POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 47-Epilogue) for 24 Feb. 1872: Serial Finale!

Dear Serial Readers,

And we come to the end! Lucilla and Oscar have been reunited, Nugent has been banished (as well as frozen), and Mme P has declared her charge a happy woman.

When I began this post, I felt compelled to tie up all the questions we’ve raised into similarly neat bows, but I don’t think even Doctor Grosse would be capable of such a comprehensive job. Instead, I’ll raise a few more ongoing questions/notes, and invite everyone who has read along to share how their early question have been inflected by the novel’s final chapters.

I found myself most drawn to the novel’s ongoing engagement with Lucilla as the finder and provider of evidence. These chapters often refer back to her earlier “experiment” with Oscar and Nugent, in which she employed her “own way” to tell the difference between the twins. On the one hand (pun intended), we have the Doctor insisting that her time of getting “thrill-tingles” is long past, because she has seen and has thus lost the “superfine-feelings” available only to the blind. At the same, she proves him wrong only one chapter later! There she is, feeling Oscar’s face and recognizing him as not-Nugent. This isn’t to suggest that the novel supports Lucilla’s assertion of her powers, because it stages a complex debate about whether she can “see” with her hands, but rather that it also doesn’t support the Doctor. Lucilla is still her own evidence gatherer.

We might also think about Mme P’s analysis of Lucilla’s degenerating vision through her degenerating handwriting. In this case, Lucilla is once again not the evidence-gatherer, but the provider of evidence for other characters who want to diagnose her changing condition. How do these moments of analysis fit into what Susan identified as The Tyranny of Oversight? Not only does Mme P read the change in handwriting as the legible sign of illegible impairment, but she also reads Lucilla’s new handwriting as a shift in identity. This new writer is “a stranger,” regardless of her consistent tone, because the form of her characters has changed. How does Mme P map the mutation in written form onto the form of Lucilla’s body? To what extent does the novel corroborate or complicate that mapping?

Finally, I wonder at the ways that the novel ends in an attempted placement of blame. Doctor Grosse insists that his eye surgery has not failed in recreating her sight. Instead, he tells Lucilla, “it is you who have failed to take care of your nice new eyes when I gave them to you.” Even if Lucilla doesn’t see her regained blindness as a failure, and if other doctors disagree with Grosse’s opinion, the novel gives him the space to blame Lucilla for her own disablement. Grosse neatly embodies the medical model of disability (as an individual problem which requires a cure to regain individual wholeness) while it was still being created, but is he represented as correct? Are Lucilla and her caregivers portrayed as having ruined her opportunity for vision or are the attempts to shelter her eyes and mind portrayed as ill founded from the start?

Thanks to everyone for reading along, and I look forward to your thoughts on the end of our odd little adventure!

Serially Satisfied,

Rachel

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 44-46), installments #22-24

Dear Serial Readers,

Each of these three chapters appeared as a separate installment when first published. Is there a suspenseful break after each of these chapters accordingly?

As for general observations about the Ramsgate seaside chapters 44 and 45 and Lucilla's journal, I have two comments that I'm titling "The Tyranny of Sight" and "The Tyranny of Oversight."

Getting to use her eyes is a confusing matter for Lucilla.  She doesn't "feel" the same about "Oscar" (who everyone else knows, except of course the aunt who'd never seen the Dubourg twins, is really Nugent), but she can't quite figure this out.  When she was blind, Lucilla seemed rather confident and bold in the department of desires, but not so now where her vision is beset by mists--both optically and the deception plotting of Nugent.  I'm less interested in the deception and traded places of the twins than in how Lucilla's sense of regained sight is rendered--and it's not an advantage for her.  Even her handwriting was better when she was blind and not confused by mists.  The Tyranny of Sight.

Mme. P's frequent interruptions of her supposedly faithful transcription of Lucialla's journal while in Ramsgate is the Tyranny of Oversight.  I get that she's filling in plot points, that she's showing us what Lucilla didn't know--such as the encounter between Grosse and Nugent--but still, these asides and reflexive commentaries take up pages sometimes.  It almost seems like the delays are padding to get to a particular length.  I also don't discern a clear, distinct voice from Lucilla's journal writing in contrast to P's voice, and I know from many other novels that Collins is able to devise very different voices for first-person narrators (such as Marian Halcombe and Walter Hartright and the peevish Frederick Fairlie, just from one serial).  Somehow Lucilla's voice seems too consistent with Pratolungo's narration which of course is the filter.  Voice and vision are less individual and instead rather misty. 

Time for finishing up this serial!  I guess that Lucilla and the real Oscar will be reunited before the elopement is completed, and that Nugent will be banished somehow. 

Rachel will see us through to the end next week!

Serially sighted,
Susan

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 39-43), installments #19-21

Dear Serial Readers,

We are nearing the end, my friends and as we do so, I’m struck by this section’s explicit focus on reading, writing, and –particularly—letters. With the action rapidly drawing to a close, we have Mme. P pulled away to deal with family matters that seem to have no narrative purpose except to put her at a deliberate distance. Why is it so important that we read this section of the novel via letters and, discussion of letters, journal entries, and narrative interpretation? I’m not sure I have the answer to that question, but I can offer a couple themes that the shift brings to the fore:

1.     It further highlights the limitations of Lucilla’s new vision. At first, she cannot read or write because her doctor insists that it (like the truth) will ruin her eyes. Then when she can read and write, being able to see doesn’t give her any greater judgmental power. She can now write with her own hand, rather than relying on an aid, but her caretakers are just as capable of concealing the truth as they were when she was blind. In fact, they might be even better.

2.     Delay. Susan has already spoken about the role of postponement and delay in the novel as we wait between plot points and serial publications. By making the characters wait between letter deliveries, they too are forced to keep the pace that their form of communication allows. And even then, the novel is liable to hold back a key piece of evidence, like Miss Batchford and her stalled letter. We might not like it, but we are told that it is good for us. We have to wait until we’re ready.

3.     Lucilla gets a turn. The novel’s turn to letters and journals also represents the first opportunity for the protagonist to tell her own story in her own words. We can certainly talk about how successful that opportunity is for Lucilla, but it does represent at least a partial change in perspective.

At this point we know that Lucilla is no longer afraid of blue faces and at least Mme P thinks that Nugent is ashamed. Will Nugent follow his better angels, will Oscar reappear from the ether, or is Lucilla going to have to suss out the deception?

For next week: chapters 44-46.

Serially yours,

Rachel

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 36-38) Installments #16-18

Dear Serial Readers,

More delays!  Will Lucilla's sight be restored during her convalescence, and if so, to what extent? And which of the twin brothers will prevail as Lucilla's suitor and, eventually, husband? The good/evil binary that Mme P constructs in her story of Oscar and Nugent keeps blurring and shifting.  Now is each one"good" inasmuch as he selflessly wants the other brother to succeed with Lucilla?  But, when will she see the light of who they are and how will she respond to the deception?

I'm struck by how the narrative seems to play with the cliche of "love at first sight."  Nugent says as much--"from the moment I first saw that heavenly creature...."  And the reverse seems true as well with Lucilla recoiling from Oscar's blue face at her very first sight of him.  However, there is a great deal of questioning whether vision is a reliable sense for knowing the world. Not only does Lucilla claim that her sense of touch is superior to sight, but also the narrator draws the comparison between the surface view or "outer covering which is physically wholesome" with "the inner nature which is morally diseased." Perhaps only Jicks's vision is reliable--or is it?

Does vision also function as a disability to see beyond a surface appearance in some respects? I'm also struck by Oscar's blue face, a kind of social disability that is the side-effect of his cure of a life-threatening disability of seizures.

For next week: chapters 39-43.  We're approaching the end!

Serially stalled,

Susan

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 32-35)--installments #13-15

Dear Serial Readers,

It’s getting exciting folks! Lucilla can see, and now she can find new ways of troubling Mme P’s careful plans.

What did you make of the moment when our protagonist first takes off her bandages? First, before she can even make any plot-changing decisions, Mme P has the chance to see her eyes. They’re different, to be sure, but this “new life of sight” isn’t necessarily a positive addition to her face. Mme P describes the change as irradiating her face with “an awful and unearthly light.” Earlier in the novel, we get multiple characters comparing Lucilla’s perceptive abilities to superhuman or unearthly powers, but now her ability to see is also something other than human? Which is it? What is it about the change from blindness to vision that so transfigures her face for our narrator?

Another trend that I noticed in this particular group of chapters was a concern about Lucilla’s potential intimacy with her German doctor. Herr Grosse, we learn is not a man who follows strict medical boundaries. He does everything “by impulse,” which sounds quite a bit like our Lucilla, and then, when he comes back from London, Mme P finds them together in a suspicious position. He sits, “gloating” over the tools of his trade, while she stoops over his body, one hand placed “familiarly on his shoulder” and the other “deftly fingering one of his horrid instruments.” Scandalous, no?

I haven’t seen any implications that Herr Grosse and Lucilla could or would do anything to seriously damage her virtue, but Mme P isn’t the only one disturbed by implications of their intimacy. Later, we see Oscar irritable over the fact that the doctor can sit on a couch and speak quietly with his ladylove, while he’s forced to wait elsewhere. Even as Mme P insists, “it was plainly impossible” for Oscar to be jealous of a man “of Grosse’s age and personal appearance,” the very fact that she has to say so renders the threat oddly real.

We might also consider connecting the Herr Grosse threat with the central sexual duplicity of the novel. For Lucilla, Oscar and Nugent trade places, which means that a woman with unusually low physical boundaries could place herself in a sexual context with a man who isn’t her fiancé. At this point, we don’t know how the switch will play out. Perhaps it will all be resolved before Nugent and Lucilla have any opportunities for hanky panky, but for now, the threat remains. What are we to make not only of the fact that Lucilla is in constant sexual danger, but that the danger seems to increase when she gains her sight?

For next week: chapters 36-38. I’m looking forward to a bumpy ride!

Serially yours,

Rachel

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 26-31)--installments 10-12

Dear Serial Readers,

The plot thickens--can we *see* where things are headed?  Interesting in *light* of Rachel's observations about the unknown causes of Lucilla's (whose name means 'light') blindness that in these chapters we learn that cataracts developed during her first year of life.  Can these cataracts be removed and sight restored?  We have two different professional opinions: yes (Grosse) and no (Sebright--another interesting name that embeds visuality).  And if Lucilla's vision is restored,
will she prefer the "light" twin over the "dark" one?

I had thought that if Lucilla were to be able to see the faces of these brothers, she might still shrink from Nugent's "blue face" (as she's been led to believe) and prefer Oscar's complexion because "light" and "dark" could only have been for her abstract (or social) concepts, but without a physical dimension.  However, now that it's disclosed that Lucilla can distinguish between (to quote Herr Grosse) "nice-light" and "horrid-dark," perhaps (if her sight is restored) she will be able to understand that Oscar has the blue face and that she's been deceived. In any case, all this attention complicates the matter of prejudice to dark and light faces as much more than a physical quality. 

Lucilla certainly seems to enjoy more freedom with her sexual desires than sighted women of her day and class, given her boldness showering Oscar with kisses and directing him to hug and kiss her. Even our French narrator is horrified.  To me, these scenes suggest the advantages of Lucilla's freedom from the gaze--given that she doesn't know what it means to be looked at and assessed accordingly.

For next week (and Rachel's lead post): chapters 32-35). I can't wait to see what happens if Lucilla sees!

Serially looking forward,
Susan

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 20-25)--installments #7-#9 (Octobert 1871 in Cassell's Mag)

Dear Serial Readers,

I’ve loved reading the comments on each section! Sometimes I wish we could all just meet up and talk about Lucilla and Oscar over cookies and tea.

To continue our conversation about forms of perception and knowledge, I’ve found myself interested in the ways in which the text shows Lucilla gathering evidence. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting her own claim that she can sense dark colors, the novel shows the many sources that Miss Finch uses to learn about the world and then allows the other characters to debate her capacity. For example, in the first scene where Mme P sees Oscar and Lucilla together after the former’s transformation, Lucilla insists that she’s being denied information because of the unnatural speed of Oscar’s beating heart. Again and again we see her selecting evidence from the world around her and using it to fill in what others might perceive as gaps.

Contrast Lucilla’s search for “proof” with the rush of unfiltered senses in Mr. Finch’s horrid reading of Hamlet, and Lucilla’s efforts of selection appear even more stark. Where Mme P seems to experience every part of the awful scene simultaneously, from the sucking baby to her own distracted legs, Miss Finch has learned to isolate those aspects of her surroundings that will be useful for her understanding.

I wonder, in particular, how the mock experiment that she conducts with Oscar and Nugent (with the hand holding and the transfer of “energy”) compares to “experiments” performed in freak shows to illustrate the superhuman powers of blind performers. I know that such performances were popular during the late-Victorian era, but I’m not sure how closely that scene echoes those demonstrations.

Finally, I was struck by the novel’s refusal to provide an easy narrative to explain Lucilla’s blindness. When Nugent starts to dig into the possible ways that Miss Finch may have become blind, both Mme P and the novel deny him the comprehensible narrative that he (and we) are looking for. There was no apparent accident or disease. In fact, we can’t see any causal agent that could allow us to turn her blinding into a legible story. If we want to give narrative signification Lucilla’s blindness, we are going to have to do it on our own, because the novel isn’t going to help us.

For next week: installments 10-12, chaps 26-31. Susan will provide our lead post.

Serially yours,

Rachel

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 11-19), serial installments 4-6 in Cassell's Magazine, Oct. 1871

Dear Serial Readers,

Great comments on the first three installments! One idea I have links up with Barbara's several interesting observations about suspense and plot and time. It seems to me that the ends of each serial installment are marked by some dramatic incident designed to bring readers back for more: Jicks's white frock with the bloody words "help me!" and Oscar's epileptic fit, and finally with the sixth installment (ends with chapter 19), Oscar's treatment which will turn him into a "blue man."  I'm curious how serial format (how the novel was first written with serial publication in mind--rather than volume publication) maps onto serial forms within the story--serial crimes, serial characters (the Dubourg twins, for instance, and then the unnamed "blue man" in Paris as a prequel to Oscar treated with silver nitrate), serial spaces (even with uneven borders or location) and other possibilities.

Barbara's comment on how the two parts of the house don't align (an observation also about forms and formats) dovetails with how topsy-turvy some elements of the story seem: Oscar's feminine hyper-nervousness, Lucilla's unfeminine lack of modesty and her boldness (which Mme P links to her lack of physical sight--clearly there are advantages for a woman who does not see the male gaze!), Jicks's wandering propensities and her precocious perception about the strange men who turn into robbers, and even Mme P's aged father who uses cosmetics, false hair and teeth, and even "stays" to make himself look younger for a woman. All these are inversions of some kind from the usual!

Tamara's observation about Mme P's appropriating the male (and narrating?) gaze is intriguing.  If the novel seems to be discrediting Mme P's (masculine-linked) rationality, is it also opening up other possibilities for knowing the world?   Collins seems to explore how Lucilla's acute sense of hearing and touch do matter, sensory knowledge offset by the narrator's litany of "my poor Miss Finch."  Lucilla's blindness is not simply an impediment--instead, she's able to "see" in the dark, to apprehend the world (and people) around her in valuable ways. Mme P even notes how Lucilla leads Oscar around the house "as if it was he that was blind, and she who had the use of her eyes."  There are also ways in which physical sight seems inferior to insight or other forms of knowledge--take Mr. Finch who only sees himself, and Mrs. Finch whose "watery blue eyes" don't seem to register much. Yet the language of vision, eyes, and sight seems to appear on nearly every page. Perhaps it's only my heightened awareness of this sensory capacity that has alerted me to how contingent the narration is on a lexicon of sight.

On the treatment with silver nitrate and the blue-black complexion--this also seems a doubling or kind of serial from another Collins serial--Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone, serialized only a few years before this one.   Collins associates some physical disablements (or "disfigurement") with immaterial capacities.

I'm also curious about how Mme. P's "revolutionary" politics via her her husband matter to this story--I guess we'll "see"!

For next week: installments 7-9, chapters 20-25. Rachel will provide our lead post.

Serially yours,
Susan

POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 1-10; serial installments 1-3; Cassell's Magazine in Sept. 1871)

Dear Serial Readers,

Welcome to the world of Poor Miss Finch! The first ten chapters (and the first three installments) introduce many of our key players, but first we have to get through Madame Pratolungo. Who on earth is this woman and why is she our narrator?

I was drawn to the specific, antagonistic rhetorical relationship that she sets up with her readers. We know from chapter one that she does not think of herself as holding the same values as her implied audience. Where she is “ultra liberal,” we are “monarchy-people, sitting fat and contented under tyrants.” Moreover, she sets up a similarly divergent relationship with the provincial, English characters that fill the rest of the novel. Why, I wonder, is this person our guide to the world of the novel? Why do we need a woman who is both completely certain in her views and frequently wrong to be our guide? She explains why she’s such a proper companion for Lucilla, but what is it about her that makes her our fit companion?  Why does she get to translate this world for us, much like she attempts to translate the world for Miss Finch?

We might want to consider how Madame Pratolungo’s role as the narrator relates to Oscar’s narrative of near-incarceration. In “The Perjury of the Clock” we learn that he was almost convicted of a murder because of mistaken evidence, or more precisely, because of a mistaken reading of evidence. The case against Oscar seemed incontrovertible, based on the given interviews and material evidence, until the housecleaner’s story came to light. If we add in fact that two of the ten chapter titles are “Candlelight View of the Man” and “Daylight View of the Man,” the novel seems to set up a discussion around accuracy and individual perception. If the same set of evidence can be understood in two different ways, is one of the two options necessarily correct? When and where is there a right way of seeing, both metaphorically and literally?

Next time, look forward to Susan’s post on chapters 11-18, which include “Discoveries at Browndown” and another appearance of my beloved Jicks.

Serially yours,

Rachel

New Serial Reading Adventure: POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins--starting week of April 21, 2014

Dear Serial Readers,

Please join in reading Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch, first serialized in Cassell's Magazine in 26 parts (from Sept. 1871 to Feb. 1872). To speed up our serial reading schedule, we'll aim for three installments per week, beginning the week of April 21, 2014.

The first three installments include the first 10 chapters (with the serial divisions after chapters 4, 7, 10). You might use the Oxford World's Classics edition of the novel, or you may read it online by downloading Poor Miss Finch

Rachel Herzl-Betz will join me in this serial reading adventure by sharing the lead posts.  We'll alternate in some fashion, so stay tuned!  Please share this website link!

Serially starting soon,

Serial Susan

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, #11, Book Fifth, chaps. 5-8 (Belgravia 1878)

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

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE #10 Book Fifth, chaps. 1-4 (Belgravia, Oct. 1878)

Dear Serial Readers,

I'm going to leave comments on this particular installment to others, and instead answer the question: why read this 1878 initial serial publication of this novel?

Thanks to the Oxford UP edition, based on the 1878 edition, I can offer some observations. Hardy revised his novels, this one in particular, for the 1895 edition and again for the 1912 edition.  The later versions bear the marks of his more developed sense of Wessex and the parallels between his fictional names and actual places in Dorset and surroundings.  Egdon Heath of the original serial version is much more indistinct and imprecise as a setting; even the map of Wessex Hardy used in the later editions differ from the 1878 edition, although I'm not sure if the map appeared in Belgravia with the installments.  Also, while the divisions into six books appears in the magazine version of the novel, there are no book titles like "The Three Women" or "The Fascination" or "The Discovery." Instead there are abstracts of a few sentences as headnotes and previews for the installment.  You can find these in Simon Gatrell's "Significant Revisions in the Text" section at the back of the Oxford edition.

It might be interesting to consider how the abstracts, along with the illustrations that appeared in the original magazine version, work to frame and guide reading the novel through these punctuated parts separated by a month.  Beyond this, though, I think the earlier haziness of the heath in this 1878 version captures what I'd call Hardy's sense of a serial past and present--how Egdon Heath bears traces of a recorded, historical past (through proper names of people and events), but also to a past that's more inchoate, perhaps like the deep history of the geological record and evolutionary theory.

I'll be posting on the remaining three segments very soon!  Any thoughts about what happens in this installment?

Serially situated,
Susan

The Return of the Native #8 Book Fourth, chaps. 1-4 (Belgravia Aug. 1874)

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

The Return of the Native #7 (Book Third, The Fascination, chaps. 5-8)

Dear Serial Readers,

I returned to the very opening of this serial, where there is a long unwinding of the scene of Egdon Heath even before characters and dialogue appear--calm, poetic description.  In this installment, in the thick of storylines, the balance shifts--dialogue and building suspense between the triangulated desires of mother, son, and his lover.  The conflict between Mrs. Y and her son over what he will do with his life, and his choice of wife, is sharp and paired with Eustacia's demands on him--and the rush to marry.  Interspersed are the scenes of landscape, Egdon almost the silent character, the presence that is something like a witness of human dramas.  And I love how Hardy makes this environment out of deep evolutionary time--"The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period."

A corollary to this uniform, abiding presence of the landscape with its deep past is one character--the Reddleman, who seems Thomasin's guardian angel despite her declining his proposal (and now she's married to Wildeve).  The movement of those 100 guineas from Mrs. Y to Christian (who is instructed to give half to Clym and half to Thomasin) to Wildeve to Venn who then gives them all to Thomasin--the "red automaton" is an interesting fixture whose home is constant movement through the landscape.   At the close of "The Fascination" are two young married couples, but neither seems to have a rosy future, although Thomasin has those guineas. 

Serially yours, Susan

The Return of the Native #6 (Book Third, The Fascination, chaps. 1-4, June 1878)

Dear Serial Reader(s),

Finally the word I've been thinking as the KEY to this novel has appeared early in this installment: anachronism!  Yet it's about Clym's beauty and men's physicical beauty as such, whereas women's beauty "may not be an anachronism." Does Hardy have in mind classical sculpture? In any case, the novel continues to flood the descriptive passages with so many allusions to the past--the near, far, and even prehistoric pasts in this setting of "the rural world" which is not ready for "forwardness."  How about Susan Nonesuch's needle attack on Eustacia in church? So much for churchgoers!  Good reason to stay clear!  This episode is also an amusing example of the superstitious view of Eustacia as a kind of witch (variation of contemporary view of her as what...a femme fatale?).  An even more interesting anachronism is the narrator calling words (to capture love and passion) as "the rusty implements of a bygone, barbarous epoch."

Such an unusual proposal scene set during a lunar eclipse--E's melancholy thoughts on love as fickle, not eternal--and then she asks Clym to talk about Paris--Geographical cure!  Historical romance!  The muted Emma Bovary allusion too-- French and English views on suicide: "In France it is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this stage: in England we do much better or much worse as the case may be."  What does *that* mean?  The "stage" here is about youthful disillusionment--when "in a young man's life... the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear."  Yet Eustacia seems to have a more abiding sense of this grimness.  I'd say the French conclusion would be her suicide, while the English would be Clym's.  Let's see what happens....

One thread of this set of chapters that seemed so "modern" is the mother/son relationship--how Mrs. Y has high hopes for Clym to escape the limits of the "rural" life and have a career in Paris, and Clym's interest in returning to his heath homeland with his quasi-socialist ambitions to equalize classes by becoming a schoolteacher (which he then modifies to ditch the poor for the wealthier), and then of course his mother's suspicions and jealousy of Eustacia as having bewitched her son.   Mrs. Y, despite her superior class position, is not so far removed from Susan Nonesuch in how they see Eustacia.  Clym sees too the irony that despite the tension between his mother and lover, they both want the same--for Clym to return to Paris.

Next time: chaps. 5-8 in "The Fascination" section.

Serially yours,
Susan

The Return of the Native #5 (Book Second The Arrival, chaps 6-8, Belgravia May 1878)

Dear Serial Readers,

If you like fast pacing and lots of dialogue and external action, then this serial is probably a challenge for you.  I'm enjoying Hardy's luxuriously slow unfolding of the world of Egdon Heath, and the meditations on and about characters across this desolate landscape. As promised at the end of #4, this installment opens with the meeting of Clym and Eustacia, whose mummer disguise as the Turkish Knight doesn't fool him.  I suppose the psychic chemistry of Eustacia (with her intense and imaginative passions--after all, she's "had undoubtedly begun to love him" already) and Clym (with his "wearing habit of meditation" and "inner strenuous") promises some fireworks later on, but not yet. I'm also struck by how Hardy uses the word "depression" to describe both Clym and Eustacia. It's interesting that the heath seems to give Eusatica more freedom to roam, as her grandfather tells her she "may walk on the heath night or day as you choose," but at the same time much isolation and time for meditation.

Not much excitement in the Wildeve and Thomasin match, after Eustacia clarifies that she's no longer interested in him.  What does interest me?  Reddleman Diggory Venn.  The chapter titled "A Coalition Between Beauty and Oddness" must surely refer to him!  His disinterested love for Thomasin, his kindness, his social status as quite malleable (he's educated, he could be a dairyman), his sensitivity to others are all part of his "beauty" along with his "obscure rubicundity of person"--love that word, "rubicundity"! What does this redness mean--how to read it?

Is it unusual for an unmarried woman to "give" the bride away, as Eustacia does Thomasin? 

Next up is Book Third, "The Fascination"--surely more on Clym and Eustacia: chaps. 1-4.

Serially yours,
Susan

The Return of the Native #4 (Book II, chaps. 1-5, Belgravia April 1878)

Dear Serial Readers,

"The Arrival"--the title of this second "book" section of the novel--is a lot of fanfare for Clym's return from Paris.  Like much else in the novel so far, there's some slow building up to his appearance on the scene (as "the owner of the awakening voice"), which is filtered through Eusatcia's eager eyes and ears (yes, eavesdropping, as Maura mentioned last time).  Her situational boredom and depression for which infatuation seems the only available cure is primed for Clym's arrival.  I do see shades of Emma Bovary here, with her great desire for "a sufficient hero," this one straight from Paris. Her plot to play the Turkish Knight in the mummers' traveling Christmas show is a bit of amusing cross-dressing.  The segment ends with her searching for her love object's "form"--will he notice her?  Do we care?

Like Maura mentioned with the last segment, there doesn't seem much "love" in any abiding sense (between and among Thomasin, Wildeve, Eusatacia, and who knows yet about Clym Y.), with the exception of Diggory Venn, our local Reddleman.  Why does he get such top billing in the decent humanity chart?  Why, as Maura asked too, are we reminded that he was once a farmer, and not always a reddleman, and that his class position was once better? 

I don't know, but I see Hardy trying to reconcile clashes or what seem disparate intersections through the chance encounters and remarkable scenery of Egdon Heath. Mostly I see Hardy trying to undo the puzzle of past and present, of the past's status in the present.  My favorite sentence in this episode comes at the end of the paragraph that begins with Eustacia's contempt for mummers and mumming: "This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction." Hardy's narrator, unlike Eustacia Vye, seems to value customs of the past as "a fossilized survival" over an imitation or "spurious reproduction." Maybe that's why he's not writing a historical novel here set in the distant past, but trying instead to capture that past through place, through the full landscape of Egdon Heath which includes the bonfires and the mummers with their "unweeting manner of performance."  "Unweeting" is apparently an archaic word for "unwitting"--funny that Hardy's language has scattered fossils of past words too.

As a stalwart serial reader, I have been paying attention to how each installment concludes with some suspenseful edge--this one with Eustacia as Turkish Knight scanning the audience for Clym's form.  However, each chapter seems to end with a suspenseful note, as if to prod readers to turn the page, to continue on.  I'm wondering if the cliff edge of suspense at the end of a monthly installment is much higher than those that conclude chapters.

For next time: the rest of Book II, chaps. 6-8 (end of "The Arrival").

Serially suspended,
Susan

The Return of the Native #3 (Book 1, chaps. 8-11, Belgravia March 1878)

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

The Return of the Native #2 (book 1, chaps. 5-7, Belgravia Feb. 1878)

Dear Serial Readers,

It occurred to me that original readers might have needed to review an installment given the one month break in publishing this novel.  I reread this installment and enjoyed it so much more the second time around!  I love the gradual revelation of the monumental Eustacia Vye who communicates with her lapsed lover Damon Wildeve by bonfire and carries around a telescope and an hour glass (because she takes "a peculiar pleasure" in seeing time "glide away").  Hardy describes within Eustacia's brain "were juxtaposed the strangest assortment of ideas, from old and from new"--and he also compares her to various figures from the past, Marie Antoinette and Mrs. Siddons (which Hardy changed in a later edition of this novel to Sappho), the Witch of Endor, and the Sphinx.

Since the novel opens on Guy Fawkes' Night (with bonfire celebrations), I suppose we should expect the volatile treason of Damon throwing off Thomasin for Eustacia in the next installments.  But are we to see Eustacia as a revolutionary female Guy Fawkes?  I don't, and Hardy says as much-- how this environment "made a rebellious woman saturnine."  Still, I'm intrigued with her a heterogeneous character of diverse parts (like a serial, almost).

The way this installment ends makes me understand how some readers have linked Flaubert's Emma Bovary with Eustacia as a depressive type, languishing from boredom and half-baked romantic fantasies.  Like Emma, she's reduced to the meager materials in her world for giving life to those dreams--or "idealising Wildeve for want of a better object."

I promise to pick up the pace of our serial reading--next time the last four chapters (chaps. 8-11) of
this first book "The Three Women" (presumably Thomasina, her aunt Mrs. Yeobright, and Eustacia).
I'll post within a week!

Serially yours,
Susan

Return of the Native #1 (book 1, chaps 1-4, Belgravia Jan. 1878)

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