[In the following essay, Daleski analyzes the forms of love in Far from the Madding Crowd, placing it in the context of later novels.]

I

Far from the Madding Crowd, says Howard Babb, is “not in the same class with Hardy's later achievements”; and Irving Howe echoes him in stating it is a novel that “by no stretch of affection could be called major.”¹ It seems to me, however, that if Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure clearly stand alone as Hardy's two great novels, Far from the Madding Crowd is nonetheless a major achievement and as good as anything else he wrote. Admittedly, it has one poorly contrived and ineffective sequence—the Greenhill Fair episode, which brings Troy back into the narrative after his disappearance—but its mature mastery, following some of the persistent crudities of A Pair of Blue Eyes, is remarkable. The gain in assurance is immediately evident in the tone and the style, which now effortlessly accommodate the vivid and the humorous, as in the following early description of the ways in which Gabriel Oak prepares his person for the proposal of marriage he intends to make to Bathsheba Everdene: “[He] used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his usually dry, sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened it to a splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman cement, making it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a boulder after the ebb.”² The warm humor plays throughout on the rustics, whose simple, steady lives are set against the passionate upheavals of the protagonists; but it even sports with serious thematic matter: “It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail” (83). It is this high-spirited narrative that contains Hardy's first major portrayal of a failed marriage. It also presents an exploration of the possibilities of love that is characterized by its originality and profundity; and if some of the action tends to be melodramatic, melodrama is the seedbed of Hardy's genius.

The title of the novel, the strong presence of the rustics, the detailed rendering of the agricultural year—particularly of what might be called “the sheep year,” with its lambing, washing, shearing, and marketing scenes—the assertion that, on the day of the shearing, “God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town” (194), the venerable barn in which the shearing takes place that is said to be “natural to the shearers” as they are “in harmony” with it (196): this kind of emphasis appears to place the narrative in a straightforward pastoral tradition. When the quotation from Gray is restored to its context, however, the title, while still continuing to evoke “pastoral affairs” (74), has a decidedly ironic dimension:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
          Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
          They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

The narrative may be located in a sequestered vale of life, but the wishes of its characters are hardly “sober” and exhibit a pronounced tendency “to stray.”³ The tendency is exemplified in miniature and in the comic mode by the story told about Bathsheba's father. Mr. Coggan calls him “one of the ficklest husbands alive,” a man whose “heart would rove” and who could not help his “wicked heart wandering.” But he manages to “cure” his straying when he makes his wife take off her wedding ring: “[A]s soon as he could thoroughly fancy he was doing wrong and committing the seventh,” says Coggan, “’a got to like her as well as ever, and they lived on a perfect picture of mutel love” (111).

That more ominous forces may lurk in the pastoral scene, however, is intimated in the early episode that changes Gabriel's life. His dog drives his ewes over a precipice, and in a typical Hardy landscape—“the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon” hangs over “an oval pond” that glitters “like a dead man's eye”—Gabriel looks down on “a heap of two hundred mangled carcases, representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.” It appears that the dog, “under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better,” had “collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the hedge,” across a field, and finally “hurled them over the edge” (86-87). The scene vividly dramatizes how even in a quiet pastoral setting creatures may be driven to destruction. This episode also has a proleptic symbolic force that establishes it as a frame for the ensuing action. The dog destroys unwittingly, a wayward animal force; in the tale that subsequently unfolds we are invited to watch the operation of a similarly wayward and destructive force in human beings, a force that drives them (though from within) as ineluctably as the dog drives the sheep. Hardy quietly insists on the parallel. Shortly after this scene when Gabriel encounters Fanny Robin and gives her some money, his fingers touch her wrist: “It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven” (101). And at the end of the narrative, in the climactic scene in which Farmer Boldwood kills Sergeant Troy, we are told that “all the female guests” in the room remain “huddled aghast against the walls like sheep in a storm” (440).

In A Pair of Blue Eyes it was sexual inhibition that was shown to have tragic consequences; in Far from the Madding Crowd it is sexual passion. In this novel Hardy begins his prolonged engagement with what he conceived as the destructive effects of passion. But he also uses the portrayal of such passion as a foil to what he takes to be a more stable and enduring kind of love, making this the motivating force of the narrative. The contrast is established through the opposition between Gabriel and Troy, who serve as prototypical figures in Hardy's developing male typology, and through Bathsheba's marriages first with Troy and then with Gabriel. Nor is this novel unique in the canon only because it resolves its triangular opposition in two marriages; it further complicates it through the heroine's deep involvement with a third man, Boldwood. Keeping Bathsheba (and her choices) firmly at the center of the narrative and more and more tightly enmeshing the lives of the four protagonists, the novelist is effectively able to depict varying possibilities of love.

II

Gabriel Oak, it will be recalled, is the character in Hardy in relation to whom the rule of the void is first prescribed.⁴ Once he becomes aware of “an increasing void within him” (64), he is ready for love—and fixes on Bathsheba Everdene as well suited to supply his need. The opening description of him, however, suggests that he is unlikely to appeal to the spirited girl whose “ropes of black hair” tumble over the crimson jacket she wears (64), and who on occasion rides her pony while lying flat on its back, “her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky,” having glided into this position with “the rapidity … of a kingfisher” and the “noiselessness … of a hawk” (65):

In his face one might notice that many of the hues and curves of youth had tarried on to manhood: there even remained in his remoter crannies some relics of the boy. His height and breadth would have been sufficient to make his presence imposing, had they been exhibited with due consideration. But there is a way some men have … for which the mind is more responsible than flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing their dimensions by their manner of showing them. And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world's room, Oak walked unassumingly. … This may be said to be a defect in an individual if he depends for his valuation more upon his appearance than upon his capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.

(52-53)

That the manly Oak still bears the marks of youth and even boyhood in his face suggests that he is a reworking of the immature Stephen Smith of A Pair of Blue Eyes. There is nothing effeminate, however, about Oak, whose physique is “imposing” and who has an unbreakable manliness of temperament that “wears well.” The immaturity that clings to him, it is indicated, is of a sexual nature, for it shows itself too in a “modesty” of disposition that is not only quiet but virginal. Oak, indeed, is a diffident man, psychologically so diffident that he appears to be smaller than he is, to make little of himself in a general “curtailing” of his physical “dimensions” and reducing of his “claim on the world's room.” His diffidence expands, ramifying into all aspects of his relations with Bathsheba. It makes him inexpressive, for, though he wants to communicate “his impressions” to her, he would as soon think of “carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language” (70-71); and this in turn makes him feel inferior to her (again recalling Stephen Smith in relation to Elfride): “I can't match you, I know,” he says to her, “in mapping out my mind upon my tongue. I never was very clever in my inside” (72). It makes him slow—too slow for the kingfisher and the hawk—and physically timid with her: when he takes her hand, he holds it “but an instant” for “fear of being too demonstrative,” and so only touches her fingers “with the lightness of a small-hearted person” (72). The small-heartedness is also projected in a dimness of being that makes him look, when he is juxtaposed with Troy, “like a candle beside gas” (299). And it manifests itself too in an acceptance of his subordination to her “superiority” that implies a readiness for a reversal of traditional sexual roles: her recognition of her superiority pleases “by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man” (73).⁵

When Oak proposes to Bathsheba, she says she “shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if [she] could be one without having a husband” (80), making it apparent he has not occupied the blank spot in her consciousness. She tells him she wants somebody “to tame” her since she is “too independent,” and she knows he is not the man for the job. So little is he capable of taming her that he is in retreat before the battle is joined, characteristically reducing his claim to her as he does on the world's room: “But I love you,” he says to her, “—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked” (80). All he arouses in Bathsheba is “a yawn” and the conviction, presumably in a number of related respects, that he is not “good enough” for her (126).

Hardy complicates his presentation of Oak—and so quite transforms the male line he had started with in Stephen Smith—by making him masterful in everything other than his relations with women. As is shown time and again in the narrative, he is a natural leader of men, an expert shepherd, and resourceful, conscientious, and reliable in all that pertains to life on a large farm. As a shepherd (if not as a lover), with four lambs hanging over his shoulders, he looks “an epitome of the world's health and vigour” (156); and as a man among men, though he is “one of the quietest and most gentle men on earth,” he is capable—when he thinks the rustics are not showing sufficient respect in their talk of Bathsheba—of “[rising] to the occasion with martial promptness” and a ready fist (157). Paradoxically, his tendency to make little of himself is the basis of a self-mastery that even Bathsheba eventually comes to recognize and to envy: it is his selflessness that underlies his general reliability and resourcefulness, for “among the multitude of interests” by which he is surrounded, he shows that those which affect “his personal well-being [are] not the most absorbing and important in his eyes”; and it ensures too that he is always capable of seeing things as they are, for he looks “upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst” (355).

Oak, that is, is an impressive exemplar of the type of decent, honorable, though sexually ineffective man that is to recur in the novels that follow. In posing him against Sergeant Troy as a contender for Bathsheba's affections, the novelist appears to be wryly contemplating the irony that gives Oak all the virtues that his rival so manifestly lacks—and none of the potency that he so manifestly possesses. Nevertheless, it will be the burden of the tale, as we shall see, that Oak's is the only kind of love that endures; and so from the start his “affection,” though limited in force by being so “placid and regular,” is also said to flow “deep and long” (83). When he loves, however diffidently, it is once and for all: “You know, mistress,” he says to Bathsheba shortly before she marries Troy, “that I love you, and shall love you always.” And he adds that she is more to him than his “own affairs, and even life!” (248) He is sincere in what he says, of course, but in terms of the plan of love propounded by the novelist, the question that insistently poses itself is how, in the face of Bathsheba‘s apparent indifference to him, he keeps his love alive. Love, as we have seen, is defined as “an extremely exacting usurer” (73), and it demands its pound of flesh. What saves Oak, it would seem, is that he is prepared to settle for less than that, as emerges on the day of the sheepshearing: “Poor Gabriel’s soul was fed with a luxury of content by having her over him, her eyes critically regarding his skilful shears.... Like Guildenstern, Oak was happy in that he was not over happy. He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough” (197-98). Oak, moderate and restrained, is satisfied by a metaphorical possession of the woman he loves: it is “enough” for him that they form “one group” and so together have possession of something that is “exclusively their own.” Consequently, he does get a return on his usurious love, for his soul is “fed with a luxury of content”; and though it is the exposure of “the void” within him that has made him love her, he does not fall into an unrequited emptiness, for merely to be with her, as in this scene, makes him “full of [a] dim and temperate bliss” (198). It is a contentment that is sustained by such contact throughout the period preceding her marriage to him and by her growing dependence and reliance on him in all that concerns her farm.

III

Where Gabriel may be seen as a more complex development of Stephen Smith, Farmer Boldwood takes off, as it were, from Henry Knight. He is a man of forty-one and, until he receives Bathsheba's valentine, has been “a confirmed bachelor” (177), as Knight was “a bachelor by nature.” But he too is a more complex conception than his predecessor:

The phases of Boldwood's life were ordinary enough, but his was not an ordinary nature. That stillness, which struck casual observers more than anything else in his character and habit, and seemed so precisely like the rest of inanition, may have been the perfect balance of enormous antagonistic forces-positives and negatives in fine adjustment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent. Stagnant or rapid, it was never slow. He was always hit mortally, or he was missed.

(171)

The narrator is surely undecided by design here, for in offering two alternative explanations of Boldwood's outstanding feature, his stillness, he contrives to insinuate both possibilities, and, though they may appear to be contradictory, they are in fact complementary. Boldwood's stillness is an outward sign of an assumed self-sufficiency, a self-containment that makes it unnecessary for him to move toward anything. But this seems more like frozen motion than a genuine inner stillness, since what may be taken to be an enormously powerful outward drive is held in “perfect balance” with a neutralizing, “antagonistic” force of withdrawal. And this is indeed “the rest of inanition,” though in a more profound sense than may strike casual observers, who presumably see it as exhaustion. But it is a hidden emptiness, the heavy immobility of the void, that the confirmed bachelor bears within in much the same way as the young shepherd. The difference between Oak and Boldwood is that the latter has not yet been made aware of it; it takes Bathsheba's valentine to do the trick. And unlike the temperate Oak, who is throughout an epitome of self-mastery, Boldwood is “mastered” by the feeling that now wells up in him. From the moment he receives the valentine he is a man possessed.”

The change in Boldwood, once he fixes on Bathsheba as a love object, is even apparent physically. When her figure “shines” on his eyes, it “[lights] him up as the moon lights up a great tower,” though it is suggested that the light actually comes from within:

A man‘s body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained. There was a change in Boldwood’s exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.

(172)

Boldwood may have a “strong nature,” and so be at the opposite pole from a character such as Stephen Smith, but he nonetheless resembles him in one respect. Stephen had a tendency to “draw himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail”; Boldwood too, prior to the valentine, has lived within his “shell,” not so much in sensitive withdrawal as in the natural “reserve” of a habitual sense of “self-containment.” His reserve has made him physically impassive, for no feeling moves into or out of his hard, shell-like “impassibleness,” keeping him closed up like a dark tower or shut book. When Bathsheba comes into his life, the new feeling “overflows,” and he then writes himself in his body, “the tablet of his soul”; powerfully lit from within, he now can be read at a glance. Having sallied forth from the tower, he lives “outside his defences for the first time”; or, alternatively, having shed his shell, he has “a fearful sense of exposure.” But it is not only that he is now exposed to the outside world; he is also exposed to a consciousness of the void within, and so it is imperative for him to fill it. What he feels for Bathsheba is said to be “genuine lover's love” (173) because it springs directly and urgently from his own need. The need is so strong that the first words he addresses to her are an “offer of marriage” (177).

Just as Oak (as we have seen) tells Bathsheba that he will love her “always” and that she is more to him even than life, so Boldwood, when she informs him “her final decision” is that she “[cannot] marry him” (251), declares that his feeling for her is “a thing strong as death” and that no “dismissal by a hasty letter” can affect it (257). In the end he will show his feeling is so strong that he can deal out death; but it is a paradox of his condition that this man who is mastered by his passion, obsessed and possessed by it, is sexually diffident, as he himself admits in an important exchange with Bathsheba:

The most tragic woman is cowed by a tragic man, and although Boldwood was, in vehemence and glow, nearly her own self rendered into another sex, Bathsheba's cheek quivered. She gasped, “Leave me, sir—leave me! I am nothing to you. Let me go on!”

“Deny that he [Troy] has kissed you.”

“I shall not.”

“Ha—then he has!” came hoarsely from the farmer.

“He has,” she said slowly, and, in spite of her fear, defiantly. “I am not ashamed to speak the truth.”

“Then curse him; and curse him!” said Boldwood, breaking into a whispered fury. “Whilst I would have given worlds to touch your hand, you have let a rake come in without right or ceremony and—kiss you! Heaven's mercy—kiss you! …”

(262)

Boldwood here takes his stand on the need for “right” and “ceremony” in a man's relations with a woman, speaking out of the knowledge that his own relations with Bathsheba have been marked by an exemplary propriety and decorum. But when this passionate man, who breaks into “a whispered fury” at the idea of Troy's having kissed her, and who ultimately will kill as well as curse him, reveals that he has not dared “to touch [her] hand,” we may assume that in the case of the “confirmed bachelor,” as in that of the “bachelor by nature” in A Pair of Blue Eyes, an underlying inhibition has been at work.

The nature of Boldwood's inhibition—unlike Knight's—is not explored, but in this respect the assertion that the farmer is nearly Bathsheba's “own self rendered into another sex” proves most suggestive. He is said to be overtly like her “in vehemence and glow,” but (as remains to be seen in her case) there is perhaps a deeper resemblance in the paralyzing effect sexually of a long-sustained sense of self-sufficiency.⁶

In the face of Bathsheba's denial of him, Oak maintains himself on the crumbs offered him; Boldwood appears to revert to his earlier condition. When she marries Troy, the farmer seems to freeze. Oak looks sympathetically at “the square figure sitting erect” on his horse, his head “turned to neither side,” his elbows “steady by the hips,” and the brim of his hat “level and undisturbed in its onward glide” and finds “something more striking in this immobility than in a collapse” (296). Boldwood might indeed have been expected to collapse, to fall into the void opened up within him and disintegrate, when his aroused feeling meets with no return. He contrives with iron will, however, to repress his feeling, and so, it would seem, to remain immobile on the edge of the void, precariously poised to move away from it if chance should offer or topple over into it. In the event, he enacts both possibilities. He remains locked in the “fond madness” of his “unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba,” and “a great hope” germinates in him when it seems possible, a year after Troy's disappearance, that Bathsheba might remarry (392). He renews his suit, but since Troy's body has not been found, Bathsheba will not contemplate marriage until seven years have elapsed from the time of his supposed drowning. Expecting to receive her consent at the Christmas party he is giving some fifteen months after that event, Boldwood asks Oak whether there is “anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years” (421). Like Stephen Smith, it appears, Boldwood is intent on ensuring possession of his beloved but is more than ready to delay it. “It seems long in a forward view,” Oak answers laconically. Boldwood's mind, we are to understand, is already “crazed with care and love,” as the “extraordinary collection of articles” he has purchased for Bathsheba later reveals (446); when Troy appears at the party and claims Bathsheba, nothing can prevent Boldwood's collapse. His initial “gnashing despair” changes to “a frenzied look” when she screams on Troy's “seizure” of her—and he shoots the sergeant (439).

IV

Bathsheba initially makes all the wrong choices in regard to the men in her life. First, she rejects Oak, whom she ultimately marries and with whom she is set to live happily ever after at the end of the narrative. Then, having registered Boldwood's indifference to her at the Casterbridge cornmarket, she brings him into her life by inciting him with her valentine, which she seals with the words “Marry Me” (147). And she not only sends the valentine to him on a whim but also, in a manner reminiscent of Elfride on her pony in A Pair of Blue Eyes, leaves it to the fall of a book as to whether she should send it to him or not. “So very idly and unreflectingly was this deed done,” comments the narrator (148), but she so chooses to do. When Boldwood proposes to her, she tells him she is not in love with him and cannot marry him, but she is conscious that love is “encircling her like a perfume” (177), and she is also left with “a strong feeling that, having been the one who began the game, she ought in honesty to accept the consequences” (181-82). Boldwood persists, and she is on the verge of giving way—“I will try to love you,” she says, and adds that she has “every reason to hope” that within about six weeks she will “be able to promise” to be his wife (210-11)—when she meets Troy. Then she marries Troy.

She meets Troy for the first time when she is making her nightly tour of inspection of the farm. She is going back to the house “by a path through a young plantation of tapering firs” when, at “the darkest point of her route,” she hears footsteps:

The noise approached, came close, and a figure was apparently on the point of gliding past her when something tugged at her skirt and pinned it forcibly to the ground. The instantaneous check nearly threw Bathsheba off her balance. In recovering she struck against warm clothes and buttons.

“A rum start, upon my soul!” said a masculine voice, a foot or so above her head. “Have I hurt you, mate?”

“No,” said Bathsheba, attempting to shrink away.

“We have got hitched together somehow, I think.”

“Yes.”

“Are you a woman?”

“Yes.”

“A lady, I should have said.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“I am a man.”

“Oh!”

Bathsheba softly tugged again, but to no purpose.

(213-14)

This is one of the scenes in the novels that first bears the unmistakable Hardy stamp. It also strikingly exhibits his new maturity as a novelist as he makes the scene resonate with symbolic and proleptic force. From the moment Bathsheba encounters Troy, we see, she becomes entangled with him, caught up so firmly she cannot get free. In a word, she is “hooked.” When she does try to free herself, she tugs so “softly” that it is “to no purpose.” The effect of the sudden contact is nearly to throw her “off her balance,” but in trying to recover it she moves only closer to him, becoming conscious of his “warm clothes,” of the warmth of his body, that is. It is in more than one sense “a rum start,” as Troy says, and a portentous one. It is made even more so by the strange way in which Troy chooses to announce his entry into her life: “I am a man,” he says; and Bathsheba, who has already been conversing with the “masculine voice” that has addressed her out of the darkness, can only gasp. It is with masculine strength of a kind she has not previously encountered that she now has to contend: when he later “looks hard” into her eyes, she at once looks down, “for his gaze [is] too strong to be received point-blank with her own” (215), and penetrating looks, we know, have their special significance in the novels. But this is a strength, it has previously been intimated, that she needs to measure herself against: at the Casterbridge cornmarket, “something” in the appearance of the “lithe slip of humanity” she is there said to be suggests her “potentiality” for “alarming exploits of sex, and daring enough to carry them out” (140). Troy, who is utterly unlike both Oak and Boldwood, is the kind of man, it rapidly becomes clear, to test that daring; he is indeed a New Man among Hardy's diffident men (though Manston of Desperate Remedies is a villainous forebear).

It is a mark of the novelist's imaginative control that Bathsheba's first instinctive response to bodily contact with Troy is “to shrink away” as much as she can. It is a crucial response as we shall see, and we do well to bear it in mind, for we tend to lose sight of it amid the brilliance of what follows:

“Is that a dark lantern you have? I fancy so,” said the man.

“Yes.”

“If you'll allow me I'll open it, and set you free.”

A hand seized the lantern, the door was opened, the rays burst out from their prison, and Bathsheba beheld her position with astonishment.

The man to whom she was hooked was brilliant in brass and scarlet. He was a soldier. His sudden appearance was to darkness what the sound of a trumpet is to silence. Gloom, the genius loci at all times hitherto, was now totally overthrown, less by the lanternlight than by what the lantern lighted. The contrast of this revelation with her anticipations of some sinister figure in sombre garb was so great that it had upon her the effect of a fairy transformation.

It was immediately apparent that the military man's spur had become entangled in the gimp which decorated the skirt of her dress. …

(214)

When Troy opens the dark lantern, we have one of the first epiphanies in the novels, the use of epiphany being one of Hardy's major techniques for implying significance as opposed to his tendency to provide regular narratorial directives in that regard.⁷ Troy is the focus of attention, and Bathsheba is the one who looks; what is suddenly illuminated comes to her with the force of a “revelation.” In the epiphanic mode, it is Troy's inner essence that is revealed here, and we do well to bear this in mind too, especially in view of what soon becomes the narrator's increasing hostility to him. Troy's “brilliance” is directly attributable to the “brass and scarlet” of his uniform (and we remember the crimson jacket in which Bathsheba makes her first appearance). But it also streams out of him, shattering the darkness as a trumpet would the silence. It is an inner radiance that confounds the spirit of place, the darkness being “totally overthrown, less by the lantern-light than by what the lantern light[s].” It is the darkness, moreover, of a site that, even “gloomy” at “cloudless noontide,” is “dark as midnight at dusk, and black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight” (213). What emanates from him is a sexual vividness and brightness, as is underscored when the phallic spur finally becomes apparent. To be open to such brightness, it is implied, is liberating: when Troy takes in what has happened, he says to her, “You are a prisoner, miss” (215); the rays of the lantern that reveal this to be the case are said (in an image that otherwise would be incongruous) to “burst out from their prison” when the lamp is opened.⁸

After this encounter Troy pursues Bathsheba, wooing her with a combination of genuine admiration and designing flattery until one day her response signifies that she has capitulated, that “the seed” that will “lift the foundation” has “taken root in the chink,” at which point “the careless sergeant [smiles] within himself, and probably too the devil [smiles] from a loop-hole in Tophet,” for this is “the turning-point of a career” (226).

A more tangible turning point in the relationship is the occasion of the sword exercise (239-41), which John Bayley calls “one of the greatest scenes in English fiction.” It is also, one may add, an early instance of Hardy's use of symbolic action to convey sexual significance, a technique that enabled him to bypass Victorian restrictions in this respect.⁹ Troy uses the demonstration, in the first place, to test Bathsheba, and her ability to stand up to his onslaught bears sharply on his later disillusionment with her. He starts with “a preliminary test” to learn whether she has “pluck enough” to let him do what he wants, and he insists that he cannot “perform” if she is afraid. He lies to her about the sword, denying that it is “very sharp” when in fact it “will shave like a razor,” but she is nevertheless unflinching when “his cuts” come so close that “had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been almost a mould of Bathsheba's figure.” But the performance is also designed, of course, to demonstrate his skill: “Never since the broadsword became the national weapon had there been more dexterity shown in its management than by the hands of Sergeant Troy.” He crowns the performance by using the razor-sharp sword to cut a lock of her hair—“Bravely borne!” he says to her. “You didn't flinch a shade's thickness. Wonderful in a woman!”—and then to spit “upon its point” a caterpillar that has settled on her bosom. When he finally tells her how sharp the sword is, she shudders: “I have been within an inch of my life,” she says, “and didn't know it”; but he assures her she has been “perfectly safe”: “My sword never errs.” In this scene, in which the sexual overtones gather fast and thick, Troy has indeed shown a mastery of his weapon. He also shows he is the kind of man who will not hesitate to put a woman at risk.

For Bathsheba the exercise reenacts and intensifies the visionary experience of her first encounter with Troy. As his “reflecting blade” flashes, catching “beams of light” from the sun, the atmosphere is “transformed to [her] eyes,” and she is “enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand.” Troy, that is, is once again all brilliance and sparkle, a fiery, vital force, manifesting himself in strong contrast to the dullness of Oak's restraint and the gloom of Boldwood's obsession. The woman who told Oak she wanted someone to tame her is mastered here, feeling “powerless to withstand or deny” Troy:

He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

He drew near and said, “I must be leaving you.” He drew nearer still. A minute later and she saw his scarlet form disappear amid the ferny thicket, almost in a flash, like a brand swiftly waved.

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 did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream—here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin.

The circumstance had been the gentle dip of Troy's mouth downwards upon her own. He had kissed her.

(241-42)

One has to give full and careful weight to this scene in order to be able later to engage with the narrator's ambivalences. If Bathsheba is overwhelmed by Troy here so that afterward she loves him, loving “in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance” (243), her capitulation is presented in positive terms. Troy may for her have become his sword as he disappears “almost in a flash, like a brand swiftly waved,” and so the encounter with him may “stop the breath” in its perilousness, but it is also vitalizing, “a reviving wind,” waking her to sexual life. And when he kisses her and fires her into passion, making her blood beat and setting her aflame, it is by way of an expansion of being that “enlarges” emotion even if it “swamps” thought. If we may be inclined to regard this as an equivocal gain, the man who works the enlargement and produces the emotion that issues in her tears is seen, like “Moses in Horeb,” to possess miraculous powers. Prudent thought would anyway be of no avail.¹⁰

Subsequently, however, Bathsheba's “culpability” is said to lie in her “making no attempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into consequences” (244). The view of her relationship with Troy that the narrator now appears to endorse is that she is foolishly infatuated with him and so is led to marry the thoroughly irresponsible and dissolute man that he reveals himself to be, a man who eventually deserts her as he has earlier abandoned Fanny Robin. Justice may be done to Troy's sexual glamour and vitality, but he is otherwise consistently condemned.

He is condemned, first, out of his own mouth: “He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no third method. ‘Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man,’ he would say” (221). He is condemned too by his own actions, as on the night of the great storm when, instead of taking steps to protect the ricks on Bathsheba's farm (which has now become his responsibility), he leads the farmworkers in a “debauch” that makes for a “painful and demoralizing termination to the evening's entertainment” he has arranged (303). And he is condemned furthermore by the hostile commentary of the narrator, who seems bent on maintaining a negative consistency of characterization. A few examples of this must suffice. He is said to be “moderately truthful towards men” but to lie “like a Cretan” to women; since his “vicious phases” are “the offspring of impulse” and “his virtuous phases of cool meditation,” the latter have “a modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen” (220). We are told that his “deformities” lie “deep down from a woman's vision,” while his “embellishments” are “upon the very surface” (244). When he plants the flowers on Fanny's grave with what I take to be genuine emotion—I shall discuss his attitude toward Fanny later—the narrator remarks that “in his prostration at this time” he has “no perception that in the futility of these romantic doings, dictated by a remorseful reaction from previous indifference, there [is] any element of absurdity” (372-73). And what Troy has “in the way of emotion” is described as “an occasional fitful sentiment which sometimes [causes] him as much inconvenience as emotion of a strong and healthy kind” (400).

Troy, clearly, is not an admirable character, but the failure of his marriage to Bathsheba is not solely to be attributed to him. Although he is again viewed critically when he and Bathsheba are seen alone for the first time after the marriage, it is also suggested that something more is at issue between the couple than emerges (rather like the scene in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady—published a few years later—in which we first see Mr. and Mrs. Osmond after their marriage and register the change in their relationship):

“And you mean, Frank,” said Bathsheba sadly—her voice was painfully lowered from the fulness and vivacity of the previous summer—“that you have lost more than a hundred pounds in a month by this dreadful horse-racing? O, Frank, it is cruel; it is foolish of you to take away my money so. We shall have to leave the farm; that will be the end of it!”

“Humbug about cruel. Now, there 'tis again—turn on the waterworks; that's just like you.”

“But you'll promise me not to go to Budmouth second meeting, won't you?” she implored. Bathsheba was at the full depth for tears, but she maintained a dry eye.

“I don't see why I should; in fact, if it turns out to be a fine day, I was thinking of taking you.” …

“But you don't mean to say that you have risked anything on [the race next Monday] too!” she exclaimed, with an agonized look.

“There now, don't you be a little fool. Wait till you are told. Why, Bathsheba, you have lost all the pluck and sauciness you formerly had, and upon my life if I had known what a chickenhearted creature you were under all your boldness, I'd never have—I know what.”

(318-19)

The injured tones of the couple as they engage in mutual recrimination indicate how soon the marriage has lost its gleam, the point being made additionally and emblematically by some “early-withered leaves” that spin across the path of their gig (319). But if Bathsheba is justifiably angered by his prodigal behavior, it is not clear why she—as distinct from her money—should be so diminished, for her voice is “painfully lowered” from its habitual “fulness and vivacity.” We recall too that on her first appearance after the marriage she has spoken “listlessly” and “seemed weary” (282). And if Troy, in turn, is led to assert his mastery in the marriage, there is nothing in the scene itself to account for the kind of disenchantment he expresses, neither her nagging nor her chickenheartedness—he, if anyone, should have the full measure of her “boldness”—being presented as so obnoxious as to warrant his implied regret that he has married her.

Shortly thereafter, when Troy is reduced to asking Bathsheba for money (which he wants to give Fanny), we are told that he deems it “necessary to be civil,” though he does “not now love her enough to allow himself to be carried too far by her ways” (330). It seems that the decline of his love for Bathsheba may be linked to his chance encounter with Fanny, with whom he has lost touch but not deliberately abandoned, and this impression is strengthened when Bathsheba discovers he keeps another woman's “coil of hair” in the case at the back of his watch (331). The discovery greatly upsets Bathsheba and forces her to review her situation. The account we are then given of her attitude to marriage suggests the cause of Troy's disenchantment with her, though the narrator carefully stops short of stating this himself:

Directly he had gone, Bathsheba burst into great sobs—dry-eyed sobs, which cut as they came, without any softening by tears. But she determined to repress all evidences of feeling. She was conquered; but she would never own it as long as she lived. Her pride was indeed brought low by despairing discoveries of her spoliation by marriage with a less pure nature than her own. She chafed to and fro in rebelliousness, like a caged leopard; her whole soul was in arms, and the blood fired her face. Until she had met Troy, Bathsheba had been proud of her position as a woman; it had been a glory to her to know that her lips had been touched by no man's on earth—that her waist had never been encircled by a lover's arm. She hated herself now. In those earlier days she had always nourished a secret contempt for girls who were slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should choose to salute them. She had never taken kindly to the idea of marriage in the abstract as did the majority of women she saw about her. In the turmoil of her anxiety for her lover she had agreed to marry him; but the perception that had accompanied her happiest hours on this account was rather that of self-sacrifice than of promotion and honour. Although she scarcely knew the divinity's name, Diana was the goddess whom Bathsheba instinctively adored. That she had never, by look, word, or sign, encouraged a man to approach her—that she had felt herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in renouncing the simplicity of a maiden existence to become the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole—were facts now bitterly remembered.

(333-34)

The narrator states that the sense of “spoliation” Bathsheba so bitterly registers here is due to her “marriage with a less pure nature than her own,” but the rest of the passage suggests it stems from the brute fact of marriage itself. It is not merely that she has “never taken kindly to the idea of marriage.” If it was a positive “glory” to her, prior to her own marriage, to know she had remained sexually untouched by any man, this feeling would seem to extend beyond a girlish pride in virginity since she is said to “hate herself now”—to be disgusted, apparently, by sexual experience per se. Such experience, the image of the caged leopard implies, has not been liberating, has failed to realize the hope symbolized in the scene with the dark lantern. Certainly the feeling of self-hatred is evoked in direct response to the recall of those untouched lips and waist. This suggests that her resentment at being “conquered” may also be related to the fact of her sexual submission and that it is not merely disillusionment in Troy that has brought “her pride” low. Similarly, her renunciation of “the simplicity of a maiden existence” for life as “the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole” is felt as a “degradation,” and the strength of the revulsion suggests a more profound kind of humbling. Indeed, she was only led into marriage in the first place “in the turmoil of anxiety for her lover,” by her jealousy and fear of losing him, that is, as she has previously admitted to Oak: “I went to Bath that night,” she tells him, “in the full intention of breaking off my engagement to Troy,” but when she learns he has been eyeing a beautiful woman, she is caught “between jealousy and distraction” and marries him (311).

The specific fear of losing Troy would seem to have allayed Bathsheba's more general fear of sexual contact and impelled her to go against her own nature, for it is Diana she “instinctively adore[s]”: Bathsheba, that is, is temperamentally a virgin, “sufficient to herself.” It is in this more profound sense that Boldwood, as we have seen, may be said to be “nearly her own self rendered into another sex”: Boldwood the bachelor, apparently confirmed in his self-sufficiency, and Boldwood the lover, who even when roused out of himself does not dare to touch her hand. Paradoxically, a sufficiency of self, a firm sense of self-establishment, is a precondition for a successful sexual relationship, provided it does not function, as in these instances, to inhibit sexual response. Marriage, even in its “happiest hours,” is a “self-sacrifice” to Bathsheba, for her martyrdom to sex entails the violation of her vaunted self-sufficiency. Bathsheba and Boldwood may thus be regarded as victims of what might be called a Diana complex. In this respect Hardy is astonishing in his handling of gender, moving far beyond an essentialist position to a profound understanding of what may be common to both man and woman. And Bathsheba and Boldwood are merely the first of major Hardy characters who are caught in sexual incapacity. Hardy will again explore the working of the complex in his portrayal of Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, of Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders, and of Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. It is interesting that, some two years after the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd, there should be an indication of a similar condition in the work of a woman novelist. In Chapter 7 of Daniel Deronda, it is said of Gwendolen Harleth that “she objected, with a sort of physical repulsion, to being directly made love to. With all her imaginative delight in being adored, there was a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her.” Gwendolen is unmarried at this point, but we may infer that she—like Bathsheba—carries such fierceness with her into marriage.¹¹

In the quoted passage from Far from the Madding Crowd, however, the narrator both implies that Bathsheba is temperamentally unsuited to marriage and contrives to camouflage this by suggesting at the same time that it is her marriage to Troy that is the trouble. What he leaves quite unsaid—though this is of the essence—is what the effect of her attitude is on Troy. Troy is no doubt a wastrel and a philanderer and so the wrong man for Bathsheba, but in the failed marriage there is more to his side of things than the novelist appears willing to admit. Troy's accusation of chickenheartedness on Bathsheba's part now takes on another meaning. In the sword exercise, we recall, Troy said he could only “perform” if she were not afraid; if she did not flinch then, we may suspect she has been inclined to “shrink away” from him now, much as she instinctively did on the occasion of their first encounter in the dark. It is not her nagging about money that is the main cause of his rapid disenchantment with her; it seems reasonable to assume, rather, that she has proved incapable of really opening herself to him. D. H. Lawrence (as I have analyzed in detail in The Forked Flame) may instruct us as to what, in all likelihood, lies behind such incapacity (this applying as well to Grace and Sue, to Boldwood and Henchard): in his depiction of a similar inhibition in Constance Chatterley, he shows it is a fear of losing the self that is at issue. Bathsheba, at all events, with her sense of violation, is a prisoner not of Troy, as in the scene with the spur, but of self.¹²

If this reading is valid, then it is Bathsheba's sexual irresponsiveness that makes Troy feel they are not truly married. Support for this view is provided by one of the most striking scenes in the novel (and in Hardy)—the confrontation of Troy and Bathsheba over the open coffin that contains the bodies of Fanny and her child, whom he has fathered:

He had originally stood perfectly erect. And now, in the well-nigh congealed immobility of his frame could be discerned an incipient movement, as in the darkest night may be discerned light after a while. He was gradually sinking forwards. The lines of his features softened, and dismay modulated to illimitable sadness. Bathsheba was regarding him from the other side, still with parted lips and distracted eyes. Capacity for intense feeling is proportionate to the general intensity of the nature, and perhaps in all Fanny's sufferings, much greater relatively to her strength, there never was a time when she suffered in an absolute sense what Bathsheba suffered now.

What Troy did was to sink upon his knees with an indefinable union of remorse and reverence upon his face, and, bending over Fanny Robin, gently kissed her, as one would kiss an infant asleep to avoid awakening it.

At the sight and sound of that, to her, unendurable act, Bathsheba sprang towards him. All the strong feelings which had been scattered over her existence since she knew what feeling was, seemed gathered together into one pulsation now. The revulsion from her indignant mood a little earlier, when she had meditated upon compromised honour, forestalment, eclipse in maternity by another, was violent and entire. All that was forgotten in the simple and still strong attachment of wife to husband. She had sighed for her self-completeness then, and now she cried aloud against the severance of the union she had deplored. She flung her arms round Troy's neck, exclaiming wildly from the deepest deep of her heart—

“Don't—don't kiss them! O, Frank, I can't bear it—I can't! I love you better than she did: kiss me too, Frank—kiss me! You will, Frank, kiss me too!” …

“I will not kiss you!” he said, pushing her away.

(359-60)

Hardy's characterization here is superb. Troy acts with complete sincerity and spontaneity, and so is unassailable. The commentary, otherwise so hostile, grants him this: as he begins to melt into motion, the unfreezing of his “congealed immobility” is given an affirmative connotation by the parallel established between it and the discerning of “light” in “the darkest night,” just as the softening of his features bespeaks the tenderness with which he approaches the dead Fanny.¹³ (His feeling now, we may remark in passing, is not different in kind from that which he later exhibits at Fanny's grave, though the narrator is not as charitable to him then.) But the suffering that Troy inflicts on Bathsheba is also sharply rendered. His gentle kissing of Fanny is an “unendurable act” for Bathsheba not alone for the quality of the feeling it reveals toward the dead woman but also in its utter negation of her, his wife, as if he were unaware of her very presence there. The fear of losing him that has led her into the marriage now operates to make her try to save it, though paradoxically it has all along been a threat to “her self-completeness,” and this propels her into her grotesque competition with Fanny. But Troy is remorseless. Putting an effective end to their marriage, he proceeds to spell out what has undermined it: “This woman,” he says to Bathsheba, “is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be,” and he then calls Fanny his “very, very wife.” He also adds, “heartlessly”: “You are nothing to me—nothing. A ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage. I am not morally yours” (361). If Troy here brutally insists on Bathsheba's lack of responsiveness to him sexually, we cannot but reflect that the professed depth of his commitment to Fanny and of his love for her must be supposed in turn to have affected his own sexual response to Bathsheba, even though he may have believed Fanny to be “miles away, or dead” (320) throughout the marriage.¹⁴

Troy acts on his sense of Fanny as his “very wife” in the tombstone he puts up for her and in its inscription (“Erected by Francis Troy / In Beloved Memory of / Fanny Robin …”); and in due course Bathsheba seems to accept the fact too: her inscription on the same tombstone reads—“In the same Grave lie / The Remains of the aforesaid / Francis Troy …” (451).

V

When Troy disappears, Bathsheba, “perceiving clearly that her mistake had been a fatal one,” accepts her position and waits “coldly for the end” (386). Eventually, however, Boldwood renews his suit, and she is on the verge of agreeing to marry him within about six years when Troy stages his return at the Christmas party. She is initially prostrated by the killing, but she “[revives] with the spring” (450), and a year after her “legal widowhood” (454) she and Oak decide to marry. Their coming together is celebrated in a passage that is pivotal in Hardy's future development as a novelist:

They spoke very little of their mutual feelings; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by 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. This good fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.

(458-59)

The love that Bathsheba and Oak achieve, we are told, is “the only love” worth having, being the only kind of love that is “strong as death” and so will endure. Its various attributes are clearly distinguished. First, it is a love that is akin to friendship, being fundamentally a matter of “good fellowship” or “camaraderie.” Sometime previously Bathsheba has begun “to entertain” for Oak “the genuine friendship of a sister” (334); by the time this feeling ripens into love, they are “tried friends” and share the mutuality of a friendship that can take their feeling for each other for granted. Second, their love is founded on “substantial affection,” a phrase that is carefully chosen. It is based on affection, not “passion,” that is, and hence is substantial, for (in Solomonic cadence) it can neither be extinguished nor dissipated, whereas passion is “evanescent as steam.” Third, it is a love that is solidly rooted in “hard prosaic reality,” flowering out of it; it is thus rooted too in a mutual fullness of knowledge that broadly encompasses “each other's character.” Fourth, it is a love that is marked by the compatibility of the lovers, a general affinity of interest that embraces a “similarity of pursuits” and an association not only in their “pleasures” but in their “labours” too. It is, therefore, a multifaceted love, and it is the fact that it is a “compounded feeling” that gives it its strength.

The sentiments expressed in the quoted passage at first seem unexceptionable in view of the tale that has preceded it. Passion indeed seems to have vanished like steam, for there is nothing left of the passion of Troy and Fanny, of Troy and Bathsheba, and of Boldwood for Bathsheba. Where the compounded feeling of camaraderie will foster true love, passion has destroyed the lovers, only Bathsheba of those named above surviving to carry on with ordinary life. It is another matter, however, when this passage is viewed in relation to the novels that follow it. The pronouncement of the seer is so emphatic that it would seem to foreclose any future exploration on his part of the nature of passion, the more especially since its destructiveness was shown to be sordid rather than tragic. And who would want to try to take hold of steam? Yet Hardy proceeded hereafter to devote all his major work (with the exception of The Mayor of Casterbridge) to this subject. An explanation of the seeming contradiction perhaps lies in the fact that his see-er had seen and shown aspects of passion that his seer ignores in his final sweeping generalization. He had shown, for instance, that the passion of Bathsheba and Troy (the main focus of interest in the novel) was not destructive per se, that it was, if anything, her lack of passion that was the trouble. This problem of the reluctant or unresponsive woman certainly preoccupied Hardy and led him to persevere in tackling it in varied passionate contexts.¹⁵ Furthermore, the see-er had seen and vividly conveyed that passion could be not only destructive but vitalizing; and if the seer invoked Solomon at its demise, the see-er had called on Moses with no less force at its birth. More needed to be said before the seer could be left to hold such sway. And though Bathsheba is set in the end to flourish in her marriage of camaraderie, we cannot but feel that the see-er has insinuated she will be missing something.¹⁶ It is a fact, at any rate, that the ideal camaraderie does not seem to interest the novelist very much, for analogous relationships founded on it tend to be tacked on to the end of the novels that follow—that is, until he essays a full-scale treatment of it in Jude the Obscure, with the sort of consequences that remain to be determined.

Notes

1. Howard Babb, “Setting and Theme in Far from the Madding Crowd,” 147; Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy, 52.

2. Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 75. Further page references to this novel will be incorporated parenthetically in the text.

3. John Goode also remarks that the narrative, “far from ignoring ignoble strife, is the story of wishes and their consequences which are neither sober nor noiseless” (Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth, 31).

4. See Chapter 1, 32-33 above.

5. In contradistinction to this view of Oak, Annette Federico talks of his “sexual equilibrium”: “He is Hardy's version of the male ideal, perfectly balanced between the flesh and the spirit” (Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing, 71). Robert Langbaum remarks on “Gabriel's strong sexuality throughout” and says his name suggests “phallic strength” (Thomas Hardy, 80, 84).

6. Marjorie Garson, however, calls “the rigid monklike celibacy” of Boldwood a “parody” of Bathsheba's “wilful self-sufficiency” (Hardy's Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text, 25).

   A number of critics have also commented (though in different terms) on the resemblance between Boldwood and Henry Knight: John Lucas states that “Boldwood is very like Henry Knight in his romantic vision of women” (“Hardy's Women,” 132). And Ronald Blythe says “the farmer, like the man of letters in A Pair of Blue Eyes, is sexually timid and uncertain” (introduction to Far from the Madding Crowd, 26).

7. See the Introduction for a discussion of the connection between Hardy and James Joyce in this respect, 8-9 above.

8. There is a lot more to this scene, as I have tried to bring out, than that phallic spur, which is often made a limiting focus of attention. Cf. Richard C. Carpenter, who says “there is patent phallic symbolism … in this scene in the cruel potency of the spur and the soft, enveloping tissues of the gown” (“The Mirror and the Sword: Imagery in Far from the Madding Crowd,” 342). Rosemarie Morgan, in her “revisionary” (that is, feminist) analysis of the scene, gives even more weight to the momentous spur, “[T]he soft, feminine folds of the woman's dress pierced through by the man's projecting blade [sic] suggests (and prefigures) not only the act of love-making, but as a material representation of inner, intangible desires, the erotic seizure now taking hold of the two young lovers” (Women and Sexuality, 33).

9. John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, 121. Another striking instance of Hardy's provision of a sexual subtext by means of symbolic action is his description of Tess's ride with Alec in his gig in Tess of the d'Urbervilles: see Chapter 7, 156-58 below.

10. This is to view the scene in radically different terms from a critic such as Susan Beegel, who (with reference to the sword exercise) refers to “Troy's brand of death-dealing passion” and says that “Bathsheba's love for Troy is a love which embraces helplessness; his feeling for her one which exults in the powerlessness of its victims” (“Bathsheba's Lovers: Male Sexuality in Far from the Madding Crowd,” 210, 212).

    Robert M. Polhemus refreshingly says that “it simply will not do to moralize smoothly on this chapter … and deplore Bathsheba's reaction to Troy as ‘self-destructive’ [the reference is to Beegel], misguided, or tragic. To do so misses the point, slighting and cheapening the soul-shaking power of the erotic.” But Polhemus himself diminishes this power by going on to call Troy “the seducer, the huckster of desire and instant gratification” (Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence, 240, 246).

11. I am indebted to my colleague, Joshua Adler, for drawing my attention to this passage in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

12. See The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence, 293-99.

    Peter J. Casagrande views the problem as one of lost innocence:

    Bathsheba is filled with repugnance toward physical contact and near-hysteria at the thought of having lost her innocence. Sexual union with Troy has left her with a sense of “spoliation,” “degradation,” and pollution, the unalterability of which she would never “own … as long as she lived.” Therefore she hates herself, regards herself a bloody victim, a fallen woman. … Her instinctive affinity for Diana … reinforces this. Her idea of growing up is, in short, a nervous panicky one requiring fulfillment of the impossible dream of regaining the lost “simplicity of a maiden existence.” (“A New View of Bathsheba Everdene,” 64)

13. George Wing is one of the few critics to accept that Troy is sincere here: “There [is] a curious warmth in the shallowness of the dandy's heart, and an unexpected fidelity in his fickleness. As he stands before Fanny's rough coffin … he is unequivocal and, I think, sincere” (Thomas Hardy, 50).

    Cf. Ian Ousby, who takes the more usual view: “With the discovery of Fanny Robin's death and the belated awakening of his guilt, Troy turns on Bathsheba in a misogynistic fury that is anything but feigned. [His] arguments … are now advanced over Fanny's coffin with an intensity that loses nothing for being rooted in hypocrisy and self-deception” (“Love-Hate Relations: Bathsheba, Hardy and the Men in Far from the Madding Crowd,” 38).

14. I am indebted to a graduate student, Dorit Ashur, for this view of the presumed consequence of Troy's love for Fanny.

    Linda M. Shires maintains that, “though the point is not made directly by Troy, Fanny is the truer wife because she has produced his child, because she is a mother, while Bathsheba is not” (“Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far from the Madding Crowd,” 172).

15. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note that Hardy's biographer has stated that his wife, Emma, failed “to respond physically” to him (Millgate, Thomas Hardy, 166).

16. Only Lionel Adey, so far as I know, points to what Bathsheba stands to lose in the marriage to Oak: “Certainly Bathsheba does right to choose companionate love wherein is no ecstasy, but she also jettisons a part of herself that, had Troy proved a fitting husband [and she a fitting wife, we might add] would have given her life an élan it will never know again” (“Styles of Love in Far from the Madding Crowd,” 60-61).