SOURCE: Shires, Linda M. “Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far from the Madding Crowd.” In Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 24, no. 2 (winter 1991): 162–77.

In the following essay, Shires deconstructs the signifiers of gender and power in the novel, claiming that previous feminist critics have not sufficiently examined the contradictions and complexities in Hardy's portrayal of a nineteenth-century woman's place.

“Are you a woman?”

“The woman—for it was a woman—approached.”¹

I.

In Chapter 44 of Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene, Mrs. Troy, runs away and hides in a fern brake. In a sudden act of revolt, born of humiliation at the hands of her husband, who has just confided his unsurpassed love for the dead Fanny Robin, Bathsheba seeks escape from a domain of male victimization. Running without direction in the darkness, she happens by chance on a thicket that seems familiar and drops down into a...