Friday, 6 June 2014

EUSTACIA’s TRAGEDY

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.”