Georgic Culture in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native

Abstract

Concentrating on The Return of the Native (1878), this chapter argues that Thomas Hardy’s literary way of cultivating a half-real, half-fictitious countryside is informed by a characteristically georgic disposition to combine practical attunement to with theoretical emancipation from an environment. As an analysis of Clym Yeobright’s ‘culture scheme’ in The Return of the Native reveals, Hardy’s literary work follows a method of participant observation that engages with traditional customs of the rural world from the inside as much as it revisits those customs from the outside. Proposing that the pastoral tends to separate participation and observation (or representation), whereas the georgic is likely to bring them together, the study shows that Hardy’s novel reworks elements of both of those genres. One aim of the chapter is to draw out the different ecological and anthropological implications of Hardy’s use of pastoral and georgic in The Return of the Native. In this way, it seeks to demonstrate that Hardy’s writing advocates a georgic culture that is capable of integrating, albeit in a way fraught with tension, conservative as well as progressive tendencies, preservation as well as transformation.