[In the following essay, Kramer examines Hardy's experiments in tragic form in The Return of the Native.]

The Return of the Native is Hardy's most imitative, most self-conscious, and generally least successful effort at high tragedy. In many ways an impressive novel—in concept of personality, in awareness of the symbolic value of setting—it is probably most accurately thought of as the kind of novel that a determined and self-taught writer had to get out of his system before he could go on to find his own manner. This is not to say that The Return of the Native is a “sport” in Hardy's oeuvre—far from it—or that Hardy did not repeat in later works many of the false notes in this novel, but that its distinctive qualities were blended in subsequent books with techniques and concepts of aesthetic form that were more of Hardy's own devising.

The Return of the Native is the first of Hardy's sustained efforts at tragedy; its uncertainty may stem partly from Hardy's puzzlement as to how tragedy in fiction should be handled and partly from his lack of confidence that he could succeed. It is not surprising that Hardy looked to traditional concepts of the tragic in casting about for a method, even though his rustic scene and characters might have seemed of questionable promise when viewed in the perspective of the masterpieces of the past for which he had never lost his schoolboy's awe. That he imitated the pattern of classical tragedy is obvious in his use of the unities of time and place.¹ He also had originally planned the main action to take place in five books, to parallel the five acts of Elizabethan drama; and both Clym and Eustacia are fond of giving speeches that make their dilemmas external and theatrical. An allusiveness richer and more varied than customary in Hardy's novels elevates Egdon Heath into a setting appropriate for a drama of the widest significance. Indeed, Hardy's allusions draw upon the epic and heroic modes as well as the tragic, and encompass Norse and Indian as well as Greek, Roman, and Christian legend.² Hardy, then, encourages the reader to furnish literary recollection of tragic impact that amplifies the actions he presents. With the exception of The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which he borrowed another feature of traditional tragedy—the dominating hero whose very character expands the stage—Hardy never again relied so extensively upon his literary predecessors for examples of tragedy or for artificial extensions of plot and characters and situations.

Still, if Hardy had limited his efforts to classical patterns, it is not likely that The Return of the Native would have called forth the variety and quality of responses that it has. There is a basic difference between The Return of the Native and the more conservative imitation of classical forms, The Mayor of Casterbridge. Although interpretations of Henchard's story vary, the developments of dilemma and disaster are straightforward and unparadoxical. Attempts to define the emotional and fictive and aesthetic directions of The Return of the Native by any encompassing theory, on the other hand, constantly run up against complications and ambiguities within the text of the novel.³ Hardy is attempting a fresh expression of tragic form, although one which incorporates the old patterns. His originality lies in his efforts to enlarge upon classical precept and to transpose the artificiality and rigidity of dramatic structure into the requisite freedom and tentativeness of fiction. Such elements as the unities of time and place are, naturally, only contributory to the novel's total effect. More important are Hardy's conception of tragic characterization and of the relationship between character and setting. In both Hardy is resourceful and suggestive, although his handling of them can be contradictory in the destructive sense of confusion or of being at cross-purposes as well as in the enriching sense of ambiguity.

I

The uniqueness of The Return of the Native among Hardy's experiments in tragic form is that its two tragic protagonists—Clym and Eustacia—inhabit different psychic worlds and evoke from us different tragic reactions.⁴ They resemble Antigone and Creon in that as tragic figures they draw upon different sources of vitality. They are distinguished from Sophocles' protagonists because they represent moral positions in a less rigid fashion. Rather than opposing social authority with the individual right to interpret moral necessity like Sophocles, Hardy constructs less absolute contrasts. Briefly, if abstractly, Eustacia's world is one of stature and ego, while Clym's is one of intention and society.⁵ Each world possesses the conflicting qualities of stasis (stature and society, both established and accepted) and action (ego and intention, both striving to become recognized or fulfilled). The internal tension between stasis and energy in each character, as well as in the contrasts the characters represent, creates the sense of involvement and conflict which dominates their portrayal.

The distinctiveness of the values of Clym and Eustacia repeats, but in quite different terms, the contrast between the values of Sergeant Troy and those of the society personified by Gabriel Oak. Hardy uses the theme of cultural and psychic conflict in each of his great novels, but with differing devices. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Oak is so much more the man of attractive strength than Troy that aesthetic tension never rises to the pitch of tragedy where Oak is concerned. In a third context, Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders is ethically superior to Fitzpiers, but is ineffectual against him, and again the effect is not similar to that in The Return of the Native. Clym and Eustacia represent Hardy's projection of the conflict of cultures into characters of equal attractiveness, who exert their appeals upon the reader by different means.

The stature of Eustacia is emphasized by Hardy in one of the famous chapters of purple writing in the novel. The “Queen of Night” chapter begins by asserting that “Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity”; and Hardy goes on to develop this statement with a potpourri of allusions. He places Eustacia alongside goddesses (Artemis, Athena, Hera) and historical and mythological personages (Alcinous, De Vere, William the Conqueror, Saul, Napoleon). He emphasizes her unconventionalism by calling her “pagan” and by pointing out that she had a youthful sympathy for Pontius Pilate's frankness and fairness. In all, Hardy describes her dignity, the grandeur of her black hair, her exaggerated expectations from life, and her refusal to compromise. She has, appropriately, a ruling passion, “to be loved to madness,” which is raised to the level of a principle by being a longing “for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover” (p. 79) [all page references from The Works of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse. The Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1912-31)].

The egoistic nature of Eustacia's existence, made evident by her disdain for a Wildeve rejected by Thomasin and by her wish to live an active social life in a resort town, is especially manifested by her attitude toward the heath. Although willing to grant that it has beauty, she is quite unable to accept its visual attractiveness as ameliorating its unpleasantness (p. 220). More tellingly, Eustacia sees the heath as directly opposed to her as an individual (p. 405). The heath, as the immediate object of Eustacia's paranoid hatred, becomes an image for Destiny, God, the colossal Prince of the World that she constantly blames for her unhappiness, which is clear from her final outcry, “O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!” (p. 422). A mark of Wildeve's command over Eustacia's inner nature is when he reinforces this concept by reassuring her that “Fate has treated you cruelly” (p. 311; see also pp. 334, 404, 405) and that he, not she, is to blame for her predicament after Mrs. Yeobright's death and the consequent estrangement from Clym (pp. 372, 405).

The perspective of Clym's psychic world differs from Eustacia's from the outset. His characterization is based on idealistic intentions of speeding up social change, but he lacks the connotations of mystery and slumbering power of Eustacia that are developed through “Queen of Night.” Disillusioned with the effeminacy and vanity of his Parisian vocation as a diamond merchant, Clym has decided to sublimate his worldly ambitions to higher aims. He intends to raise the intellectual quality of life among the heath dwellers without forcing them to pass through the intermediate stage of social ambition and worldly advance (pp. 203-04). This challenge to the established sequence of change and evolution makes him a figure comparable to Prometheus, who, thinking that mankind deserved some of the comforts of the gods, rebelled against the existing system even though it had placed him in high station. This similarity may be what Clym has in mind when he declares to Eustacia that he can “rebel, in high Promethean fashion, against the gods and fate as well as you” (p. 302), though by the time he says this he has become a furze cutter and seems not at all concerned that the opening of his school is being delayed.

The social reverberations which Clym's character causes depend upon his representativeness as well as upon his intentions. He represents two coexisting but separate societies, the heath and the outer intellectual world, which he had learned about in Paris and which had provided part of the rationale for his rejection of the life of business. The philosophies that those two societies impress upon Clym are not identical, but they are similar enough to separate further Clym's psychic state from Eustacia's. The two societies jostle for influence in Clym, but their impacts on his character are complementary. The basic point they have in common is the advocacy of self-abnegation, of submission to extra-personal forces: to principles, and to the overweening authority of the heath. The crucial differences in effect which the two systems have upon Clym are that as a neo-Parisian intellectual he optimistically intends to contribute to the spread of his principles, and that as a heath man he becomes a non-thinking passive exister. The effect of his early contact with the heath has been undermined by his adoption of the Parisian intellectualization of life, even though the concepts that follow his “rational” meditation upon existence are quite similar to those which he had absorbed from his years on Egdon. The healthy frankness of a philosophy of life based on direct experience with nature has been replaced by the murky generalizations and fears born of introspection in a closeted city life.

Clym's face, Hardy tells us, is typical of those modern men whose age is measured by experience and intensity of life (p. 161); his face reflects the effect of thought upon flesh as the mind is made to be aware of the “coil of things” (p. 162). The impetus for his return to Egdon has been his acquaintance “with ethical systems popular at the time” in Paris (p. 203). These systems are not identified, but if we can venture a guess about them from Clym's behavior, they are probably Fourieristic socialist schemes, St. Simonianism, and Comte's Positivism—all of which made the individual aware of his social role as his brother's keeper. On the other hand, Clym's intention to teach the heath folk how to skip a stage in their social evolution goes against a basic feature of these creeds—that the stages in the growth of a society are both observable and dependent on a necessary sequence—and therefore Hardy may have in mind other, less well-known philosophic creeds. (That there may be something superficial and faddish in being affected by “popular” systems of thought is largely beside the point in considering the qualities that make Clym's stance, or value-system, distinct from Eustacia's.) Because he is a man of the heath, he is as much its product as he is a product of Paris: his early society had been the human inhabitants of the heath, and “his estimate of life had been coloured by it” (p. 205). Indeed, his relationship with the heath itself had once been so close that Hardy makes a point of asserting that in the past one could not look at the heath without thinking of Clym (p. 198), a perspective that marks the intense interaction between man and environment. That the emphasis is upon thinking of Clym when seeing the heath rather than thinking of the heath when seeing Clym (a more natural and limited sort of associated thought) points up a symbiotic relationship that heightens the alliance between the man and his milieu, just as Oedipus' status in Thebes makes his guilt a condition for which the city is punished, that makes the city's “body” his body.

As the novel progresses, Clym loses some of his identity with the outer world: his face alters, losing its look of intellectuality as his “healthful and energetic sturdiness which was his by nature” begins to reacquire “its original proportions” (p. 243). By violating his civilized awareness of man's limitations—or, rather, by pursuing one society's concept of fit action in the environment of the other—he strains his eyes and can no longer read. When he goes to work cutting furze, he approximates his original status of co-identity with the heath (p. 298), so that not even his mother can readily recognize him as an individual (p. 328). The identification of Clym's specific “society,” then, shifts; but there never is doubt that Clym, sensitive to the ideas around him, represents a societal orientation toward experience and knowledge; his intention is to bring together what he considers the most truthful and permanent features of his two societies.

The story of Clym and Eustacia has a powerful quality not only because they are at cross purposes with each other but also because neither one can achieve selfhood in the psychic world of the other. But not all is negative. The dramas of their separate existences are possible because the physical world of the heath, of indeterminate character itself, can contain both, and provide the necessary testing of both. It is ironical that the discontent of Eustacia on the heath and the moral evolution of Clym during his acquaintance with Eustacia provide the emotional peaks and ethical significances of their lives. Hardy points out that if it were not for the isolating and purifying features of the heath, Eustacia would be vulgar and petty (pp. 78-79); if she and Wildeve had not died when they did, their lives would have been attenuated “to an uninteresting meagreness, through long years of wrinkles, neglect, and decay” (p. 453). We cannot know what Clym might have accomplished with Eustacia alive; but with her absent from his life he falls into pathetic ineffectuality, preaching religious cliches and commonplaces to an audience who come to hear him out of pity for his life rather than for the message he gives, for which there is not a word of approbation (p. 485). In the absence of conflicting and irreconcilable forces, life has become mediocre rather than noble and perpetually refreshed.⁶

II

The interrelationships of the heath and the major characters of The Return of the Native bear directly on tragic characterization. The indomitableness and stupendous impassivity of the heath constitute a benchmark helping to establish the moral position of the characters; the heath's permanence, representing elemental powers of the universe, is a stark reminder of the futility of human endeavor to alter one's lot. That it is the humble characters who are content to find small consolations in individual and social intercourse, and who abide on the heath in unquestioning resignation, enjoying the “triumph” in The Return of the Native, is Hardy's way of underlining the simplicity of the heath's relationship to the action of the novel.

On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that the heath is as much a cohesive force among characters as it is either a divisive agent or a sounding board that enables the gods or the reader to categorize the characters. Eustacia is as frequently identified with the heath through imagery, and with as much significance, as Clym is through authorial statement. Amid an evocative description of the winds on Rainbarrow and Egdon Heath, which bear “a great resemblance to the ruins of human song” (p. 60) and enable the spirit of the heath to speak through the heath-bells “each at once” (p. 61), Eustacia makes her first appearance and sighs. Although she is thinking of Wildeve, and thus of the sort of seized happiness usually considered antithetical to the heath's passive way, Hardy says that her mood is identical to that of the heath:

Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence: at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs.

[p. 61]

Like the heath, she can be “passively still” while yielding herself to the pull of a bramble (pp. 63-64). Her manner of dress in the wintertime obscures her beauty like that of a tiger-beetle, “which, when observed in dull situations, seems to be of the quietest neutral colour, but under a full illumination blazes with dazzling splendour” (p. 104). She thinks the influence of Yeobright is like that of “summer sun” (p. 146). These last-mentioned images are inconclusive, but Hardy takes special pains, even using repetition, to indicate the relationship between Eustacia and the heath in the scene that is the emotional climax of Eustacia's life. During her miserable uncertainty on her way to elope with Wildeve, her inner state and the state of the heath are peculiarly united by the storm. “Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without” (p. 421); and “between the drippings of the rain from her umbrella to her mantle, from her mantle to the heather, from the heather to the earth, very similar sounds could be heard coming from her lips; and the tearfulness of the outer scene was repeated upon her face” (p. 421). Though it is given from Eustacia's point of view, the sentence immediately following the latter quotation has misled many readers of the novel: “The wings of her soul were broken by the cruel obstructiveness of all about her.” But that which is “about” her is not only the material heath in itself. It is also her pride, her lack of money, her being trapped between choosing an unworthy Wildeve and a humiliating residence at her grandfather's house while waiting for Clym to reclaim her. (She is unaware that he has already written an apology.) The heath may in a large sense serve as a symbol of the circumstances of life which destroy the rebel; but it is simultaneously a manifestation of universal nature with which Eustacia is capable of being in full accord.

With a combination of instinct and culture that can manifest itself only in brooding or violence, Eustacia is an inverse parallel to Clym, whose countenance reflects both the heath and the modern ideas of Paris. The contrasting pattern between Clym and Eustacia has another ramification here. Eustacia, possessing qualities identical with those of the heath, expresses them in rebellion against her situation rather than in acceptance. Clym, possessing intellectual training, lets slip from him the social sophistication that made the mental training possible, in order to realign himself with natural forces. Although each is partly endowed with one of the qualities that would help to counteract the other's weakness, they can find no more common ground in their stances toward the universe than in their personal relationship, their stances toward each other.

Eustacia's rebellion is internal, even petty, for large sections of the novel, but rebel she does: in her affair with Wildeve (p. 79); obviously in her final decision to flee Egdon; more subtly in her refusal to tell the truth to Clym about the male visitor she had entertained on the day of Mrs. Yeobright's death. Her refusal to justify her actions may be passive, but it is hardly acceptance of her lot in the same sense in which Clym's exploitation of his blindness suggests the eagerness with which he postpones the sterner struggle of opening a school. Eustacia's adamant refusal to make the best of a bad situation is different only in degree from the attempt to destroy or escape from the situation. Her evident suicide is a further, and final, rejection of the circumstances that to her mind have conspired to keep her from the life she desires:⁷ “[Wildeve is] not great enough for me to give myself to—he does not suffice for my desire! … If he had been a Saul or a Bonaparte—ah! But to break my marriage vow for him—it is too poor a luxury!” (p. 422).

The physical locations of Clym's and Eustacia's homes helped to form their characters even more markedly than is customary in Hardy's works. The lack of modulation or shading in Eustacia's perspective is predictable, for she has gone from fashionable Budmouth to the center of the heath (p. 143). That is, she develops her attitudes from the center of both of her worlds; she is given little freedom to observe modulations of life-styles. “There was no middle distance in her perspective: … Every bizarre effect that could result from the random intertwining of watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to be found in her” (p. 78). Clym, on the other hand, was brought up on the periphery of two worlds, the heath and the meadow. The Yeobright home, Blooms-End, is on the edge of the heath, on the border of the cultivated land and the unclaimable land of Egdon (pp. 127-28). The meadow's softness, relative ease of life, and beauty give a different emphasis to the meaning of life and effort than that of lowering Egdon. Clym's borderland upbringing is reflected in the indecisiveness he manifests throughout the novel. In his youth he chose the bleak heath for an arena in which to act, a move which was not fated, for his father was a farmer; indeed, Hardy suggests that the choice was something of a perverse assault on the heath's impenetrableness. That in the heath's eyes the human Clym is a biological aberration is indicated by indirect parallelism. Clym's unnatural position in his adopted heath is matched by that of the “fir and beech plantation that had been enclosed from heath land in the year of his birth” (p. 246; my italics) and suffers “amputations, bruises, cripplings, and harsh lacerations” from a wind which on the open heath can merely wave “the furze and heather in a light caress” (p. 247). Like the plantation, Clym is “enclosed” from the heath's chastening and subduing power by his Paris experiences and by his advantageous living site at Blooms-End; like the trees, Clym is buffeted more by sufferings than are the native heath dwellers, who have neither expectations nor serious disappointments. Even Christian Cantle, who as his name suggests has been proselyted from the frank paganism of his peers, bears up tolerably well under the knowledge that women think him a “slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight fool” (p. 27).

The heath, then, has a much more complex function than is usually recognized. It is both a moral absolute and a universal solvent. Eustacia is not entirely an intrusion upon it, nor is Clym an utter familiar; indeed, to the heath indifferent to humanity, they possess equal value and meaning. The heath absorbs the Budmouth tastes of Eustacia and the Paris learning of Clym, and proves itself superior to both Budmouth and Paris as the inducer of a state of mind. It is a microcosm of the world or universe, but it is more inclusive than exclusive. The heath is not a detachable symbol, although Hardy's employment of the unity of place may create the effect that the heath is cut off from the real world by its isolated position and by the purity of its quality (its unique “heathness,” as it were) as well as by an excessive harshness and indifference toward its inhabitants who possess consciousness. But it is not—or at least no more so than the settings for human effort in Hardy's other novels. The “testing” of Clym and Eustacia by their environment is little different from that of Tess by hers or of Jude or the Mayor by theirs. Indeed, Clym—the person most aware of the state of man's life—sees that the heath projects the same significance as crowded Paris. “There was something in its oppressive horizontality which too much reminded him of the arena of life; it gave him a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a single living thing under the sun” (p. 245). “The arena of life” may not be a precise reference to Paris, but the tacit meaning of “reminded” underlines the point that the heath is an expansive setting, not an artificial limiting one.

III

There is, obviously, more to Hardy's method of presenting characters of tragic import in fiction than has generally been conceded. The dramatist has certain advantages because he can expect the actor to provide some of the impetus to involvement, even though dialogue and conflict are what prove the ultimate worth of a tragic play. The novelist, on the other hand, finds he has a difficult choice to make when he purports to write a tragedy. If he emphasizes the expansiveness of the characters' actions by description and allusion, he runs the risk of being bombastic and sentimental; if he understates the complexity of his characters' behavior, assuming that the reader will be able to supply the requisite connotations, he runs the risk of being merely bathetic and of appearing lazy and indifferent to concrete expression. Hardy's overall tactic in The Return of the Native in the face of this dilemma is to create appropriate concepts of key characters in chapters of set description and evocation, and thereafter to allow the characters essential freedom with occasional allusion to their grander status or with a brief restatement of their symbolic values. This tactic is at least partly ironic, for the protagonists' actions do not consistently justify the stature Hardy has attributed to them in “Queen of Night” and “‘My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,’” and sometimes Hardy, apparently unintentionally, allows the characters' acts to contradict their abstract values.

It is difficult to maintain balance in the pattern of alternating sections of tragic connotations and character manifestation because the two methods do not mix. When Hardy attempts to use both methods at once in an effort to heighten his characterizations by particularizing Clym's or Eustacia's traits at a moment of intense feeling, he risks producing flaws in the novel. Eustacia's dream after she sees Clym for the first time provides an instructive example of Hardy attempting an ironic variation upon the pattern. He stresses the uniqueness of Eustacia's dream for a girl of her station, using a flurry of mythological, classical, and contemporary allusions, with the evident purpose of suggesting Eustacia's felt superiority to her unheroic surroundings:

That night was an eventful one to Eustacia's brain, and one which she hardly ever forgot. She dreamt a dream; and few human beings, from Nebuchadnezzar to the Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable one. Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream was certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia's situation before. It had as many ramifications as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations as the Northern Lights, as much colour as a parterre in June, and was as crowded with figures as a coronation. To Queen Scheherazade the dream might have seemed not far removed from commonplace; and to a girl just returned from all the courts of Europe it might have seemed not more than interesting. But amid the circumstances of Eustacia's life it was as wonderful as a dream could be.

[pp. 137-38]

Despite this preparation, all we learn of Eustacia's exciting dream is that it involved “transformation scenes.” Hardy actually relates to us only the dream that immediately follows the remarkable one. This second dream is a “less extravagant episode” involving a knight in silver armor on the heath, clearly a projection of Eustacia's waking expectations of Clym. This second, conventional manifestation of fantasy, rather than supporting the grandioseness of Eustacia's character merely reinforces its mundaneness and substantiates the impression that she lacks a vital imagination. Still, it is quickly followed by the comment that “the fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul” (p. 139); and it is, after all, Eustacia's soul, not her intellect, that makes her tragic. But in referring to the dream, that which elevates her soul, Hardy does not give the unique dream but only the ordinary one. The larger question, then, seems to be whether Hardy can comprehend what kind of dream Queen Scheherazade might have or whether he thinks that to give the individualizing and aggrandizing dream in detail would have the unintended effect of limiting the tragic boundaries of Eustacia's character.

A clearer indication of how this description of Eustacia goes wrong can be found in a later, somewhat similar portrayal of Clym intended to reveal the superior qualities that make him a potential tragic hero. The portrayal of Clym, however, is more successful. When he first tells his mother that he is not going to return to Paris, he has no hope of having his motivations understood. He is “constitutionally beyond the reach of a logic that, even under favouring conditions, is almost too coarse a vehicle for the subtlety of the argument” (p. 207). A later discussion with his mother reveals to Clym that “he could reach her by a magnetism which was as superior to words as words are to yells” (p. 223). These passages about Clym, like those about Eustacia's dream, are based on the idea of a sensitivity so beyond the ordinary that its very possession sets one apart. Hardy, however, realizes that Clym's quality is beyond rhetoric, and he does not strain after expression to communicate Clym's specialness: he merely asserts, and relies upon the reader to supply the recognition. With Eustacia he promises, or seems to promise, the presentation of the mental process that demarcates her subconscious mind, but does not, in fact, present it. In the one case, then, he accepts the necessary limitations of his form for delineating the uniqueness of a tragic character; in the other, he seems to try to circumvent the limitations by implying that he is revealing more than he actually does. Whether Hardy's handling of Eustacia's dream is artistic charlatanry, magnificent failure, or diffusing irony is an issue that cannot be finally resolved. That Hardy is aware, at any rate, of the normal limitations of the form of fiction to express the verbally inexpressible is made clear in his comment on Clym's and Eustacia's emotional silence during a rendezvous: “No language could reach the level of their condition: words were as the rusty implements of a bygone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated” (p. 231). The mildly ironic tone of “to be occasionally tolerated” does not obscure the fact that Hardy is deliberately avoiding here the danger of using language to define a non-linguistic experience.

Although Hardy fails once with Eustacia, elsewhere powerful emotions appropriately go undefined. Dancing with Wildeve, Eustacia becomes rapt, evidently if not clearly with “rank” passion; her soul had passed away from and forgotten her features, which were left empty and quiescent, as they always are when feeling goes beyond their register” (p. 310). Oddly, Hardy makes little of Eustacia's emotions in this scene other than to suggest indirectly that she possesses greater receptivity than the other female dancers because she experiences the “symptoms” of passion more powerfully than they do. In the ensuing conversation with Wildeve she is the circumspect—if proud and self-pitying—wife of a furze cutter. The principal value of the dancing scene is to substantiate the tragic potentiality of Eustacia.

When Hardy responds to the dilemma of tragic characterization by trying too hard to improve upon orthodox techniques of the realistic novelist, that is, when he experiments, we have seen that much can go awry. He also occasionally accepts too readily and too thoroughly the limitations to tragedy in fiction, that is, he fails to characterize as fully as necessary for basic acceptance in terms of verisimilitude. Such under-characterization is nearly a signature of Hardy's art. More than any other important novelist of his time, he encourages the reader to supply motivations and explanations for his characters' acts. This habit can be functional at times. The evil of Alec d'Urberville becomes part of the threatening universe; Sue Bridehead becomes the final bane of Jude because he cannot, any more than can the reader, comprehend the vagaries of her tortured consciousness. Even the “Inconsequence” that Felice Charmond personifies does not fully account for her self-sacrificial and impassioned behavior in The Woodlanders, and she thus is elevated beyond the stereotype of a femme fatale to a character capable of being destroyed in the same manner that Giles is, the unintended victim of the love of her life. But under-characterization can also harm a fiction.

An example of unsatisfactory truncated characterization in The Return of the Native is found in the skein of Clym's early actions. The early stages of his growing love for Eustacia are too scantily traced for the reader to understand the point Hardy is making about the novel's title character. From the time of his suspicion that the Saracen Knight is a woman (p. 170) to his telling his mother that he has given up his plan of offering “with my own mouth rudimentary education to the lowest class” (p. 227), there is but one hint of the nature of Eustacia's attraction to Clym—the trite, unexceptional attraction of beauty (p. 220). The flaw I am suggesting is not in the nature of the attraction itself, for Hardy emphasizes the unusual beauty of his heroine, but in that Hardy has not given us a clear enough look at his hero for us to know the nature of the effect that an emotion like sensual attraction can have upon him. Hardy has told us that Clym in his returned state represents modern thinking man. Does he then mean to imply that modern man's efforts to think are inevitably futile because he is still prey both to animalistic drives and to man's tendency to idealize his drives? Or is he implying that Clym's posture as a conquering hero over ignorance and oppression is essentially but a pose, and that Clym's pretensions to selfless nobility are as hollow as Eustacia's claims to temporal social superiority? Hardy's “characterization” of Clym over the course of his courtship of Eustacia can be taken to “mean” any of these things, and other things as well, simply because Hardy has given no indication what Clym's immediate capitulation to beauty represents, either universally or individually. Nor is it clear whether this barrenness of motivation is intended to elevate Clym to a tragic level through simplicity or whether the barrenness is intended ironically to disrupt Hardy's pretensions that his novel is a tragedy by suggesting an incoherence in Clym's psyche.

IV

Many readers feel that Hardy is playing a massive joke on them in suggesting that an ill-starred love affair between a petulant girl of nineteen and an indecisive philosopher and social reformer can convey a meaningful comment on man's situation in the universe.⁸ And it is true that apart from the introductory chapter on Egdon Heath, “Queen of Night,” and “‘My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,’” the narrator explores only briefly the two characters' exceptional natures. Richard Carpenter remarks, with “Queen of Night” in mind, that “Hardy appears for long stretches to forget that his heroine is anything more dignified and grand than a passionate woman caught in a web spun by circumstances and her own emotions.”⁹ Carpenter's following remark—“as the story unfolds, the tone shifts from tragic elevation to ironic pathos”—is a concise statement of a skeptical reader's opinion of the success of Hardy's method of characterization in this novel.¹⁰ Carpenter in effect overlooks the possibility of Hardy's use of the fairly standard technique of fiction to establish a characterization early in the narrative and permit the character to act freely in the later parts without authorial manipulation. Hardy clearly has intended to demonstrate initially the quality of Eustacia's rebellious nature through classical allusions, and then through more dramatic and objective methods to show her making choices that substantiate the authorial presentation. Some choices are deliberate and conscious (such as her lighting the bonfire on the first anniversary of her affair with Wildeve), some mainly unconscious (such as her rejecting Wildeve when she learns that Thomasin may prefer another lover to him); but all of them are consistent with the overriding static portrayal of her as an imperious woman of passion and impulse, and consistent with her active state as a woman struggling to achieve the sort of recognition her ego demands of life. Moreover, as I have observed, tragic expression in The Return of the Native arises only in part from classical allusions and the actions and motivations of the principal actors; more complex feelings are created through the conflict of irreconcilable modes of psychic existence.

Nevertheless, Carpenter and other readers are certainly correct in pointing to a level of mundaneness in Eustacia. Her attitudes are intensely social in the sense that she desires parties, fashionable clothes, and friends of similar tastes, not in the sense that Clym's ideas are societally significant, dealing as they do with justice and the organization of a citizenry toward cultural goals. Eustacia's rebellion against the higher powers rests upon a subjective claim to special consideration because of her beauty: “She had cogent reasons for asking the Supreme Power by what right a being of such exquisite finish had been placed in circumstances calculated to make of her charms a curse rather than a blessing” (p. 305). The context suggests irony: “To an onlooker her beauty would have made her feelings almost seem reasonable” (my italics). In her last, great speech she says that destiny has prevented her from being a “splendid” woman (p. 422); this may have connotations of grandeur, but she means only that as the runaway paramour of Wildeve, who is no Napoleon or Saul beyond the reach of social law, she cannot hope to glitter in a Continental social scene. In all, then, Eustacia's tragic authority is limited exactly because her own perspective is so myopic. The dignity implicit in enunciating an attack upon Heaven in her last speech does not survive unscathed a cool appraisal of the puniness of her goal. Perhaps none of these or other undercuttings by Hardy prove conclusively that Eustacia is less than tragic, but they keep her from being tragic in the grand manner, as Hardy's explicit characterization of her gives us good reason to expect her to be.

Nor is Clym free from ironic diminishment, primarily because his allegiances are so varied—to a Paris-founded modern system of idealism, to the heath's absorptive power, to his mother, to his final guilt-ridden missionary vocation. Easily diverted from his selfless plan to educate the heath people, vacillating among various plans of action—none of which he ever decisively chooses—Clym's intention to correct the world's ills is flexible to the point of self-parody. His failure to understand that his pursuit of private happiness with Eustacia goes against his self-conceived societal role forestalls his intentions before he can even decide upon the most basic implementation for them. He thus presents a character less unified than Eustacia's, whose only disputed allegiance is between that part of her which is a complement of the heath and that part which vehemently loathes the heath for its lack of superficial society.

The uncertainty of the source of tragic authority in the novel is partly the result of the ambiguities in Hardy's structural scheme of two psychic worlds. Clym's instability of interests weakens both his individuality and his representativeness, further dissipating the possibilities for tragic resonance in his sufferings. The problem of locating a center for the awareness of truth frequently present in tragedy is also complicated by these factors—that is, by the structural scheme and by the evidences of inadequate purpose in the protagonists. But, of equal significance, awareness of truth is hindered because Eustacia and Clym come to individual awareness of man's role in his own fate which are exactly inverse to the conclusions that are appropriate for them. Clym is weak and easily frustrated; nevertheless, difficulty in his relations with his mother and Eustacia has been mainly their fault rather than his. To blame himself for their deaths, which he does, means he misses part of the truth of his experience. He thinks that he “must have been horribly perverted by some fiend” not to have gone to make up the argument with his mother (p. 367), but he blames himself, not the “fiend.” It is clearly for the wrong reason (in Hardy's presentation) that Clym denies that malignity in the supernatural has brought about his ultimate sorrows:

He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to say that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without shame. But that he and his had been sarcastically and pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls he did not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the sternest of men. Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.

[p. 455; my italics]

Eustacia, at the opposite extreme, pities herself as unfairly manipulated by adverse forces, though she has made all the decisions that in her final scene eventually place her on the heath with no choice but death or dishonor. The manner of portraying her lamentations and diatribes against Fate suggests that she has inadequate insight into her own blameworthiness. Hardy says that she hates the “disagreeable” as much as the “dreadful” (p. 353), and strongly hints that the blame she levies at the “indistinct, colossal Prince of the World” would be directed more accurately toward herself:

She had certainly believed that Clym was awake [when his mother had come to call], and the excuse would be an honest one as far as it went; but nothing could save her from censure in refusing to answer at the first knock. Yet, instead of blaming herself for the issue she laid the fault upon the shoulders of some indistinct, colossal Prince of the World, who had framed her situation and ruled her lot.

[p. 353]¹¹

This fairly late reference to Eustacia's self-delusion reinforces the impression given in an early description of her that she suffers from paranoia. “She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny” (p. 79; my italics). Thus, one of the bases of Eustacia's tragic stature—her consciousness of being a sufferer—can reasonably be interpreted as meretricious.¹²

Clym's potentiality as a tragic hero is revived briefly toward the end of the fifth book, but then is adversely affected by the sixth, which was added at the request of Hardy's magazine editor. At the end of book 5, on the morning after the deaths of Eustacia and Wildeve, Clym comes to a recognition of a basic feature of the tragic universe—the realization that there are offenses beyond law's power or prerogative to punish:

“I am getting used to the horror of my existence. They say that a time comes when men laugh at misery through long acquaintance with it. Surely that time will soon come to me!”

“Your aim has always been good,” said Venn. “Why should you say such desperate things?”

“No, they are not desperate. They are only hopeless; and my great regret is that for what I have done no man or law can punish me!”

[p. 449]

The implied question—what to do with one who is immune from man's law—has answers applicable to The Return of the Native. One is that justice rather than law might be applied in this instance. (Perhaps this justice would implement such human supra-legal agents as Hardy refers to earlier in the novel. Commenting on Venn's firing shotguns to keep Wildeve away from Eustacia and thus keep him faithful to Thomasin, Hardy writes, “The doubtful legitimacy of such rough coercion did not disturb the mind of Venn. It troubles few such minds in such cases, and sometimes this is not to be regretted. From the impeachment of Strafford to Farmer Lynch's short way with the scamps of Virginia there have been many triumphs of justice which are mockeries of law” [p. 321].) Another answer to the implied question is that the guilty person can punish himself. Neither answer is by itself perfectly satisfactory, because each implies an epistemological limitation upon experience, a limitation based on the idea that there is an ultimately right fate assignable according to identifiable grounds. This sort of rationally assignable fate works against the sense of ineffable unease at the “due” fate suffered by the protagonist in tragedy, an unease prompted by the inextricableness of individual responsibility and the responsibility of forces beyond the individual, the effects of which within his own life he is nonetheless accountable for.

Had Hardy not tried to take Clym beyond his expression of despair and guilt at the end of book 5, there would be some justification in putting Clym forward as the principal tragic hero of the novel. At this point there is a powerful measure of mystery to Clym's condition and his likely fate. Clym is caught up in the awareness of his blame in Eustacia's death, while the reader has just been made deeply conscious through observation of Wildeve's and Eustacia's last thoughts that Clym is not alone to blame. Had the last stage in the reader's consciousness of the story been this, there would be at least the possibility of an unease similar to that produced by the conclusions of Oedipus Rex and of Shakespeare's plays. But to carry the story past this point raises the expectation that some further aspect of the inextricableness of responsibilities will be developed through action. Such a development does not occur, the purpose of book 6 being to satisfy an editor's sense of simplistic poetic justice (moreover, a poetic justice that does not include the novel's major sufferers) rather than to round out Hardy's tragic vision of life.¹³ (The marriage and happy life of Thomasin and Venn in book 6 also disrupt what seems to have been Hardy's original scheme—to have their relationship parallel the Clym-Eustacia relationship of irreconcilable worlds. As Hardy writes in the 1912 footnote to the third chapter of book 6, Venn “was to have retained his isolated and weird character to the last, and to have disappeared mysteriously from the heath, nobody knowing whither—Thomasin remaining a widow.” That a parallel had been intended by Hardy is impossible to confirm; but it fits into Hardy's mechanistic early concepts of plotting and of contrasting sets of characters.)

To carry on the narrative after the principal action has ended is in itself enough to curtail much of the tragic effect. The adequacy of Clym for the role of tragic hero further depends upon the nature and scope of what he has learned; that is, whether his knowledge evokes an expanse of meaning beyond the applicability of the knowledge to his own individual condition. Such an expanse of meaning is not even remotely presented in book 6. Clym's realization and his subsequent actions, though full of psychological relevance in emphasizing his death wish and cementing his dedication to his mother, have only a deflating effect upon his tragic potential. In accepting guilt and in large part putting aside the justice/law dilemma, Clym makes a far from adequate response to the question of his undeserved immunity from legal punishment. Clym's half-insane guilt is already implicit in the last pages of book 5, but if Hardy had left the matter open by not dwelling in book 6 upon this sense of guilt, Clym might have retained some of the rich complexity essential for tragic characterization. Of course, that Clym mistakenly emphasizes his guilt instead of the guilt of the universe does not improve his tragic standing merely because the ambiguity of justice and law remains unresolved. That justice is not further explored by Clym in book 6 is important because it shows that he has been beaten down by his suffering rather than made aware by it.

Notes

1. In later life he was proud of having adhered to these unities in The Return of the Native: see Early Life, p. 160; Later Years, p. 235. See also my “Unity of Time in The Return of the Native,” N & Q, n.s. 12 (1965): 304-5.

2. For a comprehensive study of the traditional qualities and allusions in The Return of the Native, see Paterson, “The ‘Poetics’ of The Return of the Native.”

3. John Paterson's exploration of revisions in the manuscript, esp. those affecting the characterizations of Clym, Eustacia, and Diggory Venn, shows that Hardy had too many, conflicting notions and, because he had not resolved them before he began to write, he had a hard time doing so during the writing itself. The Making of “The Return of the Native” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1960).

4. Previous readers have also defined their sense of conflicting sympathies and idea-systems in the novel. See esp. Paterson, “The ‘Poetics’ of The Return of the Native,” p. 215; Schweik, “Theme, Character, and Perspective in Hardy's The Return of the Native”; Robert W. Stallman, “Hardy's Hour-Glass Novel,” Sewanee Review 55 (1947): 283-96; and Beach, The Technique of Thomas Hardy, p. 80.

5. An objection to my distinctions might be that Clym is as egoistic as Eustacia in his refusal to accede to her wishes to leave the heath. But the egoism and petty vanity of Eustacia's motivations do not correlate with the obstinacy and self-righteousness of Clym's. The very fact that they are unable to communicate to each other the simplest grounds for their individual determinations on this issue is an indication that they live and think on separate levels. An interesting essay whose insights are not fully developed, Richard Benvenuto's “Another Look at the Other Eustacia,” Novel 4 (1970): 77-79, argues that Eustacia's only morality is individualism.

6. Whether Eustacia commits suicide or falls accidentally into the weir-pool is a perplexing issue for readers of Hardy. My assertion that she was a suicide is based on Hardy's “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story,” facing the title page of vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878), and upon a map plotting out the movements in the novel that I made before I saw Hardy's sketch. The most pertinent detail of the physical scene is that Eustacia's path from Mistover to the weir on the night of her death takes her across one road (and perhaps two; the road forks near the weir) just before she reaches the weir. Wildeve's coachlights should have been visible to her from this point in the road, and if she had been looking for Wildeve's coach she would have proceeded along the road instead of across it onto the meadow. Coupled with her last speeches of despair and her previous attempt to kill herself with her grandfather's pistols, these facts of the physical scene strike me as persuasive indications of suicide, though it is possible that in her distracted state of mind she did not notice the marked change in footing from the heath that a road would present. For a still more positive assertion that Eustacia was a suicide, see Ken Zellefrow, “The Return of the Native: Hardy's Map and Eustacia's Suicide,” NCF 28 (1973): 214-20. Bruce K. Martin, “Whatever Happened to Eustacia Vye?” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 619-27, summarizes other reasons to believe Eustacia was a suicide.

7. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953), p. 6, correlates these passages with Clym's finding a higher wisdom.

8. The best analysis of this general feeling is by Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 60-65. Howe accommodates the multiplicity of perspectives in the novel, acknowledging for example that Eustacia is “like a young goddess of sensuality” as well as a “young girl of petulant vanity” (p. 65), and that the original conception of Clym as “dominated by modern deracination and a hunger for some nameless purpose” is a “triumph,” but that Clym's actual presentation is “far too dim and recessive for the role Hardy assigns him” (p. 63). Robert Evans, “The Other Eustacia,” Novel 1 (1968): 251-59, follows essentially Howe's criticism of Eustacia. A different stand is taken by David Eggenschwiler, “Eustacia Vye, Queen of Night and Courtly Pretender,” NCF 25 (1971): 444-54; he believes that the split in the presentation of Eustacia is intentional, and that Eustacia is “both a genuinely tragic figure and a parody upon literary romanticism.”

9. Thomas Hardy, p. 97.

10. See also Leonard Deen, “Heroism and Pathos in Hardy's Return of the Native,” NCF 15 (1960): 207-19.

11. In context it is clear that Hardy is criticizing Eustacia's self-delusion; see M. A. Goldberg, “Hardy's Double-Visioned Universe,” EIC 7 (1957): 378-82. Yet Hardy's own view as a young man was not too distant from Eustacia's: “October 30th [1870]. Mother's notion (and also mine)—that a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable.” Thomas Hardy's Notebooks, ed. Evelyn Hardy (London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 32.

12. An opposing viewpoint is that of J. Hillis Miller, who in The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame, Ind.; Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), rates Eustacia as the novel's only tragic actor because she gains “the detached vision of the futility of life which the narrator has had all along” (p. 117). Miller's point is appealing, since it implies that the novel finishes what it purportedly set out to do, and one would like to give in to one's own infatuation with and sympathy for Eustacia. But to make this point, Miller has to overlook the import of the frequent irony directed at Eustacia. Nor does he explain in what way Eustacia's ultimate “detached” vision, which allows her to “think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was,” differs from her earlier anticipation that “Fate” will play a “cruel satire” upon her (The Return of the Native, pp. 403, 243). It is Miller's view that Hardy's characters lack effective free will and thus are not to blame for their fates; see his review of Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way, in VS 10 (1967): 280-82, and Morrell's rejoinder in VS 11 (1967): 119-21. Taken together, of course, Miller's views are consistent: if mankind lacks free will except as “part of the irresistible movement of matter in its purposeless changes through time” (VS 10: 281), Eustacia's obsession with hostile chimeras (“creatures of her mind”) is a justifiable response to her helplessness.

13. For a discussion of the request by the editor of Belgravia that Hardy alter the ending of The Return of the Native, see Weber, Hardy of Wessex (1965), pp. 106-7.