the return of the native (hardy)

The Return of the Native offers another of Hardy’s winsome troubled male characters, the other side of the macho go-getting Victorian. Clym Yeobright returns from Paris, where he has been making a good living, and finds himself bewitched by both the land and its female avatar, the restless Eustacia Vye. Physically attracted to one another, they are nevertheless a disastrous match, as she has Smiths-ian dreams of being taken out tonight, whereas he is consumed by the irrefutable lure of the moor, (take me to the Moors). For Clym it feels as though it is the very texture of the landscape which seduces him, just as this same landscape feels oppressive and increasingly repugnant to Eustacia, who dreams of Paris, darling.

The soil to which Clym hoves is one that the local culture is steeped in, and has been for thousands of years. His is a return to the native, as well as being the return of a native. The tension between the two might almost be viewed as a tension between the indigenous and the globalised worlds, one that can only lead to schism and tragedy. It is also a battle between a conservative philosophy and a radical one. In the end, after his wife’s death, Yeobright becomes a lay preacher. But the final image of him preaching on a barrow would almost seem to have more to do with a druidical tradition than a Christian one. Yeobright is a man with no real philosophy or political instinct, and hence he retreats towards a fetishism of the known, as a way of escaping responsibility for having to actually do anything of any use. This might be a reaction to the fleshpots of Paris, but it’s hard not to sympathise with Eustacia’s frustration. 

“The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wildflowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”