The Victorian novel often focuses on important and relevant issues of the era in which it is written. These issues can range from class, ambition and gender to love, sexuality and desire. Victorian-era authors provided insight into these often controversial topics through the characters in their novels. Due to the prevalence of these issues in the Victorian novel, authors often have overlapping points of view and ideas. However, in Thomas Hardy's novel The Return of the Native, Hardy delivers his views on desire and romantic love with a unique twist. Hardy explores the ideas of desire for social status and possession versus romantic desire through the different relationships in the novel; in doing so, it examines the implications of modernity within these relationships. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay There are a number of important couplings in The Return of the Native. The most obvious of these are Eustacia and Clym, Eustacia and Wildeve, and Thomasin and Diggory Venn. The first, Eustacia and Clym, offers a clear depiction of a marriage motivated by the desire for social success. When Eustacia hears of Clym's return from Paris, she immediately romanticizes her image of him, portraying him as a wealthy man of the world who has the ability to take her away from the moor, thus elevating his social status. When Eustacia hears two men talking about Clym returning to the moor, she immediately begins to fantasize, thinking: "A young and intelligent man was coming to this lonely moor, coming from Paris, one of the most contrasting places in the world. coming from the sky" (110). Although Eustacia has never met or even seen Clym, she assumes that because of his time in Paris he is sophisticated and wealthy, two qualities she values ​​above all others She vows to form a relationship with Clym and succeeds in marrying him. Eustacia's desire to marry Clym for social advancement is similar to a relationship in another well-known Victorian novel: that of Catherine and Edgar Linton in The. Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë Just as Eustacia sees Clym as a means of elevating her social status, Catherine sees Edgar as useful in the same way. When Nelly questions Catherine's motives for marrying Edgar, she responds by saying: “And he will be rich, and I would like to be the greatest woman in the neighborhood, and I will be proud to have such a husband” (66) Each of these women marries out of a desire for social advancement Yet, in Return of. the Native, Hardy explores how modernity complicates this type of marriage. The Clym that Eustacia marries is no match for the Clym of her fantasies. Modern and forward-thinking, Clym cares little for luxury and material wealth, focusing instead on his desire to educate the people of the heath. This disrupts the marriage, as Clym truly loves Eustacia but refuses to compromise his modern ideals. Eustacia's realization that Clym has no intention of returning to Paris with her shatters her image of Clym as a worldly, sophisticated gentleman. She first confesses her disappointment to Mrs. Yeobright, saying: "And if I had known then what I know now, that I should live on this wild moor a month after my marriage, I should have thought twice times before accepting" (239). Shortly afterwards, she reveals to Clym that she is appalled by his choice of profession, telling him: "But it's so dreadful - a grass cutter!" and you, a man who has lived around the world, who speaks French and who knows the world. classic, and which are suitable forwhich is much better than that” (251). Here, Eustacia's desire for social advancement and wealth is prevented by Clym's modernity. The relationship between Eustacia and Damon Wildeve is radically different from that of Eustacia and Clym. These two characters act like they are passionately in love, but it seems like "act" is the key word in this relationship. Both Damon and Eustacia are unstable and emotional characters, and seem to spend much of the novel acting on whims and attempting to make each other jealous. Everything happens as if possession and competition were the driving forces of this relationship. When Damon and Eustacia meet on the moor after his quasi-marriage to Thomasin, Eustacia tells Damon that she heard he didn't marry the other woman: "And I knew it was because you loved me the most and that you couldn't do it. "(64). Eustacia's pleasure at Damon's return lies in her "victory" over Thomasin, not in any true love for Damon. She all but admits that her affection for Damon is superficial, telling Diggory Venn that "I should not have cared for him if there had been a better person nearby” (93) Eustacia's behavior in this relationship is similar to that of Estella Havisham in Dickens' novel Great Expectations. two women feel an almost magnetic attraction to their male companions and view their relationship as a game. When Estella and Pip meet after their long separation since childhood, Pip still recognizes the way Estella plays with him, saying: "She still treated me like a boy, but she attracted me” (235), Estella’s relationship with Pip is primarily a source of amusement for her, a means for her to exert power over him. However, unlike the relationship between Pip and Estella, in Hardy's novel, the dynamic of the relationship between Eustacia and Wildeve is two-sided; Eustacia isn't the only player in the game. Damon also sees their relationship as a display of power, or more precisely, possession. Throughout the novel, he oscillates between Thomasin and Eustacia, using each as a tool to make the other jealous. Hardy's initial description of Wildeve is the most accurate and explicit illustration of his character; Hardy writes: “He was quite a young man, and of the two properties, form and movement, it was the latter which first attracted the eye to him. The grace of his movement was singular: it was the pantomime expression of a career as a woman-killer. » (45). In this relationship, Eustacia and Damon are not motivated by love, but by the desire to possess each other, to exercise control over each other. As a modern novelist, Hardy rejects this type of relationship, showing through the ultimate ending not only of the relationship between Damon and Eustacia, but also of the characters themselves, that modernity denies a relationship of possession. As such, of each of the Victorian novels discussed in this essay, Hardy's Return of the Native, is the only one that features a couple married out of love, not social advancement or control, and who are happy within this union based about romantic love. This couple is of course Thomasin and Diggory Venn. Unlike Bronte and Dickens, Hardy's novel illustrates the modern couple as one whose marriage is based on love and respect, while showing the progression of such a relationship. At the beginning of the novel, Diggory Venn brings Thomasin back to her aunt after her failed attempt at marriage to Wildeve. When he meets Captain Vye along the way and the old man asks him if the woman in the wagon is Diggory's wife, he responds by saying: "My wife!...She is beyond belief." mate with people like me” (15). At this point in the novel it seems that.