The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [302]
Shattered by all that has happened, Bathsheba spends months withdrawn from the world, scarcely speaking. When the following summer she begins to venture out again, she encounters Gabriel, who tells her he will have to leave her employ. The threatened loss of the one solid figure in her life on whom she has come totally to depend finally works the trick which at the beginning of the story had seemed unthinkable. She has finally been tamed; softened into her inner femininity as completely as Katherina by Petruchio, or as Emma by Mr Knightley. Recognition dawns that she only wishes to be married to Gabriel, the honest, true, selfless man who has all along been as sturdy in her support as the tree whose name he bears. The story ends with the loving couple being joyfully greeted on their return from church by the chorus of rustic musicians, playing the same ancient instruments which had celebrated the victories of Marlborough a century and a half before. Not only have hero and heroine found wholeness in each other: they are united with the timeless world of the Dorset countryside where their new life can begin.
Disintegration: The first stage
In bringing his manly hero to such a triumphant happy ending, we might think Hardy was imagining the kind of man he would like to have been himself: a countryman at one with his natural surroundings and with every admirable human quality. But between completing the novel and its publication, Hardy went through the most dramatic watershed of his life. Now engaged to be married to Emma, he moved away from Dorset and up to London. Here, in the literary circle around his new editor Leslie Stephen, he met various intelligent, lively, liberated young women, including his illustrator Helen Paterson, with whom he was so taken that even at the end of his life he was still wondering whether he should have married her. He abruptly severed all links with the world of his upbringing (no member of his family was invited to his wedding). Yet for all the heady excitements of his new life, he was far from finding anything in the outside world to compensate for the simple certainties of the world he had left behind. Quite suddenly he lost his religious faith. Even before his marriage, he was already beginning to be haunted by the possibility that he could have chosen better for himself than the naive, provincial Emma Lavinia. And as Gittings observes of Oak's acceptance by Bathsheba: `no Hardy hero from that time onwards ever comes to such an assured and happy ending. From this moment on, the tragic and defeated hero arrives in Hardy's novels for good.'
In 1876 Hardy returned with Emma to Dorset: not to the simple life of a peasant, but to live in a new, middle-class, red-brick villa in the little town of Sturminster Newton, far apart from his family. His return to his native county inspired him to write The Return of the Native, describing how the wanderer Clym Yeobright returns from the sophisticated world of Paris to try to rediscover his roots on the great wilderness of Egdon Heath. But the attempt does not work. The mould has been broken. From its opening paragraph the book is shot through with a gathering darkness, often a quite literal darkness, as in all the scenes which take place at night or in twilight, which is quite new in Hardy's writing.
The story begins with four main characters, two masculine, two feminine. The contrast between the two men is not unlike that between the two central male characters in Far from the Madding Crowd. Diggory Venn, like Oak, is strong, good-hearted, self-contained and solitary. Damon Wildeve is as much a dark, heartless philanderer as Sergeant Troy. Similarly the restless, neurotic Eustacia Vye, longing to escape from this suffocating rural backwater, is as much a forceful opposite to the gentle, passive Thomasin