First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage. Or, for poor Fanny Robin: first comes love, then comes a baby, and then comes, um, death in the poorhouse.
And for several characters in Far from the Madding Crowd, love and marriage don't have anything at all to do with one another.
Boldwood, for example, doesn't care at all whether Bathsheba loves him, so long as she'll agree to be his wife. Gabriel, on the other hand, wants what is best for Bathsheba no matter what happens to him in the process. It's pretty easy to say that Gabriel's brand of love is a lot nicer than Boldwood's cold, practical desire to possess the woman he wants… and it's certainly nicer than Troy's amoral psychopath approach to L-U-V.
Questions About Love
- Who do you think gives us the best example of a person who feels love in this book? Why?
- Do you think it's possible for two people to live a happy life together without loving one another, just like Boldwood suggests? Why or why not?
- Early in the book, Bathsheba tells Gabriel that she can't marry him because she doesn't love him. Does this change by the time she agrees to marry him? Why or why not?
Chew on This
In Far from the Madding Crowd, we learn that love triumphs in the end… even though a few people might get hurt along the way.
In Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy shows us that there's no way to force someone to feel love, no matter how strong your own emotions might be.