Far from the Madding Crowd
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife. Their sober wishes never learned to stray. Along the cool sequestered vale of life. They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Thomas Hardy is one of the greatest realistic novelists in Britain. Most of his words portray women. He was a deep understanding of watchmen‟s life style and psychology, and shows great sympathy for the women in male—dominated society. His first famous novel Far From the Madding Crowd presents the living conditions of Victorian women funny and centrally. Far From the Madding Crowd describes Wessex that possesses the character of countryside as background, which centers around Bathsheba and Oak‟s love story, and it expresses he fiction of tragic generation about “Novels of Character and Environment”. This article ,according to analysis of author‟s tragic thought, and social factors and personality factors of effect on Bathsheba‟s tragic destiny, discloses that as an ordinary people, they rebelled and struggled to the fate and they fought with the society helplessly. In the end, they turned out to be the sacrificial victim of society. Nowadays, investigation into this tragic novel is still of realistic significance, for her tragic experience. In this thesis, I venture to argue that this novel is not a tragicomedy, but a tragedy—a tragedy of a woman, and a tragedy of society. I intend to analyze the novel in view of women‟s independence and emancipation, of Feminist criticism and of social development to prove that society is mainly to blame and Bathsheba‟s second marriage is a failure to her, which is a marriage without true love.
Just as the poem from the very beginning.Far from the Madding Crowd tells us a story that happened in a village of Britain. The young farmer, Oak, had fallen in love with a girl named Bathsheba Everdene. Bathsheba was beautiful, but too proud, so she didn’t accept Oak. The girl’s uncle was also a farmer, and she succeeded him after his death, so Bathsheba became very rich. At the same time, Oak lost everything in one night, and Bathsheba became his employer, he worked for her as a shepherd. As he thought that he had chance to be close to Bathsheba, another farmer from a rich family, Boldwood, had came into Bathsheba’s life and he begged her to accept his love and marry him. But Bathsheba gave her love to a Sergeant Troy, and soon they got married. However, Troy had a lover named Fanny Robin, and this caused a series of unhappiness. Troy left their home after Fanny’s death, and Bathsheba lived a painful life since then. Then there was some bad news, people said that Troy had been killed at sea. Boldwood asked her to marry him again, and Bathsheba agreed to marry him if there was no any news about Troy six years later. Troy appeared surprisingly at the party, which Boldwood wanted to ask for Bathsheba’s hand in marriage. Boldwood shot Troy with a gun because of fury, and then he gave himself up to the police. He was judged to be mad, and sent to the prison for life. Finally, Bathsheba became Oak’s wife. And they faced the hard tests of life together.
Village, is a place that far from the madding crowd, and it is not complicated. However, not every person there has a pure heart. There are all kinds of people. The young sergeant Troy, with his good looks, he deceived girls time after time. He was good at mouthing beautiful words. Even the proud girl, Bathsheba, was seduced by him. It cannot be denied that Bathsheba was as naive and chaste as a child. But at the same time, she was vainglorious. Her isolation from reality made her life road be full of bumpy. And Boldwood’s love for her was pure, without any distracting thoughts. He was a great person, he just wanted her to live in happiness. His love was very great, but he lost his mind, it’s reckless of him to kill Troy. And Bathsheba’s ignorance was the principal cause of Boldwood’s tragedy.
Oak, in my eyes, was a man with a gentle heart, and he was determined. Though he became very poor in the disaster, he worked hard, and he loved her as always. He had a tolerant heart, he stayed with her in her most disappointed. Though he was not so rich as Boldwood, and not as handsome as Troy, he had his own good qualities, and they empowered him to overcome all the difficulties and live with Bathsheba. Their love grows from fight in the hard tests of life, and this kind of feeling is the only love which is strong as death.
Being the master of ourselves, we should know ourselves well, without pretending and without being vain. We should be a primeval person. In my opinion, the happiest life is the simplest life.
Due to Hardy‟s own limitation, the reader is taught to admire simplicity, passivity, and perseverance rather than achievement when Bathsheba surrenders to Oak. “At
times, he goes as far as to suggest that people can only have even the smallest portion of happiness by nullifying their will and suppressing all desires—a Schopenhauerian view.” Hardy‟s another limitation lies in his view of women as infirm by nature. In the eye of Hardy, women‟s passiveness and frailty make them an especially poignant illustration of fate. Such a view of women as the “weaker vessel” permeates the whole novel. The novel exemplifies a central theme in Hardy‟s work—fate, fate in the given sense of the given character interacting with the given environment to produce inevitable results. However rebellious Bathsheba is, she can‟t defeat the overwhelming tradition, she can‟t vanquish the killing masculine society. The two symbolic images at the wedding ceremony—the Warrien‟s Malthouse and the Weatherbury band—are fully suggestive of Bathsheba‟s assimilation with tradition and the extinction of her personality and the failure of her self-fulfillment in the man-domineering society. Thus everything finally reverts to its original state, and modern changes fail to affect the rustics‟ lives. However, if a society ceases to progress, then it is a stagnant, hence hopeless society.
Such wrongful society repels ambitious, independent and free-thinking women, so women like Tess, Eustacia, Sue, Grace and Bathsheba all end up in grief and misfortune. Bathsheba‟s tragedy lies in the fact that she searches intensely for happiness in a world dominated by men, in a world hostile to changes, and in a world alien to her. Therefore, her tragedy is not only a tragedy of women, but in the final analysis also a tragedy of society.
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