Thomas Hardy is not my favorite author, because most of his characters are unrelatable. I don’t just mean that I don’t know what it feels like to be a shepherd (though this is true), but because the emotions and reactions to situations were so disconnected to what I would do.
This problem is particularly evident in the beautiful
Bathsheba Everdene, who vacillates from being the clever, strong woman of means
that every man adores, to a weak, undecided, irrational servant of her own
emotions. It was as if the character of
Bathsheba took on a life of her own against Hardy’s will, and he felt the need
to inflict all the negative stereotypes of women on her in order to control
her. The problem with this characterization
is it isn’t stable. Hardy tries to have
it both ways: he makes a great assertive character, someone who is lovable
because she is strong and independent and fiery, in order to make it believable
that all these men would fall in love with her. But then he turns around and makes her needy, passive, compliant, so
that she isn’t completely “out of their league.” Because
face it, all three men are boring compared to Bathsheba.
I get that in real life, people are contradictory. Emotions are unstable, so that one day a
person might be calm and collected, the next impulsive and irrational. Hardy uses this emotional instability and
chocks it up to Bathsheba being a woman, as if men were exempt from such pendulous
mood swings. But even if Bathsheba were
bipolar in some way, that doesn’t explain how she could be a good
businesswoman, running her farm (albeit with Gabriel Oak’s help) on her own,
and then suddenly she’s crumbling with self-doubt and submission.
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