Reading in the Dark: Sensory Perception and Agency in The Return of the Native

This article argues that Thomas Hardy’s often-expressed ambivalence towards his readers has its origins in late nineteenth-century sciences of mind. It reads The Return of the Native as an allegory of reading informed by neuropsychological theories of association that characterized sensory perception as a semiotic mental process. In Hardy’s novel, this article contends, association makes possible the radical reinterpretation of experience that Hardy elsewhere claims is key to his artistic practice, but it also leads to forms of misreading that haunt Hardy as an author and shape his decision to abandon novel-writing in the 1890s.