Here’s Clym Yeobright, recently returned from (gasp) Paris, disgusted with the corrupt awful world out there and longing to settle down in the country. Here’s Eustacia Vye, who in our century would listen to a lot of Tori Amos music and ply boys with drinks until she could have her way with them, itching to get away from the gloomy, oppressive wasteland she lives in and see the big wonderful world out there. The characters in The Return of the Native do more to bring about their own misery than any others in Hardy, and with the exception of Angel in Tess of the Baskervilles, they’re the characters I most wanted to throttle. The best one, The Mayor of Casterbridge backs up the coincidences in a truck and dumps them yet they are always at least individually plausible, and you get the sense that heroic, larger than life figures are being struck down by a cruel God who not only plays at dice, but cheats. Hardy wrote five major novels, and this is my least favorite. This above all: If you’re too frail to walk long distances, or you like to run headlong into the night bellowing for Heathcliff or Stella or whoever, do not make your home in a heath a million miles from nowhere! You may avoid beaucoup tears and disappointment.ģ. When contemplating marriage, talk to one another about your long term plans. When the bride sings “I Will Survive” at her wedding party, it does not bode well.Ģ.
Marriages made to spite one’s ex tend not to do well. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that whichresponds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.ġ. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy
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