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 Palace as far as diments go” is the description they use when describing Clym’s shop.
Hardy also uses the heath as a metaphor for how the central characters are feeling. On page 206, when Clym moves out of his mothers house, the fir and beech trees are described to be “suffering more damage than during the highest winds of winter… the wasting sap would bleed for many days to come”. We also get an insight to the way Eustacia is feeling through the storm on the heath on page 345-346, “Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without”. The brief flowering in the summer time on Egdon heath represents the love between Eustacia and Clym, when it flowered it was beautiful and colourful and sweet, but it soon drooped, dried out and finally died.
When Wildeve and Diggory Venn are playing dice on the heath, the contrast is prominent between human behaviour and nature, “The incongruity between the men’s deeds and their environment was striking”. Hardy is making a comment on human nature and it’s battle against nature. The behaviour of the two men is described as almost absurd, “the chink of guineas, the rattle of the dice, the exclamations of the players combined to form such a bizarre exhibition of circumstances as had never before met on those hills”.
Clym is represented as the person who is most in harmony with the heath, “If anyone knew the heath well it was Clym…He might be said to be its product”. He lives and breathes it and the heath feels what he feels. The happiest time that the reader sees Clym is when he has been reduced to a furze cutter, “when in full swing of labour he was cheerfully disposed and calm”. The way Hardy describes Clym when he is out on the heath working is like something from Snow White, with “amber coloured butterflies” and the “emerald-green grasshoppers”. Clym fits in with nature’s surroundings and the heath has accepted him as one of its own.
The two most resistant characters to the heath are clearly Eustacia and Wildeve. On pages 86-87, they are both having a conversation on how they dislike the heath, “You hate the heath as much as ever; that I know”, “I do … Tis my cross, my misery, and will be my death”. It is ironic when Eustacia says that as she does go on to die on the heath. They are the only two characters that die whilst trying to escape from the heath during the storm on pages 360-361. It seems almost as if the heath punishes the people who will not live in harmony with it and continue to repel it. However, it is unclear whether or not Eustacia took her own life because she was in so much despair for loathing of the heath, or she accidentally fell into the stream.
In conclusion the heath plays a very important role within the novel, it is not only the setting or the background, but every character is in some way interwoven with it, whether they are fighting against it or living in perfect harmony with it.