Explore the presentation of nature in Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native"

The first things that needs to be done if we are to read The Return of the Native for unconscious matter is to divorce ourselves from the anthropocentrism implicit in many existing readings of the work. The critical tendency to describe Egdon heath as a ‘human character’ within the novel is pervasive; it has, in Laurence Estanove’s words, become a “topos of Hardy criticism”[i]. This reading can be seen to stem from the fact that Hardy does deliver us an animate, lively landscape. What new materialist thinking can offer here is the suggestion that animation and vitality do not always amount to humanity and in fact are attributes of all matter. The opening chapter of The Return of the Native is entitled “A Face on which Time makes but little Impression” and precedes the second chapter entitled “Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with Trouble”. The opening of the novel therefore seems to declare itself devoid of humanity. There is playful provocation in the titular declaration that an ostensibly human-free chapter will describe a ‘face’. It seems as if the novel invites the reader to read anthropocentrically and what follows is a complex portrait of a landscape that is certainly not unpeopled. As Penny Boumelha has noted[ii], Hardy constructs multiple hypothetical human perspectives through which we can see the heath. We are told that were a furze-cutter to look up he “would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home.”[iii] This invocation of a human perspective can be read as demonstrative of an empirical realist position on the world – the idea that we cannot be sure that anything exists if we are not observing it. As new materialism is based upon speculative realism – the belief in an external material reality, this reading contradicts our present project. Empirical realism leads to anthropocentrism due to a privileging of human perception, there being no room in this approach for non-human objects to perceive one another. Additionally, we see the heath figured in terms of the working day, and the financial (and therefore strictly human) value that can be wrought from it through human labour. This quotation in isolation could suggest that Hardy places little value in nature when unobserved by people as even his ostensibly human-free chapter must feature invented human perspectives to be interesting.  However, the problem with reading the hypothetical furze-cutter in this way is that we are approaching the text with an assumption of human centrality and control. A slight recalibration of our perspective can allow us to see the way in which the heath is controlling the human. It is not the furze cutter who exploits the heath for its valuable furze leaving it baron and depleted, but rather the heath which in threatening darkness but confusing with light dictates when he can work. Another thing we miss in this reading is the very simple detail that this is one out of many things we are told about the heath. We go on to see that the heath in fact is very resistant to farming, resistant to being changed in any way by humans. It is “The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing”[iv] and “Civilization was its enemy.”[v] Furthermore, to suggest that Hardy’s text demonstrates an intertest in non-human matter is not to suggest it demonstrates no interest in the human. A shift in our perspective on this hypothetical furze-cutter can draw our attention to the ecological response of the earth to being farmed, for example, without erasing our understanding of the human experience. As we come to see as the novel goes on, Egdon heath plays a pivotal role in human life both economically and emotionally, sometimes being exerted upon and sometimes exerting itself upon the human and upon other elements of the system it is a part of. We ought not to read for binaries as there is a temptation to do with Hardy but rather to open ourselves to the nuances of the world he has built. The inclusion of the human is not necessarily to the exclusion of all else. Our impulse to designate the heath as a ‘human character’ is testament to the unusual vitality Hardy ascribes to this landscape. Unusual not, we will discuss, in being an over-personification of the non-human but rather unusual to the modes of thought that would term landscape inert.
[i] Laurence Estanove, “Hardy’s Humanity: “A Strange Respect for the Individual, an Extraordinary Respect””, Fathom 4 (2016): 1.[ii] Penny Boumelha, introduction to Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), xxxiii.[iii] Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 9.[iv] Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 11-12.[v] Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 12.