My favourite moment in Far from the Madding Crowd is when Bathsheba Everdene is riding high along the lanes, both literally and figuratively, on top of a cart piled up with furniture. Gabriel Oak, who is in the fields, can see her above the hedge and she doesn't know that he is watching. When her waggoner runs back to pick up a lost tailboard, Bathsheba is left waiting for a moment. To pass the time, she pulls out a small looking glass and surveys herself attentively: "She did not adjust her hat, or pat her hair, or press a dimple into shape, or do one thing to signify that any such intention had been her motive in taking up the glass. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind." The reader is then invited to imagine that her thoughts might be of "dramas in which men would play a part – vistas of probable triumphs".
This was written 100 years before second-wave feminism thought to coin the phrase "the male gaze", but what better illustration of the male gaze could there be? Oak, a 28-year-old bachelor whose mind is turning to marriage, clearly looks on Bathsheba in the lane (a scene of "peculiar vernal charm") as an erotic object. This is the first version of the male gaze. But also – the second version – Bathsheba looks at her own reflection through the eyes, we are told, of the men who may approve of her in the future. And – just to twist the screw one more time – she is roundly criticised for doing so: "Woman's prescriptive infirmity had stalked into the sunlight."
I remember feeling an incoherent embarrassment mixed with discomfort when I read this scene under the disapproving male gaze of my sixth form English teacher. I very much liked him, by the way. He was called Jim Cogan and he strode around the school with his gown flapping behind him like some kind of scholastic superhero. I think it was a wise act, giving me FFTMC to read – but still I squirmed – and was fascinated by it and didn't understand it. I was doing my A-levels at Westminster. This venerable public school, nestled into the precinct of Westminster Abbey, was – in those days (the 1980s) at any rate – a hotbed of febrile sexuality. The school had only recently started to accept a small number of girls and we were rare and exotic creatures among the libidinous adolescent boys in their tight black suits. To make things worse, the various houses were arranged around a small private courtyard, and this space became as much a showcase as Bathsheba's wagon. We sensed them sizing us up from their study windows. Lessons were similarly nerve-racking. Classes were small and we sat in the round, often 10 boys to two girls. And so the male gaze, or so it seemed, was on us at every moment.
No wonder I checked myself in mirrors all the time, but, unlike Bathsheba, it wasn't to admire myself, it was out of anxiety. I would try to hold my face in a way that made it look more like a face in a magazine, smooth, passive, appealing (chin down, eyes up – think Princess Diana). My "mirror face", my family called it. Oh yes, I knew it was vain, but how could I not care, when every pop song, magazine, film or TV programme was telling me that a woman is empowered by her beauty? I wanted some of that power. But the word vain comes from the Latin vanus, meaning empty, without substance. This is just what the fleeting sexual power of a young woman really is – empty and without substance. Reading FFTMC I felt a sense of foreboding. I was like Bathsheba on her wagon, riding for a fall and with no way to prevent it because I didn't fully understand what was happening.
I loved Bathsheba immediately. She was a relief from dutiful Dorothea, earnest Jane and prejudiced Elizabeth. Here was a heroine for me and my times. Bathsheba is brave, ambitious, independent, unruly, high spririted. She is the type to lie down on the back of her horse when cantering under low-hanging branches. She makes it clear that she could never think of herself as a man's property. She is full of determined energy and enjoys running the farm she has inherited. She speaks her mind and has no interest in getting married – although she admits she wouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding if she could do it without having a husband. (How much divorce might that kind of self-knowledge prevent today?) All in all, she begins the book suffering from "chronic good spirits" and is pleased with herself in the best possible way. "There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed in being offensive because a beholder felt it to be, on the whole, true."
She has her faults, of course. The yokel, Henery Fray, thinks her "too pronounced in her objectives" and her suitor, Oak, is under no illusion about her vanity. But to begin with, Bathsheba is strong and pure, "proud of her position as a woman", Hardy tells us. She turns down two marriage proposals, one from the solid Oak and one from a stern and well-to-do neighbouring farmer called Boldwood, only to be ensnared by an impecunious young man who wears "three chevrons upon his sleeve". She is walking through her wood at night, when the handsome soldier's spur becomes entangled in the silk cord that trims her dress. In the darkness, on the narrow path, she thinks him a dowdy villager – so when he seizes her lantern and opens it, she is astonished to find that: "The man to whom she was hooked was brilliant in brass and scarlet. He was a soldier. His sudden appearance was to darkness what the sound of a trumpet is to silence."
This is the clarion call of sexuality – "love at first sight". And immediately the element of danger is clear and present: the reader already knows that Sergeant Troy is cruel and unreliable and has promised himself to the servant girl Fanny Robin.
Even my naive teenage self got the gist here. Troy was bad news – the trouble was, I thought him very appealing. He was certainly far, far better than artless Oak and boring Boldwood. I dreaded the thought of glorious Bathsheba ending up with either of those. Oak's attempt to seduce Bathsheba early on features the famous line: "Whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you." It was quite hard to imagine anything less sexy. As for Boldwood – "he had no light and careless touches in his constitution … he was serious throughout". So no LOLs there, then.
Hardy's description of Troy, on the other hand, is a breathtaking insight into exactly the kind of man that excited me in those days, the "wherever I lay my hat" type, the boy-man who would never turn into his dad. "He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a superfluity. Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. With him the past was yesterday; the future, tomorrow; never, the day after." (I don't think this kind of living in the moment is quite what Eckhart Tolle has in mind in The Power of Now.)
If Troy was around today he'd be an actor or a DJ. He is charisma incarnate. He takes Bathsheba into a grassy hollow and seduces her with his swordplay, leaving her "as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet". Afterwards, she is in agonies of longing for him. She even drives to Bath to lay siege to him – very wanton in those days. And, oh, how she is punished for following her instinct. And, oh, how I gunned for Troy despite all that was wrong with him – which makes the book a very strange read.
Troy abandons the wretched Fanny Robin for Bathsheba's comparative wealth, and by the time their impetuous marriage has gone bad (partly because his heart – what he has of one – is still Fanny's) the girl has died in the poorhouse. Bathsheba orders the coffin to be brought into her house for the night and, suspecting foul play, she prises up the coffin lid to see if her suspicions are justified. They are. "The light slanted down, distinctly enkindling the cold features of both mother and babe." Fanny has died in childbirth and there is now no doubt that Bathsheba has yoked herself to a monstrous narcissist.
I see now that this is Bathsheba standing over the death of her innocence and self-belief. Her instinctive feelings have led her terribly astray and she must acknowledge that she has lost control of them because, even now, the less Troy loves her, the more she loves him – despite everything he has done, despite the knowledge of who he is. She cares nothing for her farm any longer, or her ambition. Her life is not her own. Her thoughts are not her own. She is truly conquered – her word – and she knows it. If you have suffered unrequited love, you will know how this feels.
Bathsheba the career woman is lonely, desolate and lost to herself, while Fanny is a victim of her sex in a more conventional way. And the career woman can't help thinking that the dead girl has triumphed: "the one feat alone – that of dying – by which a mean condition could be resolved into a grand one, Fanny had achieved." If love is everything then Fanny has triumphed – that's the madness of romance. This is what romantic love will do for a woman, Hardy is saying. This is where sexual desire will lead you. Bathsheba is so terrified by her state of mind that she looks around "for some sort of refuge from herself".
I've had a few nights like that. The coffins I've prised open in the dark watches of the night may have been fanciful ones, but to feel that I had lost myself completely and that part of me had died was very painful. I despaired of ever having a successful relationship. How on earth, if you fancy the wrong people, do you reconcile burning desire with the mundane need for companionship? If only I had understood the lessons in FFTMC … But asking me to believe that my "agonies" of youthful longing were a dangerous affliction – like Bathsheba's – rather than a flowering of true love was asking too much. How could something that feels so right be so wrong? And anyway, who wants to marry if you're going to end up like your parents? A few pages later Bathsheba, in one of her most gloriously Bathsheba-ish moments, tells her maid: "Liddy, if ever you marry – God forbid that you ever should! – you'll find yourself in a fearful situation; but mind this, don't you flinch. Stand your ground, and be cut to pieces. That's what I'm going to do." Troy's sword is now playing a very different role indeed.
Bathsheba's reprieve is unexpected. Troy runs down her estate and then disappears – presumed dead – only to reappear when Bathsheba looks as if she might marry the agonised Boldwood. The sight of his rival pushes Boldwood to madness and he shoots Troy dead, afterwards giving himself up at the local prison. The field is now left clear for the trusty Oak to spread his branches and invite Bathsheba to shelter under them.
To this extent, FFTMC has a classic "marriage plot". A misguided heroine overlooks or misunderstands sensible Mr Right, goes off with imprudent Mr Wrong, learns the error of her ways, and returns to settle safely. Even when this story is told the other way round – it's the man who has been with Miss Wrong and must be converted (think Jane Eyre or Rebecca) – the marriage plot is nearly always told from the woman's perspective; it served to protect inherited wealth, no doubt, and warned many a young heiress away from an unreliable husband. When the man is the protagonist, on the other hand, he is rarely shown to pass over the sexy beauty for the plain Jane. Quite the opposite. He is encouraged to aim high and win the girl who seems impossibly out of reach – as with Gabriel Oak in FFTMC.
But Hardy doesn't present Bathsheba as entering into a happy ever after. He is more concerned, I think, with Bathsheba's disillusionment than who she marries. The romping girl of two years ago, he tells us, is much reduced: "she never laughed readily now". Her eyes are miserable and she is heartbreakingly "bewildered by the prospect of having to rely on her own resources". After the death of Troy, Oak conducts the business of her farm and attends all the sales and fairs for her. In one sense, the book is a feminist tract. Bathsheba's lesson is hard-learned and there is a permanent loss. Such was the cost to a woman of the capitalist patriarchy.
Things are different these days. But not so different. Despite being married, I still laugh. But like Bathsheba, my journey wasn't easy. I suffered because of my independence and I struggled to reconcile sex and ambition. Luckily, it's no longer the case that unreliable men are much of a threat to one's property portfolio, but they do mean that intimacy and commitment are unlikely to be along any time soon. They're a good way to avoid all the difficult decisions that traditional domesticity will bring a woman. Perhaps that's why I picked wrong-uns in my 30s. The price I paid – until I was ready to stop paying it – was that part of my destiny remained unlived, so to speak, my potential babies unborn. This is what I now see in Fanny's coffin. I married at 40. I'd probably have more than one child if I'd been capable of settling down sooner.
Like Bathsheba, I learned the hard way to see the wonder of the Gabriel Oaks of this world. These days, when I read the novel, I delight in his constancy and his straightforwardness, and the way he defends the hayricks not once but twice (the 19th-century equivalent of putting up shelves). So his seduction skills aren't the best to begin with – but he learns. Now I find it sexy when he rides over to pierce the windy sheep and deflate them in the clover, his tools being quite as sharp as Troy's in reality and much more useful. There's been a chemical change in me; the kind of transformation that can't be wrought just by reading a book. In fact, my husband now jokes about my unromantic outlook and the way I hold forth, given half a chance, about how the only thing that really matters in a relationship is that both partners want to live in the same place and share the same cultural references and watch the same box sets. As Tim Minchin puts it: "If I didn't have you someone else would surely do." Which isn't to belittle what you do with that – what you build together. When Oak and Bathsheba do finally marry, Hardy tells us that camaraderie and "similarity of pursuit" will turn out to produce the only love worth having, a love that eventually makes romantic passion seem as "evanescent as steam".
