The Return of the Native

Clym Yeobright has returned to Egdon Heath to open a school that will enlighten youth. His intense study blinds him. He who would teach others to see is now blind. Eustacia calls it a “mishap.” Hardy may regard it as fate. Clym, blind to the real Eustacia, sees in her only what he wants to see. She will become a matron in his school. When she and Wildeve meet at the village dance and dance so passionately, the townspeople wonder who they are. They walk home together, agreeing Wildeve will leave her halfway. As Venn and Clym approach the Quiet Inn, Venn sees a man leave Eustacia’s side, but Clym is too blind to see.

Mrs. Yeobright wants her son all to herself. Clym’s behavior, equally excessive, with his repetitive agitation over visiting or not visiting his mother, over Eustacia’s visiting or not visiting his mother, wears the reader out. When he finally decides to act, he is too late. His mother, convinced by Venn to take the initiative, sees his wife’s face in the window, assumes he rejected her knock at the door, and departs heartbroken. By the time Clym overtakes her and hears her moan in the shepherd’s thyme, she is too ill to walk. The blind man picks up his mother and carries her to a hut to die. Clym turns inward, broken with grief for his guilt, apart from society, occupying two rooms at the top of the back stairs at Blooms-End.

Egdon Heath, the setting of The Return of the Native, sets the wildness and uncontrollability of nature against the human impulse to bring order, meaning, and value into life. When Clym Yeobright abandons Paris to return to the heath, he selects nature over glamour. This choice reflects his inner turmoil. In choosing the more basic, meditative life of study and teaching, he returns to his roots and repetition and seclusion. However, his philosophical and philanthropic intentions to alter the course of learning to lift the people are thwarted by his blindness. He yields to the rhythm of the vegetative cycle of the heath and lives upon the land as a furze cutter, so content with the transition that he can sleep through Eustacia and Wildeve’s discussion in the same room. Wildeve observes, “God, how I envy him that sweet sleep! […] I have not slept like that since I was a boy—years and years ago” (273).

When people wander off the road and into the heath, order disintegrates. They lose the way, get scratched and wounded, and fall into the weir. The heath facilitates sneaking around to spy on each other, for they are off the beaten path and hidden in the bushes. The heath obscures people’s views, yet it is not itself malign. Eustacia has no fear of it. Whatever evil happens in the heath occurs from human intervention, while the heath croppers circle, dissolve, and then run away, like the insects and the birds, always in motion.