Vivian Trinh

5 September 2017

ENL 4350 Advanced Studies in British Literature

Journal Response 1

Hardys Far from the Madding Crowd and the Creation of a Universe

Fiction, owing to its nature, steeps itself more or less in the workings of fictional

dates, fictional characters, and (most assuredly) fictional events. More often than not,

however, barring that extreme which we may call fantasy, fiction finds itself situated in

the real when it pertains to setting. A novels cast may be entirely fictitious, but the story

at hand finds itself in a familiar place: New York, maybe, or along the paths of a sleepy

old town in Texas. The reader opens the novel having at least some semblance of an idea

of its choice of setting, and that familiarity sets a pact between author and reader. It is

through this context that we look at Thomas Hardys famous Wessex and its impact on

the reading of Far from the Madding Crowd.

To see Wessex as simply a location would be doing it a great disservice. Hardy

avoids assigning it any concrete coordinates; at best, Wessex is a region of vague extent

in south-western England (Gatrell 19). Rather than focus on its physical location, I

invite you to view it as an experiencea pocket universe that draws from the world of

the reader, a system that breathes and behaves according to its own complex social and

environmental organization (Gatrell 19). The Wessex aesthetic is marked by grand,

sweeping views of the English countryside, and Hardys description of place is so

steeped in detail that one risks forgetting the actual plot of the novel. The first two pages

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of Far from the Madding Crowds second chapter lends itself almost entirely to this sort

of description:

The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying plantation of

beeches whose upper verge formed a line over the crest fringing its arched curve

against the sky . . . The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by

the wind in breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing naturesone

rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing

them like a soft broom . . . The sky was clearremarkably clearand the

twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a

common pulse. (Hardy 14-15)

Though the scene at present is but a small part of the larger Wessex, readers are

invariably drawn into this world that seems more real than it is fictional. We can see the

thin grasses and feel the touch of the wind. It demands the readers attentionso much

so that it momentarily dislodges the plot. Hardy predates Faulkner in the creation of

such a district, thereby introducing readers for the first time to a place familiar yet

determinately unknown. This quality of being unknown, owing to the fact that nobody

in current or previous existence could ever physically visit Wessex, sets Hardys novels

apart from many others, both during his time and still into ours.

Thus, we approach Far from the Madding Crowd with this notion in mind. Here

is an author inviting us into a world that is fictional by naturebut masquerades so well

as a real location that we can almost believe people have traveled to Wessex and visited

the places featured in the novel: Casterbridge, Weatherbury, Norcombe. As Hardy puts

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it, Wessex is a partly real, partly dream-county (Hardy 3). One might question why an

author would go to such lengths to construct a world of his or her own. Why not set the

story in a real town? For Hardy, the answer lay in the freedom offered by a fictitious

setting. As he writes in the preface to Far from the Madding Crowd, the area of a single

county did not afford a canvas large enough for what he had in mind for his series of

novels (Hardy 3); he needed a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity of their

scene (Hardy 3). From this idea of unity, Wessex manifested, and unify Hardys works

it did: perhaps it is not so obvious when one has only read a single Hardy novel, but

when the reader picks up the second book it is easy to make ties between the first and

the second. The mere mention of Casterbridge, for instance, draws attention to The

Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy, then, after decades of writing novels, succeeds in

constructing a universe that unifies the very novels that construct that universe.

As readers, this sense of unity breathes life into a potentially inanimate creation.

It is easy to write off a fictional city or town and have that be the end of it, but such an

approach threatens an unprovoking experience. The setting is dead and stagnant,

unmoving and subpar. Readers are unlikely to find much value in a setting that neither

interacts nor considers the existence of other realms. Wessex, however, continually

draws life through its characters even when Hardy has not produced a novel in a

number of years. (This may or may not be because he is dead, but that is beside the

point.) In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy shows readers the culture behind

certain Wessex towns, and in doing so he successfully immerses the reader into the

setting that encapsulates the novels events. By giving concrete detail on the distances

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between locationsfifteen miles from Norcombe to Casterbridge, five to six miles from

Casterbridge to Weatherbury (Hardy 44-45)readers are able to envision the expanse of

land that spreads between the novels most important towns. To that end, descriptions

of the people who live there are even more beneficial. The citizens of Weatherbury, for

example, were by no means uninteresting intrinsically. . . They were as hardy, merry,

thriving, wicked a set as any in the whole county (Hardy 45). Readers are told that

Casterbridge is a country-town (Hardy 43) boasting a marketplace that our two main

farmers regularly visit (Hardy 118), which suggests a great deal of the culture

surrounding that district of Wessex: likely a well-known point of commerce. Even small

details about a towns lesser names adds some flavor to this fictional setting: Gabriel

descended into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower Longpuddle as it is sometimes

called (Hardy 54). As readers venture deeper into the novel, deeper they also go into

the world of Wessex. They learn the culture of each town and the people who live in it,

and eventually one may even feel a part of that world. Ultimately, though Far from the

Madding Crowd features a relatively underdeveloped Wessex in relation to Hardys

later works, the authors attention to detail still shines. As Simon Gatrell writes, it is the

community of interest shared by workfolk on a farm that provides the richness of

context that buoys so successfully the love stories of Bathsheba Everdene, and that

establishes the fledgling Wessex in readers minds (Gatrell 22).

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 Works Cited

Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Gatrell, Simon. Wessex. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, Cambridge

University Press, 1999, pp. 1937.