In "The Other Eustacia," (NOVEL, I, Spring 1968, 251-59), Robert Evans distinguishes the Eustacia of Hardy's rhetoric-the tragic heroine, beauty, and rebel-from the kind of person "revealed to us . . . by the consistent and cumulative pattern of her own words and deeds" (p. 253). The "other Eustacia," the more real of the two, is selfish, petulant, immature, and adolescent. The two are not reconciled, and The Return of the Native suffers from Hardy's failure to see "that he could not have it both ways-that so morally frail a reed as the Eustacia who lives in this novel could not bear the weight of the tragic theme that the purely rhetorical Eustacia was intended to illustrate" (pp. 257-58, original italics). Stripped of her regal trappings, Eustacia is the object of a withering criticism. It is about time that she is. I suspect that Mr. Evans, like many of us, has lost patience with those defenders of Eustacia who have taken her own word for it that she was a splendid woman mishandled by cruel fate, and who have ignored or denied that she is "thoroughly selfish." But an understanding of her character should go further than iconoclasm, necessary as that step is. I do not think, for instance, that Hardy tried to have it both ways with Eustacia. Rather, he created a character he was in no way willing to have. His feelings towards Eustacia were ambivalent, and he could not totally accept or reject her. He was unable, intellectually and emotionally, to commit himself for or against the principle he made Eustacia represent. The principle is individualism; and perhaps in Eustacia it is rank individualism, since it entails a complete rejection of conventional values and expected patterns of behavior. Eustacia works on Sunday and reads the Bible during the week, an assertion of her difference, of her freedom from duty. She lets no one stand in her way, and she uses people-Johnny, Charley, Clym-like tools or slaves. She does not identify with Thomasin or Venn as fellow sufferers. As Mr. Evans points out, she does not "reveal any natural affection or tenderness for her aged grandfather" (p. 255). She watches silently while Clym tortures himself with a guilt that is rightly hers for his mother's death. She lets moments of ethical crisis "slip past," and she regards the breaking of her marriage vow as "less an ethical problem than a practical one" (p. 256). The list of her sins could go on and on. The sum of them all is that she does not treat people with any decency or charity whatsoever. But then, why should she? The question arises because of Eustacia's relation to the other characters in the novel. She is outside their community, ethically