What image of womanhood does Hardy project through the development of Bathsheba? /Examine Hardy’s characterisation of Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd. /Bathsheba is an independent woman who throws away her own strength willingly. Examine her character in the light of this statement.

What image of womanhood does Hardy project through the development of Bathsheba? /Examine Hardy’s characterisation of Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd. /Bathsheba is an independent woman who throws away her own strength willingly. Examine her character in the light of this statement.

Answer: A born lover of the fair sex, Hardy took in his novels what is called the old fashioned view of women. With the possible exception of his portrayal of the character of Arabella in Jude the Obscure, in all his novels he stresses their frailty, their sweetness, their submissiveness, their coquetry and their caprice. Even when they act fault, he represents them with a tender chivalry. The sufferings of Tess, of Elfride, of Marty, of Eustacia, of Bathsheba are touched all the time with a peculiar pathos. Almost all his novels, in some way or other, are the education of their heroines where they learn through their experiences. Hence, studies of his woman characters well serve a study of his vision of womanhood.

            Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine of his Far from the Madding Crowd, has generally been accepted as “the most attractive woman ever penned by the novelist’s imagination”. Hardy himself has said of her, “She is a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind.” Moreover, she is not only physically beautiful, but is also made of “the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made”. She is indispensible to high generation – “hated at parties, feared in shops and loved at crisis”. To quote Hardy again, she is “an Elizabeth in brain and Mary Stuart in spirit”. In fact, the novelist has depicted her as the type of eternal feminity embodied in a domestic shape for the guidance, consolation and illumination of the generations to come.....................................

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