Dear Serial Readers,
I was startled to find the word "Wisconsin" in this installment! How surprising that Damon Wildeve proposes that he and Eustacia elope there where he has "kindred" (toward the end of chap. 9). The installment increases the choices for Eustacia's relocations away from the heath she hates (or loves to hate, and possibly can't quite give up altogether--): Wisconsin, Budmouth. The place of coming attraction is in the installment's last line--Paris, "that rookery of pomp and vanity." Or at least, the coming attraction of the next character Clym Yeobright is returning from Paris.
I love how Hardy juxtaposes places and times, along with the love interests, and how the appeal of these places and people is contingent on how other people desire them. Like you Serial Readers, I also have wondered about the significance of all the classical references. I read these (and more appear in this installment--Candaules, Dido and Carthage) as part of Hardy's conception of time (and place) where the ancient past lurks behind the present scenery, especially Egdon Heath with its vestiges of other times. Hardy does something similar with references to nature and space--like the birds in early chap. 10, the courser as an "African truant" and the wild mallard who "brought with him an amplitude of northern knowledge. Glacial catastrophes, snowstorm episodes, glittery auroral effects, Polaris in the zenith, Franklin underfoot"--there's a lot of allusion packed in here!
What do you make of the reddleman and his reddle? When Venn objects that Mrs. Yeobright might dislike his redness, he claims his color isn't by birth. By claiming his redness isn't a matter of race, but transient occupation, of course he's trying to win some approval from Mrs. Y in his suit for Thomasin, but is there a larger issue about race, class, and social standing here?
In all the possibilities of marriage plots, what lies ahead? If Eustacia's passion for Damon Wildeve seems dampened by the possibility that Thomasina might be willing to accept someone else instead of him, will she now turn her (bon)fire to Clym, who awaits in the wings of the next installment? Or will she have two men to choose between?
Next time, we go to the second book, "The Arrival," chapters 1-5. I really do intend to pick up the serial reading pace, readers, so stay tuned later this coming week!
Serially suspicious,
Susan
3 comments:
1. I once read an essay by Auden in which he imagined a society whose main form of "news" transmission was gossip. This is true of Egdon Heath, as we see on Guy Fawkes Day. But more interesting and more unusual is the transmission of information by eavesdropping. In this section, the boy eavesdrops (involuntarily) on Eustacia & Wildeve and tells the Reddleman what he's heard; the Reddleman then goes and eavesdrops on them directly. Because I've read ahead, I can tell you that there's more of this eavesdropping to come. I can't think of any other book that uses this device so repeatedly.
2. What is striking to me about all the various love stories (at least as we've read so far), is how little love these people really have for each other. Eustacia admits to herself that she has spent time with Wildeve just because he's the best option around in the narrow world of Egdon Heath. He seems to have passion for her, but it's shallow enough that he can nearly marry Thomasin in preference to her, and his feelings for Thomasin in turn are even more shallow. We have little direct contact with Thomasin, so don't know much about her feelings, except that her main reason (after the "jilting") for wanting to marry Wildeve is to save face. And, meanwhile, among the whole group, the idea of a rival is the thing most likely to deepen the feelings that we'll have to call love or passion for now. Mrs. Yeobright makes sure that we understand this point as she tries to inflame Wildeve's interest in Tamsin by reporting the attentions of another suitor, and of course Eustacia's interests are deepened by her rivalry with Tamsin.
3. Diggory Venn strikes me as the most genuine lover, since after his rejection by Tamsin he changed his life and became a reddleman and thereby a person apart.
4. I love the Reddleman passages. There are the wonderful phrases such as the "Mephistopeliam visitant"; reddle leaves "the mark of Cain on any person who has handled it half an hour"; the reddleman as a boogieman used to scare children and his short-term replacement as chief boogieman by Napolean. I wonder if many of the things said about the Reddleman are really broader themes applicable to all the characters (and all of us?), like: reddle is "grow'd into my skin and won't wash out"; Venn was not born into it, "I took to it"; reddlemen choose their trade as a form of penance because they were "criminals for whose misdeeds other men had wrongly suffered."
5. One last observation about Venn: we are constantly reminded that he is physically attractive underneath his reddle and relatively well-born. Why?
About eavesdropping: I think there's much of it throughout nineteenth-century literature--certainly in Austen's PERSUASION there are some critical eavesdropping scenes, and I can think of many others--a plot strategy I've found intriguing. Why so much eavesdropping? Isn't that what we do as readers? Also, I agree about Diggory Venn, the Reddleman! He's the single character about whom there's something laudable and genuine (the major characters, at least).
In this installment, the recurrence of eavesdropping and interventions were prevalent. In the first chapter, Hardy gestures back toward the previous installment by showing the little boy return to Eustacia's bonfire, only to discover the presence of Wildeve and overhear the conversation of the couple. The boy then meets upon Diggory Venn to whom he innocently reveals the secret meeting of the lovers. Whereas the little boy had unintentionally stumbled upon the meeting of the two, Diggory deliberately returns to the spot the boy had described in order to witness for himself what would happen. He returns to the same spot every evening for a week, until the couple finally appear, speaking of the impending marriage of Thomasin and Wildeve. Unaware of an eavesdropper, the two reveal their feelings; Wildeve in particular reveals the ambivalence of his feelings "the scales are balanced so nicely that a feather would turn them" (83). This knowledge prompts Diggory to act on behalf of Thomasin and speak to Eustacia, in hopes that she will relinquish her hold on Wildeve. He then speaks to Mrs. Yeobright about his intentions toward Thomasin, but the old woman uses this news to manipulate Wildeve. Wildeve takes the news from Mrs. Yeobright and prods Eustacia into running away with him, but when she learns that Thonasin no longer wants Wildeve she bwgins to question her feelings for him as well.
Though the plot does not develop very much beyond the place we found ourselves in the last installment--that is, there is still no more certainty about Thomasin's and Wildeve's impending marriage, and whether they will go through with it-- there was a great deal of new information shared with the readers as well as the characters. There also seemed to be a snowball of effects fron the eavesdropping, interventions, and revelations in this installment, that still seems to be building. The installment ends with news about the impending visit of Mrs. Yeobright's son... from Paris. I could almost hear Eustacia's heart stop for a moment. It is quite clear that she only wants Wildeve because he seemed exciting and he could take her out of the heath (to Wisconsin of all places!). The end of this installment seems like a response to the end of the previous, where it is revealed that Eustacia's passion for Wildeve could be interrupted by "the advent of a greater man"--Clym Yeobright, pehaps? (71).
Post a Comment