The Return of the Native Study Guide
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy is a novel that received a very controversial feedback in the Victorian society. It is the story about the complicated relationships, love triangles that sometimes have nothing in common with love, but only with rationality. The desires and goals of the characters are rarely noble and some of them who are relatively “pure” are miserable during the whole story. The two endings of the story leave the situation even more ambiguous - the author chooses the “better” one, where at least the initial couple is able to achieve happiness, but in the alternative ending everyone is unhappy until the very end of their lives.
The story features one particularly unsettling character for the Victorian society, who, despite punished in a gruesome way in the end, still feels the strongest one in all the novel, even though being secondary. Eustacia just doesn’t belong to the place where the story is unwinding. She is too good for it - not considering herself too good, she is clearly portrayed as “queenly”. So, her desire to get out from there at any cost looks justified. Still, she is confronted by the quiet, faithful and conventional Thomasin. Eustacia’s character has a feeling of ancient Greek tragedies in the description, she is the Antigone of modernity. Some of the literary devices used in the novel also refer to the ancient Greek tradition, giving to the story of continuous adulteries the credibility of mythology. Despite the modern background, the joys and sorrows we see in the book are eternal and were known to humanity from its first written works.
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy is a brilliant example of portrayal of the eternal conflict between natural and social, the inner desires and the expectations society puts on everyone of us.
Author: Noah Kennedy
New Essays
1. Many critics feel that ‘The Return of the Native’ is too pessimistic. How far do you agree with this? 2. “The main interest in the novel lies in the characters of the three women and the ways in which the return of the native affects their destinies”. Account for the effect Clym’s return has on...
The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy’s sixth fresh and likely his best known. The narrative focuses on the lives and loves of occupants in the fictional county of Wessex. England. an country which was based on the rural country where Hardy was raised. The narrative manner of the novel is...
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18 September, 2013 Theme Analysis for The Return of the Native In Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native man is often influenced by his or her surroundings whether one is aware of it or not. The heath functions as its own character in addition to being an evocative backdrop that has some...