The Return of the Native (1878)

Abstract

There has been a marked tendency in some recent criticism of The Return of the Native to regard this novel as an expression basically of Hardy’s philosophical incertitude, of his refusal to find any social or moral continuity in his imagined world. It is read as a testimony to the exile rather than the return of the native. The two central characters— Clym and Eustacia—become: ‘figures in an allegory of flesh and spirit, like the abstractly patterned interplay of flesh and spirit (or perverse spirit) in Jude the Obscure.’¹ Although it belongs to Hardy’s middle period and is separated from Far from the Madding Crowd only by The Hand of Ethelberta, it is held to be a radically different kind of book. Concluding his analysis of the novel Richard Benvenuto says: ‘Clym is left precisely where Hardy’s original conception required him to be; in an indifferent and ambiguous world, searching to no apparent avail for what it is to do well.’² The human reality of the characters has been subordinated to metaphoric or metaphysical functions.