Eustace and Hilda

In L. P. Hartley's Eustace and Hilda trilogy (originally published 1944-47), remarkably little of interest happens.  When something very conventional happens--Hilda's seduction and abandonment by upper-class cad Dick Staveley--it happens entirely offstage.  Eustace, Hilda's brother, loves to fantasize about dramatic events, but these events fail to materialize.  This is not, in other words, a trilogy for readers interested in dramatic storylines; in fact, the plots appear to drift aimlessly, without apparent purpose or even payoff.  I'm using "appear" deliberately, however, for the novel's true action lies in the workings of Eustace's fatally blinkered perceptions. 

Eustace suffers from a weak egotism: he forever tries to build a self out of his imagined centrality to other peoples' thoughts, but he has little will.  As a result, he is easily dominated--by his sister Hilda, above all, but also by aristocrats like the sophisticated Lady Nelly and the odious Dick Staveley.  Eustace's one approximation to a heterosexual encounter collapses under the weight of his inability to properly read the situation; otherwise, he appears to be virtually asexual, although his obsession with Staveley hints at a potentially different state of affairs.  This sexual obtuseness is part and parcel of Eustace's more general self-absorption, which paradoxically manifests itself in his desire to please others ("To find his most intimate satisfaction in giving satisfaction, to be pleased by pleasing, this was the lesson that Miss Fothergill had taught him" [134]).  While Eustace's sacrificial ideal sounds, at first, like rote Christian rhetoric--"But wasn't the important thing to do what pleased other people? Shouldn't self-sacrifice be the rule of life?" (141)--the emphasis on pleasure is significant.  This is not the Benthamite pleasure principle intruding itself; in Eustace's world, there's no connection between pleasure and goodness, or even pleasure and happiness.  Eustace finds that he can please Miss Fothergill because her company, in turn, pleases him; later, he often associates pleasing others with gifts of money or objects.  Thus, he offers Nancy money instead of sex and Hilda money instead of his presence.  He "gives up" everything but himself--something that comes across most blatantly in his account of how Hilda managed to extricate him from serving on the front lines during WWI. 

In that sense, Eustace and Hilda partly parodies nineteenth-century ideals of self-sacrifice and duty.  (The novel begins around the turn of the century.)  As Anita Brookner notes in her introduction to the NYRB edition, however, the novel is more firmly traditional in its delineation of class boundaries.  The tragedy of volumes two and three originate in Miss Fothergill's gift of eighteen thousand pounds, which allows Eustace to attend public school, study at Oxford, and vacation in Italy.  Eustace is hardly nouveau riche--after he gives half of his bequest to Hilda, he's left in comfortable but potentially straitened circumstances--but it's telling that he comes to perceive his place in the world in terms of exchange value.  The simultaneous fascination and frustration of the second volume derives from Eustace's utter inability to interpret the language of upper-class life; his leftover bourgeois "sincerity" clashes painfully with their willingness to play with surfaces.  Similarly, Hilda's offstage romance with Dick Staveley collapses because she cannot understand the rules of upper-class seduction.  (As Caleb Crain notes, contemporary readers will be left unconvinced by Hilda's resulting psychosomatic paralysis.)  This clash between the landed old guard and the moneyed newcomers has a decidedly nineteenth-century ring to it--and it's the old guard that vanquishes the upstarts.

Hartley embodies the dynamics at work in these failed relationships--especially Eustace's relationship with Hilda--in his most important image: the anemone devouring the shrimp.

Its base was fastened to a boulder, just above the water-line.  From the middle of the other end, which was below, something stuck out, quivering.  It was a shrimp, Eustace decided, and the anemone was eating it, sucking it in.  A tumult arose in Eustace's breast.  His heart bled for the shrimp, he longed to rescue it; but, on the other hand, how could he bear to rob the anemone of its dinner? (5)

Here we have nature red in tooth and claw--the predator eating its prey.  Rather low down on the food chain, to be sure, but the strong still devours the weak.  As Eustace anxiously realizes, his pity for the shrimp does not cancel out the anemone's need; in the unthinking natural order of things, moral considerations don't alter the dinner menu.  The anemone must devour the shrimp in order to survive.  Too weak to interfere himself, Eustace prompts his domineering sister, Hilda, to act, with results that prove fatal to both the shrimp and the anemone.  A purportedly benevolent action from the people who "know better," in other words, destroys those weaker beings further down the line.  While Eustace is the trilogy's obvious "shrimp"--in fact, the trilogy concludes with a dream in which the anemone begins to devour him--Hilda-the-anemone is just as vulnerable.  Miss Fothergill's gift, which disrupts the established social order, propels Eustace and his sister into disaster. 

This is not, however, a trilogy overburdened by symbolic imagery (although Eustace's multiple watches will play an increasingly important role in the second and third volumes).  Hartley spends much more time on Eustace's fantasy dialogues and self-interrogations, prompted by real or anticipated social failures.  Here is a random but typical example from the second volume, sparked by both Lady Nelly's letter informing him that he will have to be moved to a different room in order to accomodate new guests, and his growing awareness that his sister in trouble:

He hadn't heard of other guests coming--was he in the way? Venetian houses looked so vast, but none of them had any bedrooms.  Was Lady Nelly tactfully giving him his dismissal? He hardly thought so; she had made such a point of his staying for the Regatta, and had said she didn't want him to miss Grundtvig's playing.  Perhaps Grundtvig really was a very great player.  Eustace's imagination got to work on this idea.  (593)

The inner dialogue that follows, pitting Eustace against his old friend Antony, highlights Eustace's submerged anxiety about whether or not he (and, for that matter, his sister) actually matters.  We can see some of this anxiety in the passage I've quoted.  First, there's his sense of being out of the loop ("He hadn't heard") and, potentially, an encumbrance ("was he in the way?").  Far from indicating Eustace's humility, this sentence indicates what I've dubbed his weak egotism: his imagination instantly situates himself at the center of events, even when it's a matter of being an imagined obstruction.  Second, Eustace does not interpret upper-class social rhetoric especially well; Lady Nelly has, in fact, been snubbing him off and on, and his interactions with her friends have been consistently inept.  Eustace is self-conscious, but, if it's possible to draw the distinction, not self-aware.