The Victorian society, dominated as it was by patriarchal ideology, restricted women physically and mentally, and severely limited their economic opportunities.

Socio-cultural institutions such as church and marriage were deeply rooted in patriarchy. In the Victorian cultural institutions were an important part of life. This essay shows the ways and reasons that Hardy portrays the representation of man’s true place in nature focusing on Egdon Heath and the significant of such representation in human life. Discussing different characters and their different qualities and the roles the characters are given in relation to the natural world surrounding them is immensely important to understand the man-environment linkage. The Return of the Native encourages the notion that setting is an essential and central element in human life which consciously or unconsciously has direct impact on their life. Through the scholarships relating to the fictional region of Wessex in Hardy’s fiction, one also understands the place and importance of Egdon Heath as the central setting and also a living character in the novel in relation to the characters.

The research will show how someone like Hardy portrayed his ecological consciousness through a mere portrayal of any harmony or disharmony of man with his environment. Analyzing Hardy’s work helps learning about the Victorian social and ecological criticism on the man-environment linkage that could be biologically and psychologically intriguing and strange when it comes to the question of placing man in the world. This study investigates the Victorian representation of the relationship between man and his environment or writing and land in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1884). Very few people, such as John Parham, have analyzed the representation of the early-and-mid-Victorian novelists’ ecological representation. However, little research has been done from an eco-critical perspective to make any claims about the Victorian approach to ecology. Victorian industrialization and its effects on the environment have been criticized by both contemporary and modern critics, writers and many other social commentators.

Hardy's valorisation of Egdon Heath in the very first chapter of his novel The Return of the Native ▬ particularly, his obvious stress on the formidably awesome grandeur of the place fraught with obtrusive suggestions of relentless, sinister and destructive associations ▬ is likely to lead one to conclude that Egdon is much more than a place: it is an externalisation of Hardy's internalised perception of the Darwinistic theory of PAGE 12

Eustacia vye the return of the native