel that the two of them might make “a very pretty pigeon pair” – ignite Eustacia’s Romantic imagination. • “The words of Sam and Humphrey on the harmony between the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect of the invading Bard's prelude in the Castle of Indolence, at which myriads of imprisoned shapes arose where had previously appeared the stillness of a void.” (Book 2, ch. 1) • Sam and Christian Cantle also highlight Eustacia’s beauty to Clym, present her as a romantic martyr to superstition and suggest a possible meeting. • However, they also point out how strange she is and that she is not one to teach children. Clym’s disregard for such warnings pave the way for his disastrous marriage and attendant suffering. • The same rustics also point out the impracticality of Clym’s educational mission: “"He'll never carry it out in the world," said Fairway. "In a few weeks he'll learn to see things otherwise.“ "'Tis good-hearted of the young man," said another. "But, for my part, I think he had better mind his business."

18. Rustics’ humour and their representation of the essential rhythms of life • Rustics also contribute to the episodes of comic relief in this otherwise tragic life. This humour is genial, realistic and basically Elizabethan. While the other characters love and lose and die, they go on with the simple business of living and keep up the flow of life with songs, dances, anecdotes and a prosaic rootedness in reality. • David Cecil: “…they build up a picture of average humanity in its rural manifestation that is carved out of the bedrock of life.” • The absence of such characters from Tess of D’ Urbervillesand Jude the Obscure detract from the value of those novels.

19. The Reddleman • The only other character who is as absorbed with Egdon Heath as the rustics themselves is Diggory Venn, the reddleman – also a representative of a bygone age. • Reddleman is key to much of the action in the first 2 books – bringing Thomasin from Anglebury after postponement of marriage, talking to Johnny Nunsuch, overhearing Wildeve and Eustacia, again proposing marriage to Thomasin which is rejected by Mrs. Yeobright, meeting Eustacia, Mrs. Yeobright using the reddleman to incite Wildeve etc. It is also through the reddleman that Eustacia confirms her rejection of Wildeve

20. The Reddleman • In all of this, Venn only works to ensure the well-being of Thomasin and remains utterly selfless. The same aspect is revealed again when Venn beats Wildeve at the dice game after appearing at a crucial juncture. • However Venn’s actions inadvertently lead to further complications leading to Eustacia and Mrs. Yeobright’s altercation by the pool. • Later again it is Venn who spots Eustacia and Wildeve returning from the dance and having confirmed his suspicions tracks Wildeve in his nocturnal roamings and even tries to scare him away. However, this only prompts him to visit during daytime which contributes to the closed door episode. Venn also conditions Clym’s subsequent response by revealing that Mrs. Yeobright was coming for reconciliation.

21. The Reddleman • The final phase showcases Diggory Venn as the hero as he now becomes a dairy farmer, develops a friendship with Thomasin, eventually fall in love and the novel ends with promise of marriage and prosperity. • Venn is a representative rustic youth who is not just handsome but also kind and loyal and such virtues are finally rewarded in the novel which progressively dilutes the enigma and unpredictability associated with him. • Yet it cannot be denied that his good intentioned decisions often lead to inadvertent and unfortunate consequences. Yet another proof of man and destiny moving in opposing directions.

22. EustaciaVye • Hardy makes her virtually goddess-like: • “EustaciaVye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman”. • “Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities. The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases.”

23. EustaciaVye • A figure of romantic isolation marked by unconventionality and a sense of haughty superiority • Craving romance: “To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.” • “Fidelity in love for fidelity's sake had less attraction for her than for most women; fidelity because of love's grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.” • “Thus she was a girl of some forwardness of mind, indeed, weighed in relation to her situation among the very rearward of thinkers, very original”.

24. EustaciaVye • “She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody after wearyingof Wildeve.” • The marriage with Clym deteriorates because Eustacia and Clym are utterly contradictory in worldviews. Clym’s blindness and loss of stature contributes to further despair for Eustacia and it is her longing that pushes her towards Wildeve. • Planned elopement as last possible act of defiance against Egdon Heath which of course fails.

25. EustaciaVye • Michael Millgatefinds that "The classical apparatus is . . . obvious and indeed obtrusive, the frame it provides both too heavy and too ornate." In particular, Millgate finds fault with the nexus of Promethean allusions and the hyperbolic language surrounding the heroine, whom Hardy described to his Belgravia ​ illustrator as "wayward & erring" (8 February 10, 1878) rather than specifically "tragic." • Millgatefeels that the sustained "allusions are . . . excessive in themselves and [tend to draw] attention to precisely those features in the novel which prove recalcitrant to analogical cross-referencing: the inappropriateness, for example, of any serious application of the term "Promethean" to the self-consuming passions of EustaciaVye" (131). • Her suffering, after all, is the consequence of neither a Christ-like selflessness nor a tragic will to self-destruction like Lear's nor the relentless unfolding of past circumstances that reveal an Oedipus-like guilt; rather, she makes a foolish choice (marrying Clym) based on a faulty premise (that, having lived in Paris, he will not long be able to tolerate the lack of mental stimulation afforded by the society of the heath).

26. ClymYeobright • The native of Egdon with brilliant promise who forgoes the lure of Paris to return and teach Rustics • Captain Vye describes him as ‘a promising boy’ (chap 1.11,) and ‘he had been a lad of whom something was expected.’ (chap 3.1).  Much is expected of him and the heathfolk see it as only right and proper that he should ‘get on’ in the world.   A self-deprecating Granfer Cantle says: ‘I am nothing by the side of you MrClym’ … ‘Nor any of us,’ (chap 2.6) and this is endorsed by Humphrey ‘in a low rich tone of admiration.’ • Clym’s reason for return: ‘my business was the idlest, vainest, most effeminate business that ever a man could be put to.’ (Chap 3.1) • Clym’s resolve: ‘I shall keep a school as near to Egdon as possible’ (Ibid)

27. ClymYeobright • Clym is Egdon’s product, inwoven with the Heath: “Clymhad been so inwovenwith the heath in his boyhood that hardly anybody could look upon it without thinking of him”. (Ch. 3.1) See. Slide 7 (3.2) for more • That waggery of fate which started Clive as a writing clerk, Gay as a linen-draper, Keats as a surgeon, and a thousand others in a thousand other odd ways, banished the wild and ascetic heath lad to a trade whose sole concern was with the especial symbols of self-indulgence and vainglory. (3.1) • The face was well shaped, even excellently. But the mind within was beginning to use it as a mere waste tablet whereon to trace its idiosyncrasies as they developed themselves. The beauty here visible would in no long time be ruthlessly over-run by its parasite, thought, which might just as well have fed upon a plainer exterior where there was nothing it could harm. Had Heaven preserved Yeobright from a wearing habit of meditation, people would have said, "A handsome man." Had his brain unfolded under sharper contours they would have said, "A thoughtful man." But an inner strenuousness was preying upon an outer symmetry, and they rated his look as singular. (chap 2.6) • As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression from without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested isolation, but it revealed something more. As is usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within an ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray. (Ibid)

28. ClymYeobright • The descriptions highlight the contradictions within Clym and the ironies that mark his character arc in the novel • the intellectual work Clym wished to do and the physical work he is forced to do • his sweeping intellectual vision and his myopic physical sight in which ‘his whole world [is] limited to a circuit of a few feet from his person’ (4.2) • his determined start to teach ennoblement and his final preaching repentance; • his physical identification with the heath, that is ‘obscure, obsolete, superseded country’, and the description that he is ‘mentally … in a provincial future’ (3.2) • Clymreturns to ‘cultivate’ the heath’s people, while on the other hand ‘indulging in a barbarous satisfaction’ at the heath’s resistance to cultivation (3.2) • although longing for a world free from ambition, he dreams of becoming the head of one of the best schools in the country’ (3.3) • Tragic error: marrying someone like Eustacia who is in many ways his polar opposite, especially in relation to the Heath. • Clym’s contradictions embody the contradictions of Victorian age itself

29. ClymYeobright He frequently walked the heath alone, when the past seized upon him with its shadowy hand, and held him there to listen to its tale. His imagination would then people the spot with its ancient inhabitants--forgotten Celtic tribes trod their tracks about him, and he could almost live among them, look in their faces, and see them standing beside the barrows which swelled around, untouched and perfect as at the time of their erection. (6.1) He had but three activities alive in him. One was his almost daily walk to the little graveyard wherein his mother lay, another, his just as frequent visits by night to the more distant enclosure which numbered his Eustacia among its dead; the third was self-preparation for a vocation which alone seemed likely to satisfy his cravings--that of an itinerant preacher of the eleventh commandment. (6.3) He becomes in his own words “too much like the skull at the banquet.“ (6.4)

30. ClymYeobright • Those who ascended to the immediate neighbourhood of the Barrow perceived that the erect form in the centre, piercing the sky, was not really alone. Round him upon the slopes of the Barrow a number of heathmen and women were reclining or sitting at their ease. They listened to the words of the man in their midst, who was preaching, while they abstractedly pulled heather, stripped ferns, or tossed pebbles down the slope. This was the first of a series of moral lectures or Sermons on the Mount, which were to be delivered from the same place every Sunday afternoon as long as the fine weather lasted. (6.4) • Michael Millgate: Since Thomasin does feel affection for Wildeve, he may conceivably possess in some degree what Clym lacks, and certainly Clym would never have been capable of the gentle consideration which Wildeve shows in omitting to tell Eustaciaof his legacy at a moment when her own situation is so desperate. Nor, for better or worse, would Wildeve have been capable of Clym'sstern resistance, at the moment of parting, to the appeal of Eustacia'sbeauty: "he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted to softness" (393). Diggory Venn, too, in his self-effacing devotion to Thomasin, displays a kind of gallantry and sensitivity which Clym would have done well to emulate in his dealings with his mother, with Eustacia, and with Thomasin herself. (140)

31. ClymYeobright • One brief paragraph outlines the factors which led Clym to Paris. The decision to provide the boy with a start in life by apprenticing him to a diamond merchant in Budmouthwas made immediately after the death of his father. • Only once does Mrs. Yeobright refer to her husband in speaking to her son. ..She rebukes Clym: "I suppose you will be like your father; like him, you are getting weary of doing well." Mrs. Yeobright presents Clym with an image of his father which is negatively charged, and she intimates that, like the father, he is not living up to her expectations. By failing to acknowledge her husband as a worthy model and by pinning hopes on her son as the "one idea" which has occupied her since the death of her husband, Mrs. Yeobright compounds the oedipal dilemma of her son and makes it difficult for him to separate from her and strike out on his own. (M.E. Jordan, 103) • Caught in an Oedipal bind by his mother, yet defiantly trying to forge his own ideal and impractically live up to it, Clym endangers both himself and others. His tragedy is that of an imperfect individuation born out of an inadequate sense of self-worth, brought about perhaps by the harshness of Mrs. Yeobright. • The depiction of Mrs. Yeobright suggests a woman lacking empathie insight into the creative, romantic needs of her children. The important loss is not the actual mother but the "magical" means of recreating the sustenance which the mother once provided. If the child has not been able to internalize the mother's validation of the richness and power of his own illusory experience, some damage to the healthy narcissism of the self will be the result. (M.E. Jordan 108)

32. ClymYeobright • Descriptions of nature on the night when Clym leaves Mrs. Yeobright provide the objective correlative of psychological scarring: “The wet young beeches were undergoing amputations, bruises, cripplings, and harsh lacerations, from which the wasting sap would bleed for many a day to come, and which would leave scars visible till the day of their burning” (3.6) • This man from Paris was now so disguised by his leather accoutrements, and by the goggles he was obliged to wear over his eyes, that his closest friend might have passed by without recognizing him. He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse, and nothing more. • Heath becomes the surrogate mother to whom Clym imaginatively return and such regression testifies to his impaired selfhood and resultant melancholia. • Freud outlined the distinguishing features of melancholia as the following: “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding to a degree that finds utterances in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment”. (“Mourning and Melancholia”. 244) • Unable to come to terms with his own anger with his mother and delusorily protraying her as a saint, Clym subjects himself to a life of melancholia that ends up corrupting his heroic potential – hence his tragedy.