Compare how the natural world is used symbolically by Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte in The Return of the Native and Wuthering Heights

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Compare how the natural world is used symbolically by Thomas Hardy

and Emily Bronte in The Return of the Native and Wuthering Heights

Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights both concern themselves with the relationship man has to Nature and the extent to which it influences on the personality and the lives of those that live within the countryside. In both novels there is the sense of Nature as having a distinct character: as providing not only a backdrop to the narrative but also having a manlike personality. However, the two authors deal with this in remarkably different ways. In this essay I will examine and contrast the ways in which Hardy and Bronte picture Nature and the place it has within their work.

The Return of the Native is a novel that, from its opening passages, is concerned not only with the subject of Nature but also the relationship man has with it:

“The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to an evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of the storms scarcely generated…” (Hardy)

Here we see Hardy describing human characteristics to things not human by referring to the “face” of the heath and highlighting the ways in which it affects the people that live on and around it by describing the extent that its colour and mere presence can lengthen or shorten the days or even make the dawn seem late. The place of Egdon Heath and its importance in, not only the characters’ but Hardy’s imagination is implied in these opening passages. Further on in the chapter, the author continues to paint a portrait of the heath as being, almost, a living entity that breathes and feels and has a biological existence:

“The place becomes full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something…” (Hardy)

Again, here Hardy not only adds human characteristics to the heath, to Nature, but also suggests the ways in which it shapes the lives of those that make their homes in it. We are made aware of the historical significance of the land in the first chapter of the book, its continuum and the eternal nature of the earth and the Earth:

“It has waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crises – the final overthrow.” (Hardy)

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Only God, Hardy suggests here can ruin the eternal and sublime beauty of Nature in the form of Egdon Heath. Out of this picture Hardy’s characters emerge, many of the physical descriptions of the them appear not so much against the background of the heath as arising out of it. The farm workers, for instance, appear so much a part of the natural world as to be almost identical from their surroundings:

“Every individual was so involved in furze by his method of carrying the faggots that he appeared like a bush on legs.” (Hardy)

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