Saturday, July 16, 2005
Eminent Victorian
There aren't a lot of Victorian novels (at least among the ones I've read, not an extensive sampling) that treat working-class people as real. Dickens's workingmen are sympathetic, but I never quite believe them. They are standing in for principles more than they behave as real people. (I find that his upper-class people have the same failing.) Trollope's people are human to me, if slightly alien, but they are rarely working-class. There are a few clerks, and a risen workman in Dr. Thorne, but no one who works a farm other than the occasional farmer-earl. Eliot has Silas Marner, an artisan, but I've read only the one novel. And Becky Sharp can be considered a working girl of a sort, but her ancestry is genteel.
Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, isn't so interested in the gentry. The mayor of Casterbridge has ascended from, and returns to, manual labor. There are gentry in Tess of the D'urbervilles, but Tess is not really one of them. The "upper classes" in Far from the Madding Crowd, the book at hand, are tenant farmers. Gabriel Oak may be somewhat stylized by modern standards, but he has authentic human feelings and motives. His love for Bathsheba Everdene is a literary conceit, but so is most literary love. What is more important is that we never doubt that he is the kind of man who can see a woman, decide to marry her, and stand by that decision forever.
Of course, this being a Victorian novel, we know from about the second chapter how it is going to end. In sensation novels or gothics, there might be surprises, but not in Hardy. (There are some minor surprises here and there, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge when we find out about the daughter, but in general we know how things are going to work out from pretty early on. Trollope, in I forget which of his novels, apologizes for bringing in something that some readers might not have anticipated. We are there for the pleasure of the journey, not to find out what is at its end.) So we know that, somewhere in the last chapter or two, Gabriel will marry Bathsheba. The question is not whether her first husband will disappear, but how, and how permanently.
I suspect that for women readers the main character is Bathsheba, in fact. For me, and possibly for most men, it is Gabriel. Much of the story really does focus on her, but Gabriel's constant backgkround presence keeps us up to date on his story as well. Each has obstacles that must be dealt with before they can get together, but the challenges are very different (even though they are, in a sense, the same: Gabriel must overcome Bathsheba's romantic inclinations and entanglements through perseverance, and is on the verge more than once to give up and move out of the county). His presence, then, is mostly passive, on the fringes of her story. He is active in small ways while she makes the grand gestures: she gives up all for a grand passion, sacrifices herself for duty, and eventually grows into a recognition of the value of mature love (that is, love that is based on merits and something beyond physical attraction; the book is unusual among Victorian novels -- granted it is late Victorian -- in acknowledging the sometimes destructive role of physical passion in forming alliances in a world that lacks ready access to divorce). All right; I guess that means Bathsheba really is the main character. She grows and changes, and Gabriel works hard and perseveres. Not the same thing at all. Still, he's rather endearing.
dmh
Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, isn't so interested in the gentry. The mayor of Casterbridge has ascended from, and returns to, manual labor. There are gentry in Tess of the D'urbervilles, but Tess is not really one of them. The "upper classes" in Far from the Madding Crowd, the book at hand, are tenant farmers. Gabriel Oak may be somewhat stylized by modern standards, but he has authentic human feelings and motives. His love for Bathsheba Everdene is a literary conceit, but so is most literary love. What is more important is that we never doubt that he is the kind of man who can see a woman, decide to marry her, and stand by that decision forever.
Of course, this being a Victorian novel, we know from about the second chapter how it is going to end. In sensation novels or gothics, there might be surprises, but not in Hardy. (There are some minor surprises here and there, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge when we find out about the daughter, but in general we know how things are going to work out from pretty early on. Trollope, in I forget which of his novels, apologizes for bringing in something that some readers might not have anticipated. We are there for the pleasure of the journey, not to find out what is at its end.) So we know that, somewhere in the last chapter or two, Gabriel will marry Bathsheba. The question is not whether her first husband will disappear, but how, and how permanently.
I suspect that for women readers the main character is Bathsheba, in fact. For me, and possibly for most men, it is Gabriel. Much of the story really does focus on her, but Gabriel's constant backgkround presence keeps us up to date on his story as well. Each has obstacles that must be dealt with before they can get together, but the challenges are very different (even though they are, in a sense, the same: Gabriel must overcome Bathsheba's romantic inclinations and entanglements through perseverance, and is on the verge more than once to give up and move out of the county). His presence, then, is mostly passive, on the fringes of her story. He is active in small ways while she makes the grand gestures: she gives up all for a grand passion, sacrifices herself for duty, and eventually grows into a recognition of the value of mature love (that is, love that is based on merits and something beyond physical attraction; the book is unusual among Victorian novels -- granted it is late Victorian -- in acknowledging the sometimes destructive role of physical passion in forming alliances in a world that lacks ready access to divorce). All right; I guess that means Bathsheba really is the main character. She grows and changes, and Gabriel works hard and perseveres. Not the same thing at all. Still, he's rather endearing.
dmh
