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“How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has
been against me... I do not deserve my lot!”
If she had been able to live in a great city, perhaps she would have been
splendid. If she had found a society that appreciated her rare qualities, rather than
fearing or scorning them as the people of Egdon do, she might have achieved great
things.
Diggory is, of course, almost too good to be true. To many readers, he almost
appears to be a supernatural being. He arrives in the nick of time, whenever
Thomasin seems to be in danger. He can move swiftly across the heath at night; he
can beat the lucky gambler Wildeve, even with Wildeve's own dice. It seems
Diggory can almost read men's minds. Capable, insightful, loyal, he performs the
role of a guardian angel.
It is easy to see why Hardy originally thought that Diggory should simply
disappear at the end of the novel, instead of settling down with Thomasin. Diggory
is too fantastic a creation to fit easily into an ordinary home life. However, he says
he has entered this strange life as a reddleman only because Thomasin rejected
him; to marry her, then, he returns to normal society.
Though his actions seem magical, Diggory's heart is totally human. It is part of
his appeal that Diggory steadfastly loves Thomasin. She is not clever or
sophisticated, and she has been foolish. She is generous, however, and her heart is in
the right place. Diggory unlike Clym and Wildeve, falls in love for reasons that
may cause love to last. He combines Clym's sense of justice with a practical
understanding of how men and women actually live their lives.
Hardy is closely familiar with the life and customs of the Wessex rustics. He knows
every detail of the business of the farmer, the woodcutter, the hay-trusser, the cider
maker, the shepherd and the dairy man. This knowledge is not that of a person who
has studied their life from apart, with a sense of superiority, but of one who has
lived with them and mixed with them on a equal footing as one of them. Characters
in Wessex novels are drawn not from the upper class of society but from the lowest
and the humblest rank of life. Henchard in “The Mayor of Caster- bridge” is a hay-
trusser. Clym also turns a hay-trusser and furze-cutter, Tess in the “Tess of the
D’Urbervilles” is a dairy maid. He reveals to us the intimate details of their respective
professions, their skills and the hardships of their lives. He tells us about the
inherent nobility of their souls, their persistence and their struggle against heavy
odds. They have to get their humble livelihood from Nature and depend upon her
unexpected changes for their life.
Wessex Superstitions
The Wessex rustics are very superstitious. Education has not yet cleared the darkness
of ignorance from the land. In every town, there are spirit callers and fortunetellers.
In “The Return of the Native”, Susan Nunsuch burns a wax effigy of Eustacia whom
she regards as a witch. There is also the superstition, ‘no moon, and no man’. In “Tess
of the D’Urbervilles”, we find that an evening crow is considered an ill omen as it
signifies premarital sex experience on the part of the bride. In this very novel, the
cattle are supposed to withhold their yield on the arrival of a new hand and soften
only when music is played to them.
Such is Hardy’s Wessex. He has immortalized it and put it on the world map. Hardy
is a great regional novelist because he has imparted universal interest to a particular
region. The scenes of his entire novel are laid in one particular region. He treats only
of its life, its history and its geography. Still his novels are of great interest even to
those who have nothing to do with Wes- sex. This is so because he has succeeded in
universalizing the regional and the topical. He concentrates on passions and
emotions that are universal; they are real themes of his novels.
Plot, in fiction, the structure of interrelated actions, consciously selected and arranged
by the author. Plot involves a considerably higher level of narrative organization than
normally occurs in a story or fable. According to E.M. Forster in Aspects of the
Novel (1927), a story is a “narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence,” whereas
a plot organizes the events according to a “sense of causality.”
In the history of literary criticism, plot has undergone a variety of interpretations. In
the Poetics, Aristotle assigned primary importance to plot (mythos) and considered it
the very “soul” of a tragedy. Later critics tended to reduce plot to a more mechanical
function, until, in the Romantic era, the term was theoretically degraded to an outline
on which the content of fiction was hung. Such outlines were popularly thought to
exist apart from any particular work and to be reusable and interchangeable. They
might be endowed with life by a particular author through his development of
character, dialogue, or some other element. The publication of books of “basic plots”
brought plot to its lowest esteem.
In the 20th century there have been many attempts to redefine plot as movement, and
some critics have even reverted to the position of Aristotle in giving it primary
importance in fiction. These neo-Aristotelians (or Chicago school of critics), following
the leadership of the critic Ronald S. Crane, have described plot as the author’s control
of the reader’s emotional responses—his arousal of the reader’s interest and anxiety
and the careful control of that anxiety over a duration of time. This approach is only
one of many attempts to restore plot to its former place of priority in fiction.
Hardy’s plots have a definite structure, design and plan, like Fielding have.
Framework is tight and definite too. Dramatic in quality, these plots have nothing
extra and unnecessary. His plots are much exciting, overdramatic and genuine.
Architectural Design
An architect by his early training, Hardy gives to his novels an architectural design.
He is a superb master on the constructive side of his plots. He builds it as mason or
an architect builds a house. As a building raises brick by brick, so Hardy’s plots rise
scene by scene. They are constructed in scenes that are the bricks of his plots of
which philosophy is the cement. The setting of every part is calculated, every stone
has its place, and every bit of mortar bears its part. The creative work of Hardy is
His Demerits
Following are the demerits of Hardy:
1. His plots are melodramatic, sensational and superficial. J.W. Beach points
out, there is too much of piling up of stage tricks, a series of circumstances,
violent and surprising, all obvious and striking arrangements for providing
excitement. Chance, coincidences, surprises, accidents, over-heard
conversations, old people turning suddenly etc., are certainly artificial devices,
and this criticism of Hardy’s plots is almost true. Hardy’s plots turn too much
upon chance and so appear forced and unnatural. Chance events in his stories
are numerous. However, it can be added to Hardy’s credit that these elements
keep up the interest of the story.
2. The Love element is obvious. The plots are so solidly built round a love-
situation, generally of a complicated nature. “The Mayor of Casterbridge”
seems to be the only exception. Duffin says , “Hardy’s plot take its rise from
the fact of two or more men loving one woman or two or more women loving
one man, or from a combination of two varieties of complications.” The
typical Hardy plot is a love story and it is marked simple. It concerns it- self
with the lives of a few persons alone. The action proceeds in a few great
movements, and in clean direct lines.
3. Hardy’s plots lack of variety. As has been shown above, they are all love
tales. Hardy’s plots are under influence of his philosophy. They are all based
on a conflict between Man and his destiny. In this conflict, Man is always
broken, despite the heroic struggle that he might put up. Thus, all the plots
have sameness, a sort of family likeness. They are repetitive. This sameness
and lack of variety also results from the fact that the scene of action is always
placed in Hardy’s Wessex. The same physical features, the same hills, dales,
heath and the same rustics, speaking the same dialect appear and re-appear
successively in one novel after another.
Suffering: A Universal
In Hardy’s considered views, all life is suffering. Man suffers from the moment of
his birth up to his death. Happiness is only occasional; it is not the general rule. He
says in “The Mayor of Casterbridge” that happiness is but an occasional episode in a
general drama of pain. There is no one who gets more than he deserves but there are
many who get much less than what they de- serve.
In fact, Hardy’s characters in general are the victims of this irony. Their intentions and
hopes are constantly frustrated, as if some hostile power were working against them.
Style
Point of View
The novel is told from the third person’s point of view. He refers the characters, as “he”
or “she” However, the narrative, does not know everything. This means that he looks at
the story unfolding from different points of view. But when it is settled on a particular
point of view it stays consistent.
Structure
This book was structured for the magazine serial. Thus each episode covers a complete
event leaving a point for completion in the next episode so that the further development
of the story is foreshadowed by the reader.
A good example of this technique is clear when Thomasin returns unmarried from
Angelbury. The chapter ends with her aunt asking, “Now Thomasin…..what’s the
meaning of this disgraceful performance?” The readers know that the explanation will
follow in the next episode.
Critics have also contended that this book is structured like a Shakespearean drama.
Most of the plays of Shakespeare were organized in five acts with a climatic conclusion
in the last act. “The Return of the Native” is presented in six books; most critics say that
the artistic structure re- quires five books. The sixth book is added to please the readers
who want to see everything turn out in the end.
Pictorial Quality
A remarkable and distinctive feature of Thomas Hardy’s style in his fiction is its
pictorial quality. A number of critics have commented upon the pictorial quality
of Hardy’s descriptive passages and the profound influence that the visual arts
exercised upon his writing and style. Norman Page remarks that “Hardy’s wide
knowledge of, and lifelong interest in, the visual arts left their mark on his fiction at
both superficial and deeper levels, and in the conception and presentation of whole
episodes as well as in individual details of style” Hardy’s novels, he adds, “contain a
strong element of literary picture-making Passages which show Hardy’s pictorial power
are found in abundance in many of his novels and short stories. In Far from the
Madding Crowd, for example, the description of Farmer Oak’s smile has the vividness
of a painting: “When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they
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were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and
diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays
in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun”. It is difficult to imagine a more vivid
description of the smile of a human being than that given here by Hardy.
Another fine example of Hardy’s pictorial quality can be observed in his description of
Edgon Heath. The famous description of Egdon in the opening chapter of The Return of
the Native is indeed a central text for anyone who would understand Hardy's mind and
his vision of the world. Much the same brooding darkness provides the setting of his best-
known lyric, 'The Darkling Thrush', composed on the brink of the new century; and it is
in fact possible to trace the stark imagery of this poem in several earlier passages of
prose. In such passages we discover what we may think of as the typically Hardyesque
landscape- ominous, desolate, and essentially inimical to man. Dwarfed by the vast
wastes surrounding him, man is presented as an insignificant creature pathetically
uncertain of his existence and of his fate; again and again the frailty of his estate is
likened to the helplessness of birds, a comparison which emphasizes the littleness of
man, placed in the limitless spaces of the grim landscape of which Egdon is the epitome,
and which Hardy describes in The Return of the Native as a place which had slipped out
of its century generations ago to intrude as an uncouth object into this', just as in 'The
Darkling' Thrush'
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant.
This Hardyesque landscape may perhaps call to mind the landscapes of Ruisdael and
Rembrandt, and there can be no doubt that its development in Hardy's hands was
intimately bound up with his views on the art of landscape-painting. Hardy, indeed, had
the eye of a painter; drawing the outlines of his forms as consciously as he filled them
with substance and with colour; giving them their proper texture and lighting; fixing
them firmly in a definite space; and relating them in scale to their surroundings.
Symbolism
The names of the Hardy’s characters are almost symbolic of their function in the
novel. The title is also no exception. “Wildeve” suggests something on the edge of
wildness. “Eustacia” is de- rived from ecstasy, which means a change in the level
of the sea indicating the immense changes that she is set to bring in the lives of the
other people.
Clym’s last name, “Yeobright”, combines the word “Yeoman” which indicates a servant
with the indication of his natural intelligence.
Loving Mother
The tragic weakness of Mrs. Yeobright is her boundless love for hr son. She regards
Clym as a part of her own self. She has sacrificed all for his sake, placing all her
hopes of happiness on him alone. She is very anxious when she comes to know that
her son has fallen into the snares of Eustacia. She is worried not because she is
jealous of Eustacia but because she realizes that Clym would never be happy with such
a proud, willful and impulsive woman. Clym marries Eustacia against the wishes of
his mother. Such is her love for her son that even this disobedience on his part is
forgiven and forgotten by her.
CHARACTER OF WILDEVE
The Villain
Wildeve has the most attractive personality. He is the character of low sensuality. He
is the villain of the novel. He is the cause of unhappiness of Thomasin and is
responsible for Eustacia’s ruin. In the beginning of the novel, he is an engineer but he
has reduced himself to an innkeeper.
Fascinating Personality
Wildeve has an attractive outward form. He possesses well-polished tastes. He is fond
of fine dress. He has a gift of the gab. He is a sort of a lady-killer. Thomasin loves him
and he likes Eustacia.
Thomasin is young and pretty girl. She is the niece of Mrs. Yeobright. She is one of the
characters of Hardy who suffer long and silently. She is a contrast to Eustacia. Her
beauty is without pride and rebelliousness. Eustacia’s beauty, on the other hand is
impulsive, capricious, wayward and rebellious. Thomasin’s character is a counterpart
of Venn. She is faithful, honest, practical and rational in her approach to life’s
problem.
Gentleness
The most distinctive feature of her character is her gentle and humble nature. She is
soft and yielding. Clym and Venn as well as Wildeve can easily influence her. Her
mildness is both her strength and her weakness. She shows remarkable patience and
calm in her love with Wildeve. When Mrs. Yeobright is angry with Wildeve, she
requests her not to be angry and harsh with him and to let her tackle him.
A Commonplace Character
Thomasin certainly does not attain the grandeur, which Eustacia has. Eustacia’s life
ends with tragedy but she attains the tragic grandeur, which makes her unforgettable.
Thomasin has no such tragic height. She is a commonplace and mediocre character.
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She is a weak character and lacks the power and ambition with her heart’s desire. One
man and the other continually rejected her. She is of compromising attitude. She
always adjusts herself to the atmosphere.
As Clym says that, he is an honest man. His personality is of rare combination. He has
a lot of experience of the world. He is clever in the worldly sense of the term, yet he does
not use his cleverness. He uses his cleverness not for his own good, but for the good of
others.