Far from the Madding Crowd
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 Bathsheba saves Gabriel's life (Plate 1, by Helen Paterson Allingham, for the first edition in Cornhill Magazine). |
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| Author | Thomas Hardy |
|---|---|
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Cornhill Magazine |
| Released | 1874 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 464 pages (Harper & Brothers edition, 1912) |
| ISBN | NA |
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel. It first appeared, anonymously, as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership; critical notices, too, were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition, and made further changes for the 1901 edition.[1]
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[edit] Plot summary
Gabriel Oak is an up-and-coming, eminently reliable shepherd in the prime of life at twenty-eight years of age. With the savings of a frugal life, he has leased and stocked a sheep-farm. He becomes enamoured with a newcomer six years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud and somewhat vain young beauty who arrives to live with her uncle and aunt. She comes to like him well enough, and even saves his life once, but when he makes her an unadorned, matter-of-fact offer of marriage, she cannot bring herself to assent; she values her independence too much and him too little. Gabriel's blunt protestations only serve to drive her to haughtiness. After a few months, she moves some miles away.
When next they meet, their circumstances have changed dramatically. An inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel's herd over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts, but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a work fair in the fictional town of Casterbridge (the setting for another famous Hardy work, The Mayor of Casterbridge). When he finds none, he heads to another fair in another town, near where Bathsheba has relocated.
On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba Everdene. She had very recently inherited the considerable estate of her uncle and is now a wealthy woman. Though somewhat uncomfortable with the situation, she hires him.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba has a new admirer; the lonely and repressed farmer William Boldwood, a man of forty whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when she sends him a valentine on which she had playfully written the words 'Marry me'. Boldwood, not realising the valentine was a jest, begins courting Bathsheba, encouraged by perceived signs of affection where none exist. When Gabriel rebukes her for her thoughtlessness, she fires him.
Then her sheep begin dying from bloat. She discovers to her distress that Gabriel is the only one who can cure them. Her pride delays the inevitable, but finally she is forced to beg him for help. Afterwards, she offers him back his job and their friendship is restored.
The dashing Sergeant Francis (Frank) Troy appears on the scene and wins Bathsheba's admiration by giving her a private display of his swordsmanship. Totally infatuated, she rejects Boldwood and elopes. Too late, she discovers that her new husband does not love her; his heart belongs to her former servant, Fanny Robin. Although they had a falling out, she remains his true love. When Fanny dies giving birth to Troy's child, he grieves openly and scorns his wife. Soon afterwards, he leaves, disgusted with himself and loathing Bathsheba's company. After a long walk to the coast, he bathes in the sea to refresh himself, but a strong current carries him away.
With Troy presumed drowned, after a year, Boldwood renews his suit. Burdened with guilt over the pain she has caused him, Bathsheba reluctantly consents to marry him in six years, long enough to have her husband declared legally dead.
Troy, however, is not dead. He returns the night Boldwood planned to announce his engagement to Bathsheba. In anguish at being cheated of love, Boldwood shoots Troy and tries unsuccessfully to kill himself. Although he is condemned to death, his friends petition the Home Secretary for mercy, citing insanity. This is granted and Boldwood's sentence is changed to "confinement during Her Majesty's pleasure". Bathsheba, profoundly chastened by guilt and grief, buries Troy in the same grave as Fanny Robin and their child, and erects a suitable marker.
Throughout her tribulations, she comes to rely more and more heavily on her oldest friend, Gabriel. When he gives her notice that he is leaving her employ, she finally realises how important he has become to her well-being. One night, she goes alone to visit him in his house, to find out why he is (in her eyes) deserting her. Pressed, he reluctantly reveals that it is because of the gossip that he wants to marry her. She exclaims that it is "...too absurd - too soon - to think of, by far!" He bitterly agrees that it is absurd, but when she corrects him, saying that it is only "too soon", he is emboldened to ask once again for her hand in marriage and she accepts.
[edit] Discussion
Far from the Madding Crowd offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished. The title, which is taken from Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), may be ironic ("madding" means "frenzied"[2]), since the lives of Weatherbury's rural denizens are complex and passionate:
- 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 favour 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.[3] In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter 50; Hardy extended the reference for the 1895 edition.[4]
- The village of Puddletown, near Dorchester, is the inspiration for the novel's Weatherbury. Dorchester, in turn, inspired Hardy's Casterbridge.[5]
- The Danish metal band Wuthering Heights released an album named after the novel.
[edit] Adaptations
A number of films based on this book exist including:
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1915) at the Internet Movie Database
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1998)
There have also been several radio plays, a musical (2000) and an opera (2006).
[edit] Footnotes
1. Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy (Norman Page, editor). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 130-132.
2. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition.
3. Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd: Preface, 1895-1902.
4. Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy, ibid., p. 131.
5. Anonymous. Far from the Madding Crowd (caption to frontispiece). New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publications, 1912.
[edit] External links
- Far from the Madding Crowd, available at Project Gutenberg.
