The Explicator

ISSN: 0014-4940 (Print) 1939-926X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Hardy’s the Return of the Native

John Jewell

To cite this article: John Jewell (1991) Hardy’s the Return of the Native, The Explicator, 49:3,
159-162, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.1991.11484050

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1991.11484050

Published online: 22 Oct 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vexp20

Download by: [New York University] Date: 22 June 2016, At: 17:30
 begins strongly with the speaker's evocation of a devotional atmosphere and cloistral setting but falls
apart, just as J 648 does, when she attempts to enunciate her hopes to an unfamiliar advocate.

WORKS CITED

Bennett, Paula. My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon P,
1986.
Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, and Alfred Leete Hampton, eds. Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickin-
son. By Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little Brown, 1935.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill. 2 vols. The Library of Chris-
tian Classics. Trans. Fred Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminister P, 1960.
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge and
London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1955.
Downloaded by [New York University] at 17:30 22 June 2016

Elliott, G. R. "Review of Further Poems of Emily Dickinson." American Literature 1 (1930): 439-42.
Feriazzo, Paul J. Emily Dickinson. Twayne's United States Authors Series. Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1976.
Gelpi, Albert. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet. Cambridge and London: Harvard
UP, 1975.
Gilbert, Sandra M. "The Wayward Nun beneath the Hill: Emily Dickinson and the Mysteries of
Womanhood." Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: In-
diana UP, 1983. 22-24.
Gilbert, SandraM., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in theAttic: The Woman Writer and the Nine-
teenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979.
Patterson, Rebecca. Emily Dickinson's Imagery. Ed. Margaret H. Freeman. Amherst: U of Massa-
chusetts P, 1979.
- - . The Riddle of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
Pollak, Vivian R. Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1984.
Power, Sister Mary James. In the Name of the Bee: The Significance of Emily Dickinson. New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1943.
Shurr, William H. The Marriage of Emily Dickinson: A Study of the Fascicles. Lexington: UP of
Kentucky, 1983.
St. Armand, Barton Levi. Emily Dickinson and her Culture: The Soul's Society. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge UP 1984.
Todd, John Emerson. "The Persona in Emily Dickinson's Love Poems." Michigan Academician 1
(1969): 197-207.

Hardy's THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

Practiced readers of Thomas Hardy's novels have noticed Hardy's concern

with color. Tony Tanner notes, for example, that color "is of the first importance
and significance" for Hardy (220), especially in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and
David Lodge adds that, for Hardy, red is "the colour of passion" (185). Lodge's
assertion is supported by numerous examples that Tanner cites in Tess, as when
the blood spurting from the family's wounded horse stains Tess, marks her move-
ment from innocence to experience, and ultimately "adumbrates the loss of her
virginity" (222).
Less noticed, though, is Hardy's use of color in The Return of the Native and

159
 the corresponding importance of Diggory Venn, Hardy's itinerant Wessex reddle-
man. The term reddle has fallen out of fashion in this century and is therefore
easily overlooked by modem readers, but in Victorian England, reddle and its
several variations were relatively common terms. Thackeray, for instance, uses
the word (raddle and ruddle were also common spellings) in Roundabout Papers,
in The Newcomes, and in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield, wherein he describes a
house in Blenheim as "like a chief raddled over with war-paint" (446).
Reddle, sometimes known as red ochre, is a red dye made from oxidized iron
ore (ferric oxide) and gathered from clay pits allover England, where the oxidized
iron ore occurs naturally as hematite. Diggory Venn collects this hematite, manu-
factures the red dye, and then sells reddle to the sheep farmers of Wessex. The
Downloaded by [New York University] at 17:30 22 June 2016

OED credits R. W. Dickson's 1805 Practical Agriculture (vol. 2, 1147) as a source

for the term reddle. Dickson explains that when used as a verb the word denotes
"smearing the fore-bows of the rams with reddle, ochre, or some similar sub-
stance that has the property of marking." What Dickson does not say, though, is
where the reddle is eventually deposited-on the hindquarters of every ewe bred
by the ram. For shepherds, then, as well as for Thomas Hardy, reddle functions
as a kind of scarlet letter. And like the dye that has turned his skin a glowing red,
Diggory Venn signals for Hardy's readers the presence of illicit love and passion,
especially after Hardy notes early in the novel that the inhabitants of Egdon
Heath at one point resemble "a travelling flock of sheep" (15).
Horace Gregory says that the theme of The Return oj the Native is "the Fall of
Man" (412). For Hardy, Diggory Venn's reddle consistently marks that fall. Not-
ing Hardy's familiarity with the Bible, Sandy Cohen offers a convincing picture
of Venn as a Christ figure (52), but even more convincing are Hardy's consistent
attempts to equate Venn with the Devil. First, Venn's clothes and skin are so per-
meated with reddle that his entire person is a brilliant red. In addition, Hardy
calls Venn one of the "Mephistophelian visitants" who served the shepherds of
Egdon Heath (89), and he says that the phrase "'The reddleman is coming for
you' had been the formulated threat of Wessex mothers for generations," when
they wished to frighten their children into submission (89). He adds that "a
child's first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life," because "that blood-
coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams which had afflicted the
juvenile spirit since imagination began" (89).
Predictably, then, when young Johnny Nunsuch first comes upon Venn's
campsite late at night on the deserted heath, he sees Venn "red from head to
heels" and knows "too well for his peace of mind upon whose lair he had
lighted" (85-86). When the reddleman tries to allay the child's fears, his unfortu-
nate syntax only further solidifies his association with the Devil. "'You little chil-
dren,''' says Venn, "'think there's only one cuckoo, one fox, one giant, one dev-
il, and one reddleman, when there's lots of us all'" (87). Venn's mention of the
Devil and the reddleman in quick succession substantiates just what the boy fears

160
 -that Venn and the Devil are one and the same. Hardy later invites the same
comparison when Venn and Wildeve gamble for the guineas that Christian Can-
dle has lost to Wildeve in a dice game. Venn, Hardy's "red automaton" (273),
commands the dice, which Christian refers to as "'the devil's playthings'" (266),
and easily wins the contest.
After establishing the reddleman as the symbol of evil, Hardy uses him to des-
ignate the fallen lovers of Egdon Heath. "Reddle," says Hardy, "spreads its live-
ly hues over everything it lights on, and stamps unmistakably, as with the mark of
Cain, any person who has handled it half an hour" (89). Venn and his red stamp
traverse Egdon Heath and mysteriously show up wherever illicit love is present. It
is Venn, for instance, who first surmises that Wildeve and Eustacia Vye are secret
Downloaded by [New York University] at 17:30 22 June 2016

lovers. After he questions Johnny Nunsuch, he realizes that it was Wildeve's love
signal to Eustacia, not a "hopfrog," that Johnny heard in Eustacia's pond on the
evening of her bonfire. Later, the reddleman eavesdrops when Wildeve and Eu-
stacia secretly meet at Rainbarrow. Burrowing under two turves and creeping
close to the "expected trysters" (94), Venn is able to overhear their conversation
and, with his symbolic and ever-present redness, able also to expose their clandes-
tine love to Hardy's readers.
The one seeming inconsistency in Venn's function in the novel is his being pres-
ent when Hardy's virtuous Thomasin Yeobright wants to return home from An-
glebury after her bungled elopement with Wildeve. Refusing to spend the night
with Wildeve after she learns that her marriage license is invalid, Thomasin strug-
gles to make her way back to Bloom's End alone, but she is eventually rescued by
Venn. Venn's presence here might at first suggest that Thomasin has been com-
promised by the worldly Wildeve, but Hardy's description of the scene reaffirms
both Thomasin's virtue and Venn's symbolic function in the novel. When the red-
dleman places the exhausted Thomasin in the back of his van, he takes elaborate
precautions to ensure that the still innocent maiden is not branded by the reddle
inside. Hardy explains that Venn makes Thomasin a small couch inside the van,
"around which was hung apparently all the drapery that the reddleman pos-
sessed, to keep the occupant of the little couch from contact with the red materi-
als of his trade" (41). Tanner finds it noteworthy that Tess before her fall is labeled
"'untinctured by experience,''' and Hardy treats the still-chaste Thomasin in the
same fashion by sparing her the stain of the reddle (221, emphasis added).
By the time Venn himself marries Thomasin in the novel's final pages, he has
given up the reddle trade, his skin has returned to its original white color, and
"red, and all approach to red, was carefully excluded from every article of
clothes upon him" (457). Cohen credits these changes to Hardy's bowing "most
awkwardly to his imperceptive and sentimental contemporary readers," in a
move that "weakens both character and book" (53). The sentimentality is per-
haps more on Hardy's part, however. When he has finally disposed of his painted
ladies and clandestine lovers and has offered his audience a match that he ap-

161
 proves, Hardy can eliminate Diggory Venn's stamp of red and replace it with his
own stamp of white.

-JOHN JEWELL, Kent State University

WORKSCITED

Cohen, Sandy. "Blind Clym, UnChristian Christian, and the Redness of the Reddleman: Character
Correspondences in Hardy's The Return of the Native." The Thomas Hardy Year Book 11 (1984):
49-55.
Gregory, Horace. Afterword. The Return on of the Native. By Thomas Hardy. New York: New
American Library, 1959.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. London: Macmillan, 1920.
Downloaded by [New York University] at 17:30 22 June 2016

Lodge, David. Language of Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Tanner, Tony. "Colour and Movement in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Critical Quarterly 10
(Autumn 1968): 219-39.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray.
Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1945.4 voIs.

Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS

As Marlow approaches the Central Station, he encounters "a vast artificial

hole," the purpose of which he is unable to identify. The passage recording his
bewilderment has not been a major touchstone for Heart oj Darkness criticism, I
perhaps in part because Marlow's emphasis on the hole's randomness fits in with
the novella's critique of Belgian "inefficiency" and with its general atmosphere
of horror. The passage therefore has seemed to require little commentary. The at-
tribution of randomness to the hole, however, is itself an ideological construction
that expresses Marlow's unconscious duplicity as a good man integrated within a
depraved social order.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that the hole is a grave for the dying workers
that Marlow presently meets in the grove of death. In protesting (too much) that
he does not understand the hole's purpose, Marlow defensively underestimates
the systematicness of imperialism and obfuscates the question of appropriate af-
fect.
Marlow's language concerning the hole is as follows:
I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope,
the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or
a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with
the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don't
know. (Youth and Two Other Stories, New York: Doubleday, 1925,65)

162