The two worlds of Hardy's fiction

The "Book Second" (how pretentious) of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native is, at least at the outset, far more conventional and tame than the weirdly dramatic first book, much of which takes place in darkness,with mysterious characters appearing on dark country roads or emerging from the shadows into the light of a bonfire. In the second book, we meet the returning native - Tomasin's cousin, coming home for a visit from Paris - and most of the focus is on the alluring Eustacia Vye, who has scorned a number of suitors and seems extremely independent but is blown away by the idea of a visitor, a returning native no less, from afar: the arrival of a man from Paris and the ensuing excitement emphasizes the complete isolation of the village on the heath. The novel takes a Shakespearean comic turn as Eustacia, not invited to the xmas ball where the Paris visitor will be feted, works out a plan to join a group of villagers putting on a masked mummer show as entertainment between dances. To do this, she has to disguise herself as a guy - this fools nobody - and recite some doggerel. The mood throughout the section is much lighter and more conventional - woman in love with a mysterious stranger schemes to draw his attention - but there is some depth as well: Eustacia does in fact seem like prisoner of her fate, trapped in a village and society too confining for her imagination, or at least for her self-image. Although Hardy's drama, and his populace, are rustic, his prose is not: he self-consciously, often clumsily, works in allusions to literature, mythology, classic and relatively recent history - and his doing so creates a dual consciousness for his novel: the superficial learnedness of Hardy's prose removes him from his characters, who are largely unread - they tell tales, rumors, legends. Hardy is not at all condescending, but he is intentionally not writing from his characters as from within, but rather as from a removed distance: they're curious specimens - except for his lead characters (women, often) who stand out all the more as three-dimensional because they inhabit both worlds, or, in Eustacia's case, yearn to do so.