The Victorian Experience

Offered Cornhill editor an outline of a 'pastoral tale' comprising 'a young woman-farmer, a shepherd, and a sergeant of cavalry’

1874 – Cornhill serialisation.

1895, 1901 – revised novel editions

Shirley Stave (1995) celebrates Bathsheba as a powerful pagan figure in the tradition of the Great Goddess

Rosemarie Morgan (1988) emphasises her victimization, “drawn, inexorably, into the web of male brutality and sexual domination that constitutes the darker world”

Bathsheba’s characterisation contains split, idealized narcissistic projections as well as an awareness of and sympathy for her flawed, vulnerable humanity

‘It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustreupon her bright face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal charm. What possessed her to indulge in such a performance in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and unperceived farmer who were alone its spectators,—whether the smile began as a factitious one, to test her capacity in that art,—nobody knows; it ended certainly in a real smile. She blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more.’ (1874, 9)

‘There was something so abnormal and startling in the childlike pain and simplicity of this appeal from a woman of Bathsheba’s calibre and independence, that Troy, loosening her tightly clasped arms from his neck, looked at her in bewilderment...

‘there arose from Bathsheba’s lips a long, low cry of measureless despair and indignation, such a wail of anguish as had never before been heard within those old-inhabited walls. . . . “If she’s—that,—what—am I?” she added, as a continuation of the same cry, and sobbing pitifully: and the rarity with her of such abandonment only made the condition more dire.

“You are nothing to me—nothing,” said Troy heartlessly’.

‘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 marvellousevolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. 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.’

‘The ground sloped downward to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi. . . . [T]he general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps. . . . The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great.’

Misapplication of Biblical allusion

E.g. Cainy Ball's 'pore mother' - being neither a 'Scripture-read woman' nor a churchgoer - makes a mistake at his christening and wrongly names her infant son 'Cain' because she had thought ''twas Abel killed Cain' (from the Genesis story, 4:1-15),

‘Reverting to the stuff of folklore and oral tradition, the Cain story is retold as another Cain story and becomes a paradigm of the story-telling process ‘

Mock-Heroic Allusions:

often serves to draw the reader into a complicit relationship with the narrator. E.g. Bathsheba nervously and a little imperiously begins her payroll activities for the very first time, and when 'the remarkable coolness of her manner' takes on the 'proportionate increase of arrogance and reserve' shown by 'Jove and his family' when they moved from 'their cramped quarters on the peak of Olympus into the wide sky above it' (x).

in the shears-grinding scene (XIX), Oak is said to stand 'somewhat as Eros is represented when in the act of sharpening his arrows'

allusion to 'Flaxman's...Mercury' (XXXVII). invokes the painter John Flaxman, -engraved line-drawing entitled 'Mercury Conducting the Souls of the Suitors to the Infernal Region'

‘The bathos inherent in the comparison introduces a mildly comic aspect, but ultimately the allusion functions in common with all others as a form of extratextual dialogue conjoining the reader to the actual process of story-making by virtue of recognizing and sharing a common cultural ancestry’ (Morgan, P. Introduction)

'partly real, partly dream-country’

Human discord is interlinked with discord in nature-the lambing season arrives late, the bee-swarming (for honey-making) is irregular and unruly –

as late summer storms wreak havoc on Bathsheba’s crops, so there is chaos on the inside as her husband wreaks havoc with her work-force, driving them drunk and insensible.

anti-pastoralism: as when the verdant pastures where sheep may safely graze transform into grotesque death-traps. Conflict and self-destruction in nature reflects the conflicting passions in human affairs and humanity's collisions of desire and self-destruction.

‘Hardy's rustics subscribe to a lopsided form of philosophical determinism. Local superstitions, traditional omens and ancient portents intersect with Ecclesiastes and Job, pointing towards some kind of incoherent but controlling power to which humanity can attribute the absurdity of the world and the folly of its own actions.’ (Morgan, P Intro).

Cf Hardy’s pessimistic philosophy – cosmic irony or ‘Immanent Will’

Imagistically the 'happy ending' of FFMC disappears from the reader's perspective. All the attentive reader is left with is a shadowy configuration of two blurred figures setting out for matrimonials obscured in gloomy mist - and this crowns the story's end in a concluding 'wedding' chapter entitled 'A Foggy Night and Morning'. The 'happy ending' also disappears under narrative incongruity e.g. Joseph Poorgrass'scomically irrelevant biblical quotation from Hosea which declares it all 'might have been worse'.