To begin, the residents of the Heath refers to the residents of Egdon Heath in Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth-century novel The Return of the Native. Authors from a more illustrious background might have presented the residents of the Heath as unkempt and rough people from a rural background. However, Thomas Hardy himself hailed from a rural region in England, one not unlike Egdon Heath. This similarity in backgrounds is evident in the ways Hardy presents the Yeobrights, the Cantles, the Nunsuches, and other characters. These residents of Edgon Heath might be uneducated in all things academic, but the characters are well-versed in the ways of the world and are often quite advanced in arenas such as the equality and liberty of women. The characters’ pursuit of natural desires in opposition to the mores held by society ultimately lead to their demise. For example, the beautiful and adventurous Eustacia Vye is grand and vivacious for the standards of her nineteenth-century rural society; Eustacia bucks the system but ultimately cannot cope with society labeling her a fallen woman, and she commits suicide.
Thomas Hardy structures the narrative of The Return of the Native as a classical tragedy, where pursuit of natural desires clashes with the values of society. The title of The Return of the Native seems to refer to Clement Yeobright, who gives up an esteemed position abroad in France and returns to his small hometown in England to become as schoolteacher. However, readers could also argue that Hardy’s title refers to the juxtaposition between native trends and society’s expectations for behavior. The people of Egdon Heath, then, create an ideal contrast to classism and societal expectations. Hardy does not present the rural roughness of the residents of Edgon Heath in a negative light but rather presents this group of residents as an extreme example of natural people. These people are humans who in many ways are not adulterated by societal mores; however, tragedy occurs when these mores take on too prominent a role in characters’ lives.
In all, Hardy’s attitude towards the residents of Edgon Heath is one that places value on living according to natural human desires rather than seeing this unrefined way of living as rude or ill-mannered.
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