Consider Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd as a pastoral novel
In one of the famous stanzas of “Elegy written in a country churchyard”, Thomas Gray refers to the
quiet and peaceful life of the people living in a village. Hardy borrowed the phrase, ‘Far from the Madding
crowd’ from Gray’s poem and used it as a title for the novel to imply that the life of the country people is
peaceful and calm and free from tumult, the turmoil and the strife which mark the life of the city people.
The novel has markedly a pastoral character. Hardy himself described the book to Stephen as a ‘Pastoral
tale’. As Howard Babb describes, “At bottom, Hardy’s story juxtaposes two different worlds or modes of
being, the natural against civilized and it consists on the superiority of the former by identifying the natural
as strong, enduring, self-contained, slow to change, sympathetic, while associating the civilized with
weakness felicity, modernity, self-centeredness”.
The progress of the narrative is marked throughout by the festivals and occupations of the
agricultural year lambing and shearing, hay making and harvest, the hiring fair and the sheep fair, the
shearing and harvest suppers, Saint Valentines’ Day and Christmas. This opposition between ‘the natural’
and ‘the civilized’, between nature and nurture, is crucial to the concept of pastoral.
Gabriel Oak, specifically a pastoral figure in the novel, is ‘linked with traditional presentations of
the shepherd as rustic lover and philosopher’. In the Norcomb chapters, Gabriel is introduced as a flute-
playing shepherd, and of the ‘pastoral tragedy’ when he loses his sheep, at the hiring fair, he is sensitive to
his fall from his ‘ modest elevation as pastoral king’ to the level of hired man. The opening chapters of the
novel represent a pastoral world. Hardy’s conception of Oak and Oak’s rural world is expressive of a new
idea of nature and man’s place in nature that is diametrically opposed to the idea of nature inherent in
traditional pastoral.
The pastoral background in Far from the Madding crowd is scarcely distinguishable from Under the
Greenwood Tree. In the famous description of the storm, he combines a faithful and perspective vision of
natural processes with an exaggerated and fanciful treatment. In many ways, this episode is the crux of the
novel, demonstrating finally the contrasts between the solid Gabriel Oak and the other two chief male
characters, Troy and Boldwood.
Although Bathsheba is chiefly a farmer, she owns a large flock of sheep as farmer Boldwood owns
a large flock of sheep. Such occupations as sheep-washing and sheep-shearing are described in great detail
by Hardy. Indeed, the sheep constitute one of the leading interests in the story. Oak’s loss of his sheep is a
major crisis in his life. Gabriel Oak is entrusted with the duty of taking the flocks of Bathsheba and
Boldwood to the annual fair at Greenhill. The pastoral element in the story is a part of its rural character.
The rural background of the story is, in fact, emphasized by the pastoral element. The specifically pastoral
aspect of the novel is emphasized in many of the images and allusions which Hardy evokes. For instance,
Boldwood speaks of waiting for Bathsheba as Jacob had for Rachael. The title of the novel Far From the
Madding Crowd represents the quiet lives of the rustic characters. Peter J Casagrande very aptly remarks,
“Nature in this view, is a normal norm and Oak, as protagonist is the imitator and champion”.
In the novel Hardy has mastered the life of the agricultural districts in the South -Western countries
–the details of the farming and the sheep-keeping, of the labouring, the feasting, and the mourning, are
painted with all the vividness of a powerful imagination. Further it is thestory of a ballad: the soldier lover,
the betrayed maiden, the neglected wife, the faithful shepherd, the aloof, tormented gentleman lover.
