Tragic Hero or Social Actor: Clym’s Experience of

Enculturation in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of The Native

Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmosphere along
with them in their orbits (Hardy, The Return of the Native)

Apart from its classic standing in the realm of Victorian literature, Hardy’s narration The Return
of the Native(1878) is an interesting read in cognitive anthropology. Through its famous
depiction of places, the magnanimity of the Egdon heath, the folklore, display of superstitions
and experience of enculturation of its male protagonist raise interesting debates about the
question of culture in this late nineteenth-century narration.

Latest debates, almost one century later after the publication of this novel, are mostly in the arena
of cultural theories, raising new interpretations on how we see mind and human self. Cognitive
anthropologists concern the question of the role of reason and evidence in shaping the mind of
man and developing particularistic behaviour and conduct (Shweder and LeVine 27). How can
one see the transformation into the mind of scientists, logician and then contrasting it with the
transformation into the minds of ordinary folks? In the novel, a journey of Clym Yeobright,-
Clement Yeobright known as Clym to heath-landers, the lead protagonist in The Return of the
Native, who wrestles with a troubled self. The novel provides thoughts on the three-century-old
debate on how the scholars from the enlightenment school of thought and romantic school of
thought view the mind and self. This debate, rather in cognitive anthropology, proved quite
fruitful by bringing out new discoveries and also the different realm of reinterpretation.

On the one side are the enlightenment thinkers who espouse the ideas of ‘unity’ and ‘uniformity’
of human self. ‘Unity’, as they refer to, in sense of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’. And
‘uniformity’, they suggest, as ‘normative uniformity of mankind’. Reason and evidence, they
assert, hold the superior role in determining the belief and conduct of human. They hold the
view that “mind of man is intendedly rational and scientific”, and “dictates of reasons are equally
binding for all regardless of time, space, culture, race…”(Shweder and LeVine 27).
Contrary to this stands the ‘romantic’ view of mind. They state that “ideas and practices are
neither rational nor irrational but rather nonrational”(Shweder and LeVine 28). The romantic
ideas of self develop on different notions about the understanding of experiences of human in a
particular social order. The most significant is the notion of arbitrariness and culture. How reason
is incomplete, as they suggest, in interpreting the human actions and how certain beyond-the-
reason aspects dominate in shaping the human self. Romantic emphasize on the “celebration of
the local context, the idea of paradigm, cultural frames and constitutive presupposition” on the
part of understanding and interpretation. They say human actions are not only the product of
reason and evidence but phenomena exhibiting the patterns of ‘subordination of deep structure to
the surface content”(Shweder and LeVine 28).

This classic tension between two contrasting vision of human mind reflects itself too into
nineteenth-century literature. In a way, the nineteenth century is a context that may refer to the
development of social evolutionary theories at that time. The Victorian era, in particular, marked
the moment when society was faced with two choices, the primitive and savage past and the
knowingly civilized present (O’hara). This was a problematic and troubling for Victorian writers
and it manifested in the fiction of Hardy, especially the prose he wrote under the category of
‘Novels of Character and Environment’. Hardy himself was cognizant of these transformative
trends in society and he was a prolific reader of history, culture and literature of the time. His
early engagements with the architecture were his first introduction to the ruminants of past. It
might be the case he himself went through the experiences of troubling questions about the past
and present(Rogers). So, the contemporary challenge was to settle the questions posed by the
development of social evolutionary theories and the ascendancy of British Empire. As Patricia
O’hara contends:

“Victorians struggled to accommodate themselves to this evolutionary version of a cultural

identity that was both discrete from and cognate with the savagery and barbarism of primitive
man—a paradoxical state of being”(O’hara 147).

The time presented the challenge of understanding of the accepted mode of knowledge. The
evidence of progress and emergence of the modern world was forthcoming. However, that did
not suggest the end of the primitive past or disassociation from the pagan culture. More
importantly, the other developments in the field of anthropology were enriching the whole debate
on the emergence of new modes of human knowledge in the Victorian present. One that is
pertinent to mention here is the ‘doctrine of survivals’ popular during that time. This suggests,
also in accordance with the Tylor (1872)’s Primitive Culture scholarship “that primitive
behaviour can and do continue to exist in "a new state of society" as "fragments of a dead lower
culture embedded in a living higher one". The idea of primitive self was also part of
contemporary debates as Sir John Lubbock(1870) in his famous articulation, addressed the
persistence of primitive ideas among the human race: primitive ideas, he notes, are "rooted in our
minds, as fossils embedded in the soil" (O’hara 155). Contemporary European peasant
communities, the likes inhabited the Hardy’s Wessex, retained those ‘fragments’ or better say,
the fossils, of primitive culture. The depiction of societies, in the narration of Hardy’s beloved
Wessex, gives a clear idea about the romantic aspects-the supremacy of local context over the
overriding material development in the contemporary European world (Thorpe 477).

The survival of primitiveness among the population, if we dare to suggest, moved side by side
with the waves of enlightenment in contemporary Victorian society. Rather we can say, keeping
in view the paradoxical state of present and primitive past, enlightenment might not be
successful in fully assimilating into ‘deep structure’ that is the arbitrariness and culture. Living in
that world and observing the perplexity of the time, Hardy’s The Return of the Native presented a
narration of conflict between two selves. In that sense, “…The Return of the Native shows Hardy
confronting the ideological and conceptual paradoxes of the anthropological model of cultural
development (O’hara 148).

Moreover, The Return of the Native presents an interesting case of understanding ‘native’ albeit
in many different ways. The narration is woven around a conflict that marks the two worlds- the
omnipresent heath (the primitive present) and the imaginary progressive world (the civilized
present). There are two opposing streams: one who wants to shun the primitiveness e.g. Eustacia
Vye and Wildeve, and other strengthens the tradition e.g. Mrs Yeobright and Diggory Venn.
Clym Yeobright represents a confusing middle between two opposing strands. This conflict
introduces the readers to “the novel's dialogue of modern rationalism and primitive perception
(O’hara 148)”. The characters in the novel exhibit the anthropological association with the
environment where they bound to live. The flow of narration makes us recognize not only the
uneven terrain of the heath but also the ethnographic formulations those might be termed as the
different stages of the culture. Mrs Yeobright is the matriarch of the heath. She represents heath
but she does not mix with the ordinary and mundane folks of heath. She takes pride in the
tradition but at the same time keeps herself away from the different local community. So, she
represents a stage in the development of culture from primitive to some higher state.

Hardy mythologizes the land and constructs a vivid and powerful personification of heath. In
many ways, as the various twists in plot suggest, heath represents a force of nature that proves
inescapable. This personification again acts as a suggestion of primitiveness. The primitive man
paid greater reverence towards nature and put the will of nature extreme as we see the case of
heath-landers. The heath of the Return of the Native and its personification throughout the novel
represents a primitive spirit through which every character is bound to associate. This is the spirit
ultimately Clym Yeobright turned to and Eustacia Vye defied the spirit and could not survive the
force of nature and drowned herself.

Apart from that, we find a great deal of animism in The Return of the Native. Putting so much
imaginative and creative labour in constructing the personification of the heath may tell the story
of the childhood imagination of the Hardy. Nonetheless, addressing the Victorian anxiety
regarding social questions and trying to answer it through the aspects of nature and culture might
be the reason behind Hardy’s effort into the personification of heath and animation of the life
around heath. Heath may stand for Hardy a symbol of arbitrariness and culture that absolves him
from perplexing contemporary debates.

Grand personification of heath in narration also represents another possibility-the possibility of

the imaginative return to the world’s youth. If that might be the case, it again suggested the
ambivalence on the part of Hardy about the development and progress of the civilized present.
Nonetheless, the romantic in Hardy was finding it difficult to accept the rational, as the discourse
of the novel suggests, and was turning the mind towards the “local contexts, cultural frames and
constitutive presuppositions” the way romantics see the human mind. Hardy was familiar with
the notion of cultural survivals and knew that human contained certain cultural commonalities
across the race and region(Kroll).

After the heath, the most important character in the novel is Clym Yeobright. Hardy himself
addressed this in his letter to the editor of the magazine, Belgravia (Hardy, The Collected Letters
of Thomas Hardy). However, it is not easy to settle whether Clym is a classic case of an
Aristotelian tragic hero who was found to be suffering from the hamartia-a tragic flaw, or a social
actor for an anthropologist who is going through the experience of enculturation in a remote
heathland. As it goes, an Aristotelian tragic hero binds to go through a tragic cycle that involves
the error of judgments. In Greek tragedies, hamartia proved the fatal in bringing the misfortune
for the protagonist. This fatal mistake usually concerns the error of judgment on the part of the
protagonist which creates the tragic plot of the story. Clym Yeobright, a mature man who used to
be living in the civilized world of European metropolis and decided to live and reform the remote
village. Whether this choice can constitute hamartia in the case of Clym? Though, turn of events
in the novel may suggest the tragic journey of the Clym. Like, with an aura of the civilized world
at the start, he emerged a person who gets attention from the heath-landers, becomes outcast, gets
blind and starts menial work as furze-cutter the lowest standard in the heath society he could
descend. This seemingly tragic plot may evoke the pity among the readers but is it the same as
the Aristotelian standards of a tragic hero? His suffering and misfortune aside, he lacks certain
characteristics of the ideal Aristotelian tragic hero like King Lear and the Oedipus. He is not, as
it emerges in the story, a character who is on the path of self-destruction because of some moral
guilt or not the one who is on a journey of unfolding the mysteries. He does not submit to any
prophecies of his time. Rather Clym exhibits a self-absorbed persona with a hollow
understanding of the world around. It does not evoke the grandeur of the Aristotelian tragic hero.
He needs to know less about himself and more about the world he inhabits. The Return of the
Native is less about tragedy and more about social questions.

Coming to the debate of enlightenment and romantic views of mind where reason and emotions
play the significant part. As Victorian era marked the time of ambivalence and ambiguities, and
in this, the choices Clym makes becomes understandable. He is faced with a society and
contrasting vision of the two worlds he has been through. The ‘fossils’ or ‘traces’ of primitive
self in her led to the choice of the native village (Mallett). This brings the question of culture and
the process of social transformation in building the understanding of choices and transformation
(that is enculturation) on the part of Clym. Hardy describes the inner world of Clym when he was
about to make the choice, so-called stupid choice
 If any one knew the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with
its odours. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the
first images of his memory were mingled; his estimate of life had been coloured by it; his toys had been the
flint knives and arrow-heads which he found there, wondering why stones should ‘grow’ to such odd
shapes; his flowers, the purple bells and yellow furze; his animal kingdom, the snakes and croppers; his
society, its human haunters (Hardy, The Return of the Native 205).

Hardy’s expansive detail about the character of Clym and his association with heath is second to
his personification of the heath itself. He termed Clym as the ‘product’ of heath and by virtue of
that association, he carried the ‘fossils’ and ‘primitiveness’ with himself. His primitive self
dominates and he sets aside all the learning of the rational world he had been through in London
or Paris.

Clym was suffering in the civilized world that denoted development and progress. He is a misfit
because he does not have ‘roots’ in that society or maybe the place does not evoke a sense of
nativity? Or his life in that civilized world just constituted his ‘private’ experience as Spiro
contends in elaborating the cultural determinism and relativism (Shweder and LeVine 323). He
might have been through the process of ‘social transformation’. In The Return of the Native,
Hardy put his character with the background of culture that stands for tradition and where the
Clym had to learn propositions and interact with a social group. At the start of the story, he is a
character with physically strong and with exposure of the civilized world, but blind to the people,
tradition and society around. And, when the story ends, he is physically weak, also physically
blind, but now he knows the traditions and society around. Malford E. Spiro in his essay on the
cultural determinism and relativism jotted down his thought about the concept of culture that
help understand the social transformation of the Clym:

As I see it, “culture” designates a cognitive system, that is, a set of proposition, both descriptive and normative
about nature, man, and society that are more or less embedded in interlocking higher-order networks and
configurations. Cultural and noncultural propositions differ in two important dimensions. First, cultural
propositions are traditional, that is, they are developed in the historical experience of social groups, and social
heritage, they are acquired by social actors through various process of social transformation (enculturation)
rather than constructed by them from their private experiences. (Shweder and LeVine 323)

Richard Shweder maintains “for the romantic, the choice between alternative self-contained
worlds must be an act of faith”. And that is what we see at the end of the story. Clym is a
preacher who is living a life where he holds the tradition, the family and the heath values
supreme. Hardy narrates about him when his enculturation is complete: “Moreover, it had
become a religion with him to preserve in good condition all that had lapsed from his mother’s
hand to his own(Hardy, The Return of the Native 406)”.

Hardy acts as a master ethnographer in constructing his characters- both Egdon heath and Clym
Yeobright. His mastery over depicting the personification of heath and primitiveness of Clym
Yeobright is flawless. He weaves an ethnographic story for the reader and animates the character
through the social heritage of heath. In this way, Hardy may become a romantic soul who
believes in the romantic ideals of mind and importance of local context and cultural frames. In
The Return of the Native, he brings us a story about nativeness, primitiveness, and the
‘fossilized’ fragments of past those constitute the cognitive system of heath but also depicts the
vitality and determinism of heath culture through the experiences of Clym.

Work Cited:

Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. 2. Clarendon Press, 1988. Web. 25
Dec. 2017.

---. The Return of the Native. Penguin, 2012. Print.

Kroll, Allison Adler. “Hardy’s Wessex, Heritage Culture, and the Archaeology of Rural
England.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31.4 (2009): 335–352. Web.

Mallett, Phillip. Thomas Hardy in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

O’hara, Patricia. “Narrating the Native: Victorian Anthropology and Hardy’s the Return of the
Native.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20.2 (1997): 147–163. Web.

Rogers, Shannon L. “‘The Historian of Wessex’ Thomas Hardy’s Contribution to History.”

Rethinking History 5.2 (2001): 217–232. Web.

Shweder, Richard A., and Robert A. Levine LeVine, eds. Culture Theory : Essays on Mind, Self,
and Emotion. Cambridge University Press, 1984. Web. 25 Dec. 2017.
Thorpe, Michael. “Thomas Hardy and Empire; Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the
Self.” English Studies 96.4 (2015): 476–479. Web.

Lubbock, Sir John. The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and
Social Condition of Savages. New York: D. Appleton, 1870.

Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,

Religion, Language, Art and Custom. 1871. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1889.