Hardy’s
The Return of the Native is a novel based on unpractical idealism and incompatible relationship between two major
characters – Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. Both of them are poles apart in
character: The former is a plodding idealist, whereas the later is a fiery
sensualist. Where Eustacia’s vision is a
projective dream of the world, Clym’s is an introspective dream.
Where she is a ‘the raw material of a divinity’ who wilfully creates the objects of her
world, Clym, is the enslaved sovereign of the kingdom of his mind. The conflict between these two antithetical modes of perception is
inevitable from the outset; both fail to see the other at the commencement of
the relationship.
When the story
begins, we are not introduced with Clym who has been in Paris at that time but
returns soon to the heath and it is the return that drives the plot of novel.
Clym Yeobright is the tragic hero of Hardy’s novel. He is young man of thirty three and he is
attractive enough to make Eustasia fall in love with him. In a letter to Arthur
Hopkins, Hardy rated him as the most important character of the novel but
described Eustacia as “the wayward and
erring heroine”.
Eustacia is described by Hardy, as “Queen of Night” whose eyes are pagan,
are too fancy that a whole winter does not contain darkness enough to form its
shadow. She is a woman of nineteen, tall, straight and graceful. Her very
appearance made Clym infatuated with her.
Eustacia always longs for passionate love:”To
be loved to madness” is her great desire.The crippling boredom
and feeling of being trapped within the heath leads Eustacia to crave an
unrealistic love. Hardy says that ‘she seemed to long for the abstraction
called passionate love more than for any particular lover’. Micael Millgate
accuses Eustacia of “impulsive actions…
which drive the couple finally apart” but describes Clym as “Self-absorbed,
isolated, humourless…incapable of sympathetic communication with anyone outside
himself”. Eustacia’s ability to quickly forget her ‘love’ for Wildeve as
soon as an apparently superior possible opportunity presents itself is very
telling. Once she begins fixating on Clym Yeobright, Wildeve develops ‘the rayless outline of the sun through
smoked glass’. All Eustacia ever really craves is a chance to escape the
Heath and lead the life she so arrogantly presumes to be her right.Throughout the novel Eustacia is filled with
romantic imagining of a man who would “love
her to madness” and take her away from the heath. She imagines Clym as a
born leader of man who would go with her into the brilliant world – Paris which
would give her the fullness of life and the freedom she craves for. Even
When Clym proses Eustacia, Eustacia’s response is, “At present speak of Paris to me. Is there any place like it on earth?”
Clym
Yeobright, on the other hand, is relentless and self-centered man who ‘had been so inwoven with the heath in his
boyhood that hardly anybody could look upon it without thinking of him’. Indeed,
it should be noted that Clym is the returning native of the heath, while
Eustacia is a complete alien on the heath, making her entrapment upon it even
more poignant. Her belief that she will be able to convince Clym to return to
Paris after they are married is another part of her downfall; she has too much
faith in her own power There is a
fatal incompatibility between the two lovers. Even at the moment
when she and Clym decide to
marry, she gazes toward the eclipsed moon and warns,
“See how our time is slipping, slipping,
slipping!”
She confides to her lover the deep fear that their love
will not last. All her fears come true.
Within two months of their marriage,
Eustacia’s vision of Clym is changed utterly; he is a fallen idol; far from
being the Promethean lover her idealising vision had made of him; he is
‘merely’ a furze-cutter, and seeing him as such she feels degraded. In
addition, her renewed interest in
Wildeve further drives Eustacia away from Clym. The death of Mrs. Yeobright is
a turning point in their relationship. When Clym learns the real cause of Mrs.
Yeobright’s death, he becomes angrily upset and rushes home to confront Eustacia.
He storms in on Eustacia. He screams at her and calls her a whore and a
murderess. Eustacia exits Clym’s house in anger and despair. Eustacia, then
decides to elope with Wildeve in order to fulfill her long cherished dream of
Paris. On the night of her elopement, weather assumes a menacing shape, and
Eustacia seems to drown herself alongwith Wildeve. Thus the most incompatible
relationship Clym and Eusacia comes to an end. Eustacia met her tragic death
leaving behind agonized Clym who turns
himself into a preacher in order to console her depressed soul.
Clym-Eustacia relationship can also be
understood in the light of Eustacia-Wildeve relationship. She seems to be torn
between her love for Clym and love for Wildeve. She oscillates back and
forth in her love affairs. The
incongruency of the Clym-Eustacia relationship is also illustrated by their different attitudes
toward Egdon Heath. Clym loves Egdon Heath as much as Eustacia hates it. He is
the ‘native' of the soil and very
object appears to him friendly. Eustacia detests the heath, and her words later
ring eerily true when she says of the heath that “’tis my cross, my shame, and will be my death!”