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in the barren land of Edgon Heath. Our heroine, Eustacia, is proud, passionate, cruel, fickle, avaricious, and desperate. She burns every life she touches, never able to find the mad love and exotic world she dreams of. Our supposed hero, Clym, is modest, steady, plain, moral, and dutiful. He is satisfied returning from Paris to the simple comfort of home. When they come together, the Heath will come apart. Originally released as five books, in classic tragic form, a sixth, tacking on a ‘happy ending’, was added by editor and public pressure 3.2About the Religious Sense in The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy's characters in The Return of the Native live in a world governed by a harsh and indifferent ironic God. Hardy sees the reigning power of the universe as being essentially unjust and morally blind, as in his poem "Hap." Instead of rewarding the good and punishing the evil, this entity presides over a universe in which suffering abounds in the form of a perverse irony. Irony is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Current English as "a situation that appears opposite to what one expects" (480), and the critic Mary Caroline Richards elaborates by stating that "irony is the issue of an action which is intended to produce one effect (good for the agent) and ends by producing its contrary (disaster for the agent)" (Part One 272). Hardy uses this definition of irony in his works, but M. H. Abrams further delineates his style in A Glossary of Literary Terms by classifying his texts in the category of cosmic irony, wherein "a deity, or else fate, is represented as though deliberately manipulating even ts so as to lead the protagonist to false hopes, only to frustrate or mock them" (137). The ironic deity or guiding principle in Hardy's texts acts as "the mockery of potentiality, intention, and promise by unfulfillment" (Richards, Part Two, 28). Richards argues that Hardy follows various laws set up by the universe that act as the source for human ironies. It is the nature of Life to dangle pretty prospects before our eyes--inner and outer--and then to snatch them away ; secondly, the indifference of the Will to justice; thirdly, the universe manifests not only indifferent but cruelty; fourthly,inner potentiality and practical possibility are all out of step; and finally,a gross lack of correspondence between man's nature and the materials of his life results. (34-35) In Hardy's fiction and poetry, the "indisputable henchmen of this force [the ironic deity] against man's felicity are Change and Chance" (Richards, Part Two, 25). Hardy's characters live in a world governed by these twin powers, whose influence all too often is for evil, not for good. Throughout The Return of the Native, bad things always happen to good people. There is a tragic heroine, Eustacia, is stifled by her environment in the heath and marries Clym Yeobright as an escape, despite his mother's disapproval. Her former lover, Damon Wildeve, spitefully marries Clym's cousin Thomasin in revenge for Eustacia's rejections of his charms. None of these characters is evil, but much misfortune befalls them before the book concludes. There seems to be no justice for the good or mercy for the mistaken. The critic Albert Elliot describes Hardy as having "no desire to explain experience; he wishes only to present it" (12). Although Hardy is often considered a pessimist as a result of his negative view about the possibility for hopefulness in li