SOURCE: Boumelha, Penny. “The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, pp. 130-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Boumelha emphasizes the complex interplay of representations of class and gender in Far from the Madding Crowd and two other Hardy novels.

Central to all of the novels under discussion here is a story of love, courtship, and marriage. More particularly, for the central female character in each case, this central fable takes the form of an erotic or marital “double choice,” to use Franco Moretti's phrase;¹ the woman is first attracted to the “right” partner, then distracted by one or more “wrong” partners before confirming—whether emotionally or formally—the “rightness” of the original choice. Also central to all three, though, is a perhaps less familiar story of...