Eustacia Vye, the heroine of
Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, does not, perhaps, immediately
come to mind when we think of the concept of Silence. Eustacia Vye is anything
but silent. She is the grand expression of transcendental nature worship as
well as the desire of romantic exploration. The sense-of-place dichotomy, to be
one with nature while at the same time trying to transcend it, lies inherent in
Eustacia:
“The
solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy tune still
played on the dead heathbells. She did not turn her head to look at a group of
dark creatures further on, who fled from her presence as she skirted a ravine
where they fed. They were about a score of the small wild ponies known as
heath-croppers. They roamed at large on the undulations of Egdon, but in
numbers too few to detract much from the solitude.
The
pedestrian noticed nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction was afforded
by a trivial incident. A bramble caught hold of her skirt and checked her
progress. Instead of putting it off and hastening along, she yielded herself up
to the pull, and stood passively still. When she began to extricate herself, it
was by turning round and round, and so unwinding the prickly switch. She was in
a desponding reverie.” (VI. pars. 17-18).
Here we see Eustacia the
Mystic reveling in the natural environment that defines her, a “desponding
reverie.” As the story progresses, we feel her desire for removal into a new,
more exciting place than the lot to which she is born. But these introductory
paragraphs define Eustacia’s character at its root essence, the oneness with
the heath that can only dislodge herself from its brambles in a sympathetic
dance
We who read of Eustacia become
enamored of her solitary position on the heath, where even the ponies who roam
in groups cannot break the silence, the windy tunes of the wind to which
Eustacia pays no attention. Through Hardy’s prose, the reader creates a character
of transcendence so imbued in her environment as to become one with it. The
initial response of any perceiver, I believe, is to feel uncomfortable that
they are having to create the art rather than the artist. But the artist, Hardy
in this case, asks the perceiver to do more than that. The perceiver needs to
be a mystic along with Eustacia, to travel into the “cloud of unknowing,” to
search for the silence.
Eustacia Vye is a mystic. Yet
she is the bold conqueror of the world outside of that which she knows. Her
irony comes in the fact of her using the power from the love she feels for the
hero, Clym, the titular “Native,” as he attempts to return to the environment
from which he once fled. She wants him to take her away to the new lands, show
her the discoveries he has made, and make further discoveries with him. But he
is resigned to returning to his roots. He sees in her the Silence and the
transcendence of the Nature he once left, but now wants to re-acquire. Thus,
her environment proclaims her in its essence and, at the same time, imprisons
her.
The ”Silence” of this early
modernist novel (1878) becomes a transition from the angst of Transcendentalism
to the preoccupation with “Silence” by the postmodernists of the 1960s. Again,
we run into definitions. Lyotard defined his “postmodernism” in the late 1970s
but was writing about a development that flowered in the 1960s. The
“Counterculture” of that era is, in many ways, an outgrowth of the move away
from Romanticism inherent in Eustacia Vye – a move away that at the same time
is an immersion. And today, half a century beyond Lyotard, we still read of
Eustacia and see the continuing presence of the angst of a place at once loved
for its rugged beauty, its predisposition towards mystical immersion, and its impetus
as a place from which to flee.
The Eustacia Vye rose, a
variant named for Hardy’s heroine.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native.
Project Gutenberg. Original publ. 1878. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/122/pg122-images.html
Nick
Harris, Feb. 2024
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