Born in 1840 in a tiny Dorset hamlet, Hardy’s own origins were as obscure as those of his fictional Jude. The son of a builder and a former domestic servant, born shortly after their shotgun wedding, he was fortunate in having a determined, ambitious and unusually well-read mother who prioritised his education. Although university was out of the question, he found work in an architect’s office, and, after moving to London, began to write in his spare time. His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (now lost), was rejected by publishers because it exposed too readily – and too radically – the author’s own class insecurities and resentments in its treatment of a star-crossed love affair between a young architect from a working-class background and a girl of higher status. Its angry depiction of the upper classes was thought too likely to stir political “mischief”. In response, Hardy turned to the “pastoral” as what he called “the safest venture”.
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Hardy’s unique literary calling-card was his intimate, first-hand knowledge of the countryside where he grew up. He was so excited at times while writing Far From the Madding Crowd at his parents’ cottage that, while out walking, he had to grab a leaf or a stone on which to scribble phrases. But his was no untutored natural genius welling forth. Far from the Madding Crowd astonishes with its craft. It also shows Hardy surreptitiously redirecting his seditious instincts into experimentation with literary technique. The peasants in the story are generally presented as happy with their lot; it is the novel form in Hardy’s hands that resists the order of things.
Socially, Hardy was a man on the margins. Aesthetically, he also disrupted genre boundaries. Unlike Gray’s sober peasant who never learned to stray, he created a hybrid voice, which moved between pastoral, social realism, melodrama, gothic and sensation. It is as if Hardy wants to keep his readers in suspense not just as to which of her three suitors Bathsheba will choose, but as to which literary mode he is writing in. It is an index of his genius that he does so without sacrificing readability.
John Schlesinger’s classic 1967 film version (with Julie Christie as Bathsheba, Alan Bates as Oak, Terence Stamp as Troy and Peter Finch as Boldwood) takes risks by embracing the original’s atmosphere of extremes. Vinterberg’s film, in contrast, which has a screenplay by David Nicholls, is a realist, “George Eliot”-version of Hardy that pushes the more mannered elements of the story to the margins, almost as if in embarrassment. In doing so, it “normalises” what is in reality a deeply unsettling book, and, despite some good performances, neutralises much of its power.
In the novel, for example, the unrequited lover Boldwood becomes a fetishistic obsessive, secretly stockpiling women’s clothes labelled with Bathsheba’s name, driven to madness – and ultimately murder – not just by frustration but by his cruel and calculated sexual humiliation at Troy’s hands. Finch in the earlier film renders him as twitchily psychotic by the end. Michael Sheen in the new version turns in a beautifully underplayed performance, but the result is a character who would not seem out of place in a novel by Mrs Gaskell, and whose final murderous act seems out of character and perfunctory.