Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, became his first commercially successful venture, allowing him to leave his vocation of architecture and write full time. First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine from January through December 1874, it would appear later that year in book form.
The novel introduced “Wessex,” a fictional geographical location that Hardy would also include in future works as his setting. He drew the title from poet Thomas Gray’s famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The novel bears its episodic imprint in “cliff-hanger” conclusions to various chapters that entice the reader to anticipate what follows.
The novel reflects Hardy’s turn from traditional religion, based on tenets of blind faith, to scientific ideas of natural chance, such as that expressed in Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, to explain the fate that seems to govern humans. As he did in other novels, Hardy focuses on the country and nature as relief from what he shaped as the negative consequences of industrialization, his title reflecting the idea that one must substitute the rural for the urban to find a modicum of peace.
In a plot populated by characters with highly symbolic names, Hardy uses the themes of uncontrollable fate and misunderstanding to weave his tale of betrayal, death, and eventual partial redemption. Often compared to George Eliot in his emphasis on the sadly predictable illogic of human nature, Hardy was never accused of framing an optimistic or lighthearted novel.
The aptly named temptress protagonist, Bathsheba Everdene, charms several males, including 28-year-old Gabriel Oak. Owner of a sheep flock, Oak’s surname and his flute playing identify him with tales of sylvan fields, a mythological and antiquated force. The narrator describes his first sighting of Bathsheba in terms that strongly foreshadow their cursed future, seemingly determined in typical Hardy approach by uncontrollable universal forces: “He saw her in a bird’s-eye view, as Milton’s Satan first saw Paradise.”
Oak faces not only romantic disappointment when Bathsheba rejects him but also financial ruin as his sheepdog goes berserk and herds his entire flock of 200 sheep, many of them pregnant ewes symbolically and literally filled with promise, off a cliff to their deaths. That action foreshadows the later “driving to death” by human forces of the deceived Fanny Robin and her infant.
When Oak then loses his property, he takes up residence as a worker on Bathsheba’s farm, which she has recently inherited. Once penniless, she becomes financially independent, an unusual state for a single woman. Oak heroically stops a destructive fire on the farm, gaining Bathsheba’s gratitude. In an interesting turn on the use of traditional symbolism, Hardy does not allow the fire to complete its normal purification through destruction, foreshadowing a later more serious destruction of human life. Oak does well, moving from his original shepherd duties to become a bailiff.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba, true to her capricious nature, sends a Valentine greeting to her neighbor, Farmer Boldwood, who guesses the anonymous note is from Bathsheba. A weak-willed man, Boldwood misinterprets Bathsheba’s gesture and falls in love with his teasing neighbor solely on the basis of the Valentine.
A third male character, the unlikable Sergeant Troy, has impregnated Fanny Robin, then refused to marry her after she mistakenly goes to the wrong church for the wedding ceremony. The abandoned Fanny is left to bear her child alone, suffering through a lonely pregnancy while working to support herself at the dreaded Casterbridge workhouse.
Simultaneously, Troy romances Bathsheba. They marry in a secret ceremony, resulting in a miserable marriage haunted by Troy’s concerns about Fanny Robin. When Fanny and her infant die, Troy grieves at the coffin in Bathsheba’s presence, then, overcome with remorse, disappears. He is thought to have drowned, a mistaken impression that will later be corrected with tragic results. Again Hardy employs a traditional symbol of cleansing, rebirth, and new life—that of water—in an ironic way. Troy indeed moves on to a new life, but not one of a spiritual nature. He joins a traveling circus in the West Country.
Never able to exist long without a love interest, and believing herself a widow, Bathsheba accepts Farmer Boldwood’s frantic attentions, and they become engaged, marking her turn to more practical thinking. When Troy resurfaces at their engagement party, the enraged Boldwood murders him and then attempts an unsuccessful suicide.
Bathsheba reacts with newly developed strength, cradling the murdered Troy’s head in her lap. The narrator comments that she astonished “all around her now, for her philosophy was her conduct, and she seldom thought practicable what she did not practice. She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made.”
Boldwood turns himself over to the police, is tried, convicted of murder and sentenced to execution, but his sentence is eventually commuted to life in prison. Capital punishment would remain a focus for Hardy, reappearing as a theme in several additional novels, all of which condemn the practice. The commutation of such sentences signals a redemption for those convicted, who generally murder rashly as a result of romantic passion. The object of the passion seldom deserves the sacrifice.
In the novel’s conclusion, Oak, now manager of both Bathsheba’s and Boldwood’s farms, plans to depart the area, feeling he can never win Bathsheba’s hand. But after the passing of “one legal year” of widowhood for Bathsheba, the two do agree to marry. Their marriage, her second, and the result of his second request, also mark a redemptive second chance for both. As the closing narrative states, their relationship held that “substantial affection” that grows from two people first knowing “the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.”
Feminist critics will find of interest roles occupied by women characters. Hardy falls back on traditional caricatures. He labels Bathsheba a temptress, simply by giving her the name of one of the Bible’s most famous temptresses. However, he also reminds readers that Bathsheba played an innocent part in her biblical temptation of King David, who spied on her and accomplished the death of her husband, his loyal soldier, in order to possess her as his own.
In Fanny Robin, Hardy invokes images of a harbinger of spring and new life who does engage in the sin of premarital sex and is symbolically rejected by the church, which should support all those in peril, when she goes to the wrong chapel. However, rather than imitating the typical whore figure, Hardy shapes Fanny as a sympathetic character, wronged not only by the male sex drive and refusal of responsibility but also by religion and society. She pays the ultimate price for her sins in death, taking her innocent child with her, and Hardy clearly suggests that fate is better for her than would be her fate had she married the undependable and shallow Troy.
Freudian/psychoanalytic critics focus on the multiple emphases on sexual alliances and, along with feminist critics, on women as sex objects. Traditional formalist critics focus on the symbolism of the characters’ names, including that of Gabriel Oak. Bearing the first name of an avenging angel, he will obviously play a part in rescuing the novel’s heroine. His surname of Oak suggests strength and wisdom and aligns him with nature and the pastoral scene, a frequent emphasis in Hardy novels.
By associating Oak so closely with nature, and vice versa, Hardy promotes a vision common to his best poetry, soon to follow publication of this novel. The irony inherent to the novel’s title, which falsely suggests that humans can escape their own destructive natures by relocating from an urban to a rural scene, is also helpful in understanding the story.
The novel remains extremely popular and has been transformed into multiple dramatic versions for stage and screen.
Bibliography
Schweik, Robert C., ed. Far from the Madding Crowd: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Criticisms. New York: Norton, 1986.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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