The Return of the Native Group

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mecramarathon88
mecramarathon88

What aspect of belonging is explored in The Return of the Native?

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Posted by mecramarathon88 on Saturday October 24, 2009 at 9:09 PM and tagged with belonging, hardy, the return of the native.

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  1. kc4u Teacher
    College - Senior

    eNotes Editor

    Thank you for this brilliant question. In Thomas Hardy's novel The Return of the Native, the setting (Egdon Heath) is as important as anything in the novel and the experience of spatiality lies at the core of the novel. There is a space of nativity and there is a space of return and the novel seems to show an ironic tension between these two. Egdon Heath, flattening Paul Carter's definitions, is both a space (unoccupied) and a place (occupied). It has its own agency and exercises an unchanging primitive authority over its dwellers. Clym, who is the native who has stayed away from the place for long, makes a return. But does he belong to the place, thus? He feels for the place, wants to do some good things for the place and its people in the lines of an educational project, but what Hardy implies is that to belong one needs to understand and submit to the autonomous power of spatiality as exhibited by a place like Egdon Heath. The human condition is marked/inscribed in a place of being which has its own mobility and any attempt to change its essentials would not be welcomed by it. Thus, Clym, Clym's mother and Eustacia all suffer while the people who belong to the Heath in the sense I have explained it--Diggory, Thomasin all survive in a more or less happy state.

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    Posted by kc4u on Tuesday November 3, 2009 at 3:36 AM