Bleak Prospects: Wasteland and National Identity in Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.