Deception is an important feature of The Return of the Native, which sees several of its characters suffer the negative consequences of lies and deceit. In particular, Wildeve and Eustacia build their relationship on a faulty foundation. Both play with each other’s emotions and withhold how they truly feel: Wildeve refuses to let Eustacia know how he feels about her compared to Thomasin, and, in return, Eustacia doesn’t tell Wildeve that she still loves him. Eustacia and Wildeve’s unhealthy relationship comes to a head when their feelings for each other indirectly contribute to the death of Mrs. Yeobright (Eustacia’s husband, Clym’s, mother). Eustacia refuses to let Mrs. Yeobright inside the house because she and Wildeve are talking inside, and she doesn’t want Mrs. Yeobright to think they’re having an affair. And, as a result, Mrs. Yeobright is forced to walk home and suffers a fatal snakebite on the way. In hopes that she can keep Clym from learning the truth about his mother’s death, Eustacia withholds the fact that she did not open the door for Mrs. Yeobright—and when the truth comes out, Clym divorces Eustacia. As such, Eustacia’s deception ends up hurting everyone involved, including herself.
In addition to deceiving others, Eustacia also struggles with self-deception. Often, Eustacia has a difficult time disentangling fantasy from reality. For instance, it does not appear that she meant to trick Clym into taking her to Paris (her dream of escaping to Paris what attracts her to Clym in the first place). Rather, it seems she genuinely believed he would eventually take her there, despite all signs pointing the opposite way. Like with her deception of others, Eustacia’s self-deceptive ways only result in more misery for her and those she loves. Her sham relationship with Clym hurts Wildeve and, in the end, hurts Eustacia herself, since the marriage ends in divorce. Although dishonesty and delusion perhaps save Eustacia from disappointment or other people’s disapproval in the short term, this sort of behavior always backfires in the end. All in all, then, the novel shows how lying and withholding information can destroy lives, and it implicitly suggests that facing the truth and communicating openly with others would be a better long-term strategy.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Deception ThemeTracker
Deception Quotes in The Return of the Native
The only intelligible meaning in this sky-backed pantomime of silhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the forms who had taken her place, was sedulously avoiding these, and had come thither for another object than theirs. The imagination of the observer clung by preference to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something more interesting, more important, more likely to have a history worth knowing than these newcomers, and unconsciously regarded them as intruders. But they remained, and established themselves; and the lonely person who hitherto had been queen of the solitude did not at present seem likely to return.
“As a matter of justice it is almost due to me,” said Wildeve. “Think what I have gone through to win her consent; the insult that it is to any man to have the banns forbidden—the double insult to a man unlucky enough to be cursed with sensitiveness, and blue demons, and Heaven knows what, as I am. I can never forget those banns. A harsher man would rejoice now in the power I have of turning upon your aunt by going no further in the business.”
“The place he’s been living at is Paris,” said Humphrey, “and they tell me ’tis where the king’s head was cut off years ago. My poor mother used to tell me about that business. ‘Hummy,’ she used to say, ‘I was a young maid then, and as I was at home ironing Mother’s caps one afternoon the parson came in and said, “They’ve cut the king’s head off, Jane; and what ’twill be next God knows.’”
She was dancing to wondrous music, and her partner was the man in silver armour who had accompanied her through the previous fantastic changes, the visor of his helmet being closed. The mazes of the dance were ecstatic. Soft whispering came into her ear from under the radiant helmet, and she felt like a woman in Paradise. Suddenly these two wheeled out from the mass of dancers, dived into one of the pools of the heath, and came out somewhere into an iridescent hollow, arched with rainbows. “It must be here,” said the voice by her side, and blushingly looking up she saw him removing his casque to kiss her. At that moment there was a cracking noise, and his figure fell into fragments like a pack of cards.
On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets, some of them having originally grown up from a common root, and then become divided by secession, some having been alien from the beginning. West Egdon believed in Blooms-End time, East Egdon in the time of the Quiet Woman Inn. Grandfer Cantle’s watch had numbered many followers in years gone by, but since he had grown older faiths were shaken. Thus, the mummers having gathered hither from scattered points each came with his own tenets on early and late; and they waited a little longer as a compromise.
When Thomasin was tremblingly engaged in signing her name Wildeve had flung towards Eustacia a glance that said plainly, “I have punished you now.” She had replied in a low tone—and he little thought how truly— “You mistake; it gives me sincerest pleasure to see her your wife today.”
“You ought to have better opinions of me—I feared you were against me from the first!” exclaimed Eustacia.
“No. I was simply for Clym,” replied Mrs. Yeobright, with too much emphasis in her earnestness. “It is the instinct of everyone to look after their own.”
“There you mistake me. I married him because I loved him, but I won’t say that I didn’t love him partly because I thought I saw a promise of that life in him.”
Her eyes were fixed on the ground; within her two sights were graven—that of Clym’s hook and brambles at the door, and that of a woman’s face at a window. Her lips trembled, becoming unnaturally thin as she murmured, “’Tis too much—Clym, how can he bear to do it! He is at home; and yet he lets her shut the door against me!”
“But, Damon, please pray tell me what I must do? To sit by him hour after hour, and hear him reproach himself as being the cause of her death, and to know that I am the sinner, if any human being is at all, drives me into cold despair. I don’t know what to do. Should I tell him or should I not tell him? I always am asking myself that. O, I want to tell him; and yet I am afraid. If he finds it out he must surely kill me, for nothing else will be in proportion to his feelings now.”
“Diggory, if we, who remain alive, were only allowed to hold conversation with the dead—just once, a bare minute, even through a screen of iron bars, as with persons in prison—what we might learn! How many who now ride smiling would hide their heads! And this mystery—I should then be at the bottom of it at once. But the grave has forever shut her in; and how shall it be found out now?”
The story of the deaths of Eustacia and Wildeve was told throughout Egdon, and far beyond, for many weeks and months. All the known incidents of their love were enlarged, distorted, touched up, and modified, till the original reality bore slight resemblance to the counterfeit presentation by surrounding tongues.
