What We Read in the Fifties: The Return of the Native

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye are brimming with impetuous youthful lust. They meet at a deserted spot on Egdon Heath -- a “vast tract of unenclosed wild” in southwestern England. Here’s how Hardy describes their moment of passion:   

 

          “’My Eustacia.’

          ‘Clym dearest’

          They remained long without a single utterance, for 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.

          ‘I began to wonder why you did not come,’ said Yeobright when she had withdrawn a little from his embrace.”

 

Instead of the eager hands and tongues that a modern novelist would supply, Hardy substitutes a sentence about the inadequacies of language. Even so mild an allusion to physical pleasure was shocking to Victorian moralists, who regularly rebuked Hardy for ‘vulgarity.’ Hardy’s last and best novel, Jude the Obscure, was derided as Jude the Obscene.

 

I myself had no idea that Hardy was a breaker of sexual taboos when I first read The Return of the Native in 1955. During the fifty intervening years, I’ve read almost every one of Hardy’s many books, some of them--Jude the Obscure in particular—repeatedly and with great admiration. Why did I not revisit The Return of the Native until this past week? The silly truth is that the novel was required reading in English class, and inasmuch as I was an alienated and unhappy high school student, I made it a point of honor to dislike assigned books.

 

There’s also a second and more substantive reason:The Return of the Native was truly disorienting for provincial city kids like myself simply because so much of it turns on landscape. The novel is all about the way various characters respond to Egdon Heath, a furze-covered “somber stretch of rounds and hollows,” that is isolated, extensive, unchanging, brooding, dotted with primeval pagan barrows, and populated by sheep, shepherds and heath-croppers. To understand Hardy’s Wessex landscape,I would have had to overcome two barriers: my appalling lack of imagination and my inexperience with geography. Perhaps some of my classmates could visualize Egdon Heath. Many of them came from families that owned automobiles, and had consequently voyaged beyond city limits. They had looked upon an expanse of land larger than a baseball field and upon feathered bipeds more exotic than the flocks of pigeons that guanoed the steps of the Newkirk Avenue subway station. 

 

Had I been less put off by unfamiliar scenery and less hostile to assigned texts, I might have recognized that sparse Egdon and my crowded concrete neighborhood had much in common. Both places were backwaters untouched by modernity. Neither offered much in the way of education -– either individuals who possessed any, or schools that were genuinely dedicated to providing it. My territory, like Egdon Heath, was a place which anyone who happened to prosper, even a little, speedily abandoned -- to the port city of Budmouth in Hardy’s world, and to “the island,” that is, the new prosperous suburbs of Queens and Nassau, in mine.

 

In the 1950s, I myself had only one big idea -- that there must be a world elsewhere. Why then did I not sympathize with Eustacia Vye, whose sole and only desire is to get herself away from Egdon?  She is as out of her element treading aimlessly on the heath as I felt myself to be when I bicycled an endless series of claustrophobic streets. More to the point, why didn’t I identify with the reddleman Diggory Venn? Diggory lives alone in his spring-van and wanders the heath selling reddle (a red dye used for marking sheep). If I had been capable of reading imaginatively, I would have taken Diggory to heart. He is Romanticism’s archetypical outsider and a character whom I should or could have recognized as a fellow sufferer. I too was solitary, introspective, and on a quest for knowledge, but these traits were not understood –- as I understand them now -- as healthy questioning but instead were stigmatized as psychological disability (“Why are you moping? Why is your nose always in a book?”) An understanding of Diggory Venn might have lent dignity and historical context to my private woes.

 

Even more to the point: there I was, awash with the imperious hormones of adolescence, and yet unable to notice that, although reticent about gropings and thrustings, The Return of the Native attaches enormous importance to sex. While I was mesmerized by the superficiality of Blackboard Jungle and suchlike novels, I somehow failed to observe that Thomas Hardy was very very serious about love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, passion and jealousy — and that The Return of the Native challenges its readers to acknowledge that sexuality was as dangerous as it was redemptive. Was there a more important lesson for me to have learned? Did my sixteen-year-old self catch the least glimmer of it? Not the slightest.

Comments

[Don Z.Block]

That Eustacia Vye is one sexy woman. In the magazine version of the novel, Hardy had to change a scene where Clym carries Eustacia across a stream. The magazine editor required Clym to place Eustacia in a wheelbarrow and wheel her across the stream.