Abstract
This novel most clearly presents Hardy’s establishment of harmony with the world. His triumph over sorrow through indifference towards it is indicated in a poem which sets the theme of the novel by appearing on the title-page itself:
To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me and so kind. I would deceive her, And so leave her But ah! she is so constant and so kind.1
The same is exhibited in the setting and illustrated in the action of the novel.
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Notes
Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native, Macmillan, London, 1964, p. iii.
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, Macmillan, London, 1957, p. 418.
Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd, Macmillan, London, 1952, p. 164.
Santayana, G., The Sense of Beauty, Dover Publications, New York, 1955, pp. 47–8.
Holloway, John, ‘Hardy’s major fiction’, in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A.J. Guerard, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, pp. 53–4.
Hawkins, Desmond, Hardy the Novelist, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1965, pp. 21–2.
Lawrence, D.H., ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, in Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald, Heinemann, London, 1961, p. 414.
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© 1985 Jagdish Chandra Vallabhram Dave
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Dave, J.C. (1985). The Return of the Native. In: The Human Predicament in Hardy’s Novels. Macmillan Hardy Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07646-8_5
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