The Return of the Native
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Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
Chapter 1: A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression
A University of Toronto Ph.D, Rollyson has published more … (more)
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From just reading the title (before even reading) and based on the word native, it seems to give the impression of someone returning to an old place after a prolonged journey or absence.
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The Native could refer to a person or a setting. The title excites curiosity. Who or what is the Native? Let’s say the Native is a person, where did he go? Why did he go? Why is he returning? What or where is he returning to?
The title could mean that the prose will be about the return itself or about the journey the Native takes to return.
“A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression” leads me to think that the Native is a person. A person who hasn’t aged though he has been gone for a considerable length of time, perhaps. The titles leave a lot of open-ended questions without a lot of answers, which will probably be in the text.
Before reading the piece, the title makes me think of a person who is returning to a place where he/she was raised or where he/she spent a long amount of time in. I’m expecting this person to be returning from some other place, perhaps from an adventure.
The first time looking at this title, gave me the impression that someone is returning home to the his/her homeland, after being away for some time.
The title gave me the impression the writing would be about a man who is traveling to some place, or maybe a romance of a different kind, meaning not romance of nature and scenenaries.
Before reading the text the title make me think of a person that is returning to their original place of origin. Furthermore the title makes me think that the person returning that has been away and is coming home from a long journey.
I must say after reading toolbox by Nichols it reminds me of all the passive and adverb filled writing that he says erks him. I feel like a moderate or even high level reader would have a hard time understanding what the author is conveying. This piece is way too poetic in my opinion.
I understand and can appreciate that Hardy is perhaps trying to be poetic by personifying the heath. I’m also sure that the mood being set in this first chapter was set up to juxtapose or foreshadow something grander in this book. However, it really is such a drag reading this. And as you said, it reminds me when King said in toolbox. If you’re going to say, “they took a crap,” don’t say “they dropped the kids off at the pool.” Just come out with it and say it. “They took a crap.”
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
This beginning paragraph really gives a sense of the setting. I noticed this in William Faulkner piece we read in class as well. That makes me ask—-Is it common to start a piece by describing or leading into a setting?
I like it that the author started off this piece with a really vivid description of the setting. It helps to draw me in any story.
That is what I thought as well. I think that starting with a setting is a great technique because it leaves a sense of mystery, I wonder what will happen in this perfect place that is being described to me.
I think that this is a beautifully written paragraph, and liked the way Hardy structured the simile of the tent. It’s cliche to say so, but I really love the way he said it.
As elaborate as this writing is, I appreciate how descriptive Hardy is. The way he builds each scene, the vocabulary he uses to describe them. Instead of saying the sun is setting, he allows us to envision the mood and setting as the cloud extends, covering the sky.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
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Hardy uses space and time to describe the heath. Space and time are very ambiguous. There’s no exact measurement for either, just the construct that man assigned to them.
In the second sentence, Hardy writes that long before night was supposed to arrive, in accordance with time told by the stars, the heath was dressed with darkness that is correlated with night. Therefore, the heath was covered in night. Hardy is manipulating time here. Night is arriving early on the heath “while day stood distinct in the sky.” Darkness and light are being divided that it would confuse a furze-cutter.
Time and space is centered around the heath. We don’t know the size of the heath or the amount of space open around it. It must be large because it adds half an hour, according to Hardy. The heath controls time’s behavior.
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I love the way you see interpret this, Hayley. I feel the same way. Both time and space are seemingly never ending, but Hardy captures the entire location in only a few sentences. In my opinion, he also seems to stretch out time (“the face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening”) by adding an exact number to deliver texture to the scene.
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From the reading, I gather that Hardy is using space and time to give characteristics to the heath. For example, the heath is given characteristics of time where Hardy states, “the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night.”
The way this is described, these particular lines especially, remind me of how I personally feel when I’m watching a sunset. It’s that moment when it’s dark enough to be evening, but light enough to still be noon, when the horizon is black and it looks as if the strip of matter holding the sky and earth together has been torn right off. Amid that kind of sunset, I am humbled by how small humanity is, in comparison to the other-worldly, majesty that is the rest of universe.
The added bit here in this entry is that Hardy personifies the majesty that is the rest of the universe. Going back to the title, “Return of the Native” it’s somewhat arrogant but also natural that the native sees his or herself in the land he or she was born to, or calls home.
Hardy writes “the heath wore the appearance of…” I find this statement really intriguing. To ‘wear’ something means to put on or to cover and ‘appearance’ is the way something looks. Usually, one says “I wear” or “I appear,” never “I am wearing the appearance of.”
What comes to mind is acting, or a performance. To me, Hardy’s word choice makes it sound like the heath is acting. If It is, what is the heath as itself (when it’s not putting on a show)?
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis--the final overthrow.
It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.
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Egdon Heath takes on an omniscient role in the second paragraph. It takes control over time and space. The heath was a place that was once full of happiness and beauty. The heath is now exhausted and has become haggard because of the attention it had once received. Appealing to those that visit the heath wore the heath out in a sense. Maybe being in control of space and time helps the heath block out the charm and fairness that it used to emit. The darkness it takes on early, isolates it and narrows in on that “subtler and scarcer instinct.”
Without reading any further, the word “haggard” here is definitely describing how run down the heath is. Maybe it is an appropriate word for Hardy to use because he will unravel its change from a breathtaking location to this haggard, exhausted spot. He will probably break down the word and end up focusing on its transition into this washed out place.
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A University of Toronto Ph.D, Rollyson has published more … (more)
his paragraph is a little difficult for me to understand. However, I think haggard is applied to the heath, because the heath is being described in a run-down manner. Clearly, the heath’s beauty has diminished. I think Hardy applies haggard to the heath, in order to show that it was once loved and admired, maybe when it was once of beauty.
I think Hardy applies the description of “haggard” to the Heath through the perspective of a person. The narrator is telling a specific story about one character or a specific set of characters, and these characters happen to view the Heath as haggard because it mirrors how they feel.
The sentence includes the words “to a more recently learnt emotion.” Haggard is a word that is usually used to describe an adult, or a person who has been through a lot. The title of this book is The Return of the Native. Knowing the title, this passage hints that it is an older, exhausted person is returning to a past place or memory of easier times.
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Yes. The way I see it is that a person’s perspective about nature changes depending on his/her own emotions. So nature is not viewed the same way by everyone.
The way this sentence uses haggard to describe the homeand, and then contrasts it with the idea of other lands that are beautiful, charming, and fair, leads me to believe it’s supposed to be telling of why the native left. Ergon is the aging wife, and the native is the infidel husband. This chapter is his return home, after recently learning that the native will always love Egdon.
Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes of Scheveningen.
This got my attention. Is this a medieval literary reference to Antonius Diogenes’ Wonders Beyond Thule?
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I think it is an allusion. I believe that perhaps the author of this piece means to compare the Vale of Tempe to Thule. Thule at the time was basically considered the fringe of the known world, around modern Iceland to be exact.
The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to wander on Egdon--he was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these. Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like this.
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature--neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness--"Bruaria." Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. "Turbaria Bruaria"--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs in charters relating to the district. "Overgrown with heth and mosse," says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.
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A University of Toronto Ph.D, Rollyson has published more … (more)
Domesday is the final day of earth’s existence. At first I thought this was ironic because it’s as if time and space take over the heath to bring it to its final days. Now I wonder if it’s that the heath cannot be diminished as Hardy writes “that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished.” Everywhere else is subject to Domesday, but not the heath.
I agree that Domesday is the final day on Earth. I just think that the heath is a representation of what Earth will be like after the Domesday. That is expansive and only able to sustain a ‘furzy, briary wilderness.’
Doomsday could mean world war II. Its usage implies that its from an outsider perspective, and not that of the native’s. The first two sentences of this paragraph are two of the few that actually describe the heath as an object, a place, and not a person. This leads me to believe that the furzy briary wilderness is what the world sees. But to those who appreciate the beauty of Egdon, the "area of Egdon has but little diminished.
The fact that Domesday is capitalized, I thought of it being a particular unknown place that the readers would eventually come to know later on in the story. In terms of the heath, I look at it as the place that holds the heath.
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape--far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.
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This is the return of the native. Civilization strayed away from its origins in order to reach satisfaction, which will never be reached. Nature, and the heath, have remained wearing its same layer that produced from its initial vegetation.
What differs between the two is the awareness that nature holds against civilization. “In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes.” The simplicity of nature exposes civilization’s failed attempt to be simple when simplicity is laying under its feet.
Even though these people are dressed differently, the land’s appearance does not change.
At the same time, I also think that while Hardy says Civilization changes (physically and mentally), Civilization is still drawn to the familiar and constant. In this case, it is Egdon, or the heath.
Hardy personifies Egdon by describing that it has a “natural and invariable garment” referring to its layout. Edgon’s “clothing” consist of its natural components that refuse to change, it can always exude expectation. Yet the human civilization that surrounds Edgon is ever-changing, and unexpected in physical appearance. The Heath is the true Native that never leaves.
The contrast here to me is that the nature of the heath was and will always be as it has been, regardless of what civilization attempts to do to it. Whether civilization treats the area kindly or not (“in its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes”), nature holds true originality and power, despite all of civilization’s efforts.
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We have lost sight of what is important to sustaining a civilization, and I think the native realizes it. Instead of conquering and adulterating the earth’s “antique brown dress,” and “particular formation,” we should see ourselves as a part of it, as one of us, as the native has done since the start of this passage.
The contrast between nature and civilization is that nature is a constant and civilization is erratic. Hardy sets up the contrast between the erratic civilization and nature by referencing nature to the “antique brown dress” and by calling civilization an enemy.
I feel that civilization is the enemy of nature. Somehow, it’s as if civilization came along and corrupted nature. And nature is always known to be this pure and beautiful thing.
Although I agree with your comment, a lot of questions come to mind. Civilization always appears to be going against nature, because civilization wants to “grow” and create new things (such as technology). But civilization came from nature. And civilization is always drawn to nature and always comes back to it.
I agree with your sentiment about civilization going against nature and at the same time being drawn to it. When I first read the passage Hardy’s description of civilization seemed like it was erratic, but after analyzing it I think civilization is ambivalent because of that inconsistent relationship with nature.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to--themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance--even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.
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Time, space, change in earth’s elements and weather patterns cannot affect the shape or behavior of Egdon.
Egdon is the most invincible of nature..as as it would be called that at all. I like the following sentence where it describes the surfaces to be neither so steep nor so flat that it would be destroyed.
Of all the imperfection that civilization has (since the fact that civilizations drastically changes throughout the centuries is reason enough to believe that it is far from perfect), Egdon has the perfection to remain what it is, and completely, perfectly intact.
Egdon is described to have been strategically placed to withstand any natural destruction. “Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be victims of floods and deposits.” Seas rise and recede, streams dry up, and towns are vacated but the Heath only has minor wear described as only the gentle touch of earth’s subtle changes.
This could possibly mean that Egdon is an eternal figure that does not change in nature even with civilization changing.
The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath, from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it overlaid an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On the evening under consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloom had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath, the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.
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Hardy’s Egdon Heath has often been called a character in the novel. Why? What attributes does the heath share with humans? What kind of story do you suppose Hardy is about to tell?
Rome is known for its long lasting infrastructure such as the coliseum. While Rome had control over Britain, I’m sure Romans left landmarks that still stand there today. These infrastructures that have lasted hundreds of years are like the heath. They don’t fall, though they do change in appearance. That’s like when the heath went from being charming to haggard.
Hardy personifies the heath. The heath faces interaction with humans and elements and the pressure to change. I think Hardy’s story will go beyond the heath. The narrative will be about the the natural superseding humanity or just outliving it. Human characters will come into play and face conflict with the heath’s presence, directly or indirectly.
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A University of Toronto Ph.D, Rollyson has published more … (more)
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I think this is referring to when the heath decides to just take complete control.
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Just like time, human nature is cyclic yet evolving. In humanity’s change, its roots of its nature are ever present. The selfish need for more and humans relationship with nature. And yet, nature will remain the nature its always been. Most of nature’s impacted by humans in humanity’s attempt to take over. Maybe parts of nature that is like the heath will outlive the follies of human nature.
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