You open to the first page and read that it is a Saturday afternoon at twilight on Egdon Heath. Hardy describes it as “This obscure, obsolete, superseded country……. of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness….”
Grandfer Cantle is next introduced singing and dancing a jig saying, “Jown the slippery glasses!” Jown them indeed you think wondering what he’s talking about.
You wonder again when Hardy describes the protagonist, Eustacia Vye in this way, “Where did her dignity come from? By a latent vein from Alcinous’ line, her father hailing from Phaeacia’s isle?-or from Fitzalan and De Vere, her maternal grandfather having had a cousin in the peerage?” Hmm.
Back to the heath, the comically superstitious Christian Cantle (who claims his age to be “Thirty-one last tatie-digging”) says, “Egdon Heath is a bad place to get lost in and the winds do huffle queerer to night than ever I heard ‘em afore. Them that know Egdon best have been pixy-led here at times."
And pixy-led we are. Though I was initially a bit lost, this is a great tale and after a few pages, the reader accustoms himself to Hardy’s writing even if the reader isn’t thoroughly versed in the classics and the Bible.
My own introduction to Thomas Hardy was in high school when we read The Mayor of Casterbridge. That’s the story that opens with a husband trying to sell his wife. What a sad sack Hardy and all his characters are! What miserable creatures for whom happiness seems always out of reach. According to my father who liked reading Thomas Hardy, the writer didn’t “believe in marriage” is how I recall my father putting it. A hasty read of Hardy’s bio tells us that marriage must have perplexed him. The death of his first wife haunted him even though they had been estranged. His second wife was 39 years his junior! In addition to marriage, Hardy must have had his doubts about Christianity as well given the final scene of the book where he appears to make a mockery of the Sermon on the Mount. The unfortunate Clym Yeobright is giving the sermon! Hardly a Christ-like figure. Consider also that the most impressionable, superstitious and laughable character in the book is named, of all things, Christian.
Whether symbolism abounds or not in this story, I took the heath to be a furze-covered, wild kind of purgatory where souls roamed about often losing their way on this untamed patch of earth that offered no clear line between good and evil. Dominating the heath was the Rainbarrow, a tumulus, a hill of bones, a burial ground, maybe hell itself, to which the characters were perilously headed if they couldn’t find their way to heaven. Which they couldn’t.
Hardy’s characters were flawed, unable to grasp what true love is as if Hardy believed such an inability to be the essence of the human person. Love was either a duty or a transaction to the characters. Clym, the native who returned, is a sop of a man, a spoiled mama’s boy with no spine. Eustacia is a Jezebel, a vixen. Wildeve is a bully and a womanizer. Thomasin and her aunt are timid rabbits. Diggory Venn is vaguely likeable as he hovers shadow-like in the background, a symbol of sacrifice and virtue though even with him my patience wore thin at times. Be that as it may, Hardy does weave these unpleasant characters into a clever and suspenseful story. Whether it’s an innocent mistake, a missed knock on the door or the driving rain on the heath, there’s always a glitch that causes the characters to just miss the chance to find true happiness.
It’s no surprise that Hardy aspired more to poetry than prose. His writing is very beautiful and often evokes vivid images or a prevailing mood with few but carefully chosen words. The dice game between Venn and Wildeve is an example. We know the men are on the heath at night but we know just how dark and gloomy it is when the candle goes out and Wildeeve makes a frenzied search for lightning bugs so they can continue the high-stakes game. The reader can feel the tension between the two men yet Hardy relies only on the terse back-and-forth dialog to communicate that tension.
This novel appeared in installments in a magazine called Belgravia and Hardy’s original ending was too depressing for his readers who demanded of the author a more upbeat conclusion. Hardy complied. A brief footnote at the end of the edition I read explained the predictable gloom that Hardy had originally intended. Despite the downer that he is, I like Hardy’s stories (this is my second reading of The Return of the Native) and I will certainly revisit his other novels in short order.
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