Farmer Boldwood: Hardy's Portrait of a Suicide

244 FARMER BOLDWOOD: HARDY'S PORTRAIT OF A SUICIDE By Frank R. Giordano, Jr. (University of Houston) Farmer Boldwood in Far From the Madding Crowd is the first victim in a long line of suicides presented in Thomas Hardy's major fiction. One of the few thoroughly interesting male figures in Hardy, Boldwood is an almost complete artistic success, his suicidal nature being presented with the precision of a scientific case-study. In every detail but one he is a classic example of what Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist , has described as the "anomic" suicide; the one discrepancy being that Hardy, for what seem questionable artistic considerations, does not permit Boldwood to shoot himself. When Boldwood's gun is seized from him, and later when he is granted a conventional last-minute reprieve, the exigencies of Hardy's plot threaten the artistic coherence of a terrible and powerful character. At the end, Boldwood's post-reprieve existence seems humanly unendurable; and Hardy partially redeems his lapses in plotting when he withdraws our attention from Boldwood's life after Her Majesty spares it. Nevertheless, though in 1874 Hardy lacked the artistic authority and courage to permit Boldwood to fulfill his suicidal mission, he possessed in great measures the artistic insights into the nature of the suicide. One may fairly state, I believe, that of all the great Victorian novelists, none understood man's self-destructive instinct as thoroughly as Hardy; and in Farmer Boldwood Hardy's intense awareness of human vulnerability is given a stirring embodiment. Farmer Boldwood is a kind of pastoral Richard Cory, a man of aristocratic dignity who seems to want for nothing in life; but who, like his counterpart in Robinson's poem, is driven by his social isolation to put a bullet through his head. The "most dignified and valuable man in the parish," Boldwood was "the nearest approach to aristocracy" that the parish could boast of.! Though nobody knew him entirely, local gossip had it that he met with some bitter disappointment after a woman jilted him when he was young and merry. Bathsheba's maid Liddy describes him: "Never was such a hopeless man for a woman! He's been courted by sixes and sevens - all the girls, gentle and simple, for miles round, have tried him . . . but Lord the money might as well have been thrown out of the window" (66-67). Rich and gentlemanly, a man whose moral and social magnitude inspired awe in the rustics, Boldwood preserved his Roman dignity in a reserve so impenetrable that he could ignore Bathsheba's beauty when every other man present afforded her glances of admiration (85). So different from every other man and seemingly untouched by common feelings, Boldwood appears "a species of Daniel" to Bathsheba, depressing her by withholding his attention. Boldwood's distinctly outlined Roman features and quiet, reserved demeanor mark him preeminently with dignity. But Hardy's 245 narrator advises us that Boldwood's external stillness is achieved only through massive emotional discipline. In a touching scene that recalls Gulliver's ludicrous social preferences at the end of his travels, the narrator describes Boldwood in his horse stables pacing up and down and meditating of an evening until total darkness envelops the scene (105)· But this scene is too troubling to be ludicrous, even when Boldwood is referred to as a celibate visiting the place that was his almonry and cloister in one; the words "celibate," "almonry," and "cloister" suggest a kind of sublimation of Boldwood's normal sexual and social instincts. This suggestion, reinforced by Boldwood's earlier association with the unicorn on Bathsheba's seal (86),2 is developed in the narrator's comments on Boldwood's extraordinary nature. That stillness, which struck casual observers more than anything else in his character and habit, and seemed so precisely like the rest of inanition, may have been the perfect balance of enormous antagonistic forces - positives and negatives in fine adjustment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent. (105-6) The description ends with a foreboding comment on the fragility...