The Return Of The Native Character Analysis

As a child, Thomas Hardy was told numerous stories of paranormal accounts from the rustic citizens of his village and even his own mother who believed she once saw a ghost. Thus, by way of nurture, Hardy began to believe in the supernatural and accept the superstitious ways of the rustic people. Because of the superstitious influence in his youth, elements of fate, superstition, and mystic characters and themes play significant roles in Hardy's works. Such elements in one of Hardy’s most famous works, The Return of the Native, provide the reader with an understanding of how Hardy perceived his world and give deeper insight into Hardy’s characters.

From the first, Hardy’s novels embodied a definitely critical attitude toward the world he was depicting (Baker 21.) Hardy’s deterministic philosophy of life can be seen in his characters who seem to have little control over their own lives. Hardy saw external circumstances and overwhelming internal impulses as controlling human actions. Chance and coincidence are used repeatedly in The Return of the Native. The novel deals less with the logic of the likely than the power of the unlikely as it is made to seem unavoidable. Hardy believed in chance and coincidence, both as manifestations of fate and as signs of revealing the dynamics of character (Howe 20.) An example of a fate manifestation would be when Wildeve fails to get the marriage certificate and Mrs. Yeobright comments that “such things don’t happen for nothing.” Many events in the novel are simply explained by chance, which is not to suggest that there is some sort of justification or acceptance surrounding the actions, but rather that things happen simply because it was meant to be that way. Hardy simply gives a reason based on ...

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...fluence humanity's life for the worse, using its agents of chance, change and coincidence (www.victorianweb.org). Unlike many other novels, The Return of the Native shows the power of a higher power but does not offer the guarantee of an ongoing steadiness or a clarification of why things are.

Many authors prefer to close out their novels with a happy situation, restoring order and justice to the lives of its characters. However, Hardy did not see that in his world, and therefore, that happy situation is left out of his novel. Though the novel ends on an upbeat, the reader still has no sense of whether these characters will have success in their lives once the story is over. Various elements of fate influence Hardy’s characters' lives as he believed influenced all of civilization's, and therefore aid in the discovery of abundant insight into his philosophy of life.