Far from the Madding Crowd (2 page)

Hardy unsparingly describes Bathsheba’s misery, the torment of her money troubles, and her jealousy after she impetuously marries the wrong man. Indeed, Hardy shows what grief an ill-considered choice of mate could bring. In the 1840s, when the novel takes place, divorce would not have been an option for ordinary people; only death could free married men and women from one another. Marriage was on the thirty-three-year-old Thomas Hardy’s mind while he wrote
Far from the Madding Crowd
. He finished the novel just a month before his wedding, and his wife-to-be, Emma Gifford, believed in his potential as a novelist and encouraged him to make a career change. Though Hardy and Emma’s marriage later suffered strains, Hardy had every reason at this time to feel upbeat about the lovely woman he would remember in some of his most beautiful poems, the elegies “Poems of 1912-13,” from
Satires of Circumstance
(1914). Both Hardy’s happiest married days and his marital troubles were ahead of him in 1873. However, when the writing of
Far from the Madding Crowd
was about one-third of the way accomplished, Hardy’s close friend, tutor, and personal mentor, Horace Moule, killed himself by cutting his own throat with a razor. Many critics believe that a reader can feel the darkening of Hardy’s mood in the later episodes of
Far from the Madding Crowd
. Although the novel celebrates the renewing cycle of the rural year, it also depicts the suffering of a cast-off woman, the madness of an obsessed man, financial ruin, disastrous weather, and other grim topics. This also serves Hardy’s needs as a storyteller, for his melodramatic plot neatly eliminates two undesirable men to leave Bathsheba free to marry the third and best choice. Thus Hardy contrives a happy ending in which no one feels too overjoyed, with betrayals, burials, and the gallows shadowing the conclusion.

Architecture, the profession that Hardy abandoned with the support of his wife, had brought them together in the first place. He met Emma Lavinia Gifford in her St. Juliot, Cornwall, home, while on a business trip concerning an architectural commission. His one significant project undertaken after their marriage was the designing of their home, Max Gate. Hardy’s success as a writer justified Emma’s confidence in him, and he managed to live without returning to the profession for which he had trained. No learning goes to waste in Hardy’s work, however. He folds his architectural knowledge into his fiction with informed descriptions of buildings. In
Far from the Madding Crowd,
houses, the barn in which the sheep shearing takes place, and the gothic gargoyle that spews water all over Fanny Robin’s grave receive Hardy’s learned commentary. The passages on architecture might seem digressive, were they not tied to character and to attitudes about the proper uses of spaces. Both Bathsheba’s house and the great barn have been employed “for farming purposes” for a long time. Thus Troy’s plans for altering the old house that he has acquired mark him as one who disrespects tradition. He would waste money altering a place that Gabriel sees as “a nice old house.” If Troy represents the potential disruption of long-standing agricultural practices, Gabriel possesses the skills that safeguard their continuity. Chapter XXII opens with a June scene of sheep shearing in the great barn. Hardy writes of the structure and its function approvingly: “the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder. Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout—a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up.”

As we will see, Hardy was ahead of his time in ways Victorians sometimes disliked, but he was also admired by his contemporaries for his depiction of rural life and country people. More and more people in the rapidly industrialized Great Britain lived in big cities. Many were separated from agricultural life by a generation or two. As Hardy was to record in other novels, such as
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1886) and
Tess of the D’Urbervilles,
mechanization had also made its way to the country, where it was transforming rural ways and patterns of work. The world of
Far from the Madding Crowd
seems largely untouched by such changes, and identity seems to be neatly connected to one’s job and clothing. The challenge to traditional gender roles posed by Bathsheba’s career (a topical feminist idea in the 1870s) Hardy balances with a detailed re-creation of ancient and apparently unaltered farming practices. Few novelists have written so convincingly about how particular jobs are done, what tools are needed, and how the effective performance of the task looks. Hardy dignifies his rural characters by treating their activities seriously. Some contemporary critics thought that his country folk spoke too much like philosophers, and Hardy did have to strive to make their speech sound authentic. Hardy knew that his readers would likely have an image of a country bumpkin already in mind, and that they would need to be taught to see country folk as individual characters. Thus Hardy complicates his rural people, with comic turns or scraps of authenticating detail so that they cannot be summed up by a stereotype called “Hodge” (a name for a nineteenth-century English red-neck). He mentions a character who stammers unless he is cursing fluently—probably a sufferer from what we call Tourette’s syndrome. Another character has problems controlling his blushing. Some characters are comical, such as Hardy’s old maltster, who measures his life to an improbable 117 years by counting seasons of work, turnip hoeing and brewing, as if they were separate years. Yet others matter-of-factly describe how demanding agricultural work could get in the way of life: Jan Coggan’s father dislocates his arm in order to have the leisure to go courting, and Joseph Poorgrass takes advantage of a bad leg to read
Pilgrim’s Progress
. The most minor characters making up the folk chorus that comments on the activities of the central figures Hardy marks with details of personality and physiognomy.

Even the animals in the novel have distinctive characters. Hardy sets up a contrast between two dogs that suggests ways of judging character that could be applied to human beings as well. The dog known as George’s son (executed for his role in destroying a valuable flock of sheep) contrasts with a heroic nameless dog who helps the destitute and exhausted Fanny Robin get to the Union workhouse in Casterbridge. Hardy’s sense of irony animates both episodes: George’s son is just doing his job too enthusiastically, while the nameless dog who helps Fanny Robin gets stoned away from the workhouse door. Throughout his career Hardy represents cruelty to animals as a negative character trait and sensitivity to their suffering as a good sign about a person. It reflects badly on Bathsheba’s character when she allows her horse Dainty to be lamed, while Gabriel gets credit not only for his skill with sheep, but also for his understanding of the human animal. Gabriel’s good husbandry allows him to recognize Fanny Robin’s distress in her pulse, which beats “with a throb of tragic intensity.” He knows “the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven.” Hardy uses animals to embody some of his most perennial themes. Whether a whole flock of sheep dies with their unborn lambs inside them, or a human woman suffers a similar fate, both episodes suggest the chance cruelties of an uncaring universe. Hardy’s handling of animals also resonated with contemporary interests: the magazine in which
Far from the Madding Crowd
first appeared also featured essays against cruelty to animals. Hardy’s contemporaries would have recognized elements of the debate about fair and sensitive treatment of different kinds of living creatures.

Hardy used other devices to make the world he described seem real to his readers. Rosemarie Morgan points out that the installments of
Far from the Madding Crowd
that came out in Leslie Stephen’s family magazine,
Cornhill,
were roughly matched up with the seasons so that Hardy’s original readers would encounter rural activities (lambing, the swarming of the honey bees, late-summer storms) just when those things were going on in the country. This device of timing helps to tether the fictional world of
Far from the Madding Crowd
to the real world, or at least to a world that seems accessible, though it is set thirty years back, in the 1840s. Hardy marked the parts of southern England he wrote about more permanently than he could have imagined when he used the word “Wessex” to describe the region for the first times in chapters XXII and L of the novel. Though far from worked out in the detail reflected by the standard map of Hardy’s Wessex that accompanies most editions of his novels,
Far from the Madding Crowd
features the country village and the market town Casterbridge (the real-world Dorchester) that would be anchoring points of Hardy’s reenvisioning of southern England. In
Far from the Madding Crowd,
Hardy captures a time and way of life perceived to be threatened and slipping away, and he later extends the times and places of this “Wessex.” The author lived to know the first generation of tourists riding around on bicycles and toting cameras who wanted to know exactly where the events of his stories took place in a Wessex that was always first a country of memory and the imagination.

Though they could not have anticipated his later celebrity and the long-lasting fame of his Wessex, Hardy and his wife had reason to hope in 1874 that he would prosper as a writer. His previous novel,
A Pair of Blue Eyes
(1873), had been published in installments in a magazine, and his short novel about a group of rural musicians,
Under the Greenwood Tree
(1872), had attracted the attention of one of the most influential literary men of the day. Leslie Stephen, who is better known now as Virginia Woolf’s father, edited the popular family magazine
Cornhill
. He wrote to Hardy asking him for a story to run in installments, a common way for Victorian novels to reach their readers. Hardy assented enthusiastically, later writing that he wanted to prove himself “a good hand at a serial.” To that end, Hardy cooperated with Stephen when the editor demanded changes in the novel. The Victorians had very strict standards about representing anything that might bring a blush to the cheek of a young person, and they enforced these unwritten codes through unofficial censorship, much as Wal-Mart demands that the music it sells not contain profane or vulgar language. Novelists who wanted to have their work distributed through the big circulating libraries would have to pass muster. The owner of the biggest circulating library (Mudie’s) was an evangelical Christian, and he wanted to make sure the books he rented out could be safely read by unmarried women and young people. An imaginary figure called “Mrs. Grundy” enforced the rules. The editors of family magazines faced a similar difficulty, and Leslie Stephen apologetically adopted a “Grundyism” that would permit a country parson’s daughter to read anything in his magazine. If you would like to compare this edition with the version that Hardy actually wrote, before it was censored, you should get a copy of the Penguin Classics
Far from the Madding Crowd,
edited by Rosemarie Morgan. That text reproduces the manuscript edition, while this one relies upon the Wessex Edition (for which Hardy made a restorative, though incomplete, revision). Morgan has written about Hardy’s experience with Leslie Stephen in a book called
Cancelled Words
(Routledge, 1992). She shows how Hardy’s blasphemous oaths, frank language about human sexuality, his character’s gestures and speech, and references to body parts (including the “buttocks” of horses) were altered by Leslie Stephen’s revisions. The most significant loss to the published version of
Far from the Madding Crowd
is a long passage describing Fanny Robin and her stillborn child (Penguin Classics 259-60). In the edition in your hands, the whole scene is reduced to a single line. Hardy’s struggle with the cultural watchdogs (literary critics, editors, and sometimes even bishops of the church) continued throughout his novel-writing career. It culminated with the censorious public reaction to
Tess of the D’Urber villes
and
Jude the Obscure,
after which Hardy abandoned fiction writing for poetry.

Though Thomas Hardy certainly adjusted his works willingly when he published them in magazines, he also restored them for republication in book form. Also, some passages that we would consider rather racy survived editorial cuts. For instance, in chapter XXVIII, Hardy creates a narrative annex (a bounded space in an alternative setting in which strange and surprising events take place) when he sends Bathsheba down into a fern-lined, saucer-shaped hidden valley. In this secret place, Sergeant Troy demonstrates his intricate swordplay all around Bathsheba’s body. A reader does not have to be an expert in Freudian readings to see the sexual symbolism of this erotic scene. Recognizing the thinly veiled sexual challenge of Troy’s action helps to explain why Bathsheba feels so intensely—“that minute’s interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream—here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin”—when all that has happened is a kiss.

This orgasmic passage covers its tracks by converting the wetness of sexual arousal to a liquid stream of tears, and it uses a literary allusion to the Old Testament to further dignify Bathsheba’s sexual awakening. Hardy often makes references to the Bible and to classical texts, as well as to literary works with which his readers were likely to be familiar. Spotting the allusions and understanding the “something extra” that they lent to the novel would have given Hardy’s well-read audience pleasure. For instance, the novel’s title comes from a poem that many people knew by heart, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Hardy quotes a line from the nineteenth stanza of Gray’s beloved poem: “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife/ Their sober wishes never learned to stray;/ Along the cool sequestered vale of life/ They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.” This stanza describes country people whose lives stay relatively calm, quiet, and undisruptive compared to those who participate in a more ambitious, frenzied existence (“madding” means “acting madly,” not “maddening”). Gray thought that rural seclusion limited people’s desires so they couldn’t sin in big ways. Hardy’s allusion gives readers the pleasure of recognition, but it also opens the possibility of an ironic interpretation of Gray’s lines. While emphasizing a literary connection to country values, and suggesting the remoteness of the scene, “far from the madding crowd” also leads the reader to question just how ordinary, sober, and noiseless Bathsheba, Boldwood, Troy, and Fanny Robin seem in the end. Perhaps only Gabriel Oak lives up to the allusion, but when he and Bathsheba work side by side to save her harvested crops from destruction in a powerful thunderstorm, Hardy revises Gray again, suggesting that excitement and intensity can coexist with good husbandry when a man and a woman enjoy the fellowship of work that matters.