Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy

A manor-house clock from the far depths of shadow struck the hour, one, in a small, attenuated tone. After midnight the voice of a clock seems to lose in breadth as much as in length, and to diminish its sonorousness to a thin falsetto.

Clock mentioneed!

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.

Religion imo

Juggernaut.

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power,

excrescence,

"I don't mean that—it was yellow hair." "Nonsense." "That's insulting me. I know it was yellow. Now whose was it? I want to know."

Gaslight McGee

Frank went on as if he had not heard her.

:/

"Oh! that meant nothing—a mere jest." "A mere jest!" she said, in mournful astonishment. "Can you jest when I am so wretchedly in earnest?

Oop-- much like her conversation with Boldwood, eh?

once I felt I could be content with nothing less than the highest homage from the husband I should choose. Now, anything short of cruelty will content me.

Women still settle like this, to this day. Reading thispassage is unfortunately like looking in a mirror

fustian

with that tendency to talk on principles which is characteristic of the barley-corn.

Drunk and on his soapbox... Too real

we Churchmen, you see, must have it all printed aforehand, or, dang it all, we should no more know what to say to a great gaffer like the Lord than babes unborn." "Chapelfolk be more hand-in-glove with them above than we,"

Class consciousness </3

I bain't such a fool as to pretend that we who stick to the Church have the same chance as they, because we know we have not. But I hate a feller who'll change his old ancient doctrines for the sake of getting to heaven.

"Nobody can hurt a dead woman," at length said Coggan, with the precision of a machine. "All that could be done for her is done—she's beyond us: and why should a man put himself in a tearing hurry for lifeless clay that can neither feel nor see, and don't know what you do with her at all? If she'd been alive, I would have been the first to help her. If she now wanted victuals and drink, I'd pay for it, money down. But she's dead, and no speed of ours will bring her to life. The woman's past us—time spent upon her is throwed away:

What doctrines guide this thinking?

Drink, shepherd, and be friends, for to-morrow we may be like her."

Yes. I love this.

in a last attempt to save Bathsheba from, at any rate, immediate anguish, he looked again, as he had looked before, at the chalk writing upon the coffin-lid. The scrawl was this simple one, "Fanny Robin and child." Gabriel took his handkerchief and carefully rubbed out the two latter words, leaving visible the inscription "Fanny Robin" only.

Another burden he is willing to carry to protect Bathsheba

desultorily.

Bathsheba was lonely and miserable now; not lonelier actually than she had been before her marriage; but her loneliness then was to that of the present time as the solitude of a mountain is to the solitude of a cave.

Emptier. Something is absent now. But before, she was accustomed to being alone. There was a sense of power in it.

Fanny's temporary resting-place had been the result of a strange complication of impulses in Bathsheba's bosom. Perhaps it would be more accurately described as a determined rebellion against her prejudices, a revulsion from a lower instinct of uncharitableness, which would have withheld all sympathy from the dead woman,

The sadness of Fanny Robin's fate did not make Bathsheba's glorious, although she was the Esther to this poor Vashti, and their fates might be supposed to stand in some respects as contrasts to each other.

Foils. Different, but so much alike.

Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave—that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst.

It is true. There is an element of self-absorption or self-indulgence in frequent anxiety

he looked at the clock, seemed surprised at the lateness of the hour, closed his book, and arose. He was going to bed, she knew, and if she tapped it must be done at once.

Clock mentioned! At what seems a pivotal moment

"Would to God you would speak and tell me your secret, Fanny! … Oh, I hope, hope it is not true that there are two of you! … If I could only look in upon you for one little minute, I should know all!" A few moments passed, and she added, slowly, "And I will."

My eyes immediately skimmed over the italicized words here, and my first assumption was that "And I will" was a response from Fanny (either her ghost or Bathsheba's imagination). And it's phrased in a way that it could be a repsponse from Fanny. Perhaps she is speaking through Bathsheba. Bathsheba certainly is possessed. By lust/rage/jealousy/hurt. By an inner knowledge that she can not compete with this dead woman

Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair in the coffin: tears of a complicated origin, of a nature indescribable, almost indefinable except as other than those of simple sorrow.

Perhaps guilt, shame?

this scheme of extinction by death was but tamely copying her rival's method without the reasons which had glorified it in her rival's case.

Lmao not her ego being the thing keeping her alive. Honestly… human ego is good for /something/

It was such an unexpected revelation of all women being alike at heart, even those so different in their accessories as Fanny and this one beside him,

Gross

Troy could hardly seem to believe her to be his proud wife Bathsheba. Fanny's own spirit seemed to be animating her frame.

Bro-- did I not say she seemed possessed?

"What have you to say as your reason?" she asked, her bitter voice being strangely low—quite that of another woman now. "I have to say that I have been a bad, black-hearted man," he answered. "And that this woman is your victim; and I not less than she."

Ugh. It's too familiar. Bathsheba -- though she views Fanny as her rival -- knows they are both victims of the real enemy. And how convenient that hsi revelation about his behavior comes at their expense

Τετελεσται

Greek word meaning "it is finished"

"like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."

Percy Bysse Shelley's poem, Ode to the West Wind

Up the sides of this depression grew sheaves of the common rush, and here and there a peculiar species of flag, the blades of which glistened in the emerging sun,

Girlie's just got to make it through this depression to see the sun

The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great, in the immediate neighbourhood of comfort and health, and Bathsheba arose with a tremor at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place.

psalter,

In the worst attacks of trouble there appears to be always a superficial film of consciousness which is left disengaged and open to the notice of trifles, and Bathsheba was faintly amused at the boy's method, till he too passed on.

"You can't come across," Bathsheba said in a whisper, which she vainly endeavoured to make loud enough to reach Liddy's ears. Liddy, not knowing this, stepped down upon the swamp, saying, as she did so, "It will bear me up, I think."

You will be okay, Bathsheba. You will get to the other side of this. Perhaps with thre gelp of good companions like Liddy and Farmer Oak. People whom you actually respect. Did you ever respect Troy?

Liddy did not sink, as Bathsheba had anticipated. She landed safely on the other side,

No Liddy, I'll read. Bring up some books—not new ones. I haven't heart to read anything new."

Me, reading classic literature while mourning the loss of my own shitty, one-sided relationship. Also, perhaps she is (sub)consciousky following Oak's example again

she was being robed in her grave-clothes by two attendants at the Union poorhouse—the first and last tiring-women the gentle creature had ever been honoured with.

Dressed by another only in death. Otherwise, a servant herself

mawkishness,

Here he entered the porch, and, reclining upon the bench within, fell asleep.

Damn. I was really hoping that Troy would kill himself :/

the two mouths which still remained open and active were gaping enough to do all the work.

Who or what do these represent? Which two mouths remain open wide enough to comoensatw for the closing of others? Mr. and Mrs. Troy? And who has been silenced? Fanny, Oak, Boldwood, Liddy?

Weatherbury tower was a somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish as distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles, which are the necessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent—of the boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most original design that a human brain could conceive. There was, so to speak, that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic of British than of Continental grotesques of the period.

Bathsheba and Francis Troy both being beautiful but kind of terrible people

Troy's face was very expressive, and any observer who had seen him now would hardly have believed him to be a man who had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles into a woman's ear.

Love-trifles followed by abandonment, flowers and marble followed by mud. He is a ruiner

Sanguine

Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply adjourning it. He could put off the consideration of any particular spectre till the matter had become old and softened by time. The planting of flowers on Fanny's grave had been perhaps but a species of elusion of the primary grief, and now it was as if his intention had been known and circumvented.

Good. He should grieve this, and he should feel guilty

This very morning the illusion completed its disappearance, and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself. The suddenness was probably more apparent than real. A coral reef which just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizon than if it had never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event which has long been potentially an accomplished thing.

Beautiful way to say this realization had been developing for quite some time, under the surface

that wayward heaviness of the past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in her without substituting the philosophy of maturer years,

Oof

reprobates'

indelible,

Her original vigorous pride of youth had sickened, and with it had declined all her anxieties about coming years, since anxiety recognizes a better and a worse alternative, and Bathsheba had made up her mind that alternatives on any noteworthy scale had ceased for her.

Yep. Hard to be anxious about or invested in an outcome over which you have no control