3. Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native
Instructions:
1. Divide yourselves into TWO groups.
2. Each group must answer at least 10 questions ( there are 21 questions in total).
3. Copy and paste the author/s and the questions you answer.
3. After you post your answers ( you will have to do so in different posts as you will not be able to do so in one post), write the names of the member of your group.
Deadline: FRI 12th, Oct. – 16.00 p.m.
Criticism of Thomas Hardy’s Art
These critical essays help us analyse and understand the two novels by Thomas Hardy we are going to read: The Return of the Native and A Pair of Blue Eyes. You are required to use at least one of these essays when writing your paper on A Pair of Blue Eyes.
1.Johnson, Lionel. “The Characteristics of Hardy’s Art.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Editor R.P. Draper. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 59-61. Print.
1. How is Hardy a typical modern novelist?
2. Where does the power of his art lie?
3. What common elements do all his novels show?
2.Lawrence, David Herbert. “The Real Tragedy.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Editor R.P. Draper London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 66-74. Print.
1. What peculiarities do Hardy’s characters share? Why are these important?
2. How does Lawrence explain the concept of “self-preservation”? What are the consequences of freeing yourself from it?
3. How is the heath the “real stuff of tragedy”?
4. What makes Hardy’s novels wonderful?
3.Williams, Raymond. “The Educated Observer and the Passionate Participant.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R.P. Draper. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 93-104. Print.
1. “…the real Hardy country,…, is the border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love and place and an experience of change.” (Williams 93). What does Williams mean?
2. What parallels does Williams draw between Hardy the man and Hardy the novelist?
3. What theme or idea seems to be recurrent in Hardy’s making of his characters?
4. Where does the difficulty of the returned native lie? How is this related to Hardy’s view of tradition?
5. Why does Williams consider Hardy’s depiction of Dorset and its people as extremely accurate
4.Paterson, John. “An Attempt at Grand Tragedy.” (1966). Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R. P. Draper. London:Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. Pp.107-115.
1.What features of classical tragedy does The Return of the Native have?
2.Where does Hardy fail in writing a great tragedy according to Paterson?
3.Which are the novel’s best features?
4.What was fateful in Eustacia’s choice of the role of the Turkish knight?
5.Casagrande, Peter J. “Son and Lover: The Dilemma of Clym Yeobright.” (1982). Ed. R.P. Draper. London:Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. Pp.115-130.
1.Which was the truth Hardy wanted to convey to us in The Return of the Native?
2.What was the original purpose of the St. George play and how does it connect with the novel? Why does it fail?
3.In which way is Mrs. Yeobright a pernicious influence?
4.Which minor characters act as Clym’s foils and for what purpose?
5.In which ways are Clym and Thomasin both alike and different?
1.Johnson, Lionel. “The Characteristics of Hardy’s Art.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Editor R.P. Draper. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 59-61. Print.
ReplyDelete1. How is Hardy a typical modern novelist?
According to Lionel Johnson, Thomas Hardy is a typical modern novelist given that he is very fond of the complexity of things, the clash of principles and of motives, the encounter of subtile emotions.
2. Where does the power of his art lie?
Johnson says that the power of Hardy’s art lies in the way he presents his characters. Hardy brings together, contrasts and makes to illustrate each other the characteristics of character (strength and stability) and of Modernism. Besides, Hardy is admired for his general ideas, for instance his tone of tought about human progress, about the province and the testimony of physical science about the sanctions of natural and social ethics.
3. What common elements do all his novels show?
Most of Thomas Hardy’s novels share common elements in their plots. Firstly, Hardy portrays all his novels in Wessex, England, where he describes the tragic and comic aspects of life. Secondly, the main characters in his novels are men with strong personalities, who live in the countryside; they are not virtuous but they are influenced by their needs and the events of everyday life. Thirdly, the secondary characters he presents belong to the same social status, they usually work in the countryside; however, they have a weaker personality than the chief character. Fourthly, Hardy makes a contrast between his primitive heroes, which have a strong nature, and men who have a better position and are better educated; however, they lack strength in their personalities. The latter are prevented from becoming clowns but instead, they are considered curs. Fifthly, he makes the previous difference more evident by using the passion of love and by introducing women, which are less strong than men in character but as strong as them as regards their soul. Sixthly, at the beginning, the path of the plot is slow, making reference to the life in the countryside; once the background has been accurately described, the plot flows smoothly. At this moment, the writer introduces passions as well as conflicts between the characters. Finally, the plot ends tragically or comically, implying the laws of cause and effects, either the right or the wrong triumphs, the end shows emotion of pity in conflict with the concept of fate.
Let me add something to your answer 2, if I may:
Delete2. Where does his power of his art lie?
• Hardy presents souls with pagan severity, grand in the endurance of dooms, simple, resolute and powerful characters. He anticipates modernism in his style and plots.
• He chooses to present life in its tragic and comic aspects in an area he knows, Wessex (Dorset, Devon…) where new influences penetrate but slowly.
• His main characters are men of powerful natures, of the country, of little acquired virtue in mind and soul – disciplined by the facts and by the necessities of life.
• He surrounds them with men of the same origin and class but who are of less strongly marked a power, less finely touched spirit: the rank of country labour (these are usually the secondary characters).
• He brings his rustic heroes into contact and into contrast with a few men, their superiors in education and in position, but their inferiors in strength and fineness of nature: men, whom more modern experiences have redeemed from being clowns, at the risk of becoming scoundrels / villains.
• He makes this contact and contrast most effective through the passion of love: to which end, he brings upon the scene women of various natures: less marked in character than the men, who are sometimes self-righteous, moralistic people or prudes and pretty fellows in outward sentiment, fashion, and culture; but nearer to the stronger and finer men, in their souls.
• The narratives are conducted slowly at first, the spirit of the country is described in detail, the play quickens into passion, the actors come into conflict, there’s strong attraction and repulsion, spirits are touched.
• There’s waiting, ominous stillness and finally, with force and motion, the play goes forward to its fine issues, all the necessities of things cause their effects and the end is told with solemnity and pity.
2.Lawrence, David Herbert. “The Real Tragedy.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Editor R.P. Draper London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 66-74. Print.
ReplyDelete1. What peculiarities do Hardy’s characters share? Why are these important?
All Thomas Hardy’s characters perform absurd actions, they always do foolish things, which nobody else understands and which are against the established social conventions. Moreover, marriage is always present in Hardy’s novels and many characters ask for special marriage licenses. Most of his characters are undeveloped due to the fact that they do not reflect upon their actions, and they always act in an expected way. All the previous features are important because they cause conflicts which lead to the development of a tragedy.
2. How does Lawrence explain the concept of “self-preservation”? What are the consequences of freeing yourself from it?
The concept of ‘self-preservation’ means that all the characters have to adapt to the environmental conditions of the place where they live in order to survive. Most of Hardy’s characters find it difficult to preserve themselves from the conventions of their communities, which remain stable and prevent them from being happy. Although they could live without money and without power ambition, the heroes and heroines do not care about those aspects of life.
3. How is the heath the “real stuff of tragedy”?
The heath is the ‘real stuff of tragedy’ because in this rustic place, all the tragic events take place. In Egdon Hill, Eustacia, Clym and all the other characters live and many difficult things happen to them by the influence of fate. However, no matter what happens to the people who inhabit Egdon, or how many people die there, the Heath is so powerful that it always remain the same. In fact, the heath is eternal in contrast with the objectives of people to change Egdon, which are useless.
4. What makes Hardy’s novels wonderful?
In Hardy’s novels, the background is so dominant and lively that is more important than the characters themselves. In The Return of the Native, the heath is sombre and has a life on its one; in this place, men fight for their moral values. Moreover, the ones that are against the laws of the powerful nature, are always defeated and perish in their struggles. The way in which men’s situations are portrayed as insignificant in this prominent background, is what makes his novels wonderful.
I'm adding something to your answer to QUESTION 2:
Delete2. How does Lawrence explain the concept of “self-preservation”? What are the consequences of freeing yourself from it?
We all respect the scheme of self-preservation, i.e., doing things that keeps us alive. Hardy’s characters find it hard to live in this scheme after bursting out of it. They free themselves from the immediate claims of self-preservation: from money, from ambition for social success (they don’t care much for these). But the greater idea of self-preservation, formulated in the State, the modelling of the community, from which the heroes and heroines of Wessex can’t free themselves. In the long run, the State, the Community, the establishment remain intact and impregnable and the individual, trying to break forth from it, dies of fear, of exhaustion, or of exposure to attacks. This is the tragedy in Hardy’s books- pioneers who have died in the wilderness, where they had escaped, after having left security and the comparative imprisonment of the established convention. It’s a recurrent theme in Hardy’s novels: remain quite within convention and you are good, safe, and happy in the long run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your side; or be passionate, individual, wilful, you will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will escape, and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to bear isolation and exposure, or by direct revenge from the community or from both. The tragedy is the division of a man against himself in such a way: fist, that he’s a member of the community, and must, upon his honour, in no way disintegrate the community, either in its moral or its practical form; second, that the convention of the community is a prison to his natural, individual desire, a desire that compels him, justified or not, to break the bound of the community, lands him outside the pale, to stand alone and say: “I was right, my desire was real and inevitable; if I was to be myself I must fulfil it, convention or no convention” or “Was I right, was I wrong? If I was wrong, let me die!”
And to QUESTION 4:
Delete4. What makes Hardy’s novels wonderful? There’s a constant revelation in Hardy’s novels: that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background of dark, passionate Edgon, of the woods, of the stars, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives. Man’s moral life and struggle seems pathetic and ridiculous when compared to the vast, incomprehensible pattern of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp. Law and order is like a walled city within which man has to defend himself from the waste enormity of nature, but it becomes too small, and those bold enough to venture out of the code of law, order and convention, die in the bonds of that code, free and yet unfree.(This was discussed in question 2 as well) This is the wonder of Hardy’s novels, which makes them beautiful. Life’s vast and unexplored morality (which we call the immorality of nature) surrounds us and it’s incomprehensible for us. In its middle goes our human morality play, with its strange frame of morality and its mechanised movement until a character looks out of the circle into the wilderness outside. Then he is lost, his little drama falls to pieces or becomes repetitive, but the theatre outside goes on enacting its own incomprehensible drama, untouched. This quality appears in Hardy’s novels, this irony of human life. In Hardy, human morality, the mechanical system is transgressed and it punishes the protagonist. Eustacia, Tess, Sue and Jude find themselves up against the established system of human government and morality, and are brought down. Their real tragedy is that they are unfaithful to the greater morality, which would have asked Eustacia fight Clym for his own soul, and Tess take and claim her Angel, since she had the greater light; would have bidden Jude and Sue endure for honour’s sake, since one must remain by the best that one has known, and not succumb to the lesser good.
4.Paterson, John. “An Attempt at Grand Tragedy.” (1966). Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R. P. Draper. London:Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. Pp.107-115.
ReplyDelete1.What features of classical tragedy does The Return of the Native have?
The Return of the Native has been ranked by some readers with The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure; however, for all its ordinary impressiveness, it can not be included in their notable company. Being carefully prepared but unnatural, it imitates traditional tragedy, although it lacks immediate reality, its distinctive feature. In The Return of the Native, the unities of time and space, as well as its organization, are similar to the classical tragedy.
2.Where does Hardy fail in writing a great tragedy according to Paterson?
As claimed by Paterson, The Return of the Native lacks essential facts of the tragedy. Firstly, their characters are rarely equal to the imposing world they are asked to occupy. For example, in the Vyes and the Yeobrights, Hardy wants a little aristocracy with the capacity to resist the burdens of tragedy. However, they remain unable to undergo heroic transformations. Secondly, the action of plot of the novel and the characters as well, operate in a more accidental way, with the presence of fate. Consequently, it does not contain the excellent and terrifying logic of cause and effect. The inevitability of Hardy’s tragic events is too frequent to demonstrate, not the natural needs of the novel but the author’s intention.
4.What was fateful in Eustacia’s choice of the role of the Turkish knight?
Although Hardy is not able to explicitly condemn Christianism, he criticises it implicitly. Eustacia Vye suffers and dies in an humiliating way, in a pre-Christian world. It is not surprising that she remains as a witch until the end of her life. What is more, in the mummers’ play, she plays the part of the antichrist, the Turkish Knight, who perishes in the hands of his Christian enemy. All the previous events portray the importance of fate in pre-Christian world.
4.Paterson, John. “An Attempt at Grand Tragedy.” (1966). Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R. P.
DeleteDraper. London:Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. Pp.107-115.
1.What features of classical tragedy does The Return of the Native have?
The Return of the Native was planned by Hardy to imitate classical tragedy: with set speeches and soliloquies by Eustacia, the heroine; conscientious observation of the unities of time and space; organised in 5 Acts. Paterson believes that it doesn’t justify the application of the term tragedy. Reasons: 1) its characters are not equal to tragic characters; 2) Hardy intended a little aristocracy fit to bear the burdens of tragedy but they are a species of stuffy local gentility and as such incapable of heroic transformations. Mrs. Yeobright’s identification with King Lear – in her final agony she’s equipped with a heath/moor, a hovel (/ˈhɒv(ə)l/ A small squalid or simply constructed dwelling) and a fool – is more deserved but it seems only slightly less willful than Clym’s identification with heroes of classical fame.
Amherdt, Bárbara
ReplyDeleteCastillo, Candela
Docteur, Noemí Magalí
Maglier, Agustina
Vera, Marcela
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ReplyDeleteWilliams, Raymond. “The Educated Observer and the Passionate Participant.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R.P. Draper. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 93-104. Print.
1. “…the real Hardy country,…, is the border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love and place and an experience of change.” (Williams 93). What does Williams mean?
Through this quotation Williams exemplifies what has been happening in British society. Generally speaking, that means a breaking of old habits, settle in new places, coming up with new different ideas and feelings which provided the society with uncertainty, i.e unexpected problems, crisis, desire or even possibilities. Such feeling has a major impact on a specific generation who can afford to study at the university and there discovered the meaning of this experience (Williams 93).
2. What parallels does Williams draw between Hardy the man and Hardy the novelist?
Hardy is considered an emblematic figure that marked a turning point in “a rooted and mobile, familiar yet newly conscious and self-conscious” (Williams 93). Instead of rural landscapes or remotes places, he tells us now about the centre of an experience that is still active; about what are known and what are mutable. All of these end up being significant due to his own personal compressions about the building up and breaking off relationships, “the crisis of the physical and mental personality”, which Hardy, as a novelist, describes and puts into practice at the same time (Williams 93).
3. What theme or idea seems to be recurrent in Hardy’s making of his characters?
The theme or idea which seems to be recurrent in Hardy’s fiction is the relation between the changing nature of rural way of living, which is determined by pressures coming from the “outside” and from “the inside”, and one or two characters that have been separated from it but whose lives remain connected, in some way, to it by the influence of the family. Therefore, social values are dramatised in a complex manner. We can consider Tess as an exemplification of this argument, she is a “passionate peasant girl seduced from the outside”. Moreover, this “separation theme” is illustrated in the description of Clym in The Return of the Native: “Yeobright loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence. He wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than individuals at the expense of the class. What was more, he was ready at once to be the first unit sacrificed”. In this fragment of the novel the idea of “sacrifice” is related with a familiar theme, “vocation”, which is obstructed or affected by an unsuitable marriage. Also, it reflects the effect of change which is a persistent social theme in realistic fiction, where the destiny of the people and the quality and destiny of a whole way of life are seen in the same dimension and not as separable issues. (Williams 95,96,97)
4. Where does the difficulty of the returned native lie? How is this related to Hardy’s view of tradition?
4a) The complexity of Hardy’s fiction in The Return of the Native shows the difficult humane perception of limitations, which cannot be resolved by nostalgia or charm or an approach to mysticism, but which are lived through by all the characters, in the real life to which all belong, the limitations of the educated and the affluent bearing an organic relation to the limitations of the ignorant and the poor.
4b) Hardy views tradition in both ways: the native place and experience but also the education, the conscious inquiry. To see living people, within the complicated sense of past and present, is another problem. He sees as a participant who is also an observer; this is the source of the strain. For the process which allows him to observe is very clearly in Hardy’s time one which includes, in its attachment to class feelings and class separations, a decisive alienation.
FOR QUESTION 1:
Delete1. “…the real Hardy country,…, is the border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love and place and an experience of change.” (Williams 93). What does Williams mean?
Hardy speaks to us not from an old rural world or remote region but from active experience, of the familiar and the changing – the making and failing of relationships, the crises of physical and mental personality – which he describes and enacts /puts into practice.
FOR QUESTION 2:
Delete2. What parallels does Williams draw between Hardy the man and Hardy the novelist?
Somerset Maugham said of Hardy:” I remember a little man with an earthly face. In his evening clothes, … he had still a strange look of the soil.” Many critics and fellow writers have considered Hardy “a countryman, a peasant” and by doing so, they have belittled/ undervalued his works. In fact, he doesn’t write about peasants but landowners, tenant farmers, dealers, craftsmen and labourers – the social structure which in a social sense is different in its variety, shading and human attitudes from the structure of the peasantry. Hardy is none of these people because he was a professional, working within this structure: his father was a builder /mason, who employed 6 or 7 workmen. Hardy was an architect and by marrying the daughter of a vicar, he moved to a different point in the social structure, with connections to the educated but not owning class. Within his writing his position is similar: he’s neither owner nor tenant, dealer nor labourer, but an observer and chronicler, often with uncertainty about his actual relation. He wasn’t writing for them, but about them, to a metropolitan and unconnected literary public. He attempts to describe and value a way of life with which he was closely yet uncertainly connected.
FOR QUESTION 3:
DeleteThere is also the idea of sacrifice related to the familiar theme of a vocation thwarted or damaged by a mistaken marriage and change as a persistent social theme. Education is very important, too: the migrant whose loyalty drives him to action which his former group can’t understand, the idea of education for personal advancement.
FOR QUESTION 4:
DeleteThe native is separated from his former group not only because he’s more educated or wealthier but because those people haven’t made his journey. Hardy shows the limitations of the educated and the affluent bearing an organic relation to the limitations of the ignorant and the poor because Hardy himself was both the educated observer and the passionate participant, in a period of radical change. He was attached to country life, to the ‘timeless’ heaths and woods of his Dorset, to the men working together on them. He shows characters who have a humanist impulse – ‘he loved his kind’ (Clym). Hardy shows us what he sees and feels about the educated world of his day, locked in its deep social prejudices and in its consequent human alienation. The social forces within his fiction are deeply based in the rural economy itself: in a system of rent and trade, in the hazards of ownership and tenancy; in the differing conditions of labour on good and bad land, in socially different villages (Talbothays and Flintcomb Ash), in what happens to people and families in the interaction between general forces and personal histories – ruin or survival, exposure or continuity (p.102).
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ReplyDeleteWilliams, Raymond. “The Educated Observer and the Passionate Participant.” Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R.P. Draper. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. 93-104. Print.
5. Why does Williams consider Hardy’s depiction of Dorset and its people as extremely accurate
Hardy shows us the relationships of the countrymen as age-old figures, or a vision of a prospering countryside being disintegrated by Corn Law repeal or the railways or agricultural machinery. Dorset used to be a country based mainly on grazing and mixed farming; and the coming of the railway gave a direct commercial advantage in the supply of milk to London.
Casagrande, Peter J. “Son and Lover: The Dilemma of Clym Yeobright.” (1982). Ed. R.P. Draper. London:Macmillan Press Ltd., 1991. Pp.115-130.
1.Which was the truth Hardy wanted to convey to us in The Return of the Native?
In The Return of the Native, Hardy attempted to transmit his view of change. He believed that everything was change, and in consequence, all change decayed. Socially, this concept meaning that “you can´t go home again”, resulted in considering the hope of a new personal and social start, as well as homecoming, as something pointless and destructive, even unnatural.
2.What was the original purpose of the St. George play and how does it connect with the novel? Why does it fail?
The St. George ceremony has it beginnings in pagan ceremonies which were carried out in order to ‘secure the regeneration of earth, animals, and humans through sympathetic magic’. In these pagan festivities, death and resurrection, the later affected by a physician, were major themes. In The Return of the Native, the Christmas party is the occasion of the St. George play. It seems that Clym’s attempt to assure redemption by returning to Egdon Heath is as unwisely as the attempt to assure regeneration through sympathetic magic (Clym’s actions sometimes are similar to those of a worshipper in primitive myth who try to regenerate things through sympathetic magic and sacrifice). Associated with Christ on the one hand and with the modern reformist through the other, Clym seems to be the physician who cannot heal his own wounds, and the reformer who neither reforms himself not his people. He is overwhelmed by the law of decay.
3.In which way is Mrs. Yeobright a pernicious influence?
Mrs. Yeobright is the root cause of the tragic mischief of the novel, since two years before the arrival of Clym, she opposed Venn’s courtship of Thomasin stating that, as a farmer’s son, he was unworthy for her. Then, she offended Wildeve by publicly opposing his marriage to Thomasin and Wildeve, resulting in his ruthless appropriation of the Yeobright guineas from Christian. Moreover, Venn’s retrieval and misapplication of the same guineas led to the death of Yeobright.
Not having satisfied herself with committing evil deeds, she also offended Eustacia by regarding her as a voluptuary and a witch. In summary, apart from the fact that Clym is blindly loyal to a destructively jealous mother who denies her children the freedom to grow toward independence, what cannot be denied, are Yeobright’s results of her intrusiveness.
4.Which minor characters act as Clym’s foils and for what purpose?
ReplyDeleteHardy portrays Clym’s pernicious attachment and idealization of his mother using two minor characters: Johnny Nunsuch and Christian Cantle. Like Mrs Yeobright, Mrs Nunsuch is possessive, protective and jealous. Apart from this, Johnny and Clym come under the direct influence of Eustacia and their mothers bad-mouth her by claiming she is a witch.
Hardy’s purpose in comparing Clym to Johnny is shown in the two episodes where the child is most important. Firstly, Johnny helps Eustacia with the signal fire. He’s Eustacia’s slave and he is paid with a crooked sixpence. After that, he encounters the devilish-looking Venn, “a sublimation of all the horrid dreams which had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began”. Secondly, he finds himself in Mrs Yeobright’s last moments when there is a childlike naiveté but at the same time, a cruel and detached attitude, showing no trace of sympathy for the old lady. Childhood, for Johnny, is not a happy time but one of fear, sadness and even terror.
Why has Hardy put the child in these two unpleasant situations? Johnny is made the common element in the encounter with Eustacia and with Mrs Yeobright because Clym is suspended between the two women as well. In this way, Clym’s boyishness is clear: he cannot grow into manhood because he responds to his wife and his mother. Furthermore, Johnny both censures and ministers to Mrs Yeobright, a kind of representation of Clym’s mixed feelings towards her mother. The main purpose of this comparison is to point out Clym’s folly in trying to regain his boyhood at Bloom’s End.
Another minor character associated with Clym is Christian. Both have lost a parent and disagree with the other. Mrs Yeobright and Grandfer Cantle disapprove of their sons’ ways of living. Christian, on the one hand, is fearful and lonely. Clym, on the other hand, has chosen to give his ambitious life up. Both of them are a mixture of belief and impiety in terms of religion. There is also a connection between Christian’s sexual impotency and Clym’s asceticism. Christian is pathetically hopeful that he will find a mate one day but women think of him as a “slack-twisted, slim-looking, maphrotight fool”. He’s also described as a wether, a male sheep castrated before it has reached sexual maturity. Similarly, Clym is probably more ‘psychic’ sexually deprived, rather than physically like Christian, and this seems to be the problem in Clym’s relationship with Eustacia. When she dances with Damon at a festival, she is kind of compensating for her failed relationship with Clym.
As a conclusion, it can be said that Hardy uses this two characters and compares them to Clym in order to show that he is torn between his mother and his wife, childhood and manhood, respectively.
5.In which ways are Clym and Thomasin both alike and different?
Thomasin is woman who is mature, is a returning native and has a stoical acceptance of change and at the same time, has a determination to do the best of a bad things without being noticed. In addition to this, she is a “practical woman” because she can set aside self-interest and regret. Also she accepts what she cannot change, a clear exemplification of her acceptances is viewed when she decided to leave the house called Bloom’s End whereas Clym takes up residence. This example also shows that she is the symbol of womanhood, maturity and renewal, thus, placing herself as the heroine of the novel’s comic subplot. Differing from Clym’s uncertain wavering between juvenility and age.
On the contrary, Clym is the victim of Hardy’s irony, in both, the first and the second conclusion of the novel, he is depicted as a dismal failure, since he failed in the ostensible aim for returning, which was to improve the Egdonites and restore himself to a simpler, more joyous life and eve more important, he also failed to see in marriage to Eustacia.
Alcaraz, Daniela
Alvarez, Ana Paula
Bergamini, Ludmila
Maglier, Nahuel
Martinez, Agustina
Paniagua, Mariano
GENERAL FEEDBACK:
DeleteAll in all, your answers are OK. However, some answers are quite superficial and therefore, poor. Hence, my additions to complete them.
In general, Group 1 has performed better than group 2 (Ludmila, Daniela, Ana , et al.) but both have passed this task.
Don't forget to copy and paste the answers ( and my additions) to a Word Document so you have the summary to study from for the Final Exam.