THE EVIL EYE: LOOKING and OVERLOOKING IN THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

The form it takes, and the way it operates, varies between cultures, but anthropologists have noted a number of recurring features: * its power comes primarily through or from the eye, with touch or speech, in particular oral praise, as ancillary powers; * the person, animal or object stricken is desirable, or of value ('a handsome child'); * its action is typically sudden, though the effects may manifest themselves in a wasting away; * the person possessing the evil eye may not be aware that he or she has the power, and even if aware of it may not always be able to prevent its action; * those harmed may not know who caused their affliction; * its effects can be deflected, or warded off, with the aid of the appropriate charms, gestures, amulets, or other apotropaic objects and symbols. Eustacia, herself the constant object of surveillance, gossip and conjecture, frequently adopts a 'spying attitude' (p. 52); she carries a telescope, enters the recess beneath a chimney to eavesdrop on a conversation, peers at the mummers through a hole in a mud wall, looks out of one window at Clym when he comes to help retrieve the bucket from the well, and from another at Mrs Yeobright when the older woman makes her ill- fated visit to her son and daughterin- law. In that conversation he also noted that that while many people assumed the 'superstition' to have become obsolete, it was still common in Dorset, even in the early twentieth century, though by then, like the word overlooking itself, it had been marginalized into the confines of remote or 'outstep' rural communities.20 In the early nineteenth century English readers who shared the growing interest in antiquarian studies could have encountered belief in the evil eye in John Brand's Popular Antiquities and William Hone's Every Day Book.21 Hone is one of a number of writers to suggest that the practice was especially common among the Irish and Scots; he notes that in the South of Ireland the evil eye is considered most dangerous on May- Eve, when it is believed to have 'more than its usual vigilance and malignity; and the nurse who would walk in the open air with a child in her arms, would be reprobated as a monster'.22 While Hone leaves the reader to wonder about the degree of belief in the evil eye in England, the Dorset poet and philologist William Barnes brought the idea nearer to home for Hardy, glossing the local dialect 'overlook' or 'auverlook' as meaning 'to bewitch or look upon with the "evil eye"'.23 The