![]() ![]() It seems as if the novel invites the reader to read anthropocentrically and what follows is a complex portrait of a landscape that is certainly not unpeopled. There is playful provocation in the titular declaration that an ostensibly human-free chapter will describe a ‘face’. The opening of the novel therefore seems to declare itself devoid of humanity. ![]() ![]() The opening chapter of The Return of the Native is entitled “A Face on which Time makes but little Impression” and precedes the second chapter entitled “Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with Trouble”. What new materialist thinking can offer here is the suggestion that animation and vitality do not always amount to humanity and in fact are attributes of all matter. This reading can be seen to stem from the fact that Hardy does deliver us an animate, lively landscape. The critical tendency to describe Egdon heath as a ‘human character’ within the novel is pervasive it has, in Laurence Estanove’s words, become a “topos of Hardy criticism”. The first things that needs to be done if we are to read The Return of the Native for unconscious matter is to divorce ourselves from the anthropocentrism implicit in many existing readings of the work. ![]()
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