[In the following essay, Boumelha emphasizes the complex interplay of representations of class and gender in Far from the Madding Crowd and two other Hardy novels.]

Central to all of the novels under discussion here is a story of love, courtship, and marriage. More particularly, for the central female character in each case, this central fable takes the form of an erotic or marital “double choice,” to use Franco Moretti's phrase;¹ the woman is first attracted to the “right” partner, then distracted by one or more “wrong” partners before confirming—whether emotionally or formally—the “rightness” of the original choice. Also central to all three, though, is a perhaps less familiar story of class mobility and social allegiance, focused through the narrative structures of fluctuating economic fortunes, ownership of property, the accumulation of financial or social capital, trading, and inheritance. These two central points of concern are, of course, deeply interconnected, thematically and in narrative terms. The triangulated relationships of potential lovers represent marital choice as the primary mode of class transition for women; it is evident that, though Fancy, Bathsheba, and Grace have all received a good education, in each case it functions rather as a marital asset than as an alternative path for class mobility. So, the vicissitudes of the lovers display the panoply of social possibilities for the heroine, and the eventual choice of husband is at the same time the choice of class position, or at least of economic and/or social status. The choice turns out slightly differently in each case. In the simplest of the three texts, Under the Greenwood Tree, Fancy Day only mildly flirts with the possibility of accepting a richer or more educated suitor before confirming her choice of Dick Dewey the carter. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene over time accepts all three suitors—the penurious half-aristocratic Troy, the wealthy landowner Boldwood, and the (variously) farmer, shepherd, and bailiff Gabriel Oak; the “right” choice can only be confirmed by the melodramatic elimination of the rivals. In the complex and self-consciously sardonic The Woodlanders, Grace Melbury is never allowed (or obliged) to sacrifice her social rise for the confirmation of her original choice, Giles Winterborne, though the rightness of the attachment is nonetheless allowed a brief and consolatory post mortem confirmation. In each case, the presence of differences of class serves at some point to stimulate romance, to merge ambition and desire, and to thwart fulfillment.

Of course, the choice to be made is never only about class position. In each case, the first-presented suitor represents a certain sturdy, faithful worth apparently associated with his being native to the locality, while the other possibilities may include a sexually compelling but faithless newcomer such as Troy or Fitzpiers, and a wealthy but unattractive older man such as Shiner or Boldwood. What might be called moral merit seems to be related directly to occupation: in each case, the “good” suitor is engaged in manual labor, the feckless suitor is as far from it as can be imagined, and the wealthiest option is a landowner. It would be easy to deduce from this a kind of sexual pastoral, in which the unshowy virtues of the hero represent the timeless qualities of a stable rural society in the heart of nature, disrupted by the influence of city-dwellers and outsiders who bring with them inappropriate ideas, aspirations, and values threatening the survival of the locality. This is a view that has often been argued, and indeed all three of the texts draw upon the conventions of the pastoral mode in a way that might appear to endorse it: the use of the seasonal cycle to structure the time-span of events, for example, or the association of the hero with fruitful labor, or the references to fertility rites and folk rituals, or the use of resonantly symbolic and allusive rural phenomena such as flocks of sheep or apple-trees. But in my view, such elements are self-consciously used to question as well as to evoke the values of the pastoral, and it would be a great mistake to settle for seeing in these novels a representation of country life as an idyllic and timeless enclave, sheltered from the pressures of contemporary life.

Rural society, for Hardy, is just that: a society, in which exploitation, solidarity, and the struggle for survival are experienced quite as keenly as they are in urban settings. Mellstock, Weatherbury, and Little Hintock are not simply backdrops for the sympathetic engagement of nature with human activities, but places of work and unemployment, financial loss and gain, social hierarchy and economic transaction. Economic and social detail is precise and significant: such episodes as the twopence Oak pays so that Bathsheba can pass through the turnpike gate, Marty's sale of her hair for two sovereigns to supplement her meager piecework earnings, or Mrs. Day's anxiety to make known to the neighbors the quality of her tablecloths and cutlery are constant reminders of the determining power of economic and class relations, even when they also carry other kinds of figurative weight. Work is taken in a serious and specific sense; in the symbolic set piece of the storm scene of Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, the reader is still always made aware of how Gabriel's experience of work enables him to predict the weather or how he goes about saving the ricks. We know how money is acquired and lost, how much things cost and laborers are paid, what domestic as well as agricultural labor supports the local economy. Clearly then, interpretation of these novels will need to focus on their realism as well as their obeisances to pastoral convention.

The plot of marital choice that I have outlined above combines the issues of gender and class in making clear the extent to which the social fate of the heroine depends upon the class and economic position of her husband; as Mr. Melbury puts it, “a woman takes her colour from the man she's walking with” ([The Woodlanders unsure which edition.], xii, p. 86). Class position and economic position may be at variance, of course; Fitzpiers is clear that he has “stooped to mate beneath” himself (Woodlanders [W], xxxv, p. 251) even though he is supported by the money of the Melburys. Nevertheless, whereas a hero can marry “up” or marry “down” without significantly transforming his own position, the social status of the heroine is secondary and derivative as soon as she marries. This combination of class and gender in the marital plot is important, and will be further discussed in the accounts of the individual texts below, but there are also other issues to be considered in relation to Hardy's mapping on to one another of the social discourses and facts of class and gender.

Hardy's concern with cross-class romance could almost be described as obsessive, and it persists virtually throughout his writing career. Indeed, his first (unpublished and now lost) work bore a title that could almost serve as an epigraph to his fiction: “The Poor Man and the Lady.” This continuing concern is fueled, I think, by an eroticization of class difference, in which the “otherness” of the other class is conceived through a kind of melancholic desire. That this cross-class desire is not simply a transposition into other terms of social ambition is evident, because it appears to be the difference, and not the class position in itself, that carries the erotic charge. In any case, it traverses the divisions of class in all directions (doctor for working girl, or educated woman for laborer, as well as shepherd for farmowner or maid for aristocratic soldier), so that it by no means always implies any form of social gain. At the same time, the prevalence of class-disparate romance in Hardy also means that the representation of gender difference is shot through with an alertness to questions of power, status, and inequality. The love relationship is, in a sense, perceived as inherently politicized, and antagonisms and rivalries of class are installed at the heart of desire. Gender difference and class difference, working in the space between antagonism and desire, are both represented as relations of power, and their intersections can take various forms. The different distributions of power are not necessarily singular and uni-dimensional, though; gender privilege and class privilege may reinforce one another (as in, say, Fitzpiers's casual appropriation of Suke Damson), but they may just as easily be in conflict (as in Bathsheba's dismissal of Oak from her employ for the way he speaks to her as a woman) or in other complex forms of overlap. Exploitation, patronage, and solidarity can function together or contradictorily within the social relations of class and those of gender.

Further, the mapping on to one another of issues and relations of class and gender has an important role to play in denaturalizing the differences upon which both forms of social organization are predicated. The differences come to be seen as contingent and arbitrary rather than as inherent and fixed, as they were presumed to be in much of the ideology of the period. For instance, the concern of the novels with actual or potential changes of class position makes it impossible to see social status as fixed once and for all by birth or descent. Nor is it only the plot of sexual choice that rests upon class mobility; the novels are full of characters who are (in the terminology of the time) self-made or of decayed aristocratic stock, and Gabriel Oak demonstrates the volatilities of class position in his migrations between landowner and wage-laborer status. Change, mobility, and choice are to the fore in the representations of class difference. At the same time, these novels combine—often rather unsettlingly—numerous voices of conventional wisdom about the nature of women and their difference from men with other moments that destabilize the certainties of the nineteenth-century gender polarity. The scenes of shared labor crucial to the representation of fulfilled love between Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene and of the thwarted love of Marty South for Giles Winterborne stress likeness and commonality rather than difference. Bathsheba's fear that her social and economic power may have made her “mannish” is answered decisively but unexpectedly in Liddy's positing of gender convergence rather than polarity: “not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis getting on that way sometimes” (Far from the Madding Crowd, xxx, p. 209). At moments such as those I have cited, differences—whether of class or of gender—are clearly shown as products of history rather than of nature.

Although the representation of class and gender differences and alliances is not confined to the heterosexual love relationship, it is there that Hardy locates their pains and pleasures at their sharpest. Difference itself is often powerfully erotically charged. There is, I think, something fetishistic about Hardy's textualization of sexuality, and it is often expressed in a slightly disturbing way through the disembodied gender significations of clothes; the scene in which the gazes of the members of the Mellstock Quire all “converge … like wheel-spokes” upon Fancy's boot, lovingly exploring its “flexible bend at the instep” and “rounded localities of the small nestling toes” (Under the Greenwood Tree [UGT,], i, iii, pp. 25-26) is echoed by the scene of the assembled wives and mistresses of Fitzpiers staring at his abandoned nightshirt, or by Boldwood's secret amassing of a hoard of silk and satin dresses, sable and ermine muffs, all carefully labeled “Bathsheba Boldwood” as if they substituted for the woman herself. Perhaps it is because of this erotic dimension to his understanding of difference that Hardy so notably conceives and represents the intensely social discourses of gender and class in almost entirely individual terms. Certainly, both class and gender shape and color the experience and relationships of individual characters, but the novels are almost devoid of any sense of collectivity. The rises and falls of class position happen through and to individuals; Oak's catastrophic loss of his investment, for instance, is due to his foolishness in leaving his freshly lamb-fed dogs unattended, rather than to changes in market prices.

Where gender is concerned, matters appear rather different. Though there is little of female friendship in the novels, both Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders contain important moments in which a recognition of commonality of experience between women overcomes the way in which their own emotional interests place them at odds; in the first, Bathsheba takes responsibility for Fanny's burial and grave initially because it is her role as employer, but then out of fellow-feeling, while in the second, Grace Melbury and Felice Charmond cling together in the woods in a mutual acceptance of the suffering of the other. Nevertheless, in each case that commonality rests upon the private experience of the love relationship, and then only because the man (and not just the situation) is in each case shared. It is striking, too, that none of the central female characters in these texts has a mother; Fanny and Grace have stepmothers, Bathsheba has (if only briefly) an aunt, Marty South has only a father. The effect is to heighten the sense of isolation in which these characters live out their common dilemmas.

This absence of mothers also throws into sharper relief, at least in the cases of Fancy Day and Grace Melbury, the patriarchal power of the father, whose role it is to make, accept, or refuse the marital choice on behalf of his daughter. Mr. Day's attempt to prevent Fancy marrying Dick and Mr. Melbury's early desire to force Grace to marry Giles are only apparently opposites; in fact, they betray the same social power. In each case, too, the primary concern of the father is whether his daughter, educated beyond the level of her family and her peers, will justify the investment by making a socially advantageous marriage. In other words, the daughter is at once the object of and the vehicle for the social ambition of the father. But if the social ambition belongs to the father, the social mobility belongs to the daughter. A kind of freedom, it nevertheless threatens to leave her “as it were in mid-air between two storeys of society” (W, xxx, p. 214) until one or other of the class-positions is confirmed by the status of the husband. The exercise of such patriarchal power, if not always by a literal father, will prove tragic in some other of Hardy's texts, but in these interrelated novels, it is shown in the end to be futile. In Under the Greenwood Tree, the father's power to make the marital choice on behalf of his daughter is comically subverted—with, it must be said, only a token resistance—by the notably unsupernatural intervention of the wise woman Mrs. Endorfield. In The Woodlanders, the father's power is carefully foregrounded in Melbury's vacillations as he impels Grace in one direction and then another according variously to the dictates of his conscience, his ambition, or his information. Finally, he is left looking rather pathetic by Grace's decision to return to Fitzpiers, which he is unable to fit into the scheme of his own power: “I have been a little misled in this … there has been some mistake—some arrangement … which I didn't quite understand” (W, xlviii, p. 359). In both texts, then, the social power of the father is asserted even as his individual power is undermined through the structure of the narrative.

Under the Greenwood Tree, according to its author's 1912 Preface, deals with the story of the church musicians and their eclipse “lightly, even … farcically and flippantly at times” (UGT, Preface, p. 5). Much the same could be said of its rather mild and low-key version of Hardy's central plotmotif, marital choice among class-differentiated suitors. Here, class differences are small, their determinations upon behavior insignificant, and their ultimate impact minimized; work and economic exploitation are largely absent; rivalries are minor, mistakes are rapidly retrieved, and tragedies averted. Narrative elements that will become significant in the other novels under discussion have not yet made their appearance: no man is financially ruined, no woman seduced and abandoned, and no one dies for love. Nevertheless, even in this lightly sketched version, it is the representation of class and gender relations that gives the novel much of its interest.

The text focuses in part upon a tension between community and individualism, tradition and modernity. It features a group of men—the Mellstock Quire—for whom the order of things, social as well as natural, lies in stasis, cycle, and repetition. Images of literal stasis (the picturesque, the statuesque, the silhouette) abound, and the novel's pastoral structure, focused on the cycle of the seasons, takes the narrative from the communal festivities of Christmas to those of Dick and Fancy's wedding. Against this background are set the two individual men whose role is to rupture the cyclical pattern and disrupt the stasis. Parson Maybold breaks the rhythm of the church festivals by substituting Fancy's “free” solo playing (UGT, iv, v, p. 167) of the organ for the communal performance of the Quire. Mr. Shiner has no respect for the traditions of the (literally cyclical and repetitive) dance:

“All I meant was,” said Dick, rather sorry that he had spoken correctingly to a guest, “that 'tis in the dance; and a man has hardly any right to hack and mangle what was ordained by the regular dance-maker, who, I daresay, got his living by making 'em, and thought of nothing else all his life.”

“I don't like casting off: then very well: I cast off for no dance-maker that ever lived.”

(UGT, i, vii, p. 53)

Positioned between the group who want things to stay the same and the individuals who want to change them is Fancy Day, so that her choice among available suitors represents also a choice among attitudes to community and tradition. As Gatrell has pointed out,² the novel is full of expressions of suspicion and distrust toward women, voiced in a kind of choric fashion by the Mellstock men. From the moment when Fancy's boot disrupts the group by compelling their attention at once to its workmanship and its embodiment of femininity, neither the reader nor the members of the Quire are ever in doubt that the male group of the outset will yield to the heterosexual couple of the conclusion. Fancy's role, it seems to me, is to represent femaleness; it does not depend upon, or even require, any individualization of her. The reader is given virtually no direct representation of any desire, intention, or feeling of Fancy's; all must be inferred from the commentaries and interpretations of (male) others, and are usually generalized on the basis of gender. “[Women] be all alike in the groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference,” advises Mr. Dewey (UGT, ii, viii, p. 108). At the same time, though, Dick's doubts, wonderings, and general confusion are scrupulously reported to the reader: “This brought another meeting, and another, Fancy faintly showing by her bearing that it was a pleasure to her of some kind to see him there; but the sort of pleasure she derived … he could not anyhow decide, although he meditated on her every little movement for hours after it was made” (UGT, ii, i, p. 69).

As a result, thrown into relief against Dick's guileless incomprehension, Fancy often comes to seem a skillful manipulator, possessed of mysterious and unexplained knowledge about the ways of the world. In the conversation that leads to Dick's proposal, for instance, there is no level of commentary guiding the reader to know whether Fancy has consciously set out to elicit it, but the self-evidence of his naivety seems to impute worldly knowledge to her. This superior knowledge seems, too, more in the nature of womanly instinct than evidence of her much-vaunted education; the novel certainly allows her precious little of scholarship and intellectual activity. The narrative voice, then, is more or less aligned with the collective wisdom of the Mellstock Quire as Dick is initiated into the ways of women. As a result, the largely cynical generalizations about women receive a degree of narrative endorsement, as when Mr. Dewey's views are confirmed as “truth”: “In fact, it is just possible that a few more blue dresses on the Longpuddle young men's account would have clarified Dick's brain entirely, and made him once more a free man” (UGT, iv, i, pp. 142-43; italics added).

Since there are no other young and marriageable women of any narrative significance in the text, Fancy is almost the exclusive focus of both erotic attention and gender generalizations, and her status as a kind of queen bee among the workers of Mellstock is brought out by the repeated references to beehives. In a sense, then, Fancy is Woman for the novel: if she is fickle, it is because women are fickle, and if the novel tells us Woman is fickle, it is because Fancy is fickle. Just as Tess Durbeyfield will later be “pure woman” precisely because she is impure, so Fancy Day is “perfect woman” (UGT, iii, iv, p. 135) precisely by virtue of her imperfections; complete in her incompleteness, she is, for this text, the singular example of “united 'ooman” (UGT, i, vi, p. 44).

Fancy's symbolic choice between the old ways and the new comes to what is in a sense a predictable conclusion: a compromise. She does displace the Quire from the church, but she also adopts many of the old-fashioned customs, in order to have a wedding like her mother's. Her exposure to the ways of “persons of newer taste” (UGT, v, ii, p. 193) allows her to bring about some modest changes in manners and habits. This ending in compromise does not constitute an avoidance of resolution, though; it marks the novel's final recognition that the breaking of pattern and cycle by the intrusion of desire is in turn itself a pattern, a cycle. Only this, after all, enables the group to recognize from the moment of his first enraptured gaze that Dick Dewey is a lost man: “Distance belongs to it: slyness belongs to it: queerest things on earth belongs to it. There—'tmay as well come early as late, s'far as I know. The sooner begun the sooner over; for come it will” (UGT, ii, iii, p. 75).

Though pastoral and mythological allusions are still significant, Far from the Madding Crowd is a novel in which class and economic relations assume a much more prominent status. If not exactly predicated upon class, its central romance is certainly permeated by work, money, and considerations of social status. The fluctuations of Oak's fortunes, and indeed of Bathsheba's, are carefully detailed. Economic motivations are often powerful, as when Troy's final return to his wife is motivated as much by her ability to keep him as by the recrudescence of desire. Most importantly, the literal and metaphorical language of economic transaction—of debt, waste, begging, investment, gamble, and contract—here both doubles and displaces the language of emotional interaction: Bathsheba feels she owes Boldwood a “‘debt, which can only be discharged in one way,’” for example, and his final proposal to her is improbably as “‘A mere business compact’” (FMC, li, p. 368 and liii, p. 386). The sense that Bathsheba and Oak are right for each other is mediated through their development of what might be called the great virtues endorsed by the text: shared work and shared commitment to the importance of labor and money. In this last, they are distinguished from the fecklessness of almost all those around them. The detail of working life in the novel, considerable as it is, is also accompanied by the detail of work refused, wasted, or neglected. To some extent, the early Bathsheba and Oak share the same carelessness; she wishes she could afford to pay a man to do the work for her, and he dozes off to sleep and loses his sheep. They help to educate one another into responsible workers and landowners, with money-saving interventions as the currency of their romance. The twopence that Bathsheba will not pay at the turnpike and Oak's reputation as a “near” man, one who mends his own socks even when he can afford not to, predestine them for one another as surely as anything more romantic. The equilibrium of the end is doubly enabled: obviously, by their economic equivalence as Oak's application and thrift help him to climb back from wage-earning status to capital accumulation, but also by Bathsheba's final half-articulated proposal to Oak—a proposal which, to pick up one of the novel's dominant metaphors, she owes him.

The proximity of love relationships and economic relations (debt, dependency, possession) in the novel draws attention to its conception of gender relations as suffused by distributions and inequalities of power. For a novel which is certainly, on one level, among the great literary romances, Far from the Madding Crowd is also curiously, strikingly full of episodes of malice, both human and otherwise. Probably the most obvious and extreme instance comes in Troy's torturing of Boldwood by delaying the news of his marriage in a way that impels his rival to offer him higher and higher bribes. But there are other such moments, too, great and small: Bathsheba's sacking of Oak, his refusal in return to save her sheep until she begs, Troy's repudiation of Bathsheba over the coffin of Fanny Robin, the gargoyle's destruction of his dilettantish efforts at atonement, even the man at the workhouse's stoning of the dog that has assisted Fanny along the Casterbridge highway. Again, the novel's romance is repeatedly undercut by undertones of antagonism and even violence in its representation of erotic and love relationships: rowelled spurs, shears, swords, lashing reins, guns, mark the various stages of relationship. Troy's symbolic seduction of Bathsheba in the hollow amid the ferns takes the form of a sword-exercise, and its intensity has something faintly sado-masochistic in its exaggerated performances of cowering and swagger:

She shuddered, “I have been within an inch of my life, and didn't know it!”

“More precisely speaking you have been within half an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times.”

“Cruel, cruel 'tis of you!”

“You have been perfectly safe nevertheless. My sword never errs.”

(FMC, xxviii, p. 196)

Beside this figurative violence there also runs another, related strain of imagery. Though there is what might be called a narrative endorsement of Bathsheba in the novel's final scene of quiet marriage, it is also noticeable that the process of maturation which fits her to Oak is represented—often though her own speech or consciousness—as a humiliation, a taming, a conquering. Similarly, Boldwood is reduced from his initial haughty independence to a state of pitiful obsession and eventual incarceration, and Fanny Robin's suffering after her abandonment by Sergeant Troy is portrayed at a length and with a relish hard for the reader to enjoy. The world of desire and passion is here one of extremity and violence. That the novel is able to conclude with romance fulfilled is due largely to the displacement of sexual relationship, at least between Oak and Bathsheba, by economic interaction. It is less as male and female that they are finally united than as landowners, workers, and social equals. Their engagement is confirmed by the discussion of “the details of his forthcoming tenure of the other farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feelings” (FMC, lvi, p. 409).

There is a sense in which this is a surprising outcome; no first-time reader, I think, could predict from the novel's opening that particular turn of events. It begins rather awkwardly. Gabriel Oak is what might be called a class-type, representing and delimited by his social position: a faintly ridiculous rustic with his “ruddy mass” of a face, his “emphatically large” boots, and a watch that has only one working hand (FMC, i, pp. 7-8). Bathsheba, similarly, begins as a gender-type, an enactment of “[w]oman's prescriptive infirmity” (FMC, i, p. 10), complete with emblematic looking-glass. It seems appropriate that their earliest interactions are so disjointed and uncommunicative, each observing the other from carefully described vantage points as if they occupied distinct narrative spaces. As the novel progresses, however, something very different happens. The point is not that the evolution of the individual characters takes them further from stereotype, but rather that the very bases of the types are undermined. It is not a change in Bathsheba, but a different understanding of gender, that takes the novel from “[w]oman's prescriptive infirmity” to a situation in which Bathsheba is “so almighty womanish” that it abuts the mannish (FMC, xxx, pp. 209). Similarly, that Oak becomes gentleman enough for Bathsheba is not only due to his accumulation of capital, nor to any development that we know of in his dress or social habits, but also to a changed idea of the determining power of class. The exuberant ideological confidence of the novel's opening is chastened along with its characters in the course of the narrative.

In many ways, The Woodlanders draws upon the same range of narrative elements and allusions as these predecessors. It is a much more disturbing novel than either, though, in its gesture towards and final avoidance of the expected conclusion, its blurring of the roles of its initially clearly opposed hero and villain, and its unsettling generic ranging across social comedy, tragedy, and melodrama. There are two elements in particular, though, that create the sense of disturbance: the peculiarly unstable character of class and sexuality, and the prevalence of obsession. From the interaction of the two emerges something quite different in the handling of the central plot of marital choice.

As in the earlier texts, love and desire act as the medium of significant patterning of relationships and characters. At the same time, relationships among the central characters are often very specifically socio-economic. That is, relationships of class alliance and antagonism here take the form of relations of employer and employee, landlord and tenant, workmates and traders. For all the novel's allusions to Sophoclean tragedy, Norse mythology, and pastoral, The Woodlanders clearly does not represent “one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world” (W, i, p. 8). Rather, its society is grounded in economic interaction and sexual desire, often in complex interaction. It is a novel in which the language of “fate” and “destiny” is harnessed to something very much more like a materialist determinism:

As with so many right hands born to manual labour, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing but a cast of the die of Destiny had decided that the girl should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to do it in good time.

(W, ii, p. 10)

There is, then, nothing natural or inherent about class position. It does not betray itself in intrinsic physical traits—nothing about Grace shows Fitzpiers that she is not his social equal—though in time it becomes written upon the body, in Melbury's sore back as much as Marty's right hand. This idea contributes to the pervasive sense of class mobility in the novel: Felice the “lady of the manor” is an actress who married a wealthy manufacturer, Melbury is a self-made man, the professional Fitzpiers comes from an aristocratic family in decline, the coffin-stool in Marty's cottage reveals a formerly wealthy family background. In this disturbingly mobile social environment,³ Grace is repeatedly described in economic terms, as a valuable gift, as yielding a return, as raw material or value added. She is, in a sense, an asset in transactions among men, who can cancel Melbury's debt to his wronged rival, or confer money and status on Giles, or balance money and social degradation for Fitzpiers. Most of all, she is Melbury's investment in the future and his profit from a lifetime's labor, and, like all capital, she must be carefully husbanded. Melbury's fixation on Grace's social position drives the plot, and there is real pathos in his prospective satisfaction that she might fulfill his obsessive social ambition by becoming too socially elevated to acknowledge him in public: “If you should ever meet me then, Grace, you can drive past me, looking the other way. I shouldn't expect you to speak to me, or wish such a thing—unless it happened to be in some lonely private place where 'twouldn't lower 'ee at all” (W, xxiii, p. 159).

Melbury is an obsessive in a novel of obsessives. At times—as with John South's inexplicable identification with the tree outside his window—it seems that irrationalism governs the novel. More particularly for my argument here, the combination of a high level of mobility and of obsessive single focus which runs through the novel's representation of social status is replicated in its version of sexuality. The plot is full of second marriages, infidelities, promises made and broken, actual or multiple attachments, and (at least as a possibility denied) divorce. It shows a society of what might be called erotic mobility, within which each sexual attraction exercises a power so compelling that it reduces character after character to symbolic somnambulism. As with class position, there is a sense that erotic choice is both arbitrary and determining; neither is fated, but each imposes its own fate. Once Marty's hands have been set to piecework, the chances of her acquiring artistic and musical accomplishments diminish to vanishing point. Similarly, once a sexual choice has been made, it cannot simply be ignored: Felice's murder at the hands of a rejected lover, Giles's death from typhoid and chivalry, Grace's departure with Fitzpiers after a narrow brush with the man-trap, all result from sexual commitments broken but not unmade.

Clearly, the novel's focus on the provisionality of class position and the restlessness of desire significantly transforms its fable of marital choice. The profoundly non-monogamous sexuality represented does not lend itself to any symbolically definitive commitment. It is fitting that Grace's choice of a suitor is in turn so restless and transitory, continually made and unmade until the novel's conclusion takes her out of the society of Little Hintock altogether. Grace acts as the appropriate focus of the novel's social and erotic choices precisely because she spends so much of it in a state of suspension, “between two storeys of society” (W, xxx, p. 215), “neither married nor single” (W, xl, p. 293), “a conjectural creature” (W, v, p. 39). Grace's vacillations and uncertainty signify the complexity of the novel's version of the plot of marital choice.

If the concluding couple of The Woodlanders frustrates expectations of rightness endorsed, there is one relationship of equality in the novel. Giles and Marty have the shared work, shared knowledge, and shared language that in Far from the Madding Crowd confer its rightness upon the Bathsheba-Oak marriage. In the erotically compulsive and socially restless world of The Woodlanders, though, their unchanging comradeship is sterile because it stands apart from the shifting obsessions of desire: “In all our outdoor days and years together, ma'am … the one thing he never spoke of to me was love; nor I to him,” says Marty (W, xliv, p. 327). Where difference is the erotic spur, their complementarity finally isolates them from their society and from each other.

In these three pastorally influenced novels of marital choice, then, class difference is as central to the generation of desire and its thwarting or fulfillment as gender difference. Indeed, it might even seem that, under the constraints imposed by nineteenth-century publishing conventions, experimentation with class position stands in for its sexual equivalent. It is important, though, that Hardy's versions of gender and class are never displacements of one another. Whether in the simplicity of Fancy's choice, the false starts that Bathsheba's financial independence allows her, or Grace's restive and half-made commitments, it is the interplay and contradiction between these two powerful social discourses that is the focus of narrative attention. In Hardy's fiction, the plot of romance—often seen as the plot of the private life—is profoundly social.

Notes

1. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The “Bildungsroman” in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), pp. 248-49, n. 33.

2. Simon Gatrell, “Introduction,” in UGT, pp. xviii-xix.

3. See John Bayley, “A Social Comedy? On Re-reading The Woodlanders,” in Thomas Hardy Annual No. 5, ed. Norman Page (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 17.

Further Reading

Bayley, John. An Essay on Hardy. Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Elbarbary, Samir. “The Male Bias of Language and Gender Hierarchy: Hardy's Bathsheba Everdene and His Vision of Feminine Reality Reconsidered.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 41 (1995), 59-79.

Garson, Marjorie. Hardy's Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Goode, John. “Hardy and Marxism.” In Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Ed. Dale Kramer with the assistance of Nancy Marck. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990, pp. 21-38.

Green, Laura. “‘Strange [In]difference of Sex’: Thomas Hardy, the Victorian Man of Letters, and the Temptations of Androgyny.” Victorian Studies, 38 (1995), 523-49.

Higonnet, Margaret R., ed. The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Ingham, Patricia. Thomas Hardy. Feminist Readings. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Jacobus, Mary. “Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders.” In Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979, pp. 116-34.

Kramer, Dale. “Revisions and Vision: Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.” Bulletin of New York Public Library, 75 (1971), pp. 195-230, 248-82.

Kramer, Dale, ed. Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979.

Levine, George. “Shaping Hardy's Art: Vision, Class, and Sex.” In The Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 533-59.

Miller, J. Hillis. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.

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

Morgan, William W. “Gender and Silence in Thomas Hardy's Texts.” In Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art. Ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 161-84.

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

Scarry, Elaine. “Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists.” Representations, 1/3 (1983), 90-123.

Williams, Merryn, and Raymond Williams. “Hardy and Social Class.” In Thomas Hardy: The Writer and His Background. Ed. Norman Page. London: Bell & Hyman, 1980, pp. 29-40.

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

Wotton, George. Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1985.

Wright, T. R. Hardy and the Erotic. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.