Against the unchanging background of Egdon Heath, fiery Eustacia Vye spends her days, wishing only for passionate and exciting love. She believes that her escape from Egdon lies in marriage to Clym Yeobright, home from Paris and discontented with his work there.
But Clym wishes to return to the Egdon community; a desire which sets him in opposition to his wife and brings them both to despair, therefore I have little confidence in the success of their marriage, for we already see that Eustacia the fiery character that she is used to getting what she wants. We see in book two Local workers are building a pile of firewood outside Captain Vye's house. From indoors, Eustacia Vye hears them talking about the imminent return to the heath of Clym Yeobright, who has been working as a diamond merchant in Paris.The local labourer Humphrey mentions that Eustacia and Clym would make a good couple, an innocent remark which sparks in Eustacia's mind intricate fantasies of a romance with Clym, and so she makes it possible, and as usual she gets what she wants or at least what she thinks she wants, she is used to being able to exercise power over men and she knows she can "I have shown my power, a mile and a half hither and a mile and a half back to your home- three miles in the dark for me, have I not shown my power? " she says these words to her ex-lover Wildeve.So when Eustacia finds that her husband has no intention of escaping the heath there is sure to be conflict between the pair. From the very beginning Clym's very presence works a charm on the impressionable and imaginative Eustacia, who conceives of an infatuation with him based not upon his personality or even upon his looks: she is determined to love him even before meeting him.
This kind of love, it is implied, is more self-love--or selfish love--than anything else: it is grows out of what Eustacia wants, rather than what Clym is.Thus, Eustacia is incapable of understanding Diggory Venn's putatively unselfish desire to help Thomasin be happy even at the expense of his own happiness: she thinks, "What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes its only one! " thus it is easy to come to the conclusion that the marriage will not succeed because she does not love him she loves the idea of escaping the heath and he seems to represent that but this false love will quickly, flitter away when the prospect of escape is out of the question.Eustacia is often associated with fire imagery "revived embers of an old passion glowed... " "You could fancy the colour of Eustasia's soul to be flame like" "The real surface of her sad and stifled warmth" and "A blaze of love.
" Because Eustacia's love is described using fire imagery we can come to the conclusion like fire her love will be raging one moment and go out very quickly the next, she has the ability to burn people, her love is momentary and does not last forever, which proves as more evidence as to why hers and Clym's marriage will be unsuccessful.There is also the conflict between Clym and his mother who sees Eustacia as unsuitable and does not wish to come second place to her in her sons eyes, and so is very jealous, when she dies Clym comes to the realisation of what part Eustacia played in the part of his mothers death, which causes friction between the two lovers. The other pairing on the heath is that of Thomasin Yeobright and Damon Wildeve, I feel that there marriage is also doomed not to succeed.Wildeve puts off his marriage to Thomasin Yeobright in order to pursue a relationship with the woman he truly wants, Eustacia Vye; when he is jilted by Eustacia, however, he marries Thomasin He is interested throughout in possession rather than love, and he wishes to posses Eustacia, Thomasin will always play second fiddle to her. Wildeve is merely using Thomasin to make Eustacia Vye jealous, it is very clear from the beginning of the novel the power Eustacia has over Wildeve when he sees the signal fire On Rainbarrow, Eustacia Vye impatiently waits for Wildeve to respond to her signal.After watching the inn for some time, she returns to the fire before her grandfather's house and persuades Johnny Nunsuch, her young assistant, to continue his work of feeding the blaze.
When Wildeve signals his approach, she sends Johnny home and awaits Wildeve's appearance. Though she is pleased that she has made him come, in their conversation she is unable to get him to say he loves her more than he does Thomasin. Though they have been lovers in the past, each is now suspicious of the other's intentions.They part without any definite commitment to each other, however it is clear that both have a passionate love for each other, "she knew that he trifled with her but she loved on" ("you could not bring yourself to give me up and are still going to love me best of all," "yes or why should I have come, he said touchingly. ") Thomasin's only fault, from her aunt's point of view, is that she persists in wanting to marry Wildeve even after she has not been well treated.
But from the reader's point of view, this is a fault only in the sense that she is too generous in her attitude toward others, too willing to do the right thing as she understands it. So, in the novel, the innocent suffer too, though not irreparably, however my point of view is that Thomasin has been hardened by her ill treatment and intends to marry Wildeve but not be walked over, this is not a good basis for a marriage and I feel sees that it does not succeed because of a lack of real love, and that both couples are wrongly paired!In Hardy's pessimistic point of view "we live to suffer we are playthings for the gods" Hardy would not have wanted the marriages to succeed and have a happy ever after ending because it would not be true to real life. People do not always end up happy and more often then not they are sad and alone. The marriages did not succeed because if they had it would mean a change in the heath and as we can see from the opening of the book "the face upon which time had but little impression" it had not changed it was untameable and would not change for many years to come.
