Far From the Madding Crowd is a Victorian novel about a strong-willed woman with three suitors, none of which she actually has to marry, because she has her own farm and is doing just fine, thank you very much. I’ve seen an early screening of the movie and RHG and I will have a joint review out later today. This review contains spoilers for the book and obviously spoilers for the movie as well, so read on at your own risk. I’m going to describe the whole plot, because it is full of crazy sauce, and y’all know we love that shit over here at the Bitchery.

The plot is this: Bathsheba Everdeen gets a rather sudden proposal from a shepherd, Gabriel Oak. Bathsheba likes Gabriel, but it’s all rather sudden and she rejects the proposal. Shortly thereafter, the two experience reversals of fortune. Bathsheba inherits her uncle’s farm, which is a large establishment employing many workers. Bathsheba fires a corrupt bailiff and decides to run the farm herself.

Meanwhile, Gabriel, who owns land and his own flock of sheep, loses all the sheep in one terrible accident. He sells everything he owns to get out of debt and ends up working as a shepherd for Bathsheba. We root for Gabriel from day one because the very first thing we see him do is hand feed a baby lamb and he goes on to save Bathsheba’s farm and flocks from fire, rain, and bloat. Also his last name is Oak. But he’s not, you know, smooth. He’s more, “Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but here’s a lamb for you to raise as a pet, marry me, maybe?” So you can see where this throws Bathsheba off.

Plus, Bathsheba is a little stuck up (she looks in the mirror A LOT), and she’s no dummy about what marriage would mean for her: “Nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart…I’d hate to be thought men’s property in that way, though possibly I shall be had someday.”

As a farmer, Bathsheba is a good employer, a hard worker, and a savvy businesswoman. In her personal life, she’s Ally McBeal. Bathsheba encounters a well-to-do farmer who is very serious (he is blessed with the name ‘Boldwood’). In an impulsive, playful moment, Bathsheba sends him an anonymous valentine. It takes Boldwood about two seconds to realize who it came from and to trot over to her house offering his hand in marriage. Bathsheba is really embarrassed and sorry, especially when she realizes that Boldwood is going to spend the rest of the book telling her that because of her stupid valentine he’s going to adore her forever and his unhappiness is all her fault so she should marry him, and if it’s out of pity, hey, he’s cool with that. He’s like a toddler who, when you are on the phone, keeps tugging on your skirt and saying, “Can I have a cookie? Can I? Can I have one now? OK, can I have one later? When? WHEN CAN I HAVE A COOKIE?”

Bathsheba is so mortified by this whole thing that she almost gives into Boldwood before she meets Sergeant Troy, who is a dashing ladies man. Far From the Madding Crowd was written over fifty years after Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, but Austen fans will instantly recognize those dashing military rakes Wickham and Willoughby to be reborn in Troy. Alas, Bathsheba falls so madly in lust with Troy, who woos her by pretending to stab her with a sword (ahem) so that she does not know what to do with herself:

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

 

Troy plays the jealousy card to convince Bathsheba to marry him:

I was coming away, when he suddenly said that he had that day seen a woman more beautiful than I, and that his constancy could not be counted on unless I at once became his…And I was grieved and troubled…And then, between jealousy and distraction, I married him!

 

The saddest thing about all this is that Bathsheba quickly realizes her mistake but she can’t do anything about it, and the only person she can confide in is Gabriel. Earlier, they had a fight over her sending a valentine to Boldwood, not because Gabriel was jealous, but because he felt it was “beneath her”, which it was, and she points out that he has no business judging her, which would be more true if she didn’t keep asking him for his opinions on her love life when he’s not busy saving all her sheep for her.

Anyway, they made up, and while Troy is getting everyone on the farm drunk, Gabriel is out in the middle of the night saving Bathsheba’s crops from the rain, because that’s the kind of hottie that he is. TEAM GABRIEL FTW.

Up until now, the book ticks a long at a medium pace, with various courtships and lots of sheep. Suddenly tons of scandalous things occur:

1. At the very beginning of the book, Troy got a girl pregnant and didn’t marry her because she went to the wrong church by mistake and he thought she did it on purpose and he ditched her. Scum.
2. This woman shows up in town, and she and the baby die. It’s horrible. It would be even more horrible if she hadn’t shown up at the very start of the book with “LOOK AT ME I AM DOOMED” stamped across her forehead.
3. Troy is all, “Bathsheba you are nothing to me I only love this chick who is dead woe is me,” and, I shit you not – he fakes his own death and joins a travelling circus. Yes, yes, he does.
4. Boldwood points out that Bathsheba is a widow now and he still wants to marry her and she’s all, “Maybe I’m a widow, maybe I’m not, also men are pigs, but oh God, I’ve made you unhappy, guilt, guilt, what to do.”
5. Boldwood has a party at which he intends to propose officially to Bathsheba. Bathsheba is depressed. Troy, who got bored with being in the circus because Troy has the attention span of a puppy on meth, shows up at the party and demands money. Bathsheba freaks out. Boldwood shoots Troy – YAY. Boldwood goes to prison. It turns out that he has a room in his house that’s like a super secret Bathsheba shrine, so that’s creepy.
6. Gabriel says, “Enough of this crazy sauce. I’m going to America, where life is calm and sensible.” Bathsheba is sad. Gabriel says, “Never mind, I just saw Fox News and realized that America is totally weird, so I’m staying here.” Bathsheba indicates a certain warm and happy felling about this and they get engaged and live happily every after, although Bathsheba is clearly still emotionally wounded from her previous boy troubles. THE END.

 

WELL. That certainly leaves us with a lot to unpack.

Let’s start with Bathsheba, who is at once a feminist icon and, I’m sorry, a melodramatic idiot. I love that she’s complex, and I get the sense that different readers could read identical words in the book and come away with completely different ideas about who she is. She’s melodramatic, she has temper fits, she acts stupidly on impulse – but she always tries to be responsible about her mistakes, sometimes to the point of over doing it. I mean criminy, how long does she have to keep atoning for that damn valentine? It was thoughtless, and she apologizes, as she should, but it shouldn’t earn her years of dramatics.

And boy, is she dramatic, although like many people who are sensitive but also competent, she is often able to postpone her swooning until she’s managed a crisis. She’s not a person who will swoon over a corpse. She’ll administer first aid, call the doctor, clean up the blood, arrange the funeral, and decorate the viewing room with a appropriate display of flowers – and when all that’s taken care of, THEN she swoons, because damn it that’s when it fits into her schedule.

Bathsheba is not an in-between kind of person. When she caves, she caves completely, as when she agrees to marry Troy, and as when, after she thinks he’s dead, she falls into such profound depression that Gabriel has to manage the farm for her. When she’s awesome, she’s completely awesome, as when she introduces herself to her new employees:

Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don’t yet know my powers or talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if you serve me well, so shall I serve you. Don’t any unfair ones among you (if there are any such, but I hope not) suppose that because I’m a woman I don’t understand the difference between bad goings-on and good.

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.

Gabriel is my favorite kind of hero. He’s able to hold his own but he has no time to waste on alpha male bullshit. He doesn’t play games or hide his feelings. His behavior when he and Bathsheba have a fight and she fires him proves that he’s loyal but not a doormat. He’s 100% trustworthy and he’s competent (except for when it comes to training new sheepdogs, which apparently he’s sucks at). He’s a laconic guy, and between his working clothes, which are as dirty as you’d expect given his occupation, and his tendency to yawn in church, it seems that not everyone takes him seriously. His sexual attractiveness doesn’t come through so much in the book, but THAT SMILE:

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

Basically, Bathsheba is presented with three possible options for marrying, and what makes her different from many other heroines is that she realizes the value of not marrying at all. Troy represents marrying for lust, which is great for all of one night until the practicalities of life intrude. Boldwood represents, from his point of view, marrying for obsessive love, and from Bathsheba’s point of view, marrying for obligation and practicality. Gabriel represents marrying for companionship. They have a friendly love, a love that is a true partnership:

This good fellowship – camaraderie – usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death – that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.

 

I adored this book. It has some very funny bits, and action, and sweetness, and tragedy. It had one of my favorite heroes – Gabriel Oak, who, unlike Troy and Boldwood, demands nothing from Bathsheba except for her respect. Bathsheba is so variable in mood and action that I don’t know how I feel about her, but she’s sure entertaining to read about. The language is lovely.

Above all, I love the idea that love is best expressed not through flowery words (Troy) or expensive gifts (Boldwood) but through action and service. Oak does not do a single glamorous thing in the course of this story. Instead, he puts out a fire, he covers bales of hay during a thunderstorm, and he cures sheep of the bloat. In real life, so much of romance in a lasting relationship comes from shared work and adversity. There’s nothing traditionally romantic about de-bloating a sheep but it’s what Bathsheba needed so that’s what he did. The story is a beautiful ode to love that comes from a shared life of shared work, and it’s a tribute to endurance and to healing. When they leave the church, Bathsheba looks “As though a rose should be shut and be a bud again,” not repressed, but with a second chance at a happy life.  Beautiful.