Narrative, Gender, and Power in "Far from the Madding Crowd"

Abstract

In Chapter 44 of Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene, Mrs. Troy, runs away and hides in a fern brake. In a sudden act of revolt, born of humiliation at the hands of her husband, who has just confided his unsurpassed love for the dead Fanny Robin, Bathsheba seeks escape from a domain of male victimization. Running without direction in the darkness, she happens by chance on a thicket that seems familiar and drops down into a deep slumber. This seemingly protected spot, so like the tree-hung enclosure where Tess d'Urberville loses her virginity, appears far more congenial than it is in actuality. Bathsheba, stripped of a role and a right she thought was hers, wishes to slip back into a void of pre-gendered nothingness. The possibility of death, which she seriously entertains, signifies peace from gender struggle and specifically what she perceives as male domination. On a deeper level, however, Bathsheba here enacts a crisis of gender.2 Her disappearance into this wet hollow is fully emblematic of a return to the womb. Indeed, because it is extremely damp, she even loses her voice, the most authoritative, acculturated aspect of herself. Losing her power over language, the strong farmer is reduced to a lost infant. It is as if Hardy, who has revealed Bathsheba, in the early part of the text, to be a colorfully coy temptress and has later shown her as a willful woman in a male profession, forces her to start over again. On the level of story, this pivotal scene not only continues to define the heroine, but actually rebirths her. Relying on condensation as if a dream, it also operates as a triple gender scenario: it is a fantasy of gender annulment, a scene of gender mixing, and a drama of sexual choice. In this sense, Chapter 44, to which I will return, encapsulates the deepest concerns of the novel.