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The Tragic Inexorability of Hardy's Logic in the Return of the Native

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The Tragic Inexorability of Hardy's Logic in the Return of the Native Sendai Shirayuri Women's College The Tragic Inexorability of Hardy’s Logic in The Return of the Native YOSHINO Satoko Introduction The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy’s fifth published novel, is ‘the first book in which Hardy reaches toward grandiose literary effects and announces those grim preoccupations with fatality that will become associated with his name,’1 and also ‘Hardy’s first attempt at tragedy as exemplifying the characteristic inexorability of his tragic vision.’2 The Return of the Native belongs to the work of his second period: the novels of his first period, Under the Greenwood Tree, or Far from the Madding Crowd are conceived in a relative calm temper, but the works of the second phase, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Caster- bridge, and The Woodlanders are gradually darkening in his mood, and at the last stage of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are completely gloomy. His philosophy, from the time he began to write, was the same: the universe was a huge impersonal mechanism, directed by some automatic principle of life unknown, pursuing its mysterious end, utterly indifferent to the feelings of mortals. A struggle between man on the one hand and, on the other, an omnipotent and indifferent Fate─that is Hardy’s interpretation of the human situation. Inevitably it imposes a pattern on his picture of the human scene, and it determines the character of his drama.3 So my interest is to study Hardy’s first attempt of an inexorable tragedy, The Return of the Native, and explore his tragic vision from a few angles. As for the making of this novel, it is evident that Hardy had set to work at the beginning of 1877. On April 12, 1877, he sent the first fifteen chapters of his story to John Blackwood of Blackwood’s Magazine. Blackwood took time to read the manuscript from beginning to end, even though he could not accept it for serialization in 1877. For financial reasons, Hardy was anxious that the publication of this novel should be delayed as little as possible. His former serial editor Leslie Stephen had been disappointed in his last novel, The Hand of Ethelberta; nevertheless, Hardy lost little time in inviting Stephen to consider his new novel. Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill said he thought he could decide in two or three weeks but would pre- fer more time: he wished to have full details of the intended development of the story when the manuscript was sent. Stephen, as the editor of ‘a family magazine’, feared that the relations between Eustacia, 19 NII-Electronic Library Service Sendai Shirayuri Women's College YOSHINO Satoko Wildeve, and Thomasin might develop in something ‘dangerous,’ so he refused to have anything to do with the story unless he could see the whole of it.4 Hardy needed a contract for serial- ization as soon as possible. He submitted his manuscript to Temple Bar, which turned it down. Then he was glad to accept terms for its publication in Belgravia, a sensational periodical. The Return of the Native was first issued in twelve monthly installment from January to December, 1878, in the magazine Belgravia. And after many false starts and bowdlerizations, he eventually produced a story that would sell, albeit to Belgravia. He would, as with all his novels following Far From the Madding Crowd, restore many of the serial cuts and bowdlerized passages to the volume edition, which would ensue as a matter of course when the serial went into its final installment. Unlike serial publications, books were available to a restricted adult readership via libraries and commercial booksellers. Finally The Return of the Native was published in a three-volume edition by Smith, Elder & Co. on November 4, 1878. And it was with a mixed reception. Evelyn Hardy states that: “The Return of the Native is now acknowledged to be the finest work of Hardy’s middle age and one of the prose masterpieces of our language. Yet when it was published it received little praise.”5 The Athenaeum review was one of the most hostile responses the book received, and one of the earliest. Evening Standard praised plot and description but deplored Hardy’s tedious love of tiresome commonplace characters. The Academy detected in his work a certain Hugoesque quality of insincerity. Blackwood’s called Hardy an original thinker and writer, but alleged that his book might have been a clever parody of his earlier ones. The Con- temporary Review was willing to have him with all his faults: “Mr. Hardy, one of the strongest of our novelists, if not the strongest, and a man between whom and Mr. Browning there are some affinities.”6 Most reviewers, however, reluctantly conceded that Hardy’s powers of description were exceptional and that here was a truly fine novelist in the making. I The opening of The Return of the Native is devoted to the description of a wild tract of unenclosed heath land. The initial description of Egdon, given from the point of view of the narrator in the central valley of the heath, is of a vast bowl claustrophobically blocking out the outside world: Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape─far-reaching proofs productive of genu- ine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now 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 invariable garment of the particular formation. (6) Hardy’s reference to the changeless nature of Egdon, which encompasses all time from pre-his- 20 NII-Electronic Library Service Sendai Shirayuri Women's College The Tragic Inexorability of Hardy’s Logic in The Return of the Native tory to the present, which acknowledges only the rhythm of the sun and the seasons, and in which clock time is meaningless, introduces a destabilizing vision as space and time expand dizzyingly. Humanity is reduced to a historical footnote. Yet Hardy’s is not a nihilistic vision, for landscape is given significance by human presence, and here on the white surface of the Roman Road is the reddleman’s van. Houses have been established on the heath, often identified as tiny points of light in the great darkness, and the novel’s tragic drama is localized in places named ‘Blooms-End’, ‘Mistover Knap’, and ‘the Quiet Woman’. The heath’s tragic dimension is alluded to in Hardy’s association of the heath with ‘that traditionary King of Wessex’, in the Preface to the 1895 edition, and in his reference to the heath’s omnipresent, anthropomorphic face, ‘suggesting tragical possibilities’ (6). Hardy defines his characters and concerns against the heath. It represents one term of the dialectic between the ineluctably material and permanent, and the state of flux of the mod- ern mind. A central motif in this novel is the opposition between the inner Victorian world of the novel and the Hellenic spirit embodied in both Eustacia and the Egdon paradigm. This is known among scholars as the Hellenic-Hebraic opposition. The disjunction is powerfully evoked by the personification that is Egdon juxtaposed with the life of its inhabitants. Egdon’s highest elevation, Rainbarrow, is shaped from an imaginative mixture of three barrows unified and centralized within the landscape. Actually the barrows are spatially separated and periph- eral to the heath. Why is this particular construct significant? Because geographical heights lend themselves to ideological emblems: temples in Greece, castles in Europe and flags of glory universally. Such elevations are patterned in architectural forms―the spires of churches, the domes of court houses, and the towers of cathedrals. The ideological clash between Hellenistic polytheism, Greek joyousness, and the pursuit of happiness on the one hand, and Christian monotheism, self-redemption, and the pursuit of godliness on the other is emblematized by the dramatic entity that is the Atlantean brow of Rainbarrow in the first instance and the Hades of downward Egdon in the second. Where Eustacia Vye crowns the former as the ‘perfect finish’ to its ‘architectural’ mass, Diggory Venn, the Mephistophelian devil, emerges from the latter: There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath.... Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure give to the dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obvious justification of their outline. Without it, there was the dome without the lantern; with it the architectural demands of the mass were satisfied. (13) Hardy returns to the motif of Greek versus Hebraic human values in Jude the Obscure―the oppression of the human spirit is a universal theme for Hardy. The force of oppression usually has its origin in social codes and practices, but latterly, especially in his poetry, the agency of human suffering, misery, and oppression is the Christian God―Hardy’s famous ‘Immanent 21 NII-Electronic Library Service Sendai Shirayuri Women's College YOSHINO Satoko Will,’ or ‘Prime Mover’―who fails, in a lack of consciousness, to address the human condition.7 An embellishment of this theme in The Return of the Native is the overthrow of the present situation. Again, this is a theme pursued by Hardy in many of his novels. Clym Yeobright fails, just as Angel of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude of Jude the Obscure fail, to bring enlighten- ment into the community. More clearly, the oppression of women struggling in a man-made world for free self-expression, autonomy, equal opportunity, and personal liberty remains unresolved. As The Return of the Native makes clear, the world is not yet ready for change.
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