The Return of the Native

Thomasin Yeobright can, however, live happily ever after. She lives with her aunt at Blooms-End, and her aunt dictates her expectations. Her aunt would not approve of the marriage proposal from Diggory Venn. Her marriage to Wildeve stresses the relationship with the aunt who prevents it at first. Wildeve, too, ranks unworthy, but the aunt accepts him to keep peace with her niece. When a mix-up in the license causes the elopement to fall apart, her aunt insists to Wildeve that the marriage must go forward to protect Thomasin’s reputation.

Thomasin’s marriage to Wildeve lacks luster, and she accepts it. Unlike Eustacia, who commands her environment, Thomasin blends into hers as mistress at the Quiet Woman, giving birth to a girl and leaving Wildeve disappointed. She exhibits spunk only at the end after her aunt dies. She begins to spy on Wildeve and his assignations with Eustacia, and she takes initiative to conspire with her cousin, Clym, whose wife betrays him. When Wildeve drowns and she inherits his fortune, she takes command and implements her intention to marry Venn.

We never learn the first name of Mrs. Yeobright. Although a cleric’s daughter, marriage determines her societal role. This gives her status as the mistress of Blooms-End, and she enforces that status with both her son and her niece. They are not to stray beyond its confines. She first denies Thomasin’s marriage to Wildeve and then forces its consummation to save the niece’s reputation and the standing of the family in the community. She decries her son’s marriage to the witch, Eustacia, and rigidly refrains from accepting the married couple into her home.

Mrs. Yeobright, however, both pragmatic and forgiving, finally decides to visit the married couple. She undertakes it with a heavy heart to salvage her relationship with her son, attentive to the pleas of both Thomasin and Venn. When she sees the face of the woman in the window who refuses to open the door, both wounded pride and a broken heart cause her to walk away. Hardy uses the social norms and class consciousness of Mrs. Yeobright to drive the plot.

If Eustacia is the protagonist, then Wildeve is the antagonist with little to like about him. Hardy writes, “He was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike” (45). He is a woman’s man but is content to be an innkeeper rather than using his education as an engineer. He seems to spend most of his time womanizing, venturing to Blackbarrow, Alderworth, and the village dance, perpetually seeking out Eustacia. His marriage to Thomasin lacks both love and passion, and he shows no fatherly love for his child.

Wildeve lacks character and values. He refuses to give his wife spending money, prompting Mrs. Yeobright to send money set aside for Thomasin and Clym by her late husband. When Christian, tempted by winning at dice, gambles with Wildeve for the 100 guineas he carries, Wildeve contemptuously manipulates him with stories of winnings. He ruthlessly takes it all. He justifies his behavior by his final scheme with Eustacia, to drive her to Budmouth, finance her escape, and join her later in Paris:

He had persuaded himself that to act honestly towards his gentle wife, and chivalrously towards another woman, was not only possible but easy; he had resolved to regulate his conduct by canon of virtue, and blind himself to his sentiments for Eustacia in lending her assistance; but, even while he endeavoured, the spell that she had cast over him intensified (353).

When Wildeve and Eustacia drown together, Hardy completes a tragic action without heroic characters, Wildeve the least heroic.

Clym Yeobright’s anticipated return to Egdon Heath from Paris creates the expectation he will be a dashing figure, bigger than life. Instead, Hardy portrays him as introverted, dissatisfied, and pale. He takes no joy in his Paris work, considering it superficial. He has a sense that he can alter the life of the working man with the school he will build, changing the way children learn. When his blindness from his studies leaves him listless, he undertakes the work of a furze cutter with a dogged indifference to its implications for both himself and his wife.

Eustacia attracts him with her notoriety, her disguise as a man at the Christmas party, and her reputation for being a witch. Just as she imagines he will take her to Paris, Clym imagines she will become the matron of his boarding school. Caught up in his philosophical zeal, he fails to hear her words. Passion proves short-lived in the marriage, and unlike Wildeve, he does not impregnate his wife. After Eustacia’s death, when he contemplates proposing to his cousin to please his dead mother, he acknowledges his impotence: “Every pulse of lover-like feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia’s lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough to hand for another fire of that sort” (370).

The intense relationship between Clym and his mother binds him to self-pity and grief. His mother’s affection and approval take precedence over all other considerations, and when he learns the course of events preceding her death, he denounces Eustacia. Even the change of mind that prompts him to write the letter to Eustacia, asking her to come back, does not prevent him from casting blame upon her, saying, “You don’t know, you never will know, what those words of anger cost me which you drew down upon yourself” (334).