Confusing Relationships—Afterthoughts on Reading “Far From the Madding Crowd”

[gxnn]

Hi, all, I am a reader from China and English is a foreign language to me even after my many years of studying it.

I believe most of you have read Thomas Hardy’s novel “Far From the Madding Crowd”. I think there are points I don’t quite understand that I would like you to help me understand.

Bathsheba, the heroine, is hard to understand. She can be have deceived by her husband Troy, but after the marriage she has known some problems of him but why does she still love him after his death (she doesn’t believe he is drowned)?

Troy is not a good guy the first time he appears in the story. He tries to ignore his girlfriend Fanny when she travels a long distance to his army camp and he later manages to impregnate this poor girl outside his marriage, this is unbelievable because he has got what any man in the world looks for—pretty girl and much money. He refuses to return home after his believed drowning and would rather work like a clown in a circus, that is ridiculous too.

Boldwood as a middle-aged man doesn’t have his own thinking and looks like a fool too. What is the real intention of Thomas Hardy to have such a figure in his novel? His behaviors are not justified at all.

Gabriel Oak looks like the real hero in the book, but he doesn’t get the percentage of roles as expected. His act looks like marginal and has no influence in the novel. Can he have nice sex and live happily after? I doubt that.

The above is my thinking only, perhaps Hardy has provided good explanations in the book and only I as a foreigner don’t get them, so it is much appreciated if you could enlighten me, thank you very much.

 

[oggbashan]

I think you are reading this with a 21st Century viewpoint, not a 19th Century one. Thomas Hardy was writing about fallible people who are not simplistic in their relationships and were inconsistent in their behaviours.

This is a standard account of the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd

This is a link to explanatory notes about it:

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/maddingcrowd/section12/

The second link might answer some of your questions.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Some good points made about the writing coming from a different social time, especially in terms of what ordinary people are expected to think like and behave like.

I'm afraid I don't go along with the huge body of people who consider writers like Hardy producing 'good' or even 'great' literature, because, they were simply riddled with conflicted ideas, partly political, and possibly economic as well, from the recent history of England at the time: England had more or less just come from the regicide of its own legitimate king, and with the lurid assertion of power by a mercantile middle class inside London City that aspired to 'aristocracy' - which it never authentically possessed and still doesn't - there was an underlying guilt which surfaced in a continual blaming of social ills on religious morality coming from maybe, Rome, or the Continent, certainly France too; and in this latter respect there was an irreconcilable conflict between the English contending with Napoleon Bonaparte, but the fact that they probably intellectually and secretly sided with him versus the traditional French aristocracy as such - since the British King Charles was related to that (French aristocracy).

You're not going to get clear-cut psychologically logical or straightforward characters inside a novel by Hardy.

If you want common sense, take up Virginia Woolf and leave off the pseudo-intellectual frauds like Hardy. And don't think that what is 'recommended text' by Oxford or higher schools or common popular belief and media and socio-political claptrap and propaganda makes anything so...

You yourself have realized that the characterization is stilted and makes little sense. That's because your impression is correct.

Women often gravitate to Hardy because of the apparent themes of relationships and sexuality. And that's about all there is INSIDE there - a theme with no substance. Often it's just bathos dressed up with some big words and fancy phrases. Or, pretentious substance given air by popular and middle class newspapers with avaricious mentalities clinging guiltily to a power they generally-speaking, stole by force.

 

[oggbashan]

I think that Desiremakesmeweak is being too harsh on Thomas Hardy. He was a writer of his time and explored themes that other authors ignored. His work has survived when some of his contemporaries have sunk into deserved obscurity.

At the time his stories were seen as realistic depictions of a section of rural society that many ignored. Charles Dickens was better, and far more popular but his stories had more urban settings.

 

[rae121452]

rather than a novel about relationships, think of it as a novel about hubris. each of the characters brings about their own downfall due to excessive pride and conceit.

 

[SamScribble]

I agree with Ogg: Hardy is a provincial writer of his time. His characters tend to overthink things. They are not generally characters we would recognise today.

 

[ishtat]

Desiremakesmeweak is right when she identifies Hardy as second rate, but Virginia Woolf was no great writer either. However, Ms Woolf did once say that many authors had tried to emulate George Eliot and failed miserably; she was particularly critical of DH Lawrence in that regard ("he has not written anything that Eliot did much better.") She included Hardy in the ambit of that criticism.

Dump Hardy and read George Eliot, arguably the finest English novelist of the last 150 years - but not easy reading. Read Silas Marner first. A shorter book, it will quickly convince you what a hack Hardy was in comparason.

 

[hadruprider]

Maybe you have watched too many Hollywood movies where the good guys always win and everyone lives happily ever after.

Hardy writes about human weaknesses, flaws and tragedy, and is indeed a great writer, contrary to some of the ill-informed statements here.

There is no contradiction in Troy having one woman and wanting another. That happens. Nor is there any contradiction in Bathsheba being attracted to a bad guy. That happens too.

 

[gxnn]

Thanks for all of your helps, they are very helpful. My problems perhaps come from the difference of language and culture, I will read the novel again and in a new light.

Another small question, I notice there are many names containing the suffix "-bury", does it have any special meaning? Like the place used to be a place for burying something (treasure or dead bodies)?

 

[Vaylon]

Another small question, I notice there are many names containing the suffix "-bury", does it have any special meaning? Like the place used to be a place for burying something (treasure or dead bodies)?

-bury is a "placename suffix indicating a fortified place." [source]

It's derived from the Old English burh [source] and is related to the German -burg (i.e., Hamburg).

 

[ElectricBlue]

Another small question, I notice there are many names containing the suffix "-bury", does it have any special meaning? Like the place used to be a place for burying something (treasure or dead bodies)?

It's from the Old English meaning a fortified enclosure, so quite the opposite of a burial ground. Prehistorically, forts (often on hills but not always) were settlements, communities, often at regular intervals on a network of tracks or near rivers. They were centres for the living, not the dead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis...place_names_in_Ireland_and_the_United_Kingdom

Note: pre-history in Britain means before 43 AD, when Julius Caesar first arrived, which is the beginning of any written records.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Britain

 

[Vaylon]

It's from the Old English meaning a fortified enclosure, so quite the opposite of a burial ground.

It may interest you to know that barrow, as in "grave-mound", has the same etymological root as burg.

 

[ElectricBlue]

It may interest you to know that barrow, as in "grave-mound", has the same etymological root as burg.

Yep. Coincidentally, I have just finished reading "Stonehenge" by Francis Pryor, a brisk little summary of the pre-history of the henge and Salisbury Plain, where there are several hundred barrows.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Electricblue66

Do you mean '43 AD when Claudius' ('Caesar') arrived?

 

[oggbashan]

Electricblue66

Do you mean '43 AD when Claudius' ('Caesar') arrived?

The first written records in detail are from 55 BC when Julius Caesar invaded for the first time. There were other mentions of Britain before 55 BC but they were secondhand accounts from travellers and fairly inaccurate.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Caesar/Gallic_War/Appendices/B*.html

 

[ElectricBlue]

Electricblue66

Do you mean '43 AD when Claudius' ('Caesar') arrived?

Quite wrong on my part - I stand corrected by Og and the 55BC landing. Damn you, Wiki .

 

[HandsInTheDark]

You may be running into a cultural difference as well as a temporal one. I'm no expert in Chinese literature but the little I've seen tends to paint in starker colors - people are good or bad, symbolism isn't very ambiguous, etc. In Western lit, heroes are fallible and sometimes mistaken; in American lit they can be downright disturbing.

And then there's the gulf of centuries. Western thought has shifted radically in 200 years. As noted by others, a modern mindset has trouble with older views - for example that good people were supposed to be firm, but thoughtful Christians, but also indulged some blindness regarding race and even class - though better authors took issue even with that. I'd argue that someone without a good grounding in Christianity is typically lost trying to read even the more accessible works by Dodgson, let alone more pessimistic and ambiguous writers like Hardy. Authors back then typically assumed familiarity with the Bible, which is far less commonplace today. And Hardy if I remember liked to mix in a little paganism, which is its own cultural barrier.

Above all, Victorian writers felt very free to assault what they knew to be weaknesses in their own culture. Hardy had issues with the sexual mores of his time, Swift tore into racism, Dodgson into false spirituality, etc. Any character going with the cultural flow in that era is probably a villain or at least a fool.

You can probably get deeper insights on other websites.

 

[gxnn]

Thanks again.

I also notice that like the American novelist John Steinbeck or William Faulkner (I don't remember very well) whose works center around the place of his origin, Hardy cannot leave his Casterbridge, it seems. At least I have been aware this name of place in his different works.

Then in 2012, China's Mo Yan got the Nobel Prize in Literature with his works that also focus on a place which looks very like his real native land.

But their works do not form an organic whole, they have separate plots and different characters. They look more like ads for promoting their homeland than choosing a name at hand.

 

[oggbashan]

Hardy's Wessex Map

http://www.tanyamarchillustrations.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/map-wessex-751.jpg