• “excited, wild
- “excited, wild and honest as the day” – she is a physical, passionate and strong being. A very 3 dimensional character who is feisty, independent and sometimes selfish and rude. Altogether, incredibly compelling character. “a caged leopard”.
- Faulted character: she is not only tempted to make the wrong choice, but actually does, and is only freed from this life long consequence when Boldwood shoots troy.
- When looking at herself in the mirror, no one can understand the purpose of her action. This action may be a way of dramatizing the issue in the novel of the men’s attempt to impose an identity on her.
troys kiss and bold wood desire
- She is willful and irresponsible in meeting troy.
- Troy’s kiss releases feeling and desires from Bathsheba that neither she nor the reader knew she was capable of. She has a sense of ‘sin’
- Boldwood’s obsession with Bathsheba is not sexual desire, as he does not even know if she is beautiful.
effects of book
- Book is very shocking in the way it contains marital desertion, illegitimacy, death in childbirth, murder, attempted suicide and insanity (arguably). The darker aspects of rural life.
- Reader seems to be assured that despite the deep social changes are imminent, the novel still holds out the possibility that the closing marriage will maintain the community and its order a little longer.
- Hardy is the first great novelist showing men and women working together side by side.
D.H. Lawrence
• D.H. Lawrence says human life is caught between ‘law’ and ‘love’. E.g the need for self-preservation such as submitting to the demands of family and work, against the need to follow sexual instinct (the latter being more compelling and stronger than the former)
Hardy’s depictions of: romance and reality; social discipline
- Differentiates between romance and reality: Boldwood’s unreal conception of Bathsheba, her vision of troy, or Troy’s idealism of the dead fanny when planting the flowers (the chapter is called ‘Troy’s Romanticism’). Suggests that one should live in accordance to reality, as Gabriel learns to do. Thus he shows the destruction ‘imaginative love’ can cause.
- Demonstrates the importance of social discipline: excess of “unfocused human desire”: The characters are made to yield to the discipline of civilization. (unlike what shelley is saying?) (yet the concluding marriage is supposed to be shocking and disobeying society’s rules?).
fanny as problem of the book
Is she “the problem of the book” – he retells her tale through Tess? She is described as a meer portion of humanity, rather than an individual: “creature”, “a figure” a “thinly clad”. Hardy seems to strip her identity to the point where it is no more human tragedy, but animal vulnerability.
How society in book and readers treat fanny
- She is “a blurred spot in the snow” when replying to troy “I am your wife, fanny”. This is partly true, partly hopeful, and she is then once more a “spot”: Not legally a wife, but the fallen woman, Victorian society would rather leave her “blurred”. Even in the illustrations of the novel, Fanny is only shown the night of her death, positioned so her pregnancy is fully hidden.
- Fanny is wholly innocent, and shows Hardy’s intention to demonstrate “man’s inhumanity to man”.
- Leslie Stephen, a magazine editor, who marked the manuscripts with many comments, first commissioned this novel. One of which was telling Hardy to treat the seduction of Fanny in “a gingerly fashion” adding that he would be “glad to remove the baby” from the scene where Bathsheba opens the coffin.
