[In the following essay, Shires deconstructs the signifiers of gender and power in the novel, claiming that previous feminist critics have not sufficiently examined the contradictions and complexities in Hardy's portrayal of a nineteenth-century woman's place.]

“Are you a woman?”

“The woman—for it was a woman—approached.”¹

I.

In Chapter 44 of Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene, Mrs. Troy, runs away and hides in a fern brake. In a sudden act of revolt, born of humiliation at the hands of her husband, who has just confided his unsurpassed love for the dead Fanny Robin, Bathsheba seeks escape from a domain of male victimization. Running without direction in the darkness, she happens by chance on a thicket that seems familiar and drops down into a deep slumber. This seemingly protected spot, so like the tree-hung enclosure where Tess d'Urberville loses her virginity, appears far more congenial than it is in actuality. Bathsheba, stripped of a role and a right she thought was hers, wishes to slip back into a void of pre-gendered nothingness. The possibility of death, which she seriously entertains, signifies peace from gender struggle and specifically what she perceives as male domination. On a deeper level, however, Bathsheba here enacts a crisis of gender.²

Her disappearance into this wet hollow is fully emblematic of a return to the womb. Indeed, because it is extremely damp, she even loses her voice, the most authoritative, acculturated aspect of herself. Losing her power over language, the strong farmer is reduced to a lost infant. It is as if Hardy, who has revealed Bathsheba, in the early part of the text, to be a colorfully coy temptress and has later shown her as a willful woman in a male profession, forces her to start over again.

On the level of story, this pivotal scene not only continues to define the heroine, but actually rebirths her. Relying on condensation as if a dream, it also operates as a triple gender scenario: it is a fantasy of gender annulment, a scene of gender mixing, and a drama of sexual choice. In this sense, Chapter 44, to which I will return, encapsulates the deepest concerns of the novel.

From its publication, Far from the Madding Crowd generated, like other novels by Hardy, a paper trail on gender, sex, and power. But more than others, it encouraged comment and confusion about gender—both that of its author and that of its hero and heroine, Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene. When Far from the Madding Crowd appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine, the Spectator review of January 3, 1874 insisted that Thomas Hardy's serial must have been written by a woman, none other than the George Eliot of Adam Bede. Such a mistake fascinates by its utter rightness and wrongness. For the reviewer accurately picks up the gender blurring of the text, but attributes it to a woman with a man's name who has written a patriarchal pastoral. In so doing, he mistakes the situation of the novel's authoring for the very topic of the narrative. Hardy, however, has taken immense pains to write a non-patriarchal pastoral, so seduced is he by his own love for the unaggressive feminine, which he does not limit to one sex.

Hardy was reported to have been both flattered and distressed by the authorial gender confusion.³ He must have been equally frustrated, however, by the critical reception of his heroine. To Henry James she was “inconsequential, wilful” and “mettlesome,” unable to be understood or liked.⁴ The reviewer of the Observer was even more critical, citing her lack of modesty and expressing sorrow that “Gabriel Oak was not sufficiently manly to refuse to have anything more to say to such an incorrigible hussy.”⁵ Both of these glib reactions unfruitfully align biology, stereotyped gender roles, and power. Both fail to regard the signifying activity of this text, which totally destabilizes gender and power.

Feminist critics have not paid sufficient attention to Far From the Madding Crowd, but when they have written on it, they have often just reversed the male Victorian reviewers' opinions. The two most recent assessments, while allowing for female sexuality as resistance in a male-dominated world, read the text as predominantly a male discourse intent on taming the heroine.⁶ They have no problem in fixing the gender of the author, nor do they need to create any distance between a strong-willed woman like Bathsheba and themselves. And they do not find Oak lacking in manliness; indeed they read him as a patriarch who would control Bathsheba from the start, and who does in the end. They present Bathsheba, finally, as passive, entangled in a sexual ideology which positions the woman only in terms of her being desired and not in terms of her desiring, and thus as trapped by the regard of her suitors.⁷ In such an interpretation, the woman farmer, so resistant to becoming man's property, is gazed at obsessively by Oak, taken in by the sexual aggressor Troy, humiliated first by him and then by the persistence of Farmer Boldwood, broken, and married off to Oak in a final gesture of Hardyesque taming.⁸

Such feminist criticism, eloquent and important though it may be on the issue of woman's oppression, runs the risk of reverse sexism. As Michèle Barrett has argued: “An analysis of gender ideology in which women are always innocent, always passive victims of patriarchal power, is patently not satisfactory.”⁹ This is a particularly grievous error in the case of Hardy's work, not because he is a woman-worshipper, itself suspect, but because his texts award and deny power of differing kinds to both sexes unpredictably. His commitment to documenting the vagaries of existence mandates that, in spite of the sexual ideologies of his day, he does not believe in a dialectical theory of power where one sex oppresses the other, but rather in power as shifting, as attained and lost by multiple negotiations which cross gender, age, and class in a world he perceives as inconsistent, illogical, and “made up so largely of compromise” (74). His point of view is part of, but not a mere reflection of, a complicated conflict over gender and power being waged at the site of late-Victorian female subjectivity.

Gender and power are not permanently aligned in Far from the Madding Crowd. In order to offer a more complex reading of the text than prior feminist work, this essay, drawing on a theoretical perspective of narratology, informed by psychoanalysis and semiotics, will expose some of the ruptures and excesses which continually destabilize power and gender. I am specifically concerned with the representation of gender and how it alters in the text before sexual difference is re-established through the fixing of closure.¹⁰ I have chosen not to discuss class or other marks of difference in this essay because while my methodology could be adapted for such analysis, space does not permit an adequate working out of the class-gender axis. Class thus remains the necessary term for an even more persuasive argument.

While prior feminist readings align power with the male and victimization with the female, and thus the cultural construction of gender with biology, I will argue for Hardy's representations of gender as subtle, mobile, and heterogenous. I will first explore the representation of masculinity through analysis of the seemingly male-engendered events of gazing at the female and of wielding weapons. Finally, two critical events of gender crisis and choice will serve as examples for my analysis of femininity. Feminists must attend more closely not only to those social meanings kept in place by alignments of gender and power at the start and the close of a text, but also to those which circulate disruptively. Such a strategy can splinter the monolith of patriarchy and make room for female power.

II.

Because any narrative organizes signifying activity and places signifying units in that field, elements of narrative such as story, character, temporal order, and others function as signs in the same way that a word or image does. Thus a given narrative, like Far from the Madding Crowd can be broken down and segmented in order to identify the most stressful points of emphasis and strain which are organized by structure and stabilized by closure. Furthermore, while the narrative system appears to determine a given text's meaning by containing the play of narrativity within a closed form, a narrative structure can never guarantee or exhaust meaning.¹¹

An “ideal” narrative, according to Tzvetan Todorov, begins with a stable situation: here, for instance, steady bachelor Oak, sheep-owner, observes and hopes to marry the young Bathsheba. There results a state of disequilibrium, which in this text has much to do with gender, sexuality, and social power: Bathsheba refuses him; Oak loses his ability to provide for a wife; Bathsheba inherits her uncle's farm; she falls in love with and marries Troy; Boldwood falls in love with her, etc. By the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established: Bathsheba recognizes that she does not want to lose Oak, now her farm manager, a landowner himself, and a friend, so she visits him, indicating her interest sufficiently enough that he proposes again and they marry.¹²

A story recounts this type of transformation in two ways. It syntagmatically places events in a sequence to organize signifying relations of addition and combination. For example, Bathsheba sends a Valentine to Boldwood, he falls in love, he gazes on her at the market. But events are also structured paradigmatically so that one event replaces another, organizing relations of substitution and selection based on location, character, or event type, as when a herd of sheep, Fanny Robin, and Sergeant Troy all die. For purposes of analysis, then, a story can be segmented into events, and events can be distinguished from each other (and so identified as signifiers) according to the way in which the story sets them in a structure of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations.

As is obvious from the examples, the paradigmatic structure of a story stresses the importance of closure as a means of containing the movement that the syntagmatic structure produces, halting the linear unfolding with a closure which discloses. Thus, while Far from the Madding Crowd propels its story forward through postponement (organizing a field of commutable and plural meanings through misunderstandings, chance connections, and so forth, which all delay closure), it also structures events paradigmatically to reach that point of closure where all story movement ceases: Gabriel and Bathsheba finally marry.

Narratology can thus aid in answering questions which earlier feminist critics have not worked out: what is the nature of Oak's masculinity and power? How have they been negotiated in the text? And how does the construction of masculinity in the text provide a context for interpretation of the closure? Finally, how are we to assess Bathsheba at the end of the text—is she really just stifled and recuperated by Oak?

Oak's story is that of the loss and regaining of power and masculinity. With his initial failure at sheepherding, he loses all stakes in a better life and must start over, humbling himself, as it turns out, before Bathsheba. He becomes, in fact, a servant to the woman farmer, who with “remarkable coolness” (115) and “imperiousness” (173) commands and demands, treating him little better than Troy will treat her.

But in addition, Oak's story is that of gender blurring. The text posits male gender identity in economic, emotional, linguistic, legal, and moral terms. But there are no gender essences for men or women. Each sex is traited with qualities opposite those by which culture would define them. Oak's traits of passivity, modesty, and trusting patience belong to the gender role that Victorians attributed to the female, a role most explicitly defined (as the opposite of Bathsheba) by the chorus of locals, and best exemplified in Fanny Robin. Oak, like Tess, falls asleep at critical moments; he does not, like Henchard, attempt to repress the feminine in himself.¹³ Rather, he attempts to repress male desire.

One can argue, in fact, that for Oak to regain power and re-establish his “proper” gender role, the masculinities of Troy and Boldwood must do each other in. Oak can become empowered only through his relation to them (his difference from them) and theirs to each other. He does not become empowered merely by sexual opposition through his relation to Bathsheba or merely by comparability to other men who traffic in women, but also by difference from other men. The central issue here is whether or not Oak regains his masculinity at the close through the defeat of Bathsheba, through her losing her pride or her independence.

The typical pattern of generic closure for the realist novel, which is also a domestic romance, a patriarchally controlled heterosexual marriage, does not tell the whole story, though many critics read the text through its closure, while still allowing it is a problematic ending. This ending validates friendship—the motive which terminates the syntagm—as the only fitting rationale for marriage. It also fixes gender and power so that Bathsheba is recuperated into the domestic sphere as wife to the new master who is cheered with cannon shot for his success by a chorus of male friends and subordinates. To realign power with the male, the closure puts in jeopardy both female power outside the domestic sphere and male passivity. Yet closure must be interpreted in light of what has come before—what this closure means, then, depends on what Gabriel and Bathsheba and power have also come to mean. Textual movement around the stake of masculinity and power can be clearly seen by examining the apparently fixed gender value of certain “middle” paradigmatic events, male gazing and the wielding of weapons.

Critics have noted Hardy's persistent fascination with the play of gazes, whether narcissistic into mirrors, or scopophilic objectification and fetishization. Far from the Madding Crowd provides a perfect example of this fascination, and many readers have commented on the repetition of gazing.¹⁴ Gazing is most prominent in this novel when the male looks at the female, as in the inauguration of the story when Gabriel watches Bathsheba who is preening in a mirror. This accident piques his curiosity enough to prompt subsequent spying on her. And the first event of male gazing is further reinforced in the text by the pleading looks of Boldwood, who “had never before inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his glance” (150). His looks take the measure of Bathsheba carefully and, at first, secretly. Furthermore, Troy's “gaze” is described as initially “too strong to be received point-blank with her own” (193). She does, however, fairly soon afterward, allow the glint of his sword blade to sow and reap around her body—shaping her as if she were a cutout.

Yet it is insufficient to dwell on the paradigmatic comparability of these looks, collapsing them into a monolithic patriarchal male gaze. All events of gazing might seem to signify the same thing: possession of the female as object. Yet because a paradigmatic event is part of a sequence which necessarily changes its value, each event of male gazing signifies somewhat differently.

The alignment of gazing with male power is disrupted doubly in Far from the Madding Crowd: both by significant differences among the looks and by exposure of the female as gazer. Oak, to be sure, idealizes Bathsheba and even casts her as a divinity, a version of Venus, Ashtoreth, as well as a fleshly country girl. At the start of the book, he stereotypes her and prides himself that he can win her. Initially he is the male investigator who gazes at woman as enigma. Yet the value of his gazing does shift significantly as the story unfolds.

Troy's gazing is more sexually aggressive than Oak's, but it is by no means one-sided. Although we think of him as the supreme tempter with his extraordinary sword-play, he confides that he would not have married Bathsheba unless she were an Aphrodite who, in fact, seduced him. His perception of Bathsheba as an active gazer herself is perhaps best substantiated by the fact that she gets entrapped by his spur and dazzled by his brilliant brass and scarlet during her nightly “look” around the homestead, when “watching is best done invisibly” (191), and by her later race through the night after him.

Moreover, Troy even plays the spectacle for Bathsheba, not merely with his dazzling swordplay, but through masquerade when he assumes her identity. Donning her bee-hiver's outfit, Captain Troy flirts with being feminized, the object of her gaze, but he also removes cultural armor from her. “He looked such an extraordinary object in this guise that, flurried as she was, she could not avoid laughing outright. It was the removal of yet another stake from the palisade of cold manners which had kept him off” (211). In this drama of sexual likeness and re-established difference, Troy seduces Bathsheba into intimacy with him and into a further recognition of her seductive powers. This patriarchal gaze is matched. On both sides, however, the romance of projected desire soon fades, only to be replaced by negative views.

Of the three men, Boldwood, wishing to possess Bathsheba from first to last, gazes most perniciously and unrelentingly. His looks follow her wherever she goes and his looks, Hardy implies, go everywhere. Boldwood even demands that she wear a ring for six years in secret courtship as a promise that she will wed him in the end (397-399). His “ideal passion” (132) distorts his life as much as it distorts hers, and in a way finally more dangerous than Troy's fickle and wandering gaze. Once Boldwood looks directly at her, this “hotbed of tropic intensity” is struck for life.¹³ He is a man always “hit mortally, or he was missed” (153). Therefore, his love must remain in the mode of idolatry, but as worship of what? For with Boldwood we see the immense cost of the sadistic quality of the male gaze when it turns into masochism and he becomes his own victim. (See Freud for a persuasive deconstruction of the binary.) It is not Bathsheba that Boldwood worships—she is not, finally, the object of his patriarchal male gaze. Rather, Boldwood worships his own ability to look, his own sexual urge, and his own imagined objectification. It is no accident, I think, that Boldwood places the Valentine from Bathsheba in the corner of his looking glass, and then a day later jumps out of bed and catches sight of himself there, “insubstantial in form” (133) during a fit of “nervous excitability” (134). Only being seen by Bathsheba will restore his form. It is also no accident that upon his waking, the whole natural scene is described in terms of “flameless fire,” blurred whiteness, and polished marble, with grass encased in icicles bristling through snow like “curved shapes of old Venetian glass” (134). Boldwood becomes the very glass of his gaze. If he can not become an acknowledged sexual object, death appears most welcome. Yet it is the discipline of imprisonment that will finally objectify Boldwood. When imprisoned and watched for the rest of his life, he is punished for more than the murder of Troy. He is also punished for what the murder signifies; Boldwood is condemned in this text for looking too much, for desiring too much.

Oak is more persistent in his gazing than Troy, but, unlike Boldwood, Gabriel does not idealize or objectify Bathsheba when she has once rejected him. Nor is he, like Boldwood, fascinated with his own ability to possess. He modifies his gaze to accommodate changing circumstances, resolving not to be governed by an uncontrollable male desire. Through the unfolding of the text, Oak alters his view of Bathsheba quite considerably, without losing his desire for her. Like Troy, he is initially stunned by her physical attractiveness and, like Boldwood, he is captivated emotionally. Yet during the course of the novel, he criticizes her for her own exhibitionism and narcissism; at the same time, he is curbing his own looking. Specifically, he confronts her with her brutal handling of Boldwood—the careless seduction, the broken promises, and her lack of self-control, all of which aid another in ruining himself. Some critics have argued that Oak retreats from desire through moralism, a point of view certainly substantiated by the hierarchy of discourses in the text and by his position as the main filter of events. Yet there is a larger point to be made. Oak criticizes Bathsheba for her own patriarchal toying with another as if he were a mere object, a criticism of her which she comes to share: “I've been a rake” (380). Thus, Oak is not retreating from desire into moralism, but is attempting a re-definition of desire, both his own and Bathsheba's.

Power relations inscribed in this realist novel by the event of gazing, then, are not as stable as the regime itself. Further discriminations can be drawn from the examples above. The conjunction of manliness and lack of power occurs through narrative event at the site of each male character discussed, but to a different degree and with a different value. The man with the most relentless gaze, Boldwood, is the least powerful as the events of the story progress. The text posits that for him lack of power and manliness are in contradiction. His very masculinity, in other words, is at stake in his power struggle over the body/image of Bathsheba. With his first loss of her to Troy, his response is self-denial: “I had better go … and hide” (236); with his second loss of her to Troy, his response is to kill that more powerful male, annulling entirely the possibility of future comparisons, except those of remorseful memory. It is clear that Boldwood signifies a desperate, bullying, and self-consuming masculinity that the text needs to eliminate.

Lack of power and manliness are also in contradiction for Troy, although he is flexible enough to play briefly with powerlessness, even as he is divided enough to harbor sentimental and self-indulgent grief over the dead Fanny. When he dresses up in Bathsheba's clothes, becoming her object while he also resembles the female as object, he is quick to re-establish male/female difference. His flirtation with the unheroic lasts only momentarily: “‘Would you be good enough to untie me and let me out? I am nearly stifled inside this silk cage’” (212), and leads directly to a re-assertion of male military power on the same evening with the sword exercise before a static Bathsheba. The next time Troy dresses up it will not be in female garb but as a “male performer” (364). Although the later scenes emphasize the new conjunction of acting with masculinity (Troy is Professor of Gymnastics, Pugilism, Sword Exercise, Roughriding etc.), the syntagm also demonstrates that when Troy is “not himself” and Bathsheba is present, he feels as stifled as if he were dressing up as a lady. Indeed, his cross-dressing and acting suggest that masculinity is a kind of garb, but a necessary prop to support the requirements of Troy's subjectivity.

Lack of power and manliness can be combined, however, without contradiction at the character site of Gabriel Oak. If annulment of identity is necessary for Boldwood and the re-assertion of sexual difference is necessary for Troy, gender mixing is possible for Oak. One of the most important scenes in the text illustrates this gender mixing in light of Oak's curbing of his sexual interest in Bathsheba.

This scene forms part of another paradigmatic pattern of events: the male use of phallic weapons. Busy with sheepshearing, Oak notices Boldwood's sudden and commanding appearance on the hillside. Bathsheba blushes, rides off, and returns in her new, stylish, myrtle-green riding habit. Oak is stunned. “Oak's eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavoring to continue his shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood's manner, he snipped the sheep in the groin” (180). Other feminists have interpreted this scene by connecting it to earlier and later scenes where men bear phallic weapons: Troy's sword, Boldwood's gun.¹⁴ They interpret Oak's cut as directed against Bathsheba, whom the ewe represents (about to be branded with her sign BE). And the words of the text here do support such a reading. It is implied that Oak is getting back at his mistress. Bathsheba, Oak tells us, knew that she was the cause of the wounding, “because she had wounded the ewe's shearer in a still more vital part” (180).

Yet there is another paradigmatic connection which should be made, which alters the meaning of this event: the earlier wounding of sheep. An early chapter called “Bathsheba's Departure—A Pastoral Tragedy” features Oak as primarily responsible through negligence for the wounding, and subsequent death, of his sheep just after Bathsheba has left the neighborhood. The narrator describes Oak's response to the dead carcasses:

Oak was an intensely humane man … a shadow in his life had always been that his flock ended in mutton—that a day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep. His first feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their unborn lambs.

(73)

This passage describes a shepherd in the pastoral world touched by a natural tragedy. Although he has been stung by the intensity of sexual passion at this point in the text, and although it has turned his world topsy-turvy, this scene shows us the Oak who has puts thoughts of Bathsheba aside as he confronts his failed labor. Oak the caretaker, who winces if he hurts a ewe, tenderly identifies with the animals. The sheep are an extension of himself—his object of care, his livelihood, his companions.¹⁵ Although he has been affected by Bathsheba's beauty enough to propose marriage, Oak mourns the loss of his sheep more than the loss of her. This concern for his labor and for the animals he tends is not erased by subsequent events. Indeed, it is reinforced by his dexterous surgery on Bathsheba's flock with an “instrument of salvation,” a “trochar, with a lance” (174).

By the time Oak sees Boldwood approach Bathsheba, he has learned to control his sexual desire for her and has repeatedly schooled himself with “the abiding sense of his inferiority to both herself and Boldwood” (180). Only “manly resolve” (180) has enabled him to realize he has “no lover's interest in her” (181), helping him to conceal feelings which can not be entirely banished. Resolutions, in other words, vulnerable constructions though they may be, are being made and usually kept. On the occasion of sheepshearing, Oak slips with the knife. Sexuality and jealousy have mastered him momentarily. The “routine” with which he stops the flow of blood, however, speaks to the routine with which he stops his own desire. Becoming phallic when he views what he perceives as a budding love relationship, he quickly returns to the role of healer. If the ewe is an emblem for Bathsheba, then, it is as much an emblem of his own femininity, his softness, which he must wound sadistically, in a symbolic act of self-castration, to avoid being more deeply wounded. Hurting the ewe distracts him from the world of love, just as mourning the loss of sheep earlier supplanted Bathsheba's departure in importance.

The scene of sheepshearing locates gender with Oak, but sexual difference with the sighting of Bathsheba and Boldwood. Just as the ewe is feminine, representing Bathsheba, it is also able to signify the vulnerability of Oak. By extension, in a double cut of himself, Oak wounds not only male desire but also his female sentiment. Yet his manliness and power, though revealed to be vulnerable, are not left in doubt. Nor are they reasserted through an extreme display of masculinity.¹⁶

Fixed gender roles which oppress women harshly, especially when allied with class inferiority, as in the case of Fanny Robin, are important in this text. But a connection of power with the male sex and victimization with the female sex oversimplifies the struggle of gender and power. A passive and an active sexuality, which are themselves complicated by a sadism becoming masochism and a masochism becoming sexual repression, as well as a scopophilia which can turn into exhibitionism, vie with each other across the slash of sexual difference (m/f) until they are themselves tied up in the knot/closure of marriage.¹⁷

III.

If Hardy deals with masculinity and power through representations of gender aligned with the acts performed by three men, thus dividing up the possible varieties and shifts of male power, he locates the issue femininity and power largely with the acts of one female character: Bathsheba. It would be disingenuous for any critic to ignore the importance of Fanny Robin in a discussion such as this one, for she claims, in one sense, more power than any woman in the text. She is worshipped, wept over, and even paid tribute to by Bathsheba herself. Yet she is most interesting for contrast.

This section of the essay will argue that through the representation of Bathsheba in two critical scenes which jeopardize and fix her sexual identity, Hardy poses the question of “What is woman?” His answer to this question is an unconventional organization of gender and power. These events, particularly, mark discursive struggle over the cultural construction of femininity: Bathsheba's viewing of Fanny's corpse and her subsequent flight to the fern brake.

When Fanny Robin is known to be dead, Bathsheba performs the traditional courtesies extended to a servant of the family: she sends for the body with a wagon bestrewn with flowers and she has the coffin brought into her house. Yet, she also senses that there is something extraordinary about this servant. “Bathsheba had grounds for conjecturing a connection between her own history and the dimly suspected tragedy of Fanny's end” (321). When Liddy quickly repeats a rumor that Fanny has born a child who is also lying in the coffin, Bathsheba decides she must learn more. At first she walks to Oak's cottage for help, but turns back, resolving to discover the truth by herself. It is significant that she does turn back because the scene becomes a startlingly powerful confrontation of a woman with femininity. At first, having pried open the lid of the coffin and having seen Fanny and her child, Bathsheba does not register femininity, but the trace of masculine betrayal: “conclusive proof of her husband's conduct” (323).

Continuing to view the corpses, Bathsheba confronts the female as Other who has come between herself and her husband. It is shocking to face her blonde-haired, white-faced rival. On one hand, she wishes to obtain equal power by dying. Yet, on the other hand, she wishes for the power to hurl recriminations at a Fanny still alive. Recoiling almost immediately from death wishes and anger, Bathsheba prays for Fanny instead, placing flowers around her hair. In so doing, she symbolically embraces her likeness, as if intuiting here what she later acknowledges in another act of placing flowers: that she and Fanny are victims of Troy.

With the entrance of Troy himself, the private agony of Bathsheba is set into a larger sexual drama. For Troy organizes the scene in terms of kinds of womanliness by first kissing Fanny and then boldly stating: “This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be” (327). Shutting out Bathsheba entirely, he addresses Fanny as his true wife. In other words, though both women hold the position of “wife,” Troy claims Fanny is more his wife, more womanly than Bathsheba. He exposes fully the gap which exists for him between the ideal (now dead) and the real (still alive) of femininity. In addition, 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.

If this scene, through Troy's intervention, posits womanliness as beauty, innocence, and fertility, it also posits such femaleness as dead. Throughout the text, Troy's actions with Fanny are judged harshly, as is his treatment of Bathsheba here. More crucially, Hardy is not supporting the ideology of womanliness as child-producing, an important aspect of the ideology of the angel in the house. He kills the mother here as he destroys her or her children elsewhere in his novels. Likewise, this scene calls into question the ideology of the woman as child-figure. During the conversation with Troy, Bathsheba cries out against severance of the union with him. She exclaims as a child might: “Kiss me too, Frank—kiss me!” (326) in a manner described as “abnormal and startling” in its “childlike pain and simplicity from a woman of Bathsheba's calibre and independence” (326). This representation of woman as mother or as child is not the “ideal” against which women are to be measured in this text.

Bathsheba's complicated encounter with Fanny's corpse first stages a scene of female castration, which marks the female as lack, both through Fanny's theft of Bathsheba's power and then through its negation by Troy. (In addition, Fanny's own power is awarded to her by Troy only when she is dead). Conversely, the male is awarded knowledge of “true” femininity; he is empowered by having had the body and devotion of one woman and the love and jealousy of another. And he is further marked as having the phallus by having fathered a child (though the fact that the child is dead too, and ungendered by the narrative, is a significant Hardy qualification, which reinforces his prior and subsequent treatment of Troy's masculinity).

It is highly significant that Bathsheba runs away. Seeing the representation that Troy would attach to Fanny and herself, Bathsheba no longer recognizes the woman she is. The scene of the corpse, through Troy's intervention, becomes one of a misrecognition of femininity. “If she's—that,—what—am I?” cries Bathsheba with despair and indignation (327). Not seeing her femaleness in his view of her femaleness, she does not know who she is. Yet she will find out.

Hardy thus questions in Far from the Madding Crowd not only conventional constructions of masculinity, but also conventional constructions of femininity. In running to the fern brake, Bathsheba enters first an imaginary world and is then, just as in the last scene, re-interpellated into the symbolic order, but differently. If the first scene threatens to negate her power entirely, this scene restores it and inaugurates a different organization of gender and power. It emphasizes not what a man sees and how his view can cancel out woman's view of herself, but what she sees herself. Just as the episode of sheepshearing works to realign masculinity and power, Bathsheba's running to the fern brake demonstrates that womanliness and power can be combined at a character site and not be in contradiction.

The scene first organizes sexuality in terms of gender blurring. Having thought of “nothing better to do with her palpitating self” (328) for the night, the self-divided Bathsheba wakes up, voiceless but refreshed. With the morning light, the fern brake is misty and blurred, as if gender itself were mixed in a “hazy luminousness” (329). The landscape is inscribed with sexual signs both masculine, such as spiky ferns and tall fungi, and feminine, such as the dawn and the pool. Bathsheba's own body is represented as a landscape of gender, but not one marked by sexual difference. Red and yellow leaves (recalling Troy's scarlet and brass uniform (193), but also her own “crimson” jacket and “bright” face (44)) entwine in her luxuriant dark hair and rest in her lap. Initially the signs are mixed together in this scene annulling difference, and nothing is awarded any particular value.

Yet, what had seemed to be a womblike haven, where she could commune with herself alone, is invaded not only by the sounds of birds, but also by the voice of a ploughboy and a team of her own horses. Masculinity intrudes, as in the corpse scene, here with the male voice and a reminder of her social position as farmer. Clearly, the boy at work with her team is a metonymy of her power and is meant to represent her masculine position in the community. In being paired with birds, however, this power is also valued as utterly natural.

As Bathsheba investigates, though, she finds the place “malignant” (329). Signs of sexuality begin to be sorted out; sexual difference is symbolically established by attaching values to this natural scene, which recalls earlier scenes. What she first took to be a hollow, is in actuality a swamp, a “nursery of pestilences small and great” (329). Up the sides of the depression leading to the swamp, rushes and blades of flag glisten like “scythes,” recalling the same hollow where Troy earlier in the season had wielded his mesmerizing blade of seduction. At the bottom of the swamp ooze red and yellow fungi. Hearing sounds of another boy, Bathsheba becomes increasingly nervous. This time it is a schoolboy, one of “the dunce class apparently” (330), reciting the collect from a psalter. The intrusion is dismissed by the narrator as a trifle, as an amusement for Bathsheba. It does, however, seem significant that this boy is juxtaposed to the earlier one. Both go about their business. But the second is a dunce with a silly method, one of endless repetition of the words “Give us.” Unlike the first boy, this one seems quite powerless—unable to master his task at hand. We may read in this example some comment on Bathsheba's own failure at educating herself in another domain, love, and possibly a comment on both the technique and the content of her earlier method, Give me.

Regardless of how we interpret the contrasting boys, it is crucial that Bathsheba's recognition of her farm boy, and the descriptions of the landscape, masculinize this spot in different ways: labor, sexuality, religion and education. For at this important moment of decision in the text—whether to return home or not—Bathsheba is envisioning both what she wanted to be in her assumption of a man's role, what she has been, and what she might be. She views as malignant and death-dealing a sexual fecundity she associates with Troy and herself. From the start until now, she has been too much the woman wielding power to subdue and humiliate; yet she has also been too much the powerless repeater who runs the risk of being metaphorically castrated.

But the scene does not enact just a confrontation with masculinity. Like the previous one, its major importance lies in Bathsheba's confrontation with femininity. In a critical moment, she is refeminized by encountering the one person with whom she has discussed whether or not she is too “mannish” (230), her maidservant Liddy. After the second boy passes by, a “form” appears “on the other side” (330) of the swamp, half-hidden still by the mist. This form of uncertain gender approaches Bathsheba as if it were a phantom. “The woman—for it was a woman—approached with her face askance” (330). Bathsheba's delayed knowledge of the gender of this figure, captured so well by the emphasized focalization, acutely pinpoints the major issue of the scene. The question in the epigraph to this essay, taken from Troy's first ensnaring of Bathsheba, becomes most resonant here: “Are you a woman?” (192).

Like the corpse scene, events in the swamp scene are organized around womanliness and power, but this time they are not in contradiction. Liddy does not question Bathsheba's womanliness as Troy had. In fact, she earlier had suggested that Bathsheba was too womanly (230). For Bathsheba to be re-interpellated into her culture, for her to go home, a woman must come to fetch her. For Bathsheba must recognize her femininity and power. In finally seeing Liddy before her, and in mustering a whispered greeting, Bathsheba sees and knows her maid, and thus herself, in a drama of sexual choice. The woman whom she recognizes is female but is not a mother. Nor does she act like a child in this scene. It is also important that she is a servant. On one hand, it acknowledges the cultural construction of the female in a position of servitude. On the other hand, it does not endorse such a position for Bathsheba. Rather, the presence of the servant Liddy stresses gender similarity but class difference. Bathsheba is constructed here as the female farmer who keeps a woman maidservant as well as farm boys. Thus, while the first boy is a metonymy of her powerful position, Liddy is both metonymy and metaphor. She represents both a part of her mistress's power and yet shares the same gender with her mistress. This scene establishes for Bathsheba, then, sexual differentiation without loss of power.

If the corpse scene raises the question of womanliness and power, this scene answers the question in terms of the power of running a farm. With these two scenes, womanliness is redefined from innocence, motherhood, and being a “runaway wife” (332) to independence, economic wealth, and “stand[ing] your ground” (332).

It can be argued that after this redefinition, Bathsheba is returned to her former status. She is hardly powerful as she waits for Troy, becomes indecisive about Boldwood, and looks back at the past as if she were herself dead (356). Yet the effect of Troy's delay and the renewal of Boldwood's suit highlights the great difficulty of retaining female power in the patriarchal realm. At this point in the text, the feminine is subsumed again, while issues of masculinity resurface to join the hermeneutic code (what will happen next?). The hermeneutic imperative is no longer located around Fanny (how many corpses are in the coffin?) or Bathsheba (how will she react; will she come home?) but around men: Troy's return, Boldwood's needs, Oak's patience. I think that this particular re-direction of the syntagm very much determines how the closure is often read, as a sign of male taming and a re-assertion of male power. The return to issues of masculinity makes Bathsheba into a dependent, passive woman who waits for her husband to come home. It almost re-inscribes her as a child and certainly positions her as lack. Rather than reading the closure through these re-inscriptions, however, which are patriarchal, it is more productive to see the end as following upon the narrative stress points of gender struggle.¹⁸

The rest of the text does not tame Bathsheba into the domestic sphere, but, rather, awards and removes, or downright denies, her access to traditional roles associated with the Victorian domestic sphere: waiting wife, widow, innocent, child bride, and mother. Her position as waiting wife and possible widow is treated as a legally dangerous situation for her, in that if Troy does not return, she may lose her farm. However, it is also critiqued by Hardy as a false position constructed by the selfishness of man. Hardy's criticism of female domestic entrapment is furthered by the fact that Bathsheba is not a mother—she is not forced to bear children (as are, say, Mina Harker or Jane Eyre). Thus, Far from the Madding Crowd actually questions what counts as domestic, even as it redefines masculinity and femininity through the process of (re-)alignments of gender and power.

The marriage of Bathsheba and Oak, then, is more complicated than a recuperation of Bathsheba into a patriarchal prison-house. While the closure fixes the equation of male power and female dependency, realigning cultural constructions of gender and biology, it does so only after destabilizing those alignments so forcefully that the equation itself becomes suspect. In allowing Oak the positions of both phallic male and castrated male, while awarding Bathsheba the contradictory position of powerful and dependent female, Hardy denies power and sexuality to neither sex.

Finally, Hardy's “solution” of gender mixing through power shifts does not work for one ideological end at the moment of the text's production. His writing of Bathsheba as strong and yet womanly, a farmer and wife, but not a mother, could be appropriated for different political ends. Part of its own power is no doubt due to the fact that it could serve diametrically opposed interests at the same time: say, that a woman should be made less powerful by recuperation into the domestic sphere, or that woman should be allowed more independence within it, or that woman should be liberated entirely from it. The re-definitions proposed in Far from the Madding Crowd serve no agenda in particular, as they stand, except to feed the growing uncertainty at the end of the nineteenth century: what is woman?

Notes

1. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (New York: St. Martin's, 1977) 192, 330. All further quotations are from this edition. Page references appear in parentheses.

2. For D. H. Lawrence's shrewd understanding of Hardy's treatment of gender, see his “Study of Thomas Hardy,” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. Macdonald (London: 1961) 398-516. For important differences between Lawrence and Hardy, see Robert Langbaum, “Lawrence and Hardy,” D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Athlone Press, 1985) 69-90 and Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “Lawrence on Hardy,” Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years, ed. Lance St. John Butler (London: Macmillan, 1977) 90-103. For a contemporary assessment along the same lines as Lawrence's but concentrating on Far from the Madding Crowd, see William Mistichelli, “Androgyny, Survival, and Fulfillment in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd,” Modern Language Studies 18:3 (1988) 53-64. This analysis is sensitive to the gender politics of the text, but falls into the rhetoric of fulfillment—arguing somewhat sentimentally that the “androgyny” of Oak and Bathsheba serves the “fulfillment of their humanity” not merely the “survival of their species.” Attractive as this may be, I am not arguing from a critical position which relies on the terminology of androgyny or fulfillment.

3. Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978) 276.

4. Laurence Lerner and J. Holstrum, eds. Thomas Hardy and His Readers (London: 1968) 33. See also Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy (New York: Random House, 1982) 168, 173.

5. Lerner and Holstrum 35.

6. See Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) 32-4 and Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (New York: Routledge, 1988) 30-57.

7. Boumelha 44; Morgan 43; Morgan 44ff.

8. For contradictions in Hardy's treatment of women and for feminist readings of his contradictions see Mary Childers, “Thomas Hardy, the Man Who ‘Liked’ Women,” Criticism 23:4 (1981), 317-34.

9. Michèle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today (London: Verso, 1985) 110. The brevity of my remarks reduces the complexity of Boumelha's argument, however. Indeed, she is one of the first feminists to investigate Hardy's relationship to the sexual ideologies of the period. But I disagree with her method for analyzing the relations between representations and culture. And I regard Far from the Madding Crowd as more sophisticated an early work than she does.

10. For another and very different deconstruction of the male/female binary, see Adrian Poole, “Men's Words and Hardy's Women,” Essays in Criticism 31:4 (1981), 328-45.

11. For a fuller discussion of the structure of story and the changing value of paradigmatic events, as well as for a working out of connections among narrative, subjectivity, and ideology, see Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

12. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 111-112.

13. See Elaine Showalter’s provocative reading, “The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge,” Thomas Hardy: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987) 175-89.

14. Morgan 35-7, 44-6; Boumelha 34-6; also Judith Bryant Wittenberg, “Angles of Vision and Questions of Gender in Far from the Madding Crowd,” The Centennial Review 30:1 (1986) 25-40; and Janie Senechal, “Focalisation, Regard et Desire dans Far from the Madding Crowd,” Cahiers Victoriens at Edouardiens 12 (1980) 73-84.

15. I thus disagree with Beegel's somewhat dismissive assessment of Boldwood, but she is right to connect him with stasis and death. Susan Beegel, “Bathsheba's Lovers: Male Sexuality in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Thomas Hardy: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987) 207-226.

16. Morgan 53-57; Boumelha 33.

17. See Beegel 216-17.

18. Gittings reports (268) that there might have been yet another sheep-flock scene, but for Leslie Stephen's editorial control. The fourth would have contrasted even more fully the difference between Oak and Troy. This fact seems to add weight to the argument that such care-taking scenes are not merely about labor, but also concern the construction of masculinity.

19. See Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957) 70-86.

20. For support of Bathsheba's turn away from victimization, see Chapter 46, “The Gurgoyle, Its Doings,” which connects the spitting of water from the gurgoyle's mouth with phallic destruction of the feminine. As “the persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directs all its vengeance into the grave” (341), it uproots the blossoms and bulbs that Troy has planted at Fanny's headstone. Like the hideous gargoyle, Troy, sleeping nearby, has ruined Fanny. After Troy discovers the wastage and dismantled grave, he turns away in momentary self-hatred (343). It is left to Bathsheba to repair the ravages and to ask the help of Gabriel, less the phallic male than Troy, to turn the gargoyle aside, so that a “repetition of the accident” might be “prevented” (347). This avoidance of “repetition” is significant because it is as much a comment on Bathsheba, who will not be used so again, as it is on the stone jaws which will aim elsewhere from now on, by her orders. Bathsheba also remains self-aware enough, through this re-masculinized section of the text, to resist Boldwood in the name of something female, even if she is unable to speak it to him. In response to his question, “Do you like me, or do you respect me?,” she replies “I don't know—at least, I cannot tell you. It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs” (376). She holds on, still, to that which she defines as womanly, though she perceives it to be as threatened as Fanny's grave.

Works Cited

Barrett, Michèle. Woman's Oppression Today. London: Verso, 1985. 4th ed.

Beegel, Susan. “Bathsheba's Lovers: Male Sexuality in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Thomas Hardy: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 207-226.

Boumelha, Penny. Thomas Hardy and Women. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 1982.

Childers, Mary. “Thomas Hardy, the Man Who ‘Liked’ Women.” Criticism 23:4 (1981) 317-34.

Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957. 70-86.

Gittings, Robert. Young Thomas Hardy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978.

Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. New York: St. Martin's, 1977.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “Lawrence on Hardy,” Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years. Ed. Lance St. John Butler. London: Macmillan, 1977. 90-103.

Langbaum, Robert. “Lawrence and Hardy,” D. H. Lawrence and Tradition. Ed. Jeffrey Meyers. London: Athlone Press, 1985. 69-90.

Lawrence, D. H. “Study of Thomas Hardy,” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. Macdonald. 1936. rpt. London, 1961. 398-516.

Lerner, Laurence and J. Holstrum. Eds. Thomas Hardy and His Readers. London: 1968.

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy. New York: Random House, 1982.

Mistichelli, William. “Androgyny, Survival, and Fulfillment in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.” Modern Language Studies 18:3 (1988) 53-64.

Morgan, Rosemarie. Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Poole, Adrian. “Men's Words and Hardy's Women.” Essays in Criticism 31:4 (1981) 328-45.

Senechal, Janie. “Focalisation, Regard et Désire dans Far from the Madding Crowd.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 12 (1980) 73-84.

Showalter, Elaine. “The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge.” Thomas Hardy Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 175-89.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Tr. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Wittenberg, Judith Bryant. “Angles of Vision and Questions of Gender in Far from the Madding Crowd.” The Centennial Review 30:1 (1986) 25-40.