The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [300]
The rooted beginning
Hardy was born in 1840 in the little thatched cottage near Dorchester which is still preserved today much as it was: a perfect picture-postcard image of old rural England before the modern world broke in. His father, a respected local stonemason, was known for his rustic fiddle-playing, in church and at village weddings. Through his childhood and teens, the country people, scenes and customs of this remote corner of Dorset were all the world Hardy knew. But already he was marked out by his intelligence, his avid reading and his sense of separateness for a very different destiny. With the simple religious faith of his upbringing, he dreamed of being a clergyman; although he then began to study as an architect, and even spent a short time in the distant great city of London. He showed his susceptibility to the opposite sex in a series of intense, unconsummated passions for various girls. Gittings shows how `mother-dominated' Hardy was, and how ill at ease in his relationships with the opposite sex. In his late twenties, he gravitated towards his career as a writer. He met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, the socially superior daughter of a west country solicitor. And in his early thirties he at last wrote his first successful novel.
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), the happiest and most innocent of his books, is like a charming retrospective snapshot of his own youthful state. In plot terms, it is a romantic Comedy. It centres on how its handsome young hero, Dick Dewy, marked out from all the other villagers he has grown up with, falls in love with Fancy Day, the pretty, independent-minded young farmer's daughter, socially a cut above him, who has moved into the schoolhouse to run the village school. But before he can win her hand, in keeping with the Comedy plot, two rivals loom up in his way. Her father, like so many `unrelenting fathers' before him, is determined she should not marry her young lover but someone of higher social status, a welloff fellow-farmer, Mr Shinar the churchwarden. She is also proposed to by Mr Maybold, the new, modern-minded young clergyman. These two also play a key part in the story's main sub-plot, their determination to end the age-old practice of having the music in church accompanied by a rustic orchestra, and to install a modern new organ played by Fancy Day. The heartless way in which the vicar consigns the village musicians to the scrapheap is a symbol of how Hardy saw the new world of the future breaking in on the traditional ways of country life, and it is telling that this innovation is identified with both Dick's rivals for Fancy's hand. But in the end the way is clear and in the final pages the young couple are married, presumably to live happily ever after.
In the light of what was to come, this romantic Comedy reads like nothing more than a simple wish-fulfilment fairy tale. Two years later, just before Hardy's own marriage, came Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). This was the last novel he wrote in the cottage of his birth, still surrounded by his family and the rustic world of his youth. Again the basic plot is that of Comedy. Again we see the hero and heroine meeting early in the story, and much of the action is again taken up with the problems posed by two rivals for her hand in marriage. But although the story still comes eventually to a happy ending, this is no longer achieved with anything like the fairy tale ease of Under the Greenwood Tree.
The hero Gabriel Oak, strong, good-hearted and self-contained, a maturer version of Dick Dewy, is as complete a man as any character in Hardy. We first see him as a self-reliant young farmer in his late twenties, at the moment when he encounters the story's beautiful but vain and headstrong young heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. Again, like a more developed version