Dear Serial Readers,
Given many of your comments about Hardy's poetic style, his hovering over the landscape and the slow drive of plot, I found myself thinking about the alterations between description and dialogue, between the immersion in local scenery and the frenzy of the accelerating collisions between mother and son, mother and daughter-in-law, aunt and niece and nephew-in-law, and most of all the brewing adultery plot between Eustacia and Wildeve. I find both Mrs. Yeobright and Eustacia similar in their sense of feeling enclosed: one resigned to her limited life, but hoping to escape vicariously through her son's adventures in Paris, the other also dreaming of the Parisian geographical fix. But the men seem much more wedded to Egdon, and Clym adjusts downward his aspirations as a schoolteacher into the furze-cutter, much to the dread of his young wife who wishes to escape her constricting life.
Most part of the landscape seems the reddleman, Diggory Venn, who seems almost like the furze itself (fustian furze maybe), always hovering and seeing all--a kind of analogue for the narrator. Is this reddleman a troublemaker or a peacemaker, a protective spirit especially for his beloved Thomasin?
As the adultery plot heats up by the end of this installment, I'm thinking too of Madame Bovary although there are marked differences between Emma and Eustacia. Still, for both, romantic fantasies seem the only escape possible.
How will the landscape, Hardy's poetry of place, work with or against all the human strife and drama and especially the unraveling marriage plots? Tune in.
Serially yours,
Susan
3 comments:
These people seem to live in a primordial unchanging landscape that is maintained by almost courtly interrelations and the unspoken pagan pleasure of fire--except that modern tropes such as the railroad, the New World (America), Napoleon, and professional expertise take their collective place alongside the rustic intercourse. There is clear class stratification, and a profession can either stigmatize a character permanently or allow the character to move up to a notion of professional gentry (working with paint vs. engineering).
I am very interested in Eustacia’s foreignness, in so far as she seems to be prone to passionate emotional extremes. She seems out of place to me so far. She professes love in a way that it’s clear she is aware of courtly pretentions. Yet, she breaks courting rules—within reason.
I wonder how many more rules will she break?
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?
My comment considers #8 and #9, and since we do not yet have a discussion board for the latter I thought I would post it here. This is a word of warning to any reader who has not yet read the next serial installment and does not want any spoilers!
Susan's recognition elsewhere on the blog of Hardy's sense of serial time - of human pasts but also of
deep geological and evolutionary histories - has prompted me to think about something I will tentatively call Hardy's "serial scale." In number 8, Yeobright's purblindness effects a reduced visual range that renders his daily life "a curious microscopic sort," producing a new consciousness of the minute world of insects (244). This is set against Eustacia and her trusty telescope, who is in this installment figured as "like the planet Mercury surrounded by the lustre of sunset" (253). But in the following serial issue, both the miniscule and the astronomical are experienced by a single character: Mrs. Yeobright. At the outset of number 9, the mother regards the "independent worlds of ephemerons" and the indistinct creatures swarming in shallow puddles of mud (266-67). She continues to take notice of that which habitually goes unnoticed, later contemplating a lively colony of ants: "To look down upon them was like observing a city street from the top of a tower" (278). Immediately after this observation, Mrs. Yeobright shifts her gaze towards the sky, reminding her of the "earthly ball to which she was pinioned"; and her very thinking is figured as moving "like the path of a meteor" (279). Like Eustacia, she is also imagined as a planetary body: Johnny Nunsuch clings to her "with the tendency of a minute body to gravitate towards a greater" (275). Hardy puts forward a series of scale-worlds: the minute, the human, the astronomic. Does this encourage us to read the part-whole relationship differently - wherein everything is a "part" of something bigger than itself, and yet also a "whole" world unto itself?
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