The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One of my vices is the reading of advice columns. The problems of the correspondents are often so bizarre as to be beyond the imagination of even the most lurid novelists. My favorite agony aunt (as the British say) is Carolyn Hax, who writes for the Washington Post. And her advice very often boils down to one simple precept: mind your own business.
This book is one long illustration of the wisdom of this maxim, as the entire tragedy of the plot could have been avoided if any of the major characters (and, indeed, even some of the minor ones) had simply minded their own business. From the aunt who cannot trust her niece—or, indeed, even her own son—to marry the right person, to the rejected suitor who spies, eavesdrops, and meddles, to the two principal characters—Eustacia and Wildeve—who express their dissatisfaction with their own marriage by tarnishing another’s, and finally to the titular “native,” whose love for his own country is tainted by his savior complex, thinking that he ought to “improve” his fellows.
Now, you may think that the injunction to attend to your own affairs is not exactly a profound subject for a novel. But considering how difficult it is, and how often we try and fail to do this, I think that it is worth close examination. Indeed, I would go so far to say that minding one’s own business is a bedrock moral principle.
To mind your own business is, in one sense, a way of showing respect, by trusting that others will have the wisdom to manage their own lives. And even if another person evidently cannot act wisely, to refrain from interfering is still very often the best course. The freedom to screw up one’s own life in one’s own chosen manner is an inseparable part of having personal autonomy. In any case, even the kindest intervention can often backfire, as Hardy illustrates with the case of Diggory Venn, who has enough good intentions to pave several superhighways to the fiery pit, and who gets most everyone except himself there in record speed.
However, the injunction to mind your own business is also, potentially, a profoundly conservative one. And as with many Victorian novels—indeed, as with many stories generally—the message boils down to this: do not tamper with the social order. Except for Thomasin and Venn (not coincidentally, the two characters who have a happy ending), all of the major characters consider the Heath to be, in some way, beneath them. Whether their dreams are financial (Mrs. Yeobright), educational (Clym), or romantic (Wildeve and Eustacia), they want to, somehow, get beyond their social reality. And as often happens in stories, the result is a tragic end for them and a return to statis of the society.
I have got caught up in analyzing what I take to be the moral of this book, but I have not said anything about its quality. Unfortunately, I have to admit I found the novel to be quite mediocre. The story is full of cliches (unread letters, mistimed messages, the lover in disguise) and implausible coincidences. I think a good tragedy should show how the end result is an inevitable result of the protagonist’s personality. But with so much seeming bad luck involved in this story, the final impression is that the denouement was just a matter of blind chance.
But it must be admitted that this artificial plot was at least very exciting. Hardy dives right into to the scandalous drama of his story and he never lets up. There is hardly a breath to the ceaseless action, except for the interludes involving the Heath folk, who apparently Hardy conceived of as a kind of Greek chorus to his Sophoclean tragedy. Indeed, as the novel was first serialized in a magazine, I think the experience of reading it must have been remarkably close to that of watching a good soap opera.
Hardy’s characters are only partly successful. His women are more compelling than the men, who are rather stiff, shallow figures. But even the novel’s strongest character, Eustacia, is hampered by Hardy’s penchant for writing dialogue that is pretentious and stuffy, even in moments of great drama. Consider this sample, Eustacia’s reply to her husband during a pivotal scene:
Never! I’ll hold my tongue like the very death that I don’t mind meeting, even though I can clear myself of half you believe by speaking. Yes. I will! Who of any dignity would take the trouble to clear cobwebs from a wild man’s mind after such language as this? No: let him go on, and think his narrow thoughts, and run his head into the mire. I have other cares.
Aside from the strangely epistolary quality of this speech, it is also a good example of a certain psychological implausibility, as Eustacia at key moments withholds explanations which would materially benefit her to provide. That she does this is not a convincing consequence of her character, prideful though she may be, but it is required for the plot to plod onward.
The prose of the novel is not much better. Hardy often seems to be straining for a weighty, literary style that feels both unnecessary and false. He often, for example, includes references to history, literature, and mythology which only prove his own learning, adding nothing to the story. And he gives the impression of choosing words simply to show off. To be fair to Hardy, the writing does improve from the beginning towards the end, which the introduction to this volume attributes to its origin as a serialized novel. Yet even in the final part, we get a sentence like this:
All the known incidents of their love were enlarged, distorted, touched up, and modified, till the original reality bore but a slight resemblance to the counterfeit presentation by surrounding tongues.
Such an ostentatious style may, perhaps, be appropriate in a history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but it is jarring in the context of a novel about rural folks.
In the end, I think this is only a half-successful novel—certainly entertaining, but so uneven as to be ultimately unconvincing as a work of art. But I can say that Hardy would at least have made a first-class agony aunt.
Lotz in Translation 