The Return of the Native

“The first tall flame from Blackbarrow sprang into the sky, attracting all eyes that had been fixed on the distant conflagrations back to their own attempt in the same kind.”

Eustacia Vye’s bonfire stands apart from all the others on November 5, burning more brightly and longer, yet all Egdon is involved in the same activity, the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. Readers meet the local people and hear the gossip.

“Eustacia! Could I forget that last autumn at this same day of the month and at this same place you lighted exactly such a fire as a signal for me to come and see you. Why should there have been a bonfire again by Captain Drew’s house if not for the same purpose.”

Wildeve returns to Eustacia’s November 5 fire, this year immediately after his botched elopement with Thomasin, whom he will marry. Eustacia’s flame ignites his passion. She draws him to her to demonstrate her power even though she knows his unworthiness and imperfection.

“To be loved to madness—such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.”

Eustacia lives in isolation from the community and entertains herself with fantasies. When a new man appears from Paris, Clym Yeobright, she makes him her love object and the subject of her imagination, moving on from Wildeve whom she enjoys manipulating.

“A child’s first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams which had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began.”

Superstition and fear motivate the locals. They perceive and cannot comprehend the peculiarity of Diggory Venn, the reddleman, with skin, clothing, and van all colored red from the reddle he sells to the sheep farmers. The reader comes to know he uses his disguise to hide physically and to hide his true feelings.

“The man who had begun by being merely her amusement, and would never have been more than her hobby but for his skill in deserting her at the right moment, was now her desire. Cessation in his love-making had made her love.”

Venn, whose proposal to Thomasin was rejected, goes to Eustacia to ask her to free Wildeve so he will marry Thomasin and make her a respectable woman. Eustacia only wants Wildeve when she can’t have him. Eustacia and Wildeve manipulate each other by withholding the passion that the other desires.

“She had come out to see a man who might possibly have the power to deliver her soul from the most deadly oppression. What was Wildeve? Interesting, but inadequate. Perhaps she would see a sufficient hero to-night.”

Eustacia goes with the mummers to the Yeobright Christmas part, disguised as the Turkish Knight. Clym Yeobright has replaced Wildeve in her imagination as the appropriate suitor for her. Her thoughts confirm the theme of the women’s need to define themselves through the men they marry.

“She loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had from the first instinctively determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody.”

Eustacia refuses the food Clym offers her at the party because it would ruin her disguise as a man. She does, however, accept elder wine from him, and she immediately begins to be in love with him. She is already in love with the idea of the man she imagines Clym to be.

“Had you been uniformly faithful to me throughout these two years you might now have some ground for accusing me of heartlessness; but if you calmly consider what I bore during the period of your desertion, and how I passively put up with your courtship of another, without once interfering, you will I think own that I have a right to consult my own feelings when you come back to me again.”

Venn, always looking out for Thomasin, convinces Eustacia to send a letter of rejection to Wildeve. In this letter, she presents herself as the victim of Wildeve’s actions rather than the perpetrator of harm, her usual practice as she interprets reality to suit her imagination.

“After all the trouble that has been taken to give you a start, and when there is nothing to do but to keep straight on, you say you will be a poor-man’s schoolmaster. Your fancies will be your ruin, Clym.”

Mrs. Yeobright responds to Clym’s intention to stay in Egdon and start a school. The villagers agree he will waste his opportunity by staying there and following a fantasy. He will be like his father and get “weary of doing well.”

“All the fold jumped up, and then we found that Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle, as she had threatened to do as soon as ever she could get the young lady to church, where she don’t come very often.”

Christian comes to Blooms-End and tells Clym and his mother about the stabbing of Eustacia. The stabbing inspires gossip, and Clym is intrigued by the tale of Eustacia’s beauty and the stories of her as a witch. He determines to go to Mistover to help salvage the bucket from the well, already entertaining the idea she might want to be a teacher.

“Her past was a blank, her life had begun.”

After an intimate exchange when Eustacia skinned her hand attempting to assist Clym with the bucket in the well, she paints her future in her mind, wiping out all memory of her past. She has already married Clym in her imagination.

“In spite of Eustacia’s apparent willingness to wait through the period of unpromising engagement, till he should be established in his new pursuit, he could not but perceive at moments that she loved him rather as a visitant from a gay world to which she rightly belonged than as a man with a purpose opposed to that recent past of his which so interested her.”

Eustacia and Clym marry at cross purposes. He wants her to be the matron of his boarding school, and she wants to be taken to Paris to experience his former life. The narrator reveals this is one of the few times when Clym acknowledges the truth.

“My plan is one for instilling high knowledge into empty minds without first cramming them with what has to be uncrammed again before true study begins.”

Clym states the purpose of his school to his mother. He has an elevated opinion of the change he might be able to bring to the provincial people. In contrast to Wildeve and Thomasin, Clym and Eustacia live in their imaginations.

“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in. I have heard of people who, upon coming suddenly into happiness, have died from anxiety lest they should not live to enjoy it. I felt myself in that whimsical state of uneasiness lately; but I shall be spared it now.”

The obstacle, his mother’s resistance, forces Clym to decide he and Eustacia must marry immediately while he finishes his study. Promising it will only be for six months until they will move to Budmouth, he introduces Fate, foreshadowing that his anxiety is warranted.

“To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of what offered; to care for the remote, to dislike the near: it was Wildeve’s nature always.”

Wildeve hears that Eustacia and Clym are to be married, and it ignites his old longing. He and Eustacia share this in common, to always yearn for what they can’t have in the moment. While he is more practical than Eustacia, they share a desire for intense experiences.

“As the minutes had passed he had gradually drifted into a revengeful intention without knowing the precise moment of forming it. This was to teach Mrs. Yeobright a lesson, as he considered it to be; in other words to show her if he could that her niece’s husband was the proper guardian of her niece’s money.”

Wildeve wagers with Christian for the money intended for Thomasin and Clym. He justifies taking it to prove that what belongs to his wife belongs to him, that he is the proper “guardian.” Venn will intervene, win it back, and deliver it to Thomasin.

“Wildeve forgot the loss of the money at the sight of his lost love, whose preciousness in his eyes was increasing in geometrical progression with each new incident that reminded him of their hopeless division.”

Wildeve sees Eustacia in her wedding carriage, and it wipes out all thought of the money. The narrator shares the disdain the reader feels toward this trivial, self-absorbed individual.

“It shocked her. To see him there, a poor afflicted man, earning money by the sweat of his brow, had a first moved her to tears; but to hear him sing and not at all rebel against an occupation which, however satisfactory to himself, was degrading to her as an educated lady-wife, wounded her through.”

Clym, blinded from his study, has become a furze cutter and Eustacia sees him engaged in this occupation. His singing while he does the task arouses her indignation. He reduces her social status by his new state in life.

“She had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood. Wildeve by himself would have been merely an agitation; Wildeve added to the dance, and the moonlight and the secrecy, began to be a delight.”

Eustacia attends a dance in the village in rebellion against the misery of her married state with Clym, at first avoiding participation, believing that she is above the status of the villagers. Wildeve appears and tells her to put down her veil. They dance so passionately the villagers wonder who the strangers are.

“That Venn’s keen eye had discerned what Yeobright’s feeble vision had not- a man in the act of withdrawing from Eustacia’s side—was within the limits of the probable.”

Clym goes to meet Eustacia from the dance and encounters Venn. In his blindness, he does not see that she was accompanied by a man, Wildeve. Venn beats Wildeve home. When Thomasin says Wildeve went out to buy a horse, Venn says, ironically, he saw him leading one home, “a beauty, with a white face and a mane as black as night” (257).

“Tell her you have seen a broken-hearted woman cast off by her son.”

Mrs. Yeobright tells this to Johnny Nunsuch after she sees Eustacia’s face at the window and assumes her son refused to respond to her knock at the door. This misunderstanding drives the tragic action of Parts 4 and 5. Mrs. Yeobright dies, Eustacia keeps her secret from Clym, and he learns the whole story later from Johnny, leading him to denounce his wife.

“Though she was no lover of money she loved what money could bring; and the new accessories she imagined around him clothed Wildeve with a great deal of interest.”

Eustacia hears about Wildeve’s inheritance and realizes Wildeve may have intended to tell her about it when he came to call but held back when he perceived her sorry state. The narrator suggests Wildeve has an underlying decency, something that motivates him to assist in Eustacia’s escape and provide her with money.

“All persons of refinement have been scared away from me since I sank into the mire of marriage. Is this your cherishing—to put me into a hut like this, and keep me like a wife of a hind? You deceived me—not by words, but by appearances, which are less seen through than words.”

Clym confronts and denounces Eustacia for her role in his mother’s death. Just as Eustacia did in her letter to Wildeve earlier, she twists her response to make herself the victim. She will leave Clym and return to her grandfather’s house and from there attempt her escape.