Far from the Madding Crowd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For an album, see Far from the Madding Crowd (album).

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is a novel by Thomas Hardy. As was common in the latter part of the Victorian Era, it first appeared as a magazine serial. The title is ironic, since the lives of the book's characters in the rural village of Weatherbury are complex and passionate.

1 Plot and Characters
2 Discussion
3 Trivia
4 Footnotes
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Plot and Characters

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The heroine is Bathsheba Everdene, a proud and independent young beauty who shocks everyone when she inherits a farm and decides to run it herself. After refusing the first man to propose to her, the eminently reliable shepherd Gabriel Oak, she is courted by two others: the lonely and repressed farmer Boldwood, whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when she sends him a playful valentine, and the dashing Sergeant Troy. Oak, meanwhile, loses his independence when a young sheepdog drives his flock over a cliff; he then becomes bailiff at Bathsheba's farm.

In an inspired bit of proto-freudianism, Hardy has Troy win Bathsheba's admiration by giving her a private display of his swordsmanship. Totally infatuated, she jilts Boldwood and elopes, realizing too late that her new husband neither loves her nor cares anything about her farm. Both her farm and her finances begin to suffer; then, she discovers that Troy already has a relationship with one of her former servants, Fanny Robin. Although he has fallen out with her, she remains his true love. When Fanny dies giving birth to Troy's child, he grieves openly, and scorns his wife. Soon after, he swims out to sea, leaving his clothes on the beach.

With Troy presumed dead, Boldwood renews his suit. Burdened with guilt over the pain she's caused him, Bathsheba finally agrees to the marriage. Troy, however, is not really dead, and returns to assert his rights on the eve of the wedding. In anguish at being cheated of love a second time, Boldwood shoots Troy. Though spared the noose, he goes to prison. Bathsheba buries Troy in the same grave as Fanny Robin and their child, and erects a suitable marker. Later, she marries her old friend, Gabriel Oak, and settles down to a happy life.

[edit] Discussion

Far from the Madding Crowd offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished. The title is taken from Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751):

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Hardy's growing taste for tragedy is also evident in the novel. In earlier works such as Under the Greenwood Tree, he maintains an almost playful tone, and allows love to triumph. Here, three of the secondary characters--Fanny Robin, Troy, and Boldwood--come to bad ends. Certain incidents, such as Fanny Robin's pitiful death bearing a bastard child, and the quiet Boldwood's sudden lapse into murderous violence, foreshadow events in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, where (as in Jude the Obscure) the protagonist is plagued by relentless misfortunes, and dies young at the end. In Madding Crowd, however, the fates still favor the lead character, who escapes two unfortunate entanglements, survives the mistakes of her youth, and finally finds contentment.

The book might also be described as an early piece of feminist literature, since it features an independent woman with the courage to defy convention by running a farm herself. Although Bathsheba's passionate nature leads her into serious errors of judgment, Hardy endows her with sufficient resilience, intelligence, and good luck to overcome her youthful folly.

Finally, in Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy explores the proper basis for a happy marriage. Bathsheba's physical attraction to the broadsword-wielding Troy leads to a disastrous marriage that might have ended in her economic ruin. A marriage to the strait-laced Boldwood, to whom she is bound only by feelings of guilt and obligation, would have meant emotional suffocation. Gabriel Oak offers her true comradeship and sound farming skills; and, although she initially spurns him, saying she doesn't love him, he turns out to be the right man to make her happy.

[edit] Trivia

Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in Far from the Madding Crowd to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of Southwest England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman Conquest kingdom.^[1]
The village of Puddletown, near Dorchester, is the inspiration for the novel's Weatherbury. Dorchester, in turn, inspired Hardy's Casterbridge.^[2]

[edit] Footnotes

1. Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd: Preface, 1895-1902.
2. Anonymous. Far from the Madding Crowd (caption to frontispiece). New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publications, 1912.