Blank Letters and Ensnared Eyes in Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

This article focuses on just one scene in Far from the Madding Crowd: that of Boldwood’s bewildered reception of Bathsheba’s Valentine. Far from showing us an “expressive eye,” the passage does the opposite, since it shows an immaculate, yet unreadable, landscape of snow stretching out before Boldwood’s blank gaze, his dazed eyes. Yet this scene which deploys in so many different ways the image of the unreadable and the invisible uses the narrative technique of internal focalization to make the reader “see” through the text itself what lies beneath the surface: the birth of unavowed, unsaid, repressed, desire.