Egdon Heath and its Significance

One of the most prominent figures in Hardy�s The Return of the Native is not a human character, but the physical landmark- Egdon Heath. The heath's central role is obvious from the beginning. The novel opens with an extensive description of the heath at dusk. Hardy begins by saying: �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�. Even though the main story focuses on the relationships between Eustacia Vye, Clym Yeobright, Wildeve and Thomasin, the Heath is the central figure. Many of the events occur on or around Egdon Heath, and equally as important- all of the characters have their own special relationship with the heath.It is  �A Face on which Time makes but little Impression�. The nature of human beings is fleeting and insignificance as compared to the permanence of the heath. Avrom Fleishman in "The Buried Giant of Egdon Heath" regards Egdon Heath as a figure "in both narrative senses of 'figure,' as a person and as a trope". Hardy says:

         �The heath becomes full of watchful intentness. When other things sank brooding to sleep, the Heath appeared slowly to awake and listen�

       The Return of the Native has been called �The Book of Egdon Heath�. Hardy does an award-winning job at extensively describing Egdon heath for his readers. He even brings the heath alive: �The somber 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.� The heath proves physically and psychologically important throughout the novel: characters are defined by their relation to the heath, and the weather patterns of the heath. Indeed, it almost seems as if the characters are formed by the heath itself: Diggory Venn, red from head to toe, is an actual embodiment of the muddy earth; Eustacia Vye seems to spring directly from the Heath, a part of Rainbarrow itself, when she is first introduced; Wildeve's name might just as well refer to the wind-whipped heath itself. But, importantly, the Heath manages to defy definition. It is, in chapter one, "a place perfectly accordant with man's nature." The narrator's descriptions of the Heath vary widely throughout the novel, ranging from the sublime to the gothic.

       Hardy�s description of the Heath has �a symbolic overtone with philosophy�. �It had a lonely face suggesting tragical possibilities� It neither ghastly, not hateful, common place, tame, but it is like man slighted and enduring.  Egdon is the premier and most extended instance of Hardy�s habitual personification of Nature. Hardy himself lived on the fringes of Egdon Heath and was perfectly with this environment. In no other novel of his does background come up as lively and breathing as The Return of the Native.

 �Egdon is a protagonist of Return of the Native�, says Walter Allen. Egdon influences all the characters moving them to love or hate, to despair or to the philosophic mind and they are described in relation to their environment. When Clym moves out of his mother�s house, the fir and beech trees are described to be �suffering more demage than during the highest winds of winter � the wasting sap would bleed for many days to come�. The two most resistatant characters to the Heath are clearly Eustacia and Wildeve; their intense disgust is revealed in their conversation: �You hate the Heath as much as ever; that I know�, �I do � �Tis my cross, my misery, and will be my death.� It is ironic when Eustacia says that she is setting for  his fatal journey. We also get an insight to the way Eustacia is feeling through the storm when Hardy says, �Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.� Hardy describes her as �the raw material of a divinity� whose �celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon.�

        Clym, unlike, Eustacia, is the product of Egdon and its shaggy hills are friendly and congenial to him. Heath swallows him up and absorbs him into its furze and other creatures. The way Hardy describes Clym when he is out on the Heath working is like something from Snow Wight, with �Amber coloured butterflies� and the�Emerald-green grasshoppers.�  If Clym is the child of heath, Eustacia is haunted by the heath, the reddleman haunts the heath. He knows every nook and corner of heath.  The heath does irreparable damage to Mrs. Yeobright and kills her. Thomasin thinks it an impersonal open ground. She calls it �a ridiculous old place.� But confesses that she could live nowhere else.

 At the very last, Egdon is shown to be inhospitable to man, as remarks D.H. Lawrence: �Egdon whose dark soil was strong and crude and organic as the body of a beast�. The dark-spirit of nature seems to be ready to engulf the whole scenario.

 When human figures do finally appear, they seem insignificant against the backdrop of the indifferent, ruthless, Egdon Heath. Many times during the course of the story, for instance, Clym will be shown to appear like a tiny insect moving across the face of nature. These elements�the heath as a setting and a symbol, and the way the main characters are shown in relation to their surroundings�demonstrate Hardy�s theme:

  �Man lives his life in a universe that is at least indifferent to him and may be hostile."

                             Prepared and Composed by Shahzad Khan Chandia