SOURCE: Polhemus, Robert M. “Pastoral Erotics: Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).” In Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence, pp. 223-50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

[In the following chapter from his full-length study of eroticism in the works of several novelists, Polhemus examines representations of love and pastoralism in Far from the Madding Crowd, using Claude Lorrain's painting Judgment of Paris as a point of comparison.]

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Psalm 23:1

There's a somebody I'm longing to see
I hope that he
Turns out to be
Someone to watch over me.
I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood;
I know I could
Always be good
To one who'll watch over me.

Ira Gershwin¹

The Cyprian Queen, my children, is not only the Cyprian; there are many other names she bears. She is Death; she is imperishable force; she is raving madness; she is untempered longing; she is lamentation. Nothing that works or is quiet, nothing that drives to violence, but as she wills. Her impress sinks into the mould of all things whose life is in their breath. Who must not yield to this goddess? She enters into every fish that swims; she is in every four-footed breed upon the land; among the birds everywhere is the beating of her wings; in beasts, in mortal men, and in the gods above. … There is no design of mortal or of god that is not cut short by love.

Sophocles²

I

Claude Lorrain's Judgment of Paris (c. 1645-46),³ like Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, shows a tenuous balance of forces and a living, but menaced faith in a still harmonious world. Both represent the choosing of love as the essence of human life, but each conveys the disruption and terror that may lurk in that choice. The tension of the picture lies in the contrast between the equanimity of natural rightness of being in Claude's wide pastoral vision and the potential strife and devastation that the figures of the myth presage. On one side, the long view with enduring, stretching fertile space and the implied consciousness to perceive it gratefully; on the other, an individualizing narrative vision featuring the inaugural discord of amorous folly and tragedy. But in both painting and novel an overall serenity about life and love prevails. The sheer largeness of nature—its depths and rhythms—swallows and in perspective diminishes even the direst human experience.

Nothing could make clearer Hardy's feeling for nature and his own pastoral relationship to his subject matter than his reminiscence of how he wrote the book: “So Hardy went on writing Far from the Madding Crowd—sometimes indoors, sometimes out—when he would occasionally find himself without a scrap of paper at the very moment that he felt volumes. In such circumstances he would use large dead leaves, white chips left by the wood-cutters, or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand.”⁴ Apocryphal or not, the story makes him seem like a character in his own fiction inscribing the novel as a labor of love to, in, about, and on nature.

Pastoral love and imagery, the basis for faith in Hardy's novel, have deep roots in human culture. Somehow the pastoral vocation and heritage lend themselves to metaphorical evocation of the most profound feelings that men and women have had about love, labor, religion, and being in the world. These run from the sublime—Christ as the “good shepherd”—to the ridiculous—the comedian as sheep lover. In Woody Allen's movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), a psychiatrist falls madly in love with a sheep. The episode offers a farcical example of erotic desire blowing away distinctions between pastoral concern and libido. The joke depends on the absurdity of bestial love in an up-to-date urban milieu and more subtly on the graphic force of the film medium to mock the stale pastoral imagery that resides in our discourse. Beneath the incongruity, though, lies the complex comedy of the relationship between the object of vocation and erotic drive—not to mention the sheer zaniness of personal desire.

The real joke may be that the linguistic analogy between sheep and humankind, especially the persistent comparison of women to sheep and lambs, really has something to do with sex and power; and people, queasy about their animality, try to laugh off the subject. Notice the endurance of “crude” sexual jokes about sheep, from the parody of the Nativity in The Second Shepherd's Play, to obscene “sheepherder” stories and to the ultimate in modern sexism: Why did God make women? Because sheep can't type. There may be something uncivilized and vaguely revolting in the merging of pastoral love and carnal desire, but the place of sheep in narrative and figurative language, gamy subject that it is, lets us infer a good deal about our culture, imagination, and work.

The pastoral conceit is that life is like sheep and shepherds in their setting. Hardy tries to realize in Far from the Madding Crowd what is living in the tradition of pastoral and to use it to fuse erotics, economics, and religious meaning for his world.⁵ “Shepherd Oak,” says a perceptive critic, “appears as the high priest of both love and work.”⁶ Hardy sets love and humanity in the long historical perspective of pastoral space, time, and vocation.

II

I want to juxtapose the following items and consider how they bear on the new pastoralism of Far from the Madding Crowd:

• 1. In Hardy's later days he recalled one of his first memories: As a child, “crossing the ewelease …, he went on hands and knees and pretended to eat grass in order to see what the sheep would do. Presently he looked up and found them gathered around in a close ring, gazing at him with astonished faces.”⁷

• 2. When Strife, at a wedding, tosses among the gods the golden apple bearing the words “to the fairest,” and Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite squabble for it, Zeus, via Hermes, sends them off to the Mount Ida countryside for the herdsman Paris to decide the issue. In early versions of the story, they are clothed when Paris judges them; in later versions, they disrobe in order to show their full beauty.⁸ In Claude's painting, Hera, disputing the shepherd judge, stands fully garbed—even seeming to carry a billowing pack on her back—at the center of the group; the other goddesses and Eros, as well as Paris, are nude except for wisps of drapery.

• 3. In the King James Bible, the allegorizing headnote to chapter 1 of the Song of Solomon begins, “The church's love unto Christ,” and glosses verses 7 and 8: “7 and [she] prayeth to be directed to his flock. 8 Christ directeth her to the shepherds' tents.” These verses proper read: “(7) Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon; for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions? (8) If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds' tents.”

• 4. In Hardy's novel, Gabriel Oak shears a ewe while the owner whom he loves, Bathsheba Everdene, looks on: “The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece—how perfectly like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be realized—looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which lay on the floor in one soft cloud.”⁹ (Say “Bathsheba” aloud and you can hear both the bleat and the name of the pastoral animal.)

The first item suggests that Hardy, besides being a quirky child, might have had a unique curiosity about the pastoral process. That this comic incident stuck in his mind for eighty years or so, testifies to its importance. It suggests such messages as these: “I am like a sheep”; “Sheep react like people”; “I can astonish them”; “Sheep are my audience”; and “Human consciousness may be a freak of nature.” Implicitly it also proclaims, “Watch this creature; he has a pastoral imagination.”

The Judgment of Paris legend, which makes a shepherd the arbiter of divine beauty and precipitator of the fall of dynasties, brings out the prominence of herding in early history and the resultant traces of pastoral memory that have shaped how we think and live.¹⁰ The choice of love over dominant political power, military prowess, and superhuman wisdom asserts the full force of erotic desire. Why is Paris a herdsman? It may well be that somewhere in the origin of this myth lies the practice of sacrifice and the substitution of animal for human victims (e.g., the substitution of a ram for Isaac in Genesis). The shepherd is not only a key man in the economy on which culture was built, he is also a key figure in the custom of religious ritual. Different deities try to gain the allegiance of the pastor. This tie between Aphrodite and Paris the keeper of flocks joins the erotic to the pastoral.

An especially puzzling feature is the disrobing part of the story, which Claude's painting features. No doubt the force of love first sparks with looking, but from where does the idea come that the shepherd has the power and privilege of having the goddesses appear naked before him? If we conjoin the image of deities unclothed with Hardy's simile of Bathsheba's newly shorn ewe as Aphrodite rising out of the foam, we might find a clue. Some esoteric, dark connection may exist between the sheep's bounty to the shepherd and the undressed goddesses' bounteous offerings to Paris. If the male is to choose a woman and love as the most tempting of prizes, then femininity, no matter how powerful, must uncover. Is it too farfetched to suppose some link exists between the shearing of sheep and the uncovering of divine beauty? What is sure is that from earliest times the spirit of divinity and religion, like the spirit of generation, has been felt to infuse the pastoral vocation.

The Scripture and its prefatory gloss from the Song of Solomon show this mutuality. The commentary epitomizes the drive of Judeo-Christian monotheism to incorporate and sublimate love and sexual desire. It tries to moralize and spiritualize volatile erotic passion. The Bible shows the continuing but evolving metaphorical identity between human life and the pastoral enterprise. No line from the novel seems more provocative by modern lights than Bathsheba's statement, “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs” (LI, 270). Essential to pastoral thinking is the idea of caring love and the image of all people, male or female, as potential members of the flock; but built into the traditions of language and thought are the identification of women with sheep and the potential role of men as shepherds. An ancient analogy persists right down to the Gershwins' “Someone to Watch over Me,” between the pastoral condition and gender roles in love life; but notice certain slippages between the Scripture I cite and its commentary. In the Song of Solomon the voice of the woman sounds out boldly. Unrestrainedly in love, she is close to—part of—the work of men; love, lover, and beloved are not abstract, but personal and immediate. Love is a wholehearted faith, unmediated by the “church” of the gloss. An unorthodox admirer of the Bible, Hardy was eager to convey the relevance of scriptural life and language that the clerisy could obscure by bracketing them off from the people and appropriating their interpretation. He was trying to recover lost ground in Far from the Madding Crowd.

Set my fourth item, the newly shorn sheep and the birth of Aphrodite, next to the first, and you can see how natural it is that Hardy should have composed that simile and yet how wonderful a revelation it is. No other novelist before him knew both sheepshearing and Aphrodite so well or would have seen and felt the one in the other. What the figure in context and the novel as a whole suggest is the knowledge that the goddess of love may be reborn fresh and beautiful—or terrible as death—in anyone's experience. A man and a woman may be laboring together at some mundane task when suddenly their common vocation turns into a vocation of love. Venus, a living deity reborn millions of times a day, lurks everywhere, ready to possess, ready for epiphany.

III

Hardy's pastoral is both very old and very new. Steeped in Ecclesiastes—“to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose”—as well as in George Eliot (when it came out anonymously, the Spectator guessed that she wrote it, and Hardy's autobiography shows how that rankled him¹¹), Far from the Madding Crowd offers a vision and a love that show people both their continuity with the earth and the past, and a hope for the future. Like Eliot in her novels, Hardy assumes the pastoral role of Ecclesiastes: “wise, he still taught the people knowledge … even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads … which are given from one shepherd.” (When very young—vanity of vanities!—he had tried to turn Ecclesiastes into Spenserian stanzas.) What is new—new to the Victorian reading public at least—is the place of common experience and a modern sense of vocation as a basis for flowering love between men and women. Near the book's end, Hardy describes in a passage of great significance the possibility of erotic faith in a new—or renewed—pastoralism:

He accompanied her up the hill, explaining to her the details of his forthcoming tenure of the other farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feelings; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.

[LVI, 303-4]

Hardy, in this muted climax to the love story of Oak and Bathsheba, with its “mass of hard prosaic reality” and the flooding waters of the last sentence, must somehow have had the end of The Mill on the Floss in mind. The rich, problematic paragraph says that both idealized, romantic love and sexual love are transient—“evanescent.” Shared work, friendship, common physical relationship to the abiding reality of the world can help to bind a couple with love till death. This attachment to one another and to the earth means that they participate creatively in what endures and revives. Hardy, here, chooses to evoke the most erotic part of the Bible, with its religious connotations (“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it,” Song of Solomon 8:7), in his new pastoral love. He wants to bring together sexual love and vocation in its old and new sense (holy calling and significant work). He does not say that “romance” and sex, which I infer as part of the meaning of the phrase “love between the sexes,” are not necessary or, for joy or woe, sure to happen. Steam, after all, has moved the world's population. At its best, love is a compound. The passage has both an idyllic and an after-the-Fall flavor. It recognizes the need to accept flaws and the damage of experience, and it allows for historical as well as personal change. One of the lessons that modern life, with the widespread employment of women as well as men, keeps repeating is that shared labor sooner or later breeds love.

The most arresting words are “strong as death.” Love is not “stronger than death,” but, at its best, it has the inevitability and impact of death. It gives the couple a share in the eternal, ongoing processes of life and death, for the consequences of labor and love are endless. If we put that prose from the end together with an excerpt from the beginning of the novel, we get at Hardy's vision of love's potential in the novel. In the early passage, Hardy assumes the pastoral function and even the cadences and periods of the George Eliot narrator, and yet he achieves his own sweeping, but finely sensed perspective: “The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars” (II, 12).

Human life for Hardy often has the futility of a shepherd trying to herd stars, but this astronomical view has potential comfort: to integrate the self into the majestic universe and consciously feel a part of it would be a way to be “strong as death.” The pastoral love that Hardy is trying to imagine would include and blend erotic love, care for another person, and the self's intimate involvement with, and feeling for, the natural cosmos and its regenerative force. His project is to awaken and uncover a few of “the mass of civilized mankind” to consciousness of their cosmic ride, to humanity's preoccupation with erotic desire, and to restorative, faithful love.

IV

Let us look again at Claude's Judgment and compare it to Hardy's novel. A fateful decision for humanity is being made in a quiet, shadowed corner of a twilight world. Central to the painting, as Oak is central to the novel, and dominating it, along with the sky opening out to the vast spaces on the right, is a large, handsome tree. Reaching up almost to the top, looming over the figures competing for preeminence below, it is apparently rooted in the Idalian rock—like Oak and his romance, “growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.” The foliage of the tree occupies a much greater area than the group in the middle distance, and it holds focus. Its somber color, its large ovallike shape, and its position roughly at the heart of the canvas suggest that whatever the vicissitudes of fortune, history, and even religion, life revolves about mysterious, unpossessable nature.

Paris and the goddesses look small. If you casually focus on them, your eye is liable to be taken up into the dark shape of the tree or, following the source of light on the figures, out into expansive, beautifully lit reaches of the river, lands, far-off bodies of water, mountains, late-day sky, golden boughs, and the deep horizons beyond the clouds. Something Bathsheba says in the novel gets at Claude's effect perfectly: “I'll try to think … if I can think out of doors; my mind spreads away so” (IV, 27). The tree spreads, the sky spreads, and they convey a greater importance and sense of permanence in this vision than the grouped figures. Behind Paris, who sits on a rock in front of a cavern, rises a firm, rugged cliff topped with tree growth and golden-leaved branches; above Aphrodite and Eros a waterfall pours down the mountainside; Pallas sits on a green bank; just above Hera's head and her imperious finger pointing upward, a narrow tree thrusts straight up into the sky, the dimension of its long slender trunk faintly mocking the gesture of the goddess by making it look so petty. And just in back of her lies the darkest part of the large tree's shadow. The animals of the herd, on which human sustenance depends, sprawl in the foreground and down the slope, blending into the landscape. The herdsman who must choose, and the deities of power, wisdom, and love and pleasure, are all contained by the existential conditions of flora, fauna, rocks, soil, mountains, water, air, weather, sun, and darkness. The imperative upon humanity is not to rule this immense landscape, the notion of which Claude's vision makes ridiculous, but to fit in, to understand it, and to harmonize consciousness and human nature to its rhythms and reality. The effect of Claude's space is very much like Hardy's ride through the stars: it undercuts pride.

The representation of the shepherd hero and the deities, though their traditional stature dwindles in the pastoral setting, has important implications. Handsome Paris, here the lone shepherd, cut off from Troy and kin, looks vulnerable to love. Hera, the embodiment of worldly power, stands centrally in the group. Admonishing Paris, her finger-pointing image conflicts with all her surroundings as well as with the other figures. Her fine raiment, like her proud peacock—whose useless gaudiness contrasts completely with the muted colors of the herd animals—seems out of place. Her unwillingness to undress, the portrayed clash of wills with the shepherd, and the power, wealth, and ambition symbolized by both her pose and clothes all mark her as the foe of pastoral life. By contrast, little pride at all shows forth in Aphrodite, Athena, or Eros. Pallas, busy with her sandal, her spear looking much like a shepherd's staff, her discarded robe matching almost exactly Paris's country garb, has the casual, undaunting form of a pastoral citizen. As for the unpretentious love goddess, intently watching Hera, she does not seem more beautiful or erotic than her rivals. Her son Cupid looks rather like a rustic's thin child—graphic evidence that love is fragile. The whole group, except for regal Juno, has undergone a pastoralization process. Majesty and divinity would seem to lie not in the separate figures, but in the rich landscape, and the fusion of consciousness and the subject of love into it. Claude's composition and Far from the Madding Crowd imply the same thing: Take the long view.

The picture, like the novel, displays spaciousness almost to infinity. It features a vision of uncovering, an opening up and out so that everything may be seen and known. This is a world without walls where, as in Hardy, the trappings of interiority and compartmentalized culture do not obscure the ecological sight lines. The high, wheeling birds lift the mind to what Hardy calls, describing Oak's vision of Bathsheba, “a bird's-eye view, as Milton's Satan first saw Paradise” (II, 16). “E. M. Forster remarked that Hardy conceived his novels from a great height, but his females are drawn from very close up.”¹² That kind of panoramic sweep, close-in focus, and intimation of relationship between the immediate and the distant—the flowing vista along with the telling detail of a particular life—make Claude “one of the unseen presences” in Far from the Madding Crowd.¹³

But Claude's painting, like Hardy's novel, has a more sinister side. The very peacefulness of the scene shows how close nemesis may be, how helpless people are when the gods single them out. The divine visit to the serene countryside renders the arbitrariness of fate. For Paris tending his flock, for Boldwood managing his farm, hard times and frightful chance happeneth and nothing can save them. Even Oak, the good shepherd, at the whim of fate loses his herd over a cliff.

The logic of Claude's choice of subject makes obvious one more thing: the decision of Paris for love means that the fact and nature of love are just as consequential and determining in human life as the tangible, visibly represented environment of the painting. The uncontrollable force of love, like an unseen wind, is part of the nature that fills that space and makes the picture. And power, armed wisdom, voluptuous desire—all the goddesses, all their jealousies, all that they represent—all the forces and matter of the universe, all human nature will be involved in the course of love. Of the five main characters in Far from the Madding Crowd, all of whom fall in love, two die horribly, one ends up in prison, and all suffer. Within the pastoral world of these two works, erotic desire means destruction and death as well as restoration.

V

Hardy—the Peeping Tom of novelists—has the libidinous curiosity of the voyeur. He combines visual intimacy and detail with far-reaching perspective, like a hawk that can see a mouse a mile away. He wants to visualize the fatal moments in life, show the spatial arrangements and details that compose critical moments in destiny. There is more, though: a fascination with exposing the other, with invading privacy and imaging scenes that have an aura of taboo about them. The voyeur turns his gaze on, not away from, the vulnerability and the secrets of others.

In discussing Villette, I said that the voyeuristic imagination, closely tied to artistic impulse, not only appropriates vicariously its desire, it also projects its obsessions onto what it sees. With Hardy no boundary exists between the erotic and the nonerotic. Judging by this novel, any reader can see that the outcome of Victorian repression is not the removal of sex from discourse, but a pressure that infuses eroticism into everything. We read a description of the countryside and suddenly we are seeing a woman's body; a sheep is shorn, and Hardy makes us think of a sexual deflowering. The erotic effect is rather like that of Sergeant Troy's phallic “blade,” “which seemed everywhere at once and yet nowhere especially” (XXVIII, 144). Venereal force and desire infuse and suffuse the novel's descriptions of nature and the subsurfaces of its text. Its ruling deity is the Sophoclean Cyprian.

Not for nothing did Hardy name his heroine Bathsheba and begin his novel with Gabriel Oak, like King David, looking down upon her from a “point of espial” (I, 10). One of the fathers of the cinematic consciousness, Hardy composes like a master of focus. He reveals casually both his own aesthetic passion and his erotic feeling for life when he remarks that Oak's “delight” in visualizing Bathsheba “effaced for the time his perception of the great difference between seeing and possessing” (VIII, 59). The distinction is telling. Hardy, like his hero, is possessed by what he sees—by love possessed; and the narrative explores what it might mean both to possess, and to be possessed by, love. But until the triumph of pastoral love in the end, those who possess love cannot see, and those who see do not possess love.

Love proverbially first begins with sight, and the author's voyeuristic point of view works to generate pastoral love. Drenched in the spirit of Ecclesiastes, the book opens by comparing Gabriel's smiling eyes and face to the rising sun (which “also riseth”); and Oak the shepherd, whose first action is to spy leisurely on Bathsheba looking at herself in a mirror, pronounces the final word of the first chapter, “Vanity” (I, 11). Likening Oak to the sun, giving him the name of a sturdy tree, Hardy means to create a man close to nature—to minimize the gap between what people think of as “nature” on the one hand and “human nature” on the other. He imagines Gabriel watching Bathsheba and guessing her mind as she smiles to herself: “She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part—vistas of probable triumphs—the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won” (I, 10). When she haggles about a road toll, Gabriel shows himself and pays it for her. Life in the novel begins with a vision of desire, a relationship between man and woman, thoughts of love, and an act of charity inspired by beauty and erotic longing.

Hardy establishes the pastoral milieu and continues to describe the force of Venus. Soon Oak's eye sweeps to the stars and then back to earth, peeking again through a roof down into an interior upon Bathsheba assisting at the birth of a calf. The shepherd, like his creator, gazing into space and feeling depths of space in himself, uses his eye to find his desire: “Having … known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, … he painted her a beauty” (II, 17).

In the next chapter, Oak again spies on Bathsheba, now riding a horse. As she passes under some branches, she drops “backwards flat upon the pony's back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky” (III, 18). (An iconographic axiom for Victorian fiction: if a woman appears on or near a horse, or talks of horses, look for sex and assessment of her sexual nature.) Bathsheba on her back, feet spread, with knees up and the horse between her legs—that's a suggestive position, to say the least; Gabriel is “amused” and “astonished” (III, 18). By the end of the chapter, having been saved by Bathsheba from suffocation in his hut, his head rests in that very “lap” that straddled the horse, and he finds himself totally in love. Voyeurism and vulnerability, both forms of intimacy, work like love potions.

I dwell on the early scenes of Oak's spying to stress that the pastor is a watcher and that this version of pastoral love is highly sensual. Oak prizes and respects Bathsheba's sexuality. Hardy's imagination, like that of Dickens, insists on the interflow of erotic emotion between a desired being and her (his) surroundings. Instead of purging sexuality from the text, Hardy stands Victorian literary decorum on its head and makes the primacy of erotic life—its drives, its desires, its varied, sometimes sublimated forms—absorb and sexualize the physical details, descriptions, incidents, and even the dialogue of the book. He uses the pastoral in much the same way as Freud would use the dream: as an acceptable, rhetorically distancing means to put before a sexually repressed and repressive audience the erotic forces that shape it.

When Bathsheba comes each day to milk a cow, Hardy conveys through Gabriel what it is like to fall in love: “By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day” (IV, 24). Those deceptively simple words—think how deftly they characterize—indicate how erotic desire is integrated with the world in Oak's character and Hardy's vision. They express a fresh mode of perception in fiction: romantic, but matter-of-fact, full of candor and peasant shrewdness, aware of how the ridiculous turns into love. Steeped in the conditions of rural life, Hardy brings out in an image or phrase personal drama and the enduring patterns of humanity trying to find both love and a living in nature.

“Love,” says the narrator, “is a possible strength in an actual weakness” (IV, 24). Substitute “devotion to God” or “duty” for “love” and you can see how the principle of erotic faith ties in with religious faith or faith in labor. Hardy would lose his erotic faith as he had his Christian faith (again and again he would later imagine love as a probable disaster in an actual weakness!), but in this novel it holds—just barely. It depends on Oak's steadiness and commitment to “the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba” (V, 30), which I read as an expression of the religious mystery of erotic love.

VI

The crucial wooing scene between Oak and Bathsheba (IV) has embarrassed some readers with its emotional nakedness. What has been called the “stylized,” disturbing quality of the chapter¹⁴ comes from Hardy's effort to have the man and the woman speak exactly as they might think and feel, something that rarely happens in life or fiction. Using the pastoral tradition, he tries to break through the wall of manners in courtship and, through the guilelessness of his characters, get at the irresistible, sometimes demeaning power of love and its uncertainties. The interview has the flavor of old ballads or of biblical stories that omit analysis and sharply truncate time in order to emphasize characteristic patterns, cycles, desires, and symbols of life. Candor, as the scene shows, often has great charm and force, but it can also disturb, making an audience face things it might wish to avoid.

Dressed up in his Sunday best, his hair slicked down, the pastoral lover lays bare his feelings when he calls on Bathsheba and finds her aunt instead: “I've brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to rear; girls do. … In short, I was going to ask her if she'd like to be married. … D'ye know if she's got any other young man hanging about her at all?” When the aunt, playing the game, tells him yes, Gabriel says, “I'm only an every-day sort of man, and my only chance was in being the first comer” (IV, 26). He leaves, but Bathsheba comes running after him in a sweat to say, “I haven't a sweetheart at all—and I never had one, and I thought that, as times go with women, it was such a pity to send you away thinking that I had several” (IV, 26-27). “I hate,” she adds, “to be thought men's property in that way.”

Behind the naiveté, Hardy is pushing his readers to focus on traditional courting practices that modern individualism tends to obscure: a man will try to smooth himself for a woman. The young woman is a totem lamb, the object of concern and sometimes of barter. Hers is the favor to grant, for which she is beseeched. She must wait, and that is hard, but when she is desired, she has great power over the male. A man's sense that he must compete for a woman's favor throbs fearfully in his early life, and he thinks about his attractiveness when compared with other men. The “times”—that is, for all intents and purposes here in the nineteenth century, all human history—are such that a woman cannot afford to take lightly a lover or an offer. The need to preserve choice and keep options open, plus the sheer love of being loved, may lead her to great exertion and coqueterie.

Notice that this scene takes place outside with no relatives around—man and woman isolated in nature—and also that none of the five principal figures, all swept up in love, have any close living relatives. Hardy's new pastoral imagines characters far from the madding crowd of family as well as urban society. What he later says of Boldwood holds for Oak: “No mother existed to absorb his devotion, no sister for his tenderness, no idle ties for sense. He became surcharged with the compound, which was genuine lover's love” (XVIII, 97). No mixture of incest taboo, incest desire, or direct Oedipal conflict mediates the erotic drama in the novel.¹⁵ Oak presses:

“Come … think a minute or two. I'll wait a while, Miss Everdene. Will you marry me? Do, Bathsheba. I love you far more than common! … I can make you happy. … You shall have a piano in a year or two … and … one of those little ten-pound gigs for market—and nice flowers, and birds—cocks and hens I mean, because they be useful,” continued Gabriel. …

“I should like it very much. …”

“And when the wedding was over, we'd have it put in the newspaper list of marriages.”

“Dearly I should like that!”

“And the babies in the births—every man jack of 'em! And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up, there will be you.”

“Wait, wait, and don't be improper!”

Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He regarded the red berries between them over and over again, to such an extent that holly seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal of marriage. …

“No; 'tis no use,” she said. “I don't want to marry you.”

“Try.”

“I've tried hard. … But a husband—. … Why, he'd always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he'd be. … I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. …”

“Why won't you have me?” he appealed. …

“Because I don't love you. …”

“But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.”

“O Mr. Oak—that's very fine! You'd get to despise me.”

“Never,” said Mr. Oak so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. “I shall do one thing in this life—one thing certain—that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”

“… It wouldn't do, Mr. Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know. … I am better educated than you—and I don't love you a bit.”

“… Very well,” said Oak firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. “Then I'll ask you no more.”

[IV, 27-30]

This minimalist art dissolves pretenses that surround courting men and women. It liberates: “I'm only an every-day sort of man,” “I am content to be liked,” “I am better educated than you,” “I don't love you.” These common feelings and ideas that women and men often try to hide come across here as straight facts of life. In Hardy there is sometimes a lifting of moral responsibility that accounts for moments of subversive, odd buoyancy—even in his gloomiest work: You cannot help it that you do not love some deserving person, that you have flaws, that your moral code does not jibe with reality, that you are a creature of desire and chance, that love and virtue may diverge. Life is hard enough without pretending that you want only what is good or that you are not hopelessly in love with some frustrating being who is bound to cause you grief.

The suddenness of Oak's proposal, the brevity of their acquaintance, his intensity, and Bathsheba's candid wonder about whether to take up the offer and then her refusal all point up how arbitrary love and marriage are. Shear away the superfluities of wooing, and you see that people, like Oak or Bathsheba, by love possessed or trying dimly to see their own good, make the fatal decisions of their love lives from quick impressions and moody impulses. Behind its pastoral rhetoric, the scene is very sophisticated about the ways of love and of men and women. If love rules the world, it is as likely as not to be unrequited love. Characters in Hardy may decide to take love, give themselves, or marry out of calculation, but they cannot decide to be in love. People may want flamboyance rather than kind devotion in love. With any couple, there is liable to be an imbalance of desire, and the beloved wields shattering power. The one who loves less may win—in the short run.

On the other side, erotic desire can give shape and purpose to a whole life. As novels keep saying, lovers may be more interested in their own fidelity and the defining force of their devotion than in the character of those they love. Oak speaks the popular Victorian erotic creed: “I shall do one thing in this life … love you … keep wanting you till I die.” Usually time proves this common sentiment false; the test of Oak's faith, then, becomes the test of erotic faith in the novel.

What do Oak and Bathsheba really want? The man seems to desire the woman's person, and she seems to desire status; but it's not that simple. When we look at how he woos her, we see that he equates the woman with the amenities of civilization: music, beauty, luxury, and, most important, regeneration. And naturally he assumes that what he wants, she would want. He is the pastor, and she, in all her beauty, is still for him a lamb. He has the craving of the good shepherd: “I will take care of you well, nourish your being, protect and love your essence, and in return I want and hope to use you for my purposes.” He does not say, “I will love you, but if that does not please you, I will respect your freedom and let you go from my desire”; he wants her to know, “I will keep wanting you till I die.” Pastoral love is especially unremitting and ultimately possessive.¹⁶

Hardy's succinct probe of desire goes deep. Oak thinks Bathsheba wants a richer life, the bourgeois dream; she does, but not nearly as much as he. She does not yet want to be settled as much as she wants passion: she wants, as strong people sometimes do, to fight a love struggle and have her independent will crossed (“I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent”). That is the key to her fall for Troy. Though Hardy and Austen would seem as different as outdoors and indoors, both imagine worlds that drive a bright, lively woman to flirt rebelliously, kicking against the social pricks. Bathsheba, when she takes up Oak's words and confesses how much she detests the idea of seeing a husband always there, like a jailer, is never more winning.

We keep seeing that the erotic dream and method of novelists are to bring together those who talk straight to each other, like Heathcliff and Cathy. Gabriel's candor is what allows Bathsheba to be honest with him and to learn her own mind. How educational it is to be rudely frank to someone who loves you. She can say anything to him; they can say anything to each other; and that experience—and memory—of being able to talk freely without penalty to a potential lover, even though things at first do not work out, can, over time, work like a slow love philter.

A quicker aphrodisiac is doubt. From start to finish, what excites Bathsheba is a love that might fly. Though she runs after Oak, once she is sure of him she feels no passion for him at all. Sexual desire may be natural, but its arousal often depends on jeopardy, novelty, and the thrill of breaking taboos. Hardy's parable about Bathsheba's father not only helps define the nature of her erotic character, it expresses perfectly the tension—tension thick in the proposal scene—and the far-reaching conflict between sex and moralized love, sex and marriage, sex and the demands of civilization.

“… Miss Everdene's father—was one of the ficklest husbands alive. … ‘Coggan,’ he said, ‘I could never wish for a handsomer woman than I've got, but feeling she's ticketed as my lawful wife, I can't help my wicked heart wandering, do what I will.’ But at last I believe he cured it by making her take off her wedding-ring and calling her by her maiden name as they sat together … and so ‘a would get to fancy she was only his sweetheart, and not married to him at all. And as soon as he could thoroughly fancy he was doing wrong and committing the seventh [“Thou shalt not commit adultery”], ‘a got to like her as well as ever, and they lived on a perfect picture of mutel love.”

[VIII, 52]

That may be a desperate remedy, but all who marry ought to know about it.

Devotees of pastoral love, like Hardy and Oak, must take into account the reality that humanity is a wandering flock. Victorian and modern civilization's almost impossibly difficult project is to make love and desire, erotics and marriage, contiguous, harmonious, and whole. Hardy focuses upon that great problem in his pastoral. The tone and meaning of the wooing scene as overture come through in Gabriel's reference to Ecclesiastes and its wise pastor, who promises a time for everything under the sun, including love.

VII

All life in Hardy's art is imbued with eroticism, and the displacement of sexuality into landscape is one of its main features. As, say, Sundays and holidays are set aside from normal days, human sexuality has been abstracted, set apart, made special and “other” from “regular” life. In Hardy, the body's sexual life manifests itself and takes place in a metaphorical setting. Ironically, Hardy adapts this method to try to make eroticism integral in the life of his novel. But displacement, the solution to his artistic problem of how to express the importance of sex in a medium that represses it, shows up as a highly significant problem in itself.

His vision both counteracts repression and is itself a symptom of sexual alienation. Hardy makes perception inseparable from erotics, but because he must show the fullness of sexual being in outward nature, rather than through the inner or bodily self, the rhetoric of his novel inevitably coaxes people to look for the erotic beyond themselves, somewhere else. The trouble with displacement is that it can frustrate people erotically by locating sex everywhere, but nowhere specially. Hardy's method of sexual representation, that is, symbolic voyeurism, is part of the message. It tends to make sex metaphorical and life vicarious. Real life lies beyond the self. Hardy's imagination touches on the advent of a mass, voyeuristic, consumerist culture. His general vision carries implications that the regenerative forces of life do not lie in the person but in the fertile continuity of ongoing nature. The hope of this art is that individuals will see themselves as part of the natural continuum of being. Its drawback is that the self can seem devalued—vacuumed. Drained away from specific individuals, erotic sympathy and reverence might flow towards the macrocosm that holds the potent force and the images of sexual energy. The danger for the good shepherd, i.e., the pastoral lover, artist, or caring reader, is that personal life and being will become both idealized and fetishized in the object of desire. Pastoral love, voyeurism, and the phenomenon of the novel have much in common.

Hardy's much-praised renderings of the countryside, the famous sword-practice episode and its complement, the storm-thatching scene, show how his pastoral voyeurism works. The scene from high summer, after Bathsheba has met Troy, famously fuses human sexuality into the landscape.

The hill opposite … extended … into an uncultivated tract of land, dotted at this season with tall thickets of brake fern, plump and diaphanous from recent rapid growth. … At eight o'clock this midsummer evening, whilst the bristling ball of gold in the west still swept the tips of the ferns with its long, luxuriant rays, a soft brushing-by of garments might have been heard among them, and Bathsheba appeared in their midst, their soft, feathery arms caressing her up to her shoulders. … She reached the verge of a pit in the middle of the ferns. … The pit was a saucer-shaped concave. … The middle within the belt of verdure was floored with a thick flossy carpet of moss and grass intermingled, so yielding that the foot was half-buried within it.

[XXVIII, 142-43]

Hardy is describing a midsummer night's dream where Bathsheba erotically opens to Troy.

In autumn, we see the exact same place, after Troy has married and betrayed her. She spends the night amid the ferns, and in the morning she sees seasonal changes:

[T]he ground sloped downwards to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi. … From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things. … The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps, some exhibiting to her listless gaze their clammy tops, others their oozing gills. Some were marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood, others were saffron yellow, and others tall and attenuated, with stems like macaroni. Some were leathery and of richest browns. The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great.

[XLIV, 232-33]

The fall landscape renders the sexual fall and the shame of Bathsheba. And in hindsight, we can see that the effects of the revolving year on the land reflect exactly Bathsheba's changing erotic condition. Hardy's seasonal visions of nature serve to objectify her libido and the emotional rhythms of her sexual life.

Why beat around the bush, to adopt his mode? His sensibility seems at times to turn nature into pornography. The uncanny precision of these descriptions—such passages in the novel could be multiplied again and again—shows his own libido fully engaged. It is as if Wessex itself were a great woman and the surface of the earth were her flesh. This kind of sensual prose vision reminds me again of David looking at Bathsheba, or of the elders looking at Susannah. Hardy has the same caressing eye, the same voyeuristic desire to possess the erotic in the act of exposure. The absorbing vision of this novel sometimes makes it clear how nature in the nineteenth century—and other times as well—could and did become a grand erotic fetish.

The sword-practice scene in “The Hollow amid the Ferns” (XXVIII), one of the most celebrated sexual passages in respectable Victorian fiction, epitomizes and vindicates Hardy's double-entendre method. In the setting and context of Bathsheba's inner sexual flowering and the outward fecundity of her surroundings, it remains vivid:

“Now,” said Troy, producing the sword, which, as he raised it into the sunlight, gleamed a sort of greeting, like a living thing. … “The thrusts are these: one, two, three, four. … Now I'll be more interesting, and let you see some loose play … quicker than lightning, and as promiscuously”. …

He flourished the sword …, and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and blade of the sword were darting with a gleam towards her left side, just above her hip; then of their reappearance on her right side … having apparently passed through her body. … All was as quick as electricity.

“Oh! … Have you run me through?—no, you have not! Whatever have you done!” …

In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba's eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun's rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven—all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy's reflecting blade. … These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling—also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand. …

That minute's interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream—here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin.

[XXVIII, 143-46]

Bathsheba, ravished in this way by Troy, falls in love for the first time. She is already loved by two devoted men, Oak and Boldwood, but now she feels an ecstasy that Hardy describes as the surge of orgasm. Troy, a soldier, menaces her with his sword. The kinship of sex to violence, to danger, to sublimated cruelty, to mastery and surrender of will, to flaunting physical show, and escape from ordinary life jumps off the page. It simply will not do to moralize smoothly on this chapter, as many have done, and deplore Bathsheba's reaction to Troy as “self-destructive,”¹⁷ misguided, or tragic. To do so misses the point, slighting and cheapening the soul-shaking power of the erotic.

If the new pastoral love is to have any value and win any credence, it must allow for and include the force and even the joy of sexuality that traditional morality calls “error” or “sin.” According to Hardy, we live in an old world where a David's erotic desire causes him to take a Bathsheba wrongfully and a Bathsheba's erotic drive causes her to take a Troy thoughtlessly. Libidinous love is the way of this world, and life does not just end for these figures when they follow their erotic drives into suffering. Straying sheep test faith and pastoral love, and everyone is a straying sheep.

VIII

The sword-flash scene is the one every reader of the novel remembers, but just as important—in fact, conjoined to it, like the panel of a diptych—is the storm scene with Oak and Bathsheba together working to save the harvest (XXXVII). Hardy imagines in this climactic passage a love that brings together devotion to a beloved's well-being, concern for the common good, mutual purpose, shared work, affection, and potent sexuality—in short, love's old dream of combining moral responsibility and the stunning force of the erotic.

Far from the Madding Crowd does not deny the ecstasy of being carried away by first love, nor the sweeping thrill of the fern-pit experience, but it works to integrate eroticism into a larger perspective. Hardy, getting at the ubiquity of the sexual imagination and his own habits of mind and art, says, “[M]an, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines” (XXXVI, 189). The context for that remark and the storm that follows is this: after the harvest and wedding celebration, which ends with Troy, newly married to Bathsheba, getting himself and all the farmhands helplessly drunk, Oak, alert, feels a ruinous storm approaching and, calculating exactly the monetary damage it will do to the unprotected grain, decides to try to save the crop. Hardy, referring to “man” as a text of hidden meanings, then writes, “It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: ‘I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly’” (XXXVI, 189). The spirit of courtly love filters downward into society, blending with practical economics and the eroticization of nature to generate a new pastoral.

The novel portrays Oak, “the faithful man” (XXXVI, 190), acting out his love for—and with—Bathsheba in circumstances that contrast with Troy in the hollow and that put the narrative in a new light. Instead of a sword, Gabriel's instrument, that he keeps sticking in the “stack” to thatch, is “his ricking-rod, or poniard, as it was indifferently called—a long iron lance, … polished by handling” (XXXVII, 192). Hardy flaunts his symbolism. Bathsheba and “the stack” become one: “Oak looked up. … Bathsheba was sitting almost on the apex of the stack, her feet gathered up beneath her” (XXXVII, 195). Instead of ferns, we have Bathsheba's sheaves of grain. Instead of glinting summer sunlight and movement like electricity, we get real electricity in a dramatic lightning storm. Instead of “loose play,” we have work; instead of feminine passivity, we have the mistress laboring with the man. Instead of the seducer, we have the unrequited lover risking his life for a woman. Instead of nature as backdrop for human sexuality, we have a vision of nature's full potency, sexual force, and engulfing qualities—its power to bind a man and a woman together in a closeness that mocks the looseness of infatuation and even the relative impotence of the social marriage contract. Instead of a virgin closed to the good shepherd but ready to unclose to the scarlet soldier, we have a woman who, without being conscious of it, is beginning now to open herself to the pastoral lover.

As the lightning gets closer and the man uses his rod to thatch, the woman joins him, and they work alone in harmony in the storm, he for her future good. Instead of Bathsheba's enclosure in the “firmament” of light from Troy's phallic sword, we have Bathsheba and Oak enclosed in this primal scene of cosmic sex:

[T]here came a burst of light.

“Hold on!” said Gabriel, taking the sheaf from her shoulder, and grasping her arm again. Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones—dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout. … In the meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain, and into the earth. Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand—a sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe. …

Bathsheba said nothing; but he could distinctly hear her rhythmical pants, and the recurrent rustle of the sheaf beside her in response to her frightened pulsations.

[XXXVII, 193-94]

That sexual displacement is also erotic sublimation on a superhuman scale. Sources as diverse as popular mythology, the Bhagavad-Gita, Vico, James Joyce, and Jerome Kern as sung and danced by Fred Astaire in Top Hat,¹⁸ locate the beginning of all eroticism and fertility in the Promethean spark of lightning, the generative heavenly act. In Hardy's storm, it is as if the arrows of blind Eros were made into Zeus's thunderbolts. Oak and Bathsheba share a time of primitive intimacy—a time, the imagery shows, of intense sexuality. What these two are made to see, feel, and share of lightning here, they are made to know in their lives of love's fiery beauty, its ominous potential for annihilation, its randomness, and the amazingly varied, fateful reactions it calls forth. Hardy represents them finding that love is not merely personal, though it is seen and experienced personally. It is set in and against the power of the impersonal—that is the meaning of Oak's experiencing the thrill of Bathsheba's touch just at the moment when nature is dwarfing to insignificance individual human emotions and concerns. This moment exposes a deep conflict in Hardy and in modern feelings about love generally.¹⁹ One person's erotic passion may seem—and, in fact, be—trivial and ineluctably doomed when set against the universe's furious energy or even against the full range of human life; but without that spark of love there is no worth or meaning in life—no perception, even, according to this text, of the universe. Human love, according to Hardy, is what makes the novelist and characters see what they see. Imagining a new pastoral love, epitomized by Oak and his actions in this scene, is an attempt to reconcile the contradiction between flashing nature as both source and destroyer of love and life. The storm episode constitutes the experience and vision on which he bases his summary words about the pastoral love “strong as death” and the final union of Oak and Bathsheba. The rest of the novel elaborates the metaphorical implications of this scene.

Bathsheba's thoughts of Gabriel after the death of Fanny Robin mark the progress of her growing love.

She suddenly felt a longing to speak to some one stronger than herself, and so get strength. … What a way Oak had, she thought, of enduring things. … [A]mong the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be.

[XLIII, 226]

No doubt that was also how Hardy himself wished to be, and, as a writer, sometimes saw himself. His own vision and desire obviously mingle here with Bathsheba's reflection. The passage claims for Oak and his pastoral outlook sweeping powers of perception unlimited by the ego's focus. Behind the modesty that she ascribes to the shepherd lies an unselfconscious pride that can make dazzling assumptions—assumptions on which the whole practice of the nineteenth-century novel may rest: first, that he can know and enter helpfully into the interests and circumstances of others; and, second, that he is so strong, competent, and farseeing that he can transcend normal self-interest. Hardy's imagination fused the identities of pastor, lover, and novelist, but so in effect did most distinguished Victorian fiction.

The wellspring of Oak's pastoralism is erotic, not ethical or conventionally religious, and that is what keeps him, the faithful shepherd, from being a sentimental or self-righteous figure. Hardy calls him, in all that he does, “the love-led man” (XXI, 112). The reward for his commitment would seem to come, after all, in the loving regard of the woman he is strong enough to love unrequitedly. Erotic desire may help stimulate a pastoral love that in turn may finally stimulate erotic desire in the other. That is the hope of this perilous world. Hardy imagines that someone could love another better than oneself, and do so effectively; erotic feeling, not God, first inspires Oak. This matters: the basis of pastoral love in Far from the Madding Crowd is not maternal or paternal feeling, not infantile memory, not God, not supernatural awe, not utilitarian drive or material necessity, but sexual attraction—erotic desire.

Oak is a symbolic act of faith in the novel, an ideal pastoral lover rooted in his love for the other. His rod is “grounded,” unlike Troy's sword or Boldwood's gun. He can make us see the crudeness of reductive, totalizing notions of a phallocentric sexuality, a phallocentric society, the phallus. All phallic symbols, all phallic acts, are not the same. Gabriel wields the lance to save the lives of the bloated sheep, he plays the flute for pleasure, and he plies his rod to preserve the grain. Whatever tool or instrument he touches, he uses to serve and enrich the woman's life and space and to bring human consciousness into harmony with natural force. Odd irony that the most notoriously pessimistic of nineteenth-century English novelists should have imagined the successful good shepherd of Aphrodite.

IX

Love is the fate, test, god, and desire of the four other figures besides Oak who make the plot. They are what John Bayley, playing on the relationship between writing and emotional life, calls “characters of love.”²⁰

Bathsheba: A heroine with staying power, she is both the “new” woman and the old, both conventional female “life force” and uncategorizable individual.²¹ Like her biblical namesake she becomes a fatal object of desire. She plays the roles of a Ruth, an Esther, and a Queen of Sheba, but she also moves and acts with restless modern subjectivity. Hardy wants to see her as a typical female partaking of a common, timeless femininity; but, knowing life as he does, he also imagines something new in history. The narrator describes her near the end: “She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises” (LIV, 291). That hints at her richness, shows how she has developed since Oak first wooed her, but it underscores the tensions in her characterization and indirectly points up the way she eludes even thoughtful generalization. The male author's urge to classify the female by biological function and delimit roles for even the most vital of women can nettle feminist nerves. But Hardy's sexist tic of saying, in effect, “just like a woman,” or fitting Bathsheba, from time to time, into a male-defined mold of female nature, ought not to obscure her complexity and consequence as a fictional figure. Inheriting and running a large farm, knowing and accepting three very different men as mates, she works and loves as most Victorians would expect only a man could. A problematic figure, she is not yet a pastor herself, like Oak. But she shows, as she participates in Hardy's new pastoralism, that the social and novelistic imagination is moving towards the conception of woman as an active pastoral figure.

Range of emotion and action, fluidity of libido, and frankness characterize Bathsheba. She has what Hardy calls “general intensity of … nature” and a proportionate “capacity for intense feeling” (XLIII, 230). Look at what she does: boldly commands the men of the farm; laughs at Gabriel, but holds his love; plays girlishly with her maid Liddy and sends Boldwood the fatal valentine; meets Troy alone in the hollow; elopes; braves the lightning with Oak; opens the coffin of Fanny and her baby; lays flowers about the dead girl's head; abases herself horribly with a husband whom she loves but despises; works with Oak to decorate her rival's grave; goes to the circus; agrees to marry Boldwood out of guilt for having led him on; tries bravely to staunch the wound of her dying husband; virtually proposes to another man (Oak) when she's hardly out of mourning; loves chastity, sex, work, music, her own beauty, stoicism, and agriculture; acts with contradictory cruelty and kindness; loves and resents male strength; ends up having chosen all of her suitors.

Hardy tries to express painful truths through her that most people would like to deny. Near the end, for instance, she says to Oak with an awful matter-of-factness: “I have thought so much more of you since I fancied you did not want even to see me again” (LVI, 303). After all they have gone through, this sympathetic being nevertheless tells him in effect: To arouse my desire and win me, don't be nice; be mean. Threaten me with loss. Cupid is an imp of the perverse. Hardy, through Bathsheba's amorous response to indifference and the threat of loss, is getting at something deep about the feminine push for independence. A buried resentment wells up in her—and in other high-spirited nineteenth-century heroines, like Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Natasha Rostov, and Meredith's Clara Middleton—against being fixed as an object of desire by a conventionally good man, rather than acting herself as a desiring entity. To be put on a pedestal, to be idolized, means becoming inert, losing selfhood, as does having to admire what is conventionally respectable. To follow desire, no matter how ill-chosen, is to begin to assume full individuality.

Hardy, through Bathsheba, is candid about the abasement of love. When Troy proves a bad husband, she scorns him in her heart; but then she opens the coffin of his dead lover Fanny and sees her with the stillborn child. At Troy's return, Bathsheba's revulsion for him fades in a moment. She knows, as he kisses the dead woman, how absolute his betrayal has been, but all her feelings coalesce. Grabbing him she screams, “from the deepest deep of her heart—‘Don't—don't kiss them. O, Frank, I can't bear it—I can't! I love you better than she did: kiss me too, Frank—kiss me! You will, Frank, kiss me too!’” (XLIII, 230).

Not much has been said about this scene. It may be shocking and melodramatic, but only someone who has never felt a hint of the power of love to debase—never felt the impulse to hang on at all costs, never seen the execution of the abandoned self in the cold eyes of a beloved—could miss the emotional force of this passage. Many want to forget the abjection that can come with erotic desire. Surely, however, there is something soothing in the resilience of Hardy's own creative imagination when he makes this figure cry out the truth of the agonizing vulnerability of being in love—“Loving is a misery for women always. I shall never forgive God for making me a woman” (XXX, 154)—but then goes on to describe the delight and promise with which she marries Oak.

Let us return to Bathsheba's remark, when Boldwood badgers her about what exactly she feels for him: “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” Hardy, in representing this woman, is trying to realize that insight. Bathsheba avoids fixity, she points to and sometimes embodies a protean way of being that resists the structure of definition. When Troy refuses her that kiss, she rushes away into the autumnal fern hollow turned as rank as festering eroticism. Hardy, through Bathsheba, is figuring in the text an intuition that resists abstraction and may lend itself to charges of sentimentalization and “pathetic fallacy.” This creative perception works as art but tends to fade when we try to describe it in the categorizing language made chiefly by men.

But let me try: Bathsheba is not a symbol of nature or natural existence, but neither is she separable from nature. Hardy not only makes clear that her being and libido inhabit the fern hollow, he cannot imagine, in this book, that the fern hollow exists in any conceivable form without her. Her being, the pervasiveness of erotic desire for and by her, and the pastoral love she provokes, merge into the sheep, into the hiving bees, the landscape, the lightning, and most of the rest of what we see: her character and what is visible are not separably meaningful. The terse sentence that best epitomizes her essence opens the penultimate chapter in which, after all the calamities, she woos Oak: “Bathsheba revived with the spring” (LVI, 297). That does not simply say that she, being a natural creature, is influenced by the seasonal buoyancy. Hardy's insight is comparable to Botticelli's in the Primavera: we are wrong, we betray our real experience and perceptions of life and art, if we cannot see that the beautiful image of the woman and the reviving spring are ineluctably fused, that what we mean and understand by “spring” does not exist without that desirable configuration. It is the flow of Bathsheba's being into the world and the eye that arouses pastoral feeling for life and causes the voice of the dove to be heard in the land.

Troy: The seducer, the huckster of desire and instant gratification, the Paris of Wessex—he matters also. Lying to women, he flatters them, tells them what they want to hear, persuades them to trust and uncover. The novel makes him a Don Juan and shows in him the democratization of that mythic figure. Hardy does not moralize much on him, but in the squalid consequences of Troy's sexual victimizing he makes clear, better than most moralists, why the threat of Don Juan haunted the Western imagination and why people, though they might feel some envy and admiration for him, were so sincerely ready to damn and hate him.

A bastard born of erotic desire, the progeny of a lord and a maid—noblesse oblige and servitude—Troy seeks to replicate explosive moments of erotic euphoria. Unable to defer satisfaction, he acts out of impulse, makes sudden, splashy gestures, and embodies a nasty version of the romantic temper, which has always been conjoined with the thrill and menace of sexual attraction. He personifies at moments pure sexuality, without past or future, that loose phallic cannon on the ship of civilization. All time is now for him, and such people, though exciting, are dangerous: “He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a superfluity. Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present” (XXV, 130). Hardy goes on to say that Troy can be considered lucky, since recall often works like a disease, and absolute faith, the only comfortable form of looking ahead, is practically impossible for a contemporary human being.

As Bathsheba's first love, he has a feeling for what will touch and move her. In his early scenes with her, we get the gaiety—as we do not elsewhere—in the flirting ways of men and maids. He brings erotic desire into her ken; Troy knows what people like. The trouble is, what they like may not be good for them. Master of swordplay, he is not really a soldier, but a showman and a salesman. In terms of the plot, he helps make possible the flourishing of Oak's love; pastoralism needs erotic flash. But pastoral love, to endure, must keep the inevitable fall of Troy in perspective.

Boldwood: Love comes to him like syphilis to the South Sea islanders. More than a figure of aberrant psychology, he manifests important tendencies in erotic history. A devotee to a terrible internalized love deity, he appears as a familiar enough creature of the Victorian age: a love-struck man whose regard turns a woman into an object—not a sex object but a religious icon on whom he projects all meaning and value.

The valentine Bathsheba sends out of mischief and chance hits him like the heart attack it is and turns him into a scary romantic-obsessive. Over forty, and never having been in love, he becomes abject and compulsive. At first, his condition resembles Oak's and, later, Bathsheba's: “[H]e was now,” says Hardy, in memorable words about what being in love feels like, “living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure” (XVIII, 96-97). But Boldwood, unlike Oak, cannot really see or know the other, the woman Bathsheba. He is like Pip, who, fixated, fetishizes Estella; except that Boldwood is middle-aged and inflexible. Symbolically, his fate is told in the vision of him staring at Bathsheba's valentine: “Here the bachelor's gaze was continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye; and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon …—‘MARRY ME’” (XIV, 80). In his solipsistic fixation, the blot on his retina stays permanently, and when he gazes at the card, “The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words written, had no individuality” (XIV, 81). Bathsheba is a romantic injunction and fantasy inscribed in his mind, not an independent woman. And when, with this new shaft of love in him, he walks out to look at the morning, he sees “over the snowy down … the only half of the sun yet visible … like a red and flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone” (XIV, 81). The bloody-looking valentine expands to become his heart, his world, and the whole spectacle of his life.

How fitting that Boldwood turns out to be an actual fetishist, with a locked-away horde of ladies' dresses, jewelry, and the like, “brought home by stealth,” neatly packaged and marked “Bathsheba Boldwood” (LV, 294). He has made a fetish of her, calling her life. He wants to own her and cherish her as a wonderful possession—a self-possession; and proof that she is an object shows through in his indifference to the fact that she does not at all love him. Love can be—often is—a fetishism of one's self, one's emotions, one's desire. Fetishism develops when the thing or configuration that symbolizes and is associated with one's love itself becomes the object of erotic desire and emotion. Feelings change; it is easy to lose the symbolic flow. My love may be like a red, red rose, but then I may stop seeing or loving the woman or man and keep loving and feeling the erotic power of the rose. Or I may love the name of the rose and the narrative of love.

The fetishist, however, lacks dignity; he acts out the theme of erotic abasement. Hardy psychologizes Boldwood and makes him more introspective than any of the other characters. His mind, finally “crazed with care and love” (LV, 295), resembles the locked closet with the collection of articles that symbolize Bathsheba, but that she never sees. Boldwood loses pastoral feeling and true vocation; he can see only what is inside his head, the image of his longing. One of love's men in the dark, deranged and locked away from the light by solipsistic eroticism, he is ruled by a blind love god sprung from his own head, engendered by caprice. Imagine him alone, surreptitiously fondling and arranging the clothes, the bracelets, the golden things he has bought for Bathsheba. That is love as idolatry, a common blasphemy of the desperate idealist against life.

Fanny Robin: She is the victim of Troy's sexual sword, one for whom the Cyprian's name is Death. Her presence reminds us of why, until recently, a society could not for long sentimentalize eroticism or treat it frivolously. Like Eliot's Hetty Sorrel and Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, she embodies the doom that has always threatened to sap and spoil erotic faith: unwanted pregnancy.

In all of Hardy, no fate is harsher than Fanny's, no passage bleaker than her trek on the Casterbridge highway (XL). Late in her pregnancy, starving and cold, she struggles pitifully to get to the poorhouse, where she thinks Troy may meet her. Her trip is like something out of Samuel Beckett, only without the jokes: at first barely able to propel herself on homemade crutches, then not at all, she finally gets there, mostly dead, by hanging on to a huge homeless dog. Her quest of love turns her into an agonized, dumb animal; she and her baby die wretchedly.

How can Hardy maintain a hopeful equanimity or any sort of faith when his novel includes such a character and such a fate? We come back again—as we do so often in matters of faith—to the idea of sacrifice. In the religious imagination, figures often die so that others may learn and flourish in spirit (e.g., in the love religion, Lucy Ashton, Cathy Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Paul Emanuel, Miss Havisham, Maggie Tulliver). When Bathsheba confronts the corpses of Fanny and her baby, she is at first bitter: “The one feat alone—that of dying—by which a mean condition could be resolved into a grand one, Fanny had achieved” (XLIII, 228). But that transformation from “mean” to “grand” is not limited to the self. As Bathsheba changes and warms, those words on the victim's death take on a redemptive, even religious, meaning. The sacrifice of Fanny helps move the narrative and Bathsheba out of erotic chaos towards a new kind of love.

Hardy, looking for a living creed in the world, imagines one more important “character” that makes his pastoral come alive: the chorus of country folk. If all flesh is grass, that at least means that flesh will always be. These people exist collectively in vocational relationship to nature and to each other; they constitute a kind of human landscape, a continuous entity that is the mortal equivalent of nature's revolving, returning year. In essence, they personify “good nature” and its communal voice, distilling erotic wisdom in a vivid comic poetry of the flock. Again and again we get language such as this by a servant bewailing her single state: “what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness” (IX, 63).

X

Orthodox religion counts for little in the novel, except as a tradition that induces ritual habits and as Scripture, which serves as a body of common knowledge and a source of analogous that brings continuity to people's daily experience. The novel's pastoral love seems to antedate and outlast the Christian model of pastoralism, which appears here as a historical variety of something larger. Before the priest, there was the love-dazed shepherd; before the congregation, the flock. The great barn, which he describes famously in chapter XXII as the temple of the sheepshearing and the religion of “daily bread,” is more holy than the church and, in its form, older.

Consider the sentence, “The defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire” (XXII, 114). Though the novel stresses and honors the vocation of gaining the sustenance to support life, “daily bread” is neither the subject nor the savior in the book. If we say the defence and salvation of the body by love is still a study, a religion, and a desire, we describe the pastoral activity and faith of Oak and the point of view of “Hardy,” and we characterize Far from the Madding Crowd generally.

Claude's Judgment of Paris can again help in reading the narrative and seeing its meaning. Look, if you can find it, at Paris's golden apple and what the painting does to it. That idol of fetishistic beauty, sexual yearning, and inert mammonism—so prominent in Bronzino's view of corrupted love—is lost in the expanse and flow of nature, diminished almost to nothing by the tree and its connotations. Hardy chooses to end his novel with these words of Joseph Poorgrass, on leaving the newly wedded Bathsheba and Oak: “I wish him joy o' her; though I were once or twice upon saying to-day with holy Hosea, in my scripture manner …, ‘Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone.’ [4:17] But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly” (LVII, 308).²² That is puzzling until we go to Hosea and its final chapter. There idolatry ends and growth returns in a way that exactly parallels the novel. From “Ephraim is joined to idols” the prophet moves to this: “His branches shall spread. … They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn, and grow as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon. Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols? … I am like a green fir tree. From me is thy fruit found.” Oak, who embodies and shades amorous desire and pastoral love in this landmark vision of erotic faith, rises like the tree in Claude Lorrain, like the tree in Hosea.

Notes

1. George and Ira Gershwin, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” from the musical Oh, Kay!, 1926.

2. Sophocles, fragment trans. F. W. Cornford in Gore Vidal's The Judgment of Paris (New York, 1952), p. 361; see The Fragments of Sophocles, Fragment 941, ed. Alfred C. Pearson (Cambridge, 1917).

3. For comments on the rediscovery of this painting, see John Walker, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, new and revised edition (New York, 1984), p. 310. See also the citations on Claude above in chap. 6, n. 5, especially Röthlisberger.

4. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (New York, 1962), p. 96. All the Life, except the account of the last few years, was really written by Thomas Hardy himself.

5. For authoritative discussion of pastoral modes, various definitions of the pastoral, bibliographical information on the pastoral, and broad perspective on the subject of the pastoral in literature, see Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville, Va., 1974); W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1906, reprinted New York, 1959); William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (1935, reprinted Norfolk, Conn., 1960); Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969); Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971); Frank Kermode, ed., English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell (London, 1952); Renato Poggioli, “The Oaten Flute,” Harvard Library Bulletin 11 (1957): 147-84.

6. See Susan Beegel, “Bathsheba's Lovers: Male Sexuality in Far from the Madding Crowd,” in Sexuality and Victorian Literature, p. 121.

7. F. E. Hardy, p. 444.

8. See T. C. W. Stinton, Euripides and the Judgement of Paris (London, 1965), for a full account of the story and development of the judgment of Paris motif in the classical world. See also Karoly Kerényi, The Heroes of the Greeks (London, 1959), trans. H. J. Rose, p. 316, who confirms that the disrobing was a part of later versions of the legend.

9. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Criticism, ed. Robert C. Schweik (New York, 1986), Norton Critical Edition, chap. 22, pp. 115-16. All subsequent citations, by chapter and page, are to this edition.

10. For the prominence of herdsmen in early cultures and in myths and folk tales involving love and love's deities, see Stinton, pp. 51-63, especially p. 60.

11. F. E. Hardy, p. 98.

12. Rosalind Miles quotes E. M. Forster, “The Women of Wessex,” in The Novels of Thomas Hardy, ed. Anne Smith (Plymouth and London, 1979), p. 31.

13. Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (London, 1979), p. 53: “Claude might be described, it seems to me, as one of the unseen presences of this novel.” She speaks of Claude generally. I happily came upon this reference after I had decided to compare his Judgment of Paris with Far from the Madding Crowd.

14. Squires, p. 37.

15. One great Oedipal, incestuous complex does storm through this novel, and indeed through most of Hardy's writing: the relationship between himself and Nature and Fate, upon whom he projects the roles and attributes of Mother and Father.

16. D. H. Lawrence, whose gamekeeper, Lady Chatterley's lover, owes much to Gabriel, wickedly and—it must be said—unfairly compares Oak to “a dog that watches the bone and bides the time” (Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal [New York, 1956], p. 170).

17. Beegel, p. 113.

18. Rosalind Miles writes that Hardy “was always in love,” but it never made him happy (p. 23).

19. My discussion of the storm, the sexuality in the episode, and the meaning of this and other passages has been informed by Susan Beegel's discussion, especially pp. 121-23.

20. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (New York, 1960).

21. See Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Totowa, N.J., 1982), for a balanced, insightful feminist reading of Hardy's sexual ideology as it emerges in his fictional treatment of women. Boumelha implies that Bathsheba has always been more popular with men than women, and that is probably true. She shows the contradictions in Hardy's characterization of Bathsheba, which reveal, she says, “antagonism” (p. 32) as well as sympathy. I find her a more complex figure than does Boumelha or Rosalind Miles (“Women of Wessex”), and I do not see a shrinking of potential in her; instead, stressing the vocational love passage and the relationship with Oak, I read the genuine possibility for growth. Bathsheba, in context, is not a typical Hardy heroine and ought not to be lumped together with later Hardy women.

22. See the note by Robert C. Schweik that the Poorgrass quotation from Hosea is “comically irrelevant” (Far from the Madding Crowd, LVII, 308, n. 5). Obviously I disagree.