Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native -Egdon Heath

                                                  

                              Painting : October (1878) by Jules Bastien-Lepage  *


'Return of the Native' was Hardy's sixth novel and is centred around an area he called Egdon Heath. As a physical location it is not easy to place. Edward Parnell in 'Ghostland' has proposed that geographically Black Heath and Duddle Heath in Dorset fulfil this role PARNELL.Mr Parnell has also cited Hardy's  own view of  his own  creation of 'Wessex' as being "partly real, partly dream country". Egdon Heath also features  in 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' and Hardy's short story 'The Withered Arm'. 

The novel opens with an anonymous narrator offering a description of the Heath ( "heathy, furzy, briary wilderness--"Bruaria"")  Chapter One , and there are some magnificent passages depicting a wild landscape with its stubborn soil.

"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."Chapter One 

And I have to add 

..... "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." Chapter One 

There is a strange localised feeling to Egdon Heath, making it seem a small, depopulated, pocket of rural land. Yet those who live there can walk for hours and still be confined to the Heath. The soil is not fit for ploughing, but cattle and sheep grazing goes on. Hardy evokes a world of the 1840-1850's though the novel was first published in 1878.  There is an absence of railways,photography or telegraph. Bonaparte's threatened invasion is still in living memory for older folk. Witchcraft still prevails. Diggory Venn, the reddleman, whose clothes and skin are permanently stained red due to the use of reddle, ( supplied to dye -mark the sheep) finds enough custom. In reality such a  trade had already largely died out by the time the book was written.  Furze cutting also takes place. Adders, wild ponies known as 'heath-croppers' ,and  pre-Christian burial mounds,all find their place on the Heath.  

As D H Lawrence wrote in his study of Hardy's work-usually dated to the start of World War 1- "What is the great tragic power in the book? It is Egdon Heath. It is the primitive primal earth, where the instinctive life heaves up." LAWRENCE Perhaps 'Wuthering Heights' comes close to the idea of deep primordial forces operating through Nature. 

There are only six major characters . The aforementioned Diggory Venn the reddleman,a former dairy man who now crosses the heath from time to time in a caravan drawn by ponies, Eustacia Vye, an outsider who lives with her grandfather, who can not settle, but dreams of escape into sophisticated urban life. Thomasin Yeobright, who lives with her aunt Mrs Yeobright, Damon Wildeve who is tempted away from Egdon. Mrs Yeobright's son Clym, who returns to make a firm commitment to life in Egdon Heath, after giving up a career in the diamond trade of Paris, and wants to start a school in the area. Suffice to say Damon and Eustacia abandon a relationship and enter into unsuitable marriages with other individuals. Mrs Yeobright wanders across the Heath at high Summer, collapsing with exhaustion, and ends up being bitten by an adder. She is found barely conscious, and locals kill other adders, melt their fat to rub on the bite, but this does not save her life. Egdon Heath is reminiscent of the 'blasted heath' where the Weird Sisters lurk in 'Macbeth'. Or  King Lear's sojourn on the heath during a storm. The very beauty of wild nature contains a very strong shadowside. 

Eustacia can not banish her dream of living in Paris. A local woman is convinced that Eustacia is a witch, and curses her when she suspects Eustacia of harming her child, dressing a poppet like her then piercing its form with pins, reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards.  Eustacia and Damon make a desperate attempt to leave Egdon  Heath to travel abroad together but are caught in a storm of apocalyptic proportions which destroys them. All this adds to a strange contrast of Egdon Heath being its own realm where Nature in all its beauty seems indifferent to the fate of human individuals  set against Eustacia's dream of Paris, which had been so magnificently rebuilt  on the directions of Georges Haussman during the reign of Emperor  Napoleon III ( 1851-1870).  

In 1927 Gustav Holst visited Thomas Hardy, living in the Dorset countryside. It is not certain  if Holst's' tonal poem- Egdon Heath Homage to Hardy. Op 47'- was already completed or partly completed. TOMALIN /COOKE   A short 16 mm film was made to act out their meeting in 1972, written and directed by John Petley- Jones, filmed in Dorset with the  'Country Folk of Wessex taking part'. Sadly Hardy died in January 1928, and was unable to hear the music that he inspired. 

.......to be continued. 

The next 'Return of the Native' related blogpost titled 'Rainbarrow' , will look at the novel , and how 5th November bonfires are incorporated into the cyclical year. 

Sources 

Quotes from 

The Return of the Native On Line Text 


Books

'Ghostland-In Search of a Haunted Country' Edward PARNELL, William Collins, 2019 

'Pheonix The Posthumous Papers of D H Lawrence 1885-1930' edited by Edward Macdonald  D H LAWRENCE , Harmondsworth, Penguin 1978 .

Introduction to 'The 'Return of the Native', Doctor Claire SEYMOUR, 1995, Wordsworth papberback edition. 

'Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man', Claire TOMALIN , Viking/Penguin Group, 2006.


Web article

On Gustav Holst's 'Egdon Heath]   By Classical Music writer Philip Cooke. 

Youtube

EGDON HEATH  When Gustav Holst met Thomas Hardy (1972 16 mm film) written and directed by John Petley-Jones.


* October  painting in public domain courtesy of 'Wikipedia'. 

I wish to thank the 'Thomas Hardy Fans' Facebook group for background material. 

The  responsibility for any factual errors or schoolboy howlers is solely mine,and can not be attributed to any source that I have quoted. 

Michael Bleak 

Brighton, England 

28th August 2023 


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