When a pretty woman flirts with a middle-aged man, you might expect annoyance when he discovers she’s having him on. You don’t expect carnage, which is what happens in this pastoral romantic tragicomedy by Thomas Hardy, Victorian fiction’s master of disaster.
The second of Hardy’s celebrated run of
“Wessex” novels, Far From The Madding Crowd details the calamitous
romantic history of Bathsheba Everdene, inheritor of a substantial farm in her
early twenties who sends a prank valentine to a bachelor named Boldwood who owns the
neighboring spread.
She ensnares others, too: A bounder named Sergeant Troy who leaves a pregnant lover to pursue the rich Bathsheba and a luckless shepherd named Gabriel Oak whose love for Bathsheba is more grounded in practicality and subsequently easiest for her to take for granted.
Bathsheba’s verdict on Gabriel’s proposal can
be viewed as death sentence or reprieve, depending on where you are in the
book: “He wasn’t quite good enough for me.”
Women! Am I right, guys?
About
Bathsheba, Hardy writes: There was a bright air and manner about her now, by
which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be
questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed in being offensive because
a beholder felt it to be, upon the whole, true.
Bathsheba’s coy aloofness will annoy many, yet
her whimsical passions and struggle to assert her own identity in a man’s world
is needed to fuel the plot and engage readers. Bathsheba is vain and selfish,
too easily wooed by gleaming surfaces, like her Biblical namesake ruination to
those who desire her; but Hardy makes clear she has a good heart and a point or
two when it comes to the battle of the sexes:
“It
is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly
made by men to express theirs.”
Bathsheba is a fantastic character of English
fiction; the novel she inhabits is not quite all that, but still pretty
brilliant in the main.
What is best about Far From The Madding
Crowd is the way Hardy enlivens his Wessex setting with beguiling tone
poems of scenic delight. He was a novelist who preferred poetry; you see
flashes of Wordsworth and Keats in the way Hardy marks shifts in season:
It
was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the
landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and color. Every green
was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing
currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had
gone with the world to town.
You expect this sort of naturalism reading
Hardy’s other books; what’s more unique about Far From The Madding Crowd
is its amiability. Even harsher moments are delivered with dollops of humor; Hardy’s
ability to draw chuckles from the folk wisdom of the local rustics remains a
constant from start to finish.
“Too
much liquor is bad, and leads us to that horned man in the smoky house; but
after all, many people haven’t the gift of enjoying a wet, and since we be
highly favored with a power that way, we should make the most o’t.”
Yet Hardy’s enveloping descriptions and his
flashes of Dickens-like charm are compromised by sluggish plot development and
unengaging men.
Take Gabriel Oak, our de facto lead
character with whom we witness the story unfold from first chapter to last. He
is much too inert and Mary-Sue-like with his perfect disposition, overall
excellence in everything he does, and unfailing loyalty to Bathsheba. Whenever
she gets into trouble, Gabriel is always there to help, with an understanding
nod and no expectations. His one fault, we are told, is blunt candor.
His very name screams “earth angel;” he lacks
too much the stuff of everyday life. Even the other farmhands note this: “’A’s rather a
curious item, but a very understanding shepherd, and learned in books.”
The other two main men, Sergeant Troy and
Boldwood, are more interesting but too limited. Troy possesses a beguiling
rascality (“He
never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly; and hence,
though his morals had hardly been applauded, disapproval of them had frequently
been tempered with a smile.”) But Troy’s personality shifts from chapter to
chapter. Hardy alters him to suit the plot; which even good authors often do but
less obviously than here.
Boldwood
is in some ways the most noble of our characters; more impressive a lonesome
loser than Oak as he is more human about it. Yet he is so choked by infatuation
for Bathsheba that I wound up feeling sorry for her, an unusual position
for a guy who has known some clever minxes in his time. By the latter chapters,
he’s telling Bathsheba, who has long ago repented of her Valentine prank, that
she now owes him marriage or he’ll go crazy. The scary part: She knows he’s not
bluffing.
As far as the plot is concerned, Far From
The Madding Crowd’s descriptive wealth comes at the expense of a forward
narrative thrust. Events do move, but never swiftly. For much of the time Hardy
regurgitates pastoral romantic tropes: Eyes flash, bosoms heave, sheep graze,
over and over for 375 pages.
Oh, but does the man go on about those sheep!
The best I can say about reading Hardy is that
it reminds me of what Dorothy Parker said about writing. He’s very enjoyable to
have read; not nearly so much to read. Not only is there that
slow narrative, and a tendency toward lengthy philosophical digression (which
sometimes is quite profound, but strains concentration), but Hardy’s storylines
often tend to be cruel.
Far From The Madding Crowd is less this way than other Hardy novels; but its cruelty is still
felt. Early on, in a choice bit of Hardy-ian randomness, Gabriel Oak loses most
of his sheep flock (and his fortune, as he bought them on credit) when one of
his dogs runs them off all a cliff, following too zealously the herding example
of his father George, another dog in Oak’s employ.
Oak winds up shooting the pup, not out of
revenge but because the animal can’t be relied upon. Hardy even finds cold
humor in the situation,
“another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other
philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and
attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of
compromise.”
The
most beastly episode in Far From The Madding Crowd involves the
struggles of a young female vagabond whom we later discover is pregnant and
connected to more than one of the main characters. Sick, she staggers along a highway
willing herself to keep going post-by-post, accompanied by a homeless dog who
comes to her, as starved for affection as she. The woman eventually finds
shelter, but dies soon after along with her baby. Only the dog survives, driven
off by stones.
All
this pales beside the struggles of Tess Durbeyfield and other tragic Hardy
characters in other bleak novels of his, but it leaves a mark. Far From The
Madding Crowd has elements of comedy, and a happy ending that comes off
forced but is certainly unambiguous. It’s still Hardy, though, and the story of
the pregnant woman and her canine companion suggest the uncaring cosmos that
reigns supreme in his other fiction and make his books so singular for their
time. It’s all a question of scientific balance with him:
We
learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject,
that give them the colors that they are known by, and in the same way people
are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is
looked upon as no attribute at all.
Far
From The Madding Crowd may be Hardy’s most popular novel. It has been
adapted for screen numerous times, beginning in 1915 and most recently in 2015.
On Goodreads, only Tess Of The d’Urbanvilles draws more reviews among Hardy’s work, and not
so high an average ranking as this (just under four stars out of five, about
where I put it.)
If
Madding Crowd is truly Hardy’s most popular work, or even just one of his two
biggest hits, that would be funny given how it represents early Hardy, just four
novels into his career. Before giving up novel-writing completely by the end of
the 19th-century, he spent quite a while detailing Wessex and its
inhabitants. The template he uses here, a love triangle with extra angles, was recycled four years later in The Return Of The Native, a more refined novel in many ways but not nearly as fun or convincing.
I
think a big reason why Far From The Madding Crowd endures so well,
despite my reservations, is how it encompasses a certain type of pastoralism,
lyrically and humorously but not without edges. Hearts break, people die,
Hardy’s strange rules of cosmically-enforced tragic contrivances remain in
effect, yet the balance between good and bad outcomes seems fairer than they do
in other books (I haven’t even read Jude The Obscure yet; I hear it’s a
pip!)
The
last line of the novel, delivered by a comic rustic named Poorgrass, sums it
all up rather well: “But since ‘tis as ‘tis, why, it might have been worse, and
I feel my thanks accordingly.”
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