Far From the Madding Crowd

For the longest time I thought that Thomas Hardy’s famous book was called Far From the Maddening Crowd.  I mean until I was about twenty.  It makes sense.  I’d want to be as far away from this hypothetical maddening crowd as possible and I respected Hardy’s honesty in that fact and decided said maddening crowd was a good reason not to read this book.  Anyway, turns out that it’s actually a line from a poem and “madding” just means frenzied.  So, I put off reading the book for ages for no good reason and instead choose Tess of the D’Urbervilles as my Hardy starter book years ago.  Naturally, with my feminist inclinations, I do not love that book.  Tess is wonderful and it’s very well written, but just all the men are utterly terrible.  Literally all of them.  I’ve been told that I’m being too sensitive in regards to this, but my point stands. 

Anyway, back to the book in question; Far From the Madding Crowd.  It’s good.  Really good.  The plot, in brief, is the tale of Bathsheba Everdene, wealthy farmer, bailiff and independent woman.  I like Bathsheba.  Two local men, Gabriel Oak and William Boldwood both fall madly in love with Bathsheba and, after a slew of refused marriage proposals; she elopes with soldier Frank Troy.  This is an incredibly poor decision on Bathsheba’s part as he is pretty much the only man in the entire book who doesn’t love her.  There’s quite a lot of rural shit happening too.  Multiple sheep-based plot point occur that I won’t bother to go into here.  They manly serve to drive Gabriel and Bathsheba together or apart, depending on what would be most dramatic at any given point.

As I mentioned, I like Bathsheba.  She is so ahead of her time it’s unreal.  She inherits her uncle’s farm and instead of getting a man to run the place she mucks right in and not only makes runs it, she makes it flourish.  She proves that she doesn’t need a man, despite the fact that men all around her are desperate to marry her.  Yes, sometimes the balance between independent woman and total dick falls on the wrong side of the line, but she is a young, single woman who voices her opinions even when they don’t agree with those of the men around her. 

It’s the men who let the book down really.  At proposal number one, Gabriel tells Bathsheba that she essentially has to marry him because he loves her and this is more important than the fact that she doesn’t love him.  She’ll get the hang of doing so in time.  Boldwood is jealously aggressive when it comes to Bathsheba’s relationship with Troy.  The entire book is made up of men trying to possess or to tame Bathsheba and she resists it throughout. 

It’s wonderful to see a book written at this time, 1874, celebrate a strong woman in the way that it does; in a way that a lot of media even now doesn’t and it really surprised me.  The women Hardy wrote about are the kind that laid the groundwork for feminism and I didn’t expect that from this book.  Far From the Madding Crowd is great.  Well, there are great bits of it.  If you don’t look too closely at the bits about sheep bloat, it’s utterly wonderful.  And my mum likes it.

I’ve now moved on to Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.