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Introduction
Thomas Hardy, one of the most famous British poets and novelists, has left so many fantastic and marvelous works during his life. The number of the poems created by Hardy is up to 918. He has composed many famous novels, including Tess of the D'Urbervillesand, Desperate Remedies, The Mayor of Casterbridge and so on. But the most influential one among those excellent masterpieces must be The Return of the Native.
The novel The Return of the Native was written in the year of 1878, just in the middle of the Victorian Age. And this era was not only seen as the highlight of the British Empire, but also as the highlight of the limitation and oppression to women. In the society during the Victorian Age, patriarchal idea was the main opinion people held. Families were patriarchal. Every girl listened to and obeyed her father. The Return of the Native took place in southwest England in the 1850s, when socioeconomic status was important. People rarely married someone from another social class. Members of the upper class held a considerably contemptuous attitude towards those of lower classes. In the novel, Hardy shows how rigid class distinctions contribute to unhappiness, especially by interfering with romantic love. Much of the book’s tension arises from class barriers, which are parts of a world where randomness and chance are key parts of everyday life.
The novel tells the story of Eustacia Vye, a rebellious girl pursuing passionate love and freedom from the Egdon Heath, a desert in the Dorset countryside, with only her grandfather living with her. She finds herself hate the boring life and searches for a man to take her away from this “prison”.However, when Damon Wildeve, a man of the natives on the Heath who can help Eustacia to complete her ideas, decides to marry the meek Thomasin Yeobright, Eustacia changes her target. It is Thomasin’s cousin, Clym, who returns to Egdon Heath from Paris as a jeweler. The seduction of extravagant life and escape renders Eustacia fall in love with a man capable of fulfilling her desire, which finally becomes a fantasy. Later Clym’s decision to abandon the Parisian life for teaching and becoming a heath worker damages her dreams, thus she goes back to Wildeve just for possible hope of leaving the heath. Unfortunately, she fails to realize her dreams and dies miserably.
As The Return of the Native is one of the most classic novels among all of Thomas Hardy’s creations, many scholars have tried to analyze reasons for the opposite fates of the two girls. For example, some scholars think that outer environment is the main factor for characters’ fates. Firstly, the Industrial Revolution changes the purified lifestyle in countrysides, damaging natural environment and making difference to villagers’ values. Secondly, the initial reason is the patriarchal society, in which women obey their fathers and they are an appurtenance to men. A woman is supposed to give up freedom and independence. What they should do is being protected and ruled by men. Women is a symbol of blandness, passiveness, softness and so on. Some think that it is the effect of inner temperaments and outer living conditions that leads to different fates. Eustacia, who is ambitious and rebellious, is doomed to fail in a society where women are born to be angels, that is, to be mild and obedient. While Thomasin obeys and adjusts to Egdon Heath of her own accord. Thus, she survives and has a happy ending.
This paper also uncovers the fatalism and the ecological theory in the novel via the two roles, Eustacia and Thomasin. Hardy portrays the two girls with different characters. And due to the combined action of the character and the environment they live in, the two girls experience two quite different lifestyles and life experiences. By making a concrete analysis of the different traits of character of Eustacia and Yeobright and the different life experiences of the two girls , this paper emphasizes the effect that character can decide one’s fate .