Far From the Madding Crowd: Swampy Decomposition and Female Individualism

Abstract

The political or epochal decay prognosticated in C. F. G. Masterman’s Edwardian vision uncannily echoes a mysteriously resonant episode in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), a novel aptly characterised by an early review as progressing ‘in a succession of sensation scenes’.²In this scene, Bathsheba Everdene, having opened Fanny Robin’s coffin and discovered the dead baby, flees from her farmstead, ‘neither knowing nor caring about the direction or issue of her flight’.³ Lying down upon ‘a brake of fern, now withering fast’, she can ‘think of nothing better to do with her palpitating self than to go in here and hide’ (FMC, 295). After giving way to a fitful sleep, at dawn she awakes to fuller consciousness of her surroundings, discovering that ‘the ground sloped downwards to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi’. The general aspect of the swamp, the narrator notes, was ‘malignant’:

From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps, some exhibiting to her listless gaze their clammy tops, others their oozing gills. Some were marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood — others were saffron yellow, and others tall and attenuated with stems like macaroni. Some were leathery and of richest browns. 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. (FMC, 296)