finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_16_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 17
chapter 17
{"name": "Chapter 17", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-17", "summary": "It's Saturday, and good ol' Boldwood is back in the marketplace as per usual. But now he's a smitten kitten. Bathsheba's joke Valentine has made him fall head over heels in love with her. Boldwood has never claimed to understand women, and he doesn't understand Bathsheba. We can't blame him: Bathsheba seems a little weird what with the prank love letters and all. But Boldwood is kind of weird. He asks around to find out whether Bathsheba's considered good looking. A friend says that she is, so now Boldwood feels good about approaching her. Bathsheba, meanwhile, can feel Boldwood watching her all the time now, and she considers this a bit of a triumph, since he was the only man in town who didn't admire her before.", "analysis": ""}


IN THE MARKET-PLACE


On Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market house as usual, when
the disturber of his dreams entered and became visible to him.  Adam
had awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve.  The
farmer took courage, and for the first time really looked at her.

Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in
regular equation.  The result from capital employed in the production
of any movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the
cause itself is absurdly minute.  When women are in a freakish mood,
their usual intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect,
seemingly fails to teach them this, and hence it was that Bathsheba
was fated to be astonished to-day.

Boldwood looked at her--not slily, critically, or understandingly,
but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing
train--as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood.
To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary
complements--comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and
permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical,
unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely
erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty
to consider.

He saw her black hair, her correct facial curves and profile, and
the roundness of her chin and throat.  He saw then the side of her
eyelids, eyes, and lashes, and the shape of her ear.  Next he noticed
her figure, her skirt, and the very soles of her shoes.

Boldwood thought her beautiful, but wondered whether he was right in
his thought, for it seemed impossible that this romance in the flesh,
if so sweet as he imagined, could have been going on long without
creating a commotion of delight among men, and provoking more inquiry
than Bathsheba had done, even though that was not a little.  To the
best of his judgement neither nature nor art could improve this
perfect one of an imperfect many.  His heart began to move within
him.  Boldwood, it must be remembered, though forty years of age, had
never before inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his
glance; they had struck upon all his senses at wide angles.

Was she really beautiful?  He could not assure himself that his
opinion was true even now.  He furtively said to a neighbour, "Is
Miss Everdene considered handsome?"

"Oh yes; she was a good deal noticed the first time she came, if you
remember.  A very handsome girl indeed."

A man is never more credulous than in receiving favourable opinions
on the beauty of a woman he is half, or quite, in love with; a mere
child's word on the point has the weight of an R.A.'s.  Boldwood was
satisfied now.

And this charming woman had in effect said to him, "Marry me."  Why
should she have done that strange thing?  Boldwood's blindness to
the difference between approving of what circumstances suggest, and
originating what they do not suggest, was well matched by Bathsheba's
insensibility to the possibly great issues of little beginnings.

She was at this moment coolly dealing with a dashing young farmer,
adding up accounts with him as indifferently as if his face had been
the pages of a ledger.  It was evident that such a nature as his had
no attraction for a woman of Bathsheba's taste.  But Boldwood grew
hot down to his hands with an incipient jealousy; he trod for the
first time the threshold of "the injured lover's hell."  His first
impulse was to go and thrust himself between them.  This could be
done, but only in one way--by asking to see a sample of her corn.
Boldwood renounced the idea.  He could not make the request; it was
debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and sell, and jarred with his
conceptions of her.

All this time Bathsheba was conscious of having broken into that
dignified stronghold at last.  His eyes, she knew, were following her
everywhere.  This was a triumph; and had it come naturally, such a
triumph would have been the sweeter to her for this piquing delay.
But it had been brought about by misdirected ingenuity, and she
valued it only as she valued an artificial flower or a wax fruit.

Being a woman with some good sense in reasoning on subjects wherein
her heart was not involved, Bathsheba genuinely repented that a freak
which had owed its existence as much to Liddy as to herself, should
ever have been undertaken, to disturb the placidity of a man she
respected too highly to deliberately tease.

She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his pardon on
the very next occasion of their meeting.  The worst features of this
arrangement were that, if he thought she ridiculed him, an apology
would increase the offence by being disbelieved; and if he thought
she wanted him to woo her, it would read like additional evidence of
her forwardness.




Chapter 17
It's Saturday, and good ol' Boldwood is back in the marketplace as per usual. But now he's a smitten kitten. Bathsheba's joke Valentine has made him fall head over heels in love with her. Boldwood has never claimed to understand women, and he doesn't understand Bathsheba. We can't blame him: Bathsheba seems a little weird what with the prank love letters and all. But Boldwood is kind of weird. He asks around to find out whether Bathsheba's considered good looking. A friend says that she is, so now Boldwood feels good about approaching her. Bathsheba, meanwhile, can feel Boldwood watching her all the time now, and she considers this a bit of a triumph, since he was the only man in town who didn't admire her before.