What is the Significance of the Heath in Return of the Native?

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Jane Stollery

What is the Significance of the Heath in

Return of the Native?

It is evident right from the beginning that the heath plays an integral part in the novel “Return of the Native”, this is because the opening chapter is exclusively about the heath.

The heath assists in creating the feelings of both central characters and the background heath folk, the first chapter is titled “A Face on which Time makes but little Impression”, meaning that Egdon Heath is timeless and everybody on it has little significance.

The reader gains an insight of the novel and its genre through the first chapter, “It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.” This aids the reader in identifying that there is going to be something tragical in the novel. Hardy is also using personification, which brings the heath to life.

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In spite of this, the first chapter also does what every other first chapter in a novel does, it sets the scene. Egdon Heath, as far as the novel is concerned and the characters inside it, is the world. The only time that the novel ever abandons the heath is only briefly between pages 253-257 which is the part when Wildeve and Eustacia are at the dance together in Budmouth. It is comprehensible that the heath folk consider Egdon Heath to be everything when they talk about Paris as if it were a million miles away, “like a King’s ...

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