The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [303]
Desperately wounded by her lover's marriage to Thomasin, Eustacia sets her sights on the newcomer, hoping he will sweep her away from this claustrophobic little world back to Paris. To the horror of his mother, as strong-minded and dogmatic as Hardy's own, they get married. But Clym shows no sign of wanting to leave the heath and, as his eyesight fails, becomes a humble furze-cutter. The marriage begins to disintegrate, tempting Eustacia to resume her secret affair with Wildeve. When Clym's mother, after a sequence of misunderstandings in vainly trying to bring about a reconciliation between her son and his wife, exhausts herself and dies of a heart attack, this precipitates the climactic catastrophe in which the two `dark' lovers try one stormy night to elope and are swept to their deaths by drowning. The weak, mother-dominated Yeobright is left motherless, wifeless and alone, to wander the countryside as an eccentric preacher.
At least there appears to be a partial happy ending to the story, as the two `rooted' characters, Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright, are finally brought together in marriage. But even this, Hardy tells us, was not his original intention, whereby Thomasin was to remain a widow and Venn was simply to vanish mysteriously from the heath. Their wedding was only concocted at the last minute while the story was being serialised, because Hardy's dismayed publishers felt the unrelieved hopelessness of his original ending might have been too much for readers to take.
Disintegration: The second stage
What we see here is how Hardy's novels were beginning to follow a similar pattern to that we saw emerging in nineteenth-century opera, with Donizetti and Verdi. The underlying plot is still that of Comedy. But now it is Comedy without any recognition or breaking in of the light. In contrast to his earlier books, Hardy's imagination could no longer encompass the kind of story which ends in a hero and heroine being brought triumphantly together. From now on, the characters rising up from his unconscious seem increasingly trapped in a kind of twilight, fatally mismatched with the wrong man or the wrong woman. And in this inability to bring masculine and feminine into balance, we see the reflection of a fundamental split which had opened up in Hardy himself.
As we have seen, the archetypal ending of stories where a hero and heroine come together in perfect union symbolises something much deeper than just a marriage. It is the image of complete human integration, where the two become in every sense one: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The hero, become a fully mature man, is at last integrated with his anima, that mysterious defining component in human identity we call the `soul'. And it was precisely this point of maturity which Hardy, unable to become fully a man and therefore unable to realise his inner feminine, was unable to reach: as his fiction came increasingly to reflect. Whenever in a story there is outward trouble between a hero and heroine, we can be sure that something has gone awry in the hero's relations with his inner feminine; and that this may equally well express what is going on inside the author whose unconscious has created that character. It was no accident, for instance, that shortly after Tolstoy had, in Anna Karenina, conjured up one of the most haunting of all portraits of a beautiful woman throwing herself to destruction,