The ending of The Return of the Native, particularly the addition of the sixth book that resolves Thomasin and Diggory Venn's romance with relative happiness after the preceding tragedy, has long been a subject of critical debate, since Hardy himself reportedly added this section partly due to pressure from serial publication and reader expectations rather than pure artistic conviction. This genuine ambiguity about whether the ending represents authentic authorial intention or a compromised concession to commercial pressure gives students an unusually rich and genuinely contested question to write about. Unlike many essay topics where the "correct" interpretation is relatively settled among critics, this question invites students into a real, ongoing debate with legitimate positions on multiple sides. Framing the assignment around this genuine critical uncertainty tends to produce more engaged, original student writing than topics with a more settled critical consensus.

A strong essay prompt on this topic might ask students to argue whether the novel's relatively hopeful conclusion undermines or is consistent with the fatalistic tone established throughout the preceding narrative, requiring them to take a genuine position on a question without an obvious single correct answer. Students arguing the ending undermines the novel's tone might point to how abruptly the tragic momentum shifts once the sixth book begins, while students arguing for consistency might note that Thomasin's happier outcome was foreshadowed earlier through her more adaptable temperament compared to Eustacia's rigid resistance. Both positions can be well defended with careful textual evidence, which makes this an ideal topic for teaching students that strong literary arguments do not always require identifying a single objectively correct reading. This lesson about the nature of literary interpretation itself is valuable well beyond this single essay assignment.

Providing students with brief historical context about the actual publication history, including Hardy's own later comments suggesting some ambivalence about the added ending, gives students real biographical and historical evidence to incorporate into their argument rather than relying purely on internal textual analysis. This kind of extratextual evidence, when used carefully and cited appropriately, can meaningfully strengthen an essay's argument about authorial intention and the tension between artistic and commercial pressures. Teachers should be clear with students about how to integrate this kind of historical context without letting it substitute entirely for close reading of the actual text, since the strongest essays will combine both kinds of evidence rather than relying on historical context alone. This combination of biographical and textual evidence represents a genuinely sophisticated approach to literary argument.

Framing the Assignment as Genuine Debate

Structuring this assignment explicitly as participation in an ongoing critical debate, rather than a search for the single correct interpretation, helps students understand that their task is persuasion through evidence rather than discovery of a hidden objective truth. A useful framing device presents students with two brief, contrasting hypothetical critical positions, one arguing the ending is a genuine artistic failure and one arguing it represents a deliberate, meaningful contrast, and asks students to stake out and defend their own position somewhere in relation to these two poles. This kind of framing, modeling how actual literary scholars engage with contested questions, prepares students for the reality that most substantive literary criticism involves genuine disagreement among thoughtful, well-informed readers. Presenting the assignment this way from the outset tends to reduce student anxiety about finding a single correct answer and increases genuine engagement with the actual argumentative task.

• Does the essay take a genuine, defensible position on whether the ending fits the novel's overall tone?
• Is historical or biographical context about the publication history used to support, not replace, textual evidence?
• Does the essay acknowledge and respond to the strongest counterargument to its own position?
• Is evidence drawn from both the earlier tragic sections and the resolution itself?
• Does the conclusion avoid claiming a single definitive answer to a genuinely contested critical question?

Grading a Genuinely Contested Question

Because this topic lacks a single correct answer, grading should focus almost entirely on the quality of argument and evidence rather than which specific position a student takes, and teachers should be explicit with students that either position, if well argued, can earn full marks. A rubric criterion specifically assessing whether the essay acknowledges and responds to the strongest counterargument helps ensure students engage seriously with the genuine complexity of the question rather than simply asserting their preferred reading without addressing alternatives. Teachers should resist any temptation to grade based on their own personal opinion about the ending's success, since doing so would undermine the genuinely open nature of this critical question and could unintentionally penalize students who happen to disagree with the instructor's own reading.

Feedback on these essays should push students toward greater specificity in their evidence rather than toward a different overall position, since the goal is strengthening whichever argument the student has chosen rather than converting them to a different interpretation. A student arguing the ending is a genuine tonal failure might be pushed to identify the exact sentence or scene where they feel the shift becomes most jarring, grounding their broader claim in specific textual evidence rather than a general impression. This kind of evidence-focused feedback, regardless of which position a student takes, keeps the emphasis on argumentative craft rather than on reaching a particular predetermined conclusion. Teachers grading a full stack of these essays should expect and welcome genuine diversity of position across the class, treating that diversity as a sign the assignment is working as intended.

Using This Assignment to Teach Critical Humility

This essay offers a valuable opportunity to teach students that literary criticism does not always resolve into a single settled answer, and that genuine intellectual engagement sometimes means holding a well-defended position while acknowledging real uncertainty and the legitimacy of other perspectives. This kind of critical humility, confidence in one's own argument alongside genuine respect for competing evidence-based positions, is a valuable disposition that extends well beyond literary analysis into any field requiring evidence-based argumentation. Teachers might use a brief post-essay discussion, comparing several students' differing positions and their supporting evidence, to reinforce this lesson explicitly and let students see firsthand how thoughtful people can reach different conclusions from the same shared evidence. This kind of discussion also builds a classroom culture where disagreement is treated as intellectually productive rather than something to be resolved or avoided.

For departments interested in building students' comfort with genuinely contested critical questions across a full curriculum, this ending debate offers a strong template that can be adapted to other ambiguous endings students will encounter in future coursework, from other Victorian novels to more contemporary contested texts. Teaching students explicitly to recognize the signs of a genuinely open critical question, disagreement among established critics, conflicting authorial statements, or internal textual tension, gives them a transferable diagnostic skill for identifying similar opportunities in future reading. This skill of recognizing productive ambiguity, rather than assuming every literary question has a single hidden correct answer waiting to be found, represents a genuinely advanced level of literary sophistication worth cultivating deliberately across a student's education.