Hardy’s “femme
fatale”, Eustacia Vye is perhaps one of the most alluring and fascinating
characters in The Return of the Native.
Hardy presents a complicated and enthralling character of Eustacia vye, a
genuine woman as opposed to an idealised one. Although Hardy gives proud,
selfish and egotistical potrait of Eustacia, yet he masterfully creates a
scenario in which she appears a tragic figure. Whereas Clym may be ‘the nicest’ among Hardy’s characters, it is the eccentric Eustacia
Vye which is the centre of the novel.
Even in the Hardy’s introduction of her, there is plenty to dwell upon.
The
first time her existence is mentioned,
it is through the idle gossip of the locals. She is described as “very strange in her ways”, some of
them accuse her of being a witch. Unlike Clym, whom the heath folk can at least
fathom in part, Eustacia is beyond their comprehension. Her whole personality
has a sleepy, dreamy cast to it. Though she is beautiful in an exotic way,
it is clear that she is not an easy person to live with or be around. Hardy takes
great pains to describe Eustacia in supernatural terms, as when he describes
her ‘the raw material of a divinity’
or as the
“Queen of Night” “whose eyes are pagan, are too fancy that a
whole winter does not contain darkness enough to form its shadow’ or when is described as profiled against the
sky, due to her stature "like an organic part of the entire
motionless structure,". She
is a woman of nineteen, tall, straight and graceful. Her very appearance
made Clym infatuated with her.
A Part of Eustacia’s tragedy lies in her own
impulsive nature. Eustacia always longs for passionate love: ”To be loved to madness” is her great desire. The crippling boredom
and feeling of being trapped within the heath leads Eustacia to crave an
unrealistic love, as “love was to her
the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days”. Hardy
states that “she seemed to long for the
abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover”.
Hardy goes on to say that these passions are those that make her “a model goddess”, but not quite “a model
woman.".
Eustacia, to some extent, is responsible for
her tragedy as she always vicillates between her love for Clym and her love for
Wildeve. Eustacia’s ability to quickly forget her love for Wildeve as soon as
an apparently superior possible opportunity presents itself is very telling.
Once she begins fixating on Clym Yeobright, Wildeve develops ‘the rayless outline of the sun through
smoked glass.’ All Eustacia ever really craves is a chance to escape the
Heath and lead the life she so arrogantly presumes to be her right.
Throughout the novel Eustacia is filled with romantic imagining of a man who
would “love her to madness” and take
her away from the heath. She falls in love with Clym as soon as she learns
Clym’s arrival. She imagines Clym as a born leader of man who would go with her
into the brilliant world – Paris which would give her the fullness of life and the freedom
she craves for. Even When
Clym proses Eustacia, Eustacia’s response is, “At present speak of Paris to me. Is there any place like it on earth?”
Eustacia’s
tragedy can also be understood by the incongruency of Clym-Eustacia relationship
and a comparative study of their contrastive natures. The former is a plodding
idealist, whereas the later is a fiery sensualist. Where Eustacia’s vision is a projective dream of the world, Clym’s is
an introspective dream. Whereas Clym is ‘inwoven with the heath’,
Eustacia is a complete alien on the heath, making her entrapment upon it even
more poignant. Her belief that she will be able to convince Clym to return to
Paris after they are married is another part of her downfall; she has too much
faith in her own power. Within two months of their marriage,
Eustacia’s vision of Clym is changed utterly; he is a fallen idol far from
being the Promethean lover,; he is ‘merely’ a furze-cutter, and seeing him as
such she feels degraded.
Eustacia Vye’s
relationship with Egdon Heath is crucial to a full understanding of both her as
a character and her place within the novel. Eustacia’s fiery nature
stands in direct contrast with the bleakness of the heath (or at least, the
bleakness which she herself perceives). Eustacia detests the heath, and her
words later ring eerily true when she says of the heath that “’tis my cross, my shame, and will be
my death!”. She is fatally out-of-place
and she doesn't quite fit into her surroundings. and it helps
to form quite an interesting interpretation of Eustacia as a ‘fish out of water’,
so to speak. Somehow, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that Eustacia’s
fate had been sealed always; she was doomed to exist and die on Egdon Heath, as
she herself predicted. Right at the end of the novel, Damon tells Eustacia “I see more and more that I have been your
ruin,” to which Eustacia replies “Not
you. This place I live in.” Vocal in her condemnation of Destiny, Eustacia is an
active demonstration of Hardy's theme in the novel. In the end audience finds
her resenting over her fortune:“How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has
been against me. I do not deserve my lot…I have been injured and blighted and
crushed by things beyond my control.”