From Jewels to Furze: Transience and Permanence in The Return of the Native

Abstract

For many readers, their first and most enduring impression of The Return of the Native (1878) remains the highly sensuous and atmospheric evocation of Egdon Heath at the start. Grouped into ‘Novels of Character and Environment’ in his General Preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912, Hardy’s sixth novel draws much of its colouring and inspiration from that initial framework: in film terms, a salient establishing shot. In terms of its actual scale, the account of Egdon occupies, with one exception, the least space of any chapter (134 lines vs. average of 276), a fact testifying to the degree of its intensity and powerful recall in the imagination of the reader.² By sharp contrast with the three venues and immediate entry of the heroine at the start of the foregoing HE, the first chapter of RN features no human beings, only Egdon Heath as dominating personality of the natural world.³ As its title intimates (‘A Face on which Time makes but Little Impression’), the chapter appears to be atemporal, reaching back to prehistory and myth from the locus of a twilight Saturday in November. Two chapters later, it is identified as the Fifth, Guy Fawkes’ Night, a date which naturalizes the important bonfire motif of Book First.

[Egdon Heath] was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature — neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.¹

To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.... For the rest, she suffered much from depression of spirits, and took slow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather’s telescope and her grandmother’s hour-glass — the latter because of a peculiar pleasure she derived from watching a material representation of time’s gradual glide away. (pp. 70–1; 1.7)