The heath folk's superstitious beliefs are dramatized in a scene where Susan Nunsuch, long suspicious that Eustacia is a witch and is working evil on her son Johnny, makes a wax doll of Eustacia, pierces it many times with pins, and burns it in the fire. The Lord's Prayer said backward is an incantation which, as Hardy remarks, is "usual in proceedings for obtaining unhallowed assistance against an enemy." Sticking an image full of pins is common in voodoo, too.
Even as the image of Eustacia is melting in Susan's fire, the young woman herself is "melting" on Rainbarrow, that symbolic projection which is the highest point on the heath. The barrow has meant much to Eustacia: from it she has viewed the heath, both nature and man. On it, in effect, she takes her last look at the world; even as at the end of the novel we see Clym practicing his newfound vocation on it. Eustacia just before death stands upon a monument to death. She looks at the world and sees nothing good: "I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!" She cannot return to Clym, she thinks, and Wildeve is not worthy of her. The earlier intimations of suicide now pay off by letting the reader see what Eustacia will do.
The storm on the heath is also a heavy symbol. Writing of Eustacia, Hardy says: "Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without." This works for Eustacia and for other characters as well. . The plot shows a confused pattern of people moving helter-skelter over the heath. With the storm comes the element of melodrama, to be climaxed by the deaths in the stream near the weir. The storm rages as it did in many nineteenth-century novels: significantly but unbelievably.
