Dear Serial Readers,
The last post shows all the serial installment divisions and reading schedule--but that schedule is clearly changing! I'll post at the end the estimated date for the next session on the next installment--and we'll try to finish up this novel in month's time!
The opening portion is rather lethargic--that pastoral air in decline! So much description of place rather than person is sometimes hard to engage with. What do you notice about Hardy's Wessex?
Notice that place comes first and then the second chapter title announces: "Humanity Appears Upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble." Sort of like a reworked Genesis story of creation with heaven and heath first and then "Humanity" with the "Trouble" that gives a hint of suspense.
Who is this "Humanity"? First we have Diggory Venn, the reddleman with his "lurid red" van. The reddleman sells reddle, or red ochre dye, to farmers who mark their rams in a way that it transfers to the ewes to show that there's been some conjugal action to lead to lambs. Then various other local folks speak in dialect and we learn about Thomasin Yeobright (great name!) and Damon Wildeve (another great name!) who have gone off to marry--but apparently that didn't work out so well, since Thomasin is actually sleeping in Diggory's red van--are we supposed to think she's marked by the ram, symbolically speaking, and in the lambing way? Hmmm. The installment concludes with Mrs. Yeobright scolding her niece, "'Now Thomasin,' she said sternly, 'what's the meaning of this disgraceful performance?'" Is this enough of a cliffhanger for you to return for the next installment?
One last observation--the bonfires in across the heath seem a form of communication, and one bonfire in particular is associated with the granddaughter of Capt. Drew (whoever he is)--and she's marked (not exactly with reddle) as "very strange in her ways, living up there by herself, and such things please her." This strange woman is surely one of "The Three Women"--the title of this first Book (not installment). Does the original portion in Belgravia include this Book First title? And who is the third woman, Mrs Yeobright, Tamsin's aunt? We also learn that she has a beloved son Clym who's due home. There's a tension between the Wessex country heath (and the old folk ways of the reddleman and other inhabitants) and town life. What's that about?
Serial Readers, what are you noticing? I'd love to know more about what else appeared in that issue of the magazine Belgravia. Although this beginning seems ploddingly slow, acts of creation can move along in surprising ways!
I'll plan to post on installment two (Book First, chaps. 5-7) by early next week (June 17th).
Serially starting again,
Susan
7 comments:
As I began reading this novel in its serialized form, I was very put off by the entirety of the first chapter being devoted to landscape description. I think we as modern readers are not accustomed to this level of intricate description in our literature. I have learned to love Victorian intricacy and detail in paintings, but now must learn to appreciate it in literature as well.
It has certainly been a push to ge through the first chapter of Return of the Native, but I hope that I can learn to appreciate the novel's form in a way similar to my appreciation of art: even if I do not like the subject or even execution of a painting, I can appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into its construction, and can relish in learning about its original, contemporary reception.
See you next installment!
I loved the opening chapter with its primordial atmosphere of foreboding; humans appear as specks upon the horizon, miniscule in comparison to the broad sweep of history that has preceded them. The explanation about the reddleman really helped me understand what's going on in chapter 2. I found chapter 3 confusing. What's going on with Christian, "the man," "the man no woman will marry," "the man of no moon"? This seems somehow related to the fire imagery, bonfires, lanterns, lighted windows, all associated with women. What's with the name of the inn, The Silent Woman, whose sign shows "the figure of a matron carrying her head under her arm"?!! Oops, sorry, chapter five. And what really happened in Anglebury? That's enough to keep me reading! Thanks, enjoying it a lot so far.
I'm behindtimes, obviously, so I won't say too much because I'm not sure if anyone reads tardy posts.
The physical descriptions were pretty challenging but very beautiful and satisfying. There were several paragraphs that I just read over and over the way one reads a poem. I read some aloud to my son, a poetry-lover. It's not surprising that the prose is so poetic because (I think) Hardy identified primarily as a poet despite his greater long-term fame as a novelist.
I thought Chapter III was mesmerizing. What I found so interesting is the Hardy's way of making it so grandly mythic. There are verbal allusions to Dante's hell, Greco-Roman and Norse gods, and Druidism. These references to so many different traditions don't seem sloppy or ill-conceived. Hardy shows that they all come from the same root and impulse.
Now for the great sentence: "the blazes … are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot."
I had two reactions: 1) Yes, Tom, that's exactly what I thought you were doing. Clever me. 2) Guy Fawkes Day?!! That's what this is? I was so surprised somehow. I didn't expect such an explanation. And, fun for me, I read this chapter on July 4. But this brings me to a question that maybe someone can answer:
Would the 1878 reader have known all along that this was Guy Fawkes Day before the Gunpowder Plot reference? Would an 1878 Englishman have recognized this manmade Hell on the heath before he was told?
And doesn't the Reddleman look like a devil? But that's a strange connection because he's such a dear.
Unlike some commenters, I was enchanted by the opening description of the landscape. It was rich, and I found it much more grounding as an opening to a novel than Our Mutual Friend's beginning. What I found interesting about this installment compared to the first installment of the Dickens is that I believed my disoriented feeling in OMF had to do with the way characters jumped around, but Hardy's novel doesn't even have "humanity appear upon the scene" until the second chapter. Even so, I felt instantly rooted in Egdon Heath, and because I was grounded in the setting, this felt like a coherent novel from the first chapter of the first installment. I think this is interesting for thinking about seriality. You have to have something to hold on to and have repeat in order to produce the repetition that is a serial. From the beginning of OMF, I didn't know what was being repeated, and so it didn't feel like a connected story. But Hardy's establishment of the scene of Egdon Heath provided an instant element to hold on to in the following chapters and installments. Looking forward to exploring this mysterious and enchanting setting in the next installment!
Several atmospheric aspects of the first installment of The Return of the Native initially struck me as paradoxical in relation to serial publication. Specifically, Hardy’s focus on intensity by way of lingering, stillness, and stasis seems like it should be directly at odds with the rapid clip of modernity and the serial publication formation. For example, he describes the heath as a place “full of watchful intentness,” and he later explains that “[i]ntensity” in this space “was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant” (9, 11). This suggests a meditative intensity arrived at through focus and stillness, through solemnity rather than sparkling conversation, activity, and movement. Later, he describes the way in which travelers through this space “frequently plod on for miles without speech: contiguity amounts to a tacit conversation where, otherwise than in cities, such contiguity can be put an end to on the merest inclination, and where not to put an end to it is intercourse itself” (14). In other words, as long as two people are traveling side-by-side, the mere fact of proximity between the individuals constitutes a form of discourse. Therefore, Hardy is offering us discourse that, like the heath, possesses a form of solemn intensity and focus. My mind went from this to thinking about the intensity of focus required to read a text as dense as Hardy’s, and from there, I realized that seriality actually lends itself ideally to Hardy’s style of writing because it gives the reader more time to linger with the text, to travel alongside the speaker in a tacit dialogue that is, in fact, silent, for the reader and the writer only ever exchange words across the silent space of the page. In a sense, the space of Hardy’s page becomes another heath through which the reader and writer travel together without ever uttering a sound.
I did not feel able to engage with the first installment until the characters' conversation took off near the bonfire. The description before that felt more like a narrative pause--which is unusual because it starts the installment. Why begin with a delay? However, Hardy's structure (at least so far) seems to incorporate delays: setting before characters, figures on the hill before they are named and their actions are explained, a bonfire before its significance is revealed. This could connect to the delays that are built into serialization--though I still question why the novel would start this way.
I agree with Amy that Egdon Heath felt like a place that was "out of time" or out of modern time, perhaps. I did feel a little disoriented throughout this first number, in space, in plot, in conversations. I understood what was happening only belatedly, and I felt almost completely unable to predict where the rest of the plot would go. This was different from the experience of reading something like The Doctor's Wife, or even Our Mutual Friend, in which I at least had some guesses as to what would happen to the characters as the plot progressed.
I also was interested in the experience of reading multiple serials at once, as many Victorian readers I think did. I know this was published more than a decade after Our Mutual Friend, but when Hardy described Venn as a being like a "bird of prey," I immediately thought of Hexam in Our Mutual Friend. I wonder if reading serials that were published concurrently would yield interesting insights about intertextuality.
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