The Return of the Native: Saint George Defeated

Brian Thomas begins this insightful analysis of The Return of the Native by laying to rest the contention of some earlier critics that Hardy's was an "unconscious" sort of genius; on the contrary, Thomas argues, such narratives as The Return of the Native tend to be unified by carefully established antithetical polarities of metaphor and perspective. This novel is in fact constructed around the subtle alternation of different angles of vision, according to Thomas: people and things are constantly being seen, almost cinematically, from different visual distances and are thereby revealed in new ways or with new kinds of significance.
Thomas examines how myths, Christian and pagan, apply to the novel, particularly the sun-hero myth and its merging with the Christian belief in a redeemer who comes to restore life. Thomas observes that many elements of this myth appear in the novel in virtually undisplaced form, which accounts for the wasteland imagery and for the central and subtextual motifs of loss, alienation, exile, and fall. Thomas points up the irony in Hardy's use of the sun-hero myth by paralleling the legend of Saint George slaying the dragon with a "hero" who turns out to be impotent and all but blind to the salvific role accorded him.
The unique power of The Return of the Native is, Thomas observes, related to its operatic quality. Although conceived in naturalistic terms, Egdon Heath has an archaic strangeness that frees the story's social world from the confines of plausibility. While often melodramatic and sometimes verging on the absurd, the novel's sense of passion and pathos is, Thomas contends, always on the grand scale. Desire and fear are characterized by a peculiar operatic compulsiveness precisely because they resonate within the context of what seems to be a compulsion of a much larger and stranger kind - a primal force that both shapes those human emotions and is oblivious to them.

Brian Thomas is director of the Writing Workshop at Victoria College, University of Toronto.