Dear Serial Readers,
Many repetitions and building suspense in this penultimate installment. First, the date--fifth of November and bonfire night--echoes the opening installment of then novel and also echoes the month of this installment. Then the repetition of the communications by signals, the fateful knocking at the door, the female figures on the stormy heath at night--how Thomasin (with baby no less) and Eustacia follow or haunt each other, as Diggory Venn confuses one for the other. This installment also seems more accented with suspense that gets replicated in several ways--the weather, the crossed signals, the mistaken reading of Wildeve's assistance to Eustacia's escape as indication of planned adultery, and then the cliffhanger ending where Thomasin "could say no more." Things don't look promising for Eustacia's survival. The question remains about her method: the pistols (if not secured well), or some other way.
One of the most interesting bits to me was Susan Nonsuch's wax effigy of Eustacia, with all those pins and then the destruction of the Eustacia effigy through flames--like the burning of witches. Of this superstition, the narrator remarks: "It was a practice well-known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the present day." This captures Hardy's sense of historical process--as a palimpsest or layering, or echoing or haunting so that the past, with its anachronistic practices, is still evident in the present. Egdon Heath is part-fossilized history and ongoing present, like the evolutionary process of steady-state and slow transformations. And yet, and yet--the drama of human actors on this scene! Is Eustacia's tragic end overdetermined like the long arc of deep time?
Only the time of the last installment will tell!
Serially suspended,
Susan
4 comments:
I think it's interesting that #11 contiains book 5, chapters 5-8 and that #12 includes the final chapter of book 5 as well as all of book 6. It's not terribly hard to guess why that is. Book 5, chapter 9 is the tragic climax of the story. As a complete novel, it makes sense for the break to come after the tragic climax, making the book 6 a final, discrete section for reflection and closure. But it makes sense leave the climax for the final segement in its serial publication, keeping the the reader anticipating between #11 and #12. This strikes me as a clear example of how the logic of breaks and gaps is determined by the publication context, and not the content of the book. I wonder how many fewer copies #12 would have sold if Bk. 5, Ch. 9 was published in #11. Would people feel satisfied? What would happen to their compulsion to read on?
I also found the burning of Eustacia's effigy by Susan Nonsuch to be very interesting, as a sign of a historical practice/ethos that points to “time out of joint” in Egdon Heath. I also found the burning of the effigy interesting as a contrast to the storm raging at the end of this installment (and to Eustacia's fate in the final installment). Before the storm and the burning effigy, I was not quite convinced that I was reading a tragedy (despite the paratextual cues of the back cover of the oxford edition). However, after following the multiple perspectives and wanderings of lost and disturbed characters, and witnessing, like a member of the audience attending a tragic play, characters mistake the identities and intentions of others, I could only anticipate what tragedy would befall these lost wanderers in the final installment.
Like Rick, I was also curious about the way these last two installments were broken up, as the start of book 5 chapter 9 is seamless with the ending of book 5 chapter 8. The ending of chapter 8 works great as a cliffhanger, but I wonder how aggravating a month wait between chapter 8 and 9 would be? I can only imagine that I would find it especially important to reread the last monthly installment over before commencing chapter 9, as I think “cold reading” chapter 9 would hamper the feverish pace of the tragic climax (at least in my own reading practice). I found it hard to take even an hour break away from chapter 9.
I have been irregularly following all your Serial Readers' comments over the past few months, and am finally (and so belatedly -- sorry, Susan!) jumping in to post my own. I first read this book 30 years ago and confess that I remembered not one word of it. Now, reading this frenzied climax, I'm amazed that I had no recollection of any of these events or characters. A couple of observations, first regarding Susan Nunsuch burning Eustacia in effigy. My marginal notes from 30 years ago note how frequently Eustacia is associated with fire: we first meet her by her bonfire (the first to be seen that night, and the last to go out); in Book 1, chapter 7, “…you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like”; she has “smouldering rebelliousness”; when Venn first confronts Eustacia, he “is surprised to see how a slow fire could blaze on occasion"; later on, “murmured Eustacia with a smothered fire of feeling”; and her signals to Wildeve are also with flames. So this effigy scene both recalls these images of flames, conflagration and burning feeling, and brings them to a possibly fiery conclusion. I wonder if it foretells Eustacia’s end.
Also, there was a discussion awhile back about the role of eavesdropping. The plot is also laden with instances of spying, and seeing things by night, and conversely, not seeing things. Eustacia can be seen at the beginning and at the end of the book with her grandfather’s telescope, peering at the far reaches of the heath. In these final pages, that is how she sees Clym moving all their furniture back to Blooms-End. I wonder at the many revelations in the book when people have seen something by dark, or spied on someone, or have seen what they were not supposed to see: Johnny Nunsuch, Diggory Venn, Mrs. Yeobright, Thomasin spying on Wildeve. And then Clym losing most of his sight, too. The dark heath is the backdrop for many of these instances of seeing and not seeing. (Note also Mrs. Yeobright’s question to Thomasin in book 3, chap. 6: “Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”)
Finally, one of you mentioned early on the idea of delays. I was struck in these last several chapters how delays continue to add to the tragedy. Clym delays reconciling with his mother (as she had delayed doing so with him); Eustacia delays opening the door to Mrs. Yeobright until it is too late; Clym delays sending his note of reconciliation of Eustacia; the grandfather delays delivering it. Only Wildeve never delays in his attentions to Eustacia.
Leora Z.
When the reader first encounters Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, Hardy describes her as a “figure” and a “form” moving in a ghostly fashion; she “descended on the right side of the barrow, with the glide of a water drop down a bud, and then vanished” (17). She does not walk or move in a human way, but descends, glides, and vanishes. Eustacia is seldom described walking up to someone on the heath; instead, she “vanished in a hollow for a few minutes, and then her whole form unfolded itself from a brake” (201). And the Reddleman, too, appears like a demon or angel, as “a figure [who] slowly rose from behind a neighboring bush” (223). The people of the heath initially discuss Christian’s sighting of Diggory Venn, the Reddleman, by referring to ghosts: “A red one. Yes, most ghosts be white; but this is as if it had been dipped in blood” (30). Those who make a habit of walking about on the heath are “regular haunters of the heath,” and whenever Wildeve meets up with Eustacia for a rendezvous, he alternately dissolves and appears on the scene (57). After one such tryst, we read that “Eustacia watched his shadowy form until it disappeared” (100). Wildeve’s body is merely a “shadowy” form, incorporeal, insubstantial. In addition, Eustacia’s thoughts seem to summon Wildeve’s appearances: “She was disturbed in her reverie by a voice behind, and turning her head beheld her old lover and fortunate inheritor of wealth immediately beside her,” despite the fact that Wildeve is in this particular moment far from home and totally unexpected (289). When the lovers part ways at one point, Eustacia reaches the next hill and looks back for Wildeve, but “Wildeve was nowhere to be seen,” for he has vanished once again (293).
The frequency with which Hardy describes characters in The Return of the Native as dissolving into or rising up from the heath offers another way to think about serialized narratives as ghosts of prior narratives. Some have argued that Hardy’s novel is a rewriting of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and/or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife, and I would like to extend this connection to think about serial hauntings. What if we think of ghosts, disembodied voices, and dis/appearing as idioms and tropes for texts reserialized and rewritten by later authors? In what ways might these residual voices and textual reverberations to prior texts offer new ways of thinking about seriality? Much as Eustacia’s thoughts summon Wildeve, how might the reader’s thoughts of prior texts summon associations and synthesize textual echoes between a family of related texts? Does reading a collection of serialized narratives all based around the same “ghost” narrative create a richer, more complex reading experience? Hardy’s investment in images of the diffusion from the outset of The Return of the Native offers one wedge into thinking about the shift or bleed through from what was to what is, either in terms of ghosts within the novel or in terms of stories reimagined by new authors. How can the reader separate the new material from the old? What remains from the prior narrative in the reimagined text? As many critics such as Gilles Deleuze have established, repetition is never exact; it always comes with a difference. So how do we trace the remainders from the original and what would such a project get us?
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