The Mirror and the Sword: Imagery in Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

HOMAS HARDY'S early novels show in embryo many of the characteristics to be found in the later masterpieces. Desperate Remedies has a Mephistophelian villain and a disastrous fire; A Pair of Blue Eyes, a heroine who cannot make up her mind between two lovers; Under the Greenwood Tree, a rustic chorus both humorous and wise in their simplicity. Flashes of the familiar Hardy imagery also appear from to to intensify the reader's perception and enrich his response: the Mellstock choir gathered around Mr. Penny's cobbler shop; Fancy Day framed by the window architrave; Manston peering into the rain-barrel to see minute living creatures tumbling about in its greenish depths; Knight clinging to the Cliff-Without-a-Name while time closed up like a fan before him. All these and more are indicative of the kinds of images Hardy was to employ throughout his novels: the intertwined relationship of man and Nature; mutability as seen in the change in manners and customs; the contrast between light and shadow, illusion and reality. These are, however, only flashes. Not until Far From the Madding Crowd, the first of the novels, was Hardy to achieve an integrated design such as we find in Tess of the d'Urbervilles or The Mayor of Casterbridge. One of the reasons why these novels are major is precisely that in them Hardy managed to create a fabric of images, repeated and concatenated to deepen and make complex the emotional and conceptual significance. The structure of images in The Return of the Native is as much superior to that of Two on a Tower as are the plot and theme. To see how this is applicable to Far From the Madding Crowd, I wish to take a passage from the early part of the novel and trace