Critical Evaluation
As the title indicates, Thomas Hardy’s first major novel has an isolated setting: rural, remote from the world, and mainly centered upon Upper Weatherbury Farm in Wessex. Unlike that in Under the Greenwood Tree(1872), however, this secluded environment at times gives way to the town: the busy corn exchange in Casterbridge, the King’s Arms Hotel, the Casterbridge workhouse, the cities of Bath and Budmouth, and the lively Buck’s Head Inn on the Casterbridge Road.
Nevertheless, the setting has a timeless quality, accentuated by the round of seasonal activities and the continuity of agricultural life. Major scenes in the novel focus around the sheep shearing, saving of hayricks in the storm, spring sheep washing, and the autumn sheep fair at Greenhill. Nature here, however, is not merely background or a constant factor informing characters’ actions and proclivities; it is more powerful, a force vast and indifferent to man’s thoughts and actions. This is the nature that in Hardy’s later novels evolves into inexorable fate, before which the individual is helpless and in opposing which he or she comes to destruction. The main characters in this novel who survive are those who succeed in adjusting themselves to nature’s laws and often hostile dominance: Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene.
Far from the Madding Crowd exhibits confident power throughout in its fully developed characters, the imperceptible movements in the various conflicts involving Bathsheba and her three lovers, and in the way these conflicts evolve from their varied personalities. The combination of the four personalities furnishes the most explosive potential for melodramatic situation: Bathsheba’s capriciousness and attractiveness to men; Oak’s stolid, patient, unswerving loyalty and love for her; Boldwood’s composite character with its “enormous antagonistic forces” and “wild capabilities”; Sergeant Troy’s impulsiveness, his living only for the present moment, dashing but totally irresponsible; and the simple nature of Fanny, unaffected and victimized. Interactions of these intimately associated characters, in an almost closed environment, engender passionate and at times almost unbelievable conflicts.
Further complicating the clashes and intricate relationships among these four are the unforeseen, relentless accidents of nature: the initial loss of Oak’s sheep, the heavy storm with water that ruins Troy’s flowers on Fanny’s grave and that precipitates his disappearance, the loss of Boldwood’s hayricks in a second storm. The novel progresses in turns, driven headlong by Bathsheba’s careless whim of sending Boldwood an anonymous valentine and again by Troy’s determination to possess her in spite of all odds. Even Oak and Fanny, the two who outwardly seem driven by the impulsive actions of others, unconsciously complicate the plot by their very quiet and uncomplaining natures. Fanny, betrayed by Sergeant Troy, goes down before forces she has no means to combat, although she has a macabre revenge in the scene in which Bathsheba opens her coffin to find Troy’s child dead with its mother.
Oak, of stronger stuff, endures—like the nature he is so close to and of which he seems an integral part. Although he feels Bathsheba rules his life and the reader may be swept into this illusion, it is the earth and all of its creatures to which he is bound. Only when Bathsheba comes full circle through her marriage to the dissolute, unstable Troy, her half acceptance of Boldwood’s position and estate, back to an understanding of the land and its enduring qualities as embodied in Oak, can their marriage be possible. What Gabriel holds to in Bathsheba and what she herself does not recognize is the same elemental belonging to the land and its eternal strength.
The language of the novel is bound to the earth; the best...
(This entire section contains 1015 words.)
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example of this is the rural chorus, which is to figure in Hardy’s later novels and which provides much of the humor. The habitués of Warren’s Malthouse on the Casterbridge Road are intimately involved in the action and contribute to domestic scenes and rural atmosphere. They not only serve to comment on the various episodes but also reinforce the setting, for they, too, belong to the earth. In fact, they form part of the novel’s foundation; it is of importance that Oak is at home with them and shares their social outlook. When the Malthouse crowd appears at the end of the book to serenade the newly married Gabriel and Bathsheba with their “venerable worm-eaten instruments,” Gabriel invites them: “Come in, souls, and have something to eat and drink wi’ me and my wife.”
In this novel, the reader finds the emerging role of nature, the typical romantic, dramatic situations that will even intensify in later novels, and devices such as the village chorus and rural activities to mark the continuity and coherence of human existence. Apparent also are the chance encounters, series of coincidences, unforeseen accidents, overheard conversations, and secretly observed actions—all of which make up the fabric of a typical Hardy narrative. His plots, because of these devices, share an improbability and sense of the miraculous found in folklore. The coffin scene where Bathsheba finds Fanny and Troy’s child is the stuff of which ballads are made. The scene in which Troy woos Bathsheba with a sword exercise, in its bold sexual symbolism, also foreshadows such scenes as the fight between Henchard and Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the entwined couples at the hay-trusser’s dance in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).
Although not as carefully structured as his later novels, this work shows Hardy’s ability to convey the mental life of his characters, especially that of a complicated woman. He boldly draws his theatrical scenes, exploits his evocative rural settings, and for the first time in his career as a novelist dares give his work amplitude and passion. Not yet, however, does the reader find in this book the intense sense of gloom over a vanishing way of life—a depression that marked much of Hardy’s later writing; nor does the story embody humanity’s defeat and tragedy that increasingly became Hardy’s preoccupation.
