Boldwood: “a man trained to repression”

Abstract

Boldwood of Far from the Madding Crowd marks an important early stage in Hardy’s development as a novelist. The treatment of this character shows an increasing interest, already demonstrated in Desperate Remedies and A Pair of Blue Eyes, in complex, disturbed personalities; it is, in a tentative way, a study of the development of insanity. The treatment is sometimes clumsy, sometimes inconsistent, and frequently exposes the need for some new technique for presenting the psychological complexities that Hardy has perceived. Nevertheless, this character shows the early interest in psychological theory revealed in the Notebooks developing into a capacity to embody that knowledge in psychologically complex characters and even to achieve startling new insights, some of which were later also perceived, through his clinical studies, by Freud. By the time of Jude the Obscure Hardy had found more effective ways of exploring in a novel his insights into neuroses; in Boldwood we have a comparatively crude and uncertain attempt at a similar theme. In spite of the obvious struggle with the mode of presentation, the depth of understanding is apparent.