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Theme Of Desire In The Return Of The Native

Decent Essays

In Thomas Hardy’s aesthetic world ‘desire’ is not only an inevitable component, but it appears as a dominant dynamic of his creations. Especially in all the fourteen novels of Hardy, ‘desire’ is seen as a vital energy creating a new and a better realm of existence though its reverse turn is also apparent. In The Return of the Native (1878) desire works as a driving force as the narrative fabric of the novel manifests ‘desire’ with its manifold implications. In this novel ‘desire’ with its varied implications is seen to be integrated with the lives of the characters in such a way that it even influences human subjectivity, creating a visibly poignant universe.
The thematic design of The Return of the Native embodies disappointment, frustrated …show more content…

If we accept the definition of ‘desire’ as a strong feeling of wanting something, the fundamental impulse behind The Return of the Native is that of desire. The term ‘desire’ indicates a central but diffuse and by no means unified concept or set of concepts. According to Michel Foucault, “the more recent researchers of psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethnology have ‘decentred’ the subject in relation to the laws of his desire”, and the concept of desire has assumed an important but varied function in the field of theory.1 Freud’s essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ takes us closer to understanding the formal organization of desire – the illusion of a striving toward perfection is here explained by instinctual repression and the persisting tension of the repressed instinct, and the resulting difference between the pleasure of satisfaction demanded and that achieved. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings Freud says:
...The gulf between the level of gratificatory pleasure demanded and the level actually achieved produces that driving force that prevents the individual from resting content with any satisfaction he ever contrives, and instead –as the poet says—he ‘presses ever onward unbridled and untamed.’(Mephisto in Faust I, Faust’s Study)

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