Far From the Madding Crowd (1874): Priapus in Arcadia

Abstract

The text of Far From the Madding Crowd seems both accessible and ‘acceptable’: a pastoral which, although its tone is chidingly ironic, does little to disenchant the reader in search of a lost and picturesque organic world where prosaic events may become mildly mythic; a love story which rewards continence, persistence, selflessness and good-heartedness in a man, and the acceptance of objectification and patriarchal structures in a woman. Spontaneous desire, libertinism, importunity, deception, obsessional behaviour and melancholia are admitted as human failings, but are not to be encouraged. The surviving lovers, discovering their true love only after these dangerous elements have been played out by other characters (who have conveniently been removed from the scene, one dead and the other locked away), achieve a resolution of property and propriety which is, particularly from the man’s point of view, unusually generous in the matter of property. The woman, of course, is given her resolution in the form of marriage to a ‘good’ man.

Society is founded not on the union of the sexes but on what is a widely different thing, its prohibition, its limitation. The herd says to primitive man not ‘thou shalt marry’, but, save under the strictest limitations for the common good, ‘thou shalt not marry’.

(Jane Harrison, ‘Homo Sum’; being a letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist (1913)¹