Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann, Friday 24th July. Class to read two chapters of "
Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around "landscapes."
1.00pm - 3.00pm: Room 3, Upstairs, FAC North Wing
OOTA $20 - NON-OOTA $25
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is
Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in
Cornhill Magazine,
where it gained a wide readership. Critical notices were plentiful and
mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition
and made further changes for the 1901 edition.
PLOT
Gabriel Oak is a young
shepherd.
With the savings of a frugal life, and a loan, he has leased and
stocked a sheep farm. He falls in love with a newcomer six years his
junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her
aunt, Mrs Hurst. Over time, Bathsheba and Gabriel grow to like each
other well enough, and Bathsheba even saves his life once. However, when
he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values
her independence too much, and him too little. Feeling betrayed and
embarrassed, Gabriel's blunt protestations only foster her haughtiness.
After a few days, she moves to
Weatherbury, a village some miles off. When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An
inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel's flock over a cliff, ruining
him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all
his debts but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a
hiring fair in the town of
Casterbridge.
When he finds none, he heads to another such fair in Shottsford, a town
about ten miles from Weatherbury. On the way, he happens upon a
dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out.
When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a
shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other
than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited her uncle's estate and is now
wealthy. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she employs him.
THE LANDSCAPES OF THOMAS HARDY
Thomas Hardy continues to draw
very different sorts of readers and
Far from the Madding Crowd is now a major film by Thomas Vinterberg (2015). As academics have written Hardy's view of scenery and "inert settings" is to consider the landscape as ambient space. Looking at
visual and acoustic details in Hardy's fiction and poetry, there is a "mutual dependency between
background and characters" as well as a consideration of
"small things" (insects and noises). Many passages from the fiction show
their deployment of sensory features. He uses this same method when he moves to the encompassing idea of landscape
as a realm of reciprocal movements. The fluidity of space in which very different objects appear to
resemble each other. In this company, Hardy's technique appears
both Victorian and modern; the effects of his description range
from the realistic and microscopic to the surreal. Metaphors in
both poems and novels equate objects the way Morandi's images do;
they show, in other words, that two separate entities are "acted on
by the same forces". "The scenes displayed are delusive" and
"evanescent, reflecting the dubieties and complexities of our
habitual ways of seeing and conceptualizing".
Hardy's settings for all his major novels is the south and southwest of England. He named the area
"Wessex" after
the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the
Norman Conquest.
Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many
cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town
of
Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in
The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the novel
Far From the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as
"a merely realistic dream country".
The actual definition of "Hardy's Wessex" varied widely throughout
Hardy's career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired
from writing novels. When he created the concept of a fictional Wessex,
it consisted merely of the small area of Dorset in which Hardy grew up;
by the time he wrote
Jude the Obscure,
the boundaries had extended to include all of Dorset, Wiltshire,
Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, much of Berkshire, and some of Oxfordshire,
with its most north-easterly point being Oxford (renamed "Christminster"
in the novel). Cornwall was also referred to but named "Off Wessex".
Similarly, the nature and significance of ideas of "Wessex" were
developed over a long series of novels through a lengthy period of time.
The idea of Wessex plays an important artistic role in Hardy's works
(particularly his later novels), assisting the presentation of themes of
progress, primitivism, sexuality, religion, nature and naturalism;
however, this is complicated by the economic role Wessex played in
Hardy's career. Considering himself primarily to be a poet, Hardy wrote
novels mostly to earn money. Books that could be marketed under the
Hardy brand of "Wessex novels" were particularly lucrative, which gave
rise to a tendency to sentimentalised, picturesque, populist
descriptions of Wessex – which, as a glance through most tourist
gift shops in the south-west will reveal, remain popular with consumers
today.
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy%27s_Wessex
December 19, 2015
