In Far From the Madding Crowd, we see that Bathsheba is courted by three very different men. One is Gabriel Oak, who she refused to marry at the beginning of the novel. The other is Farmer Boldwood who is well respected around the village and will go to any length to marry her. The last is Troy who is dashing, a handsome soldier and knows how to flatter her. It is not surprising therefore that Bathsheba does fall in love with Troy and marries him late on in the novel. In this essay I shall be analyzing the first meeting between Bathsheba and Troy in detail.<br><br>In Chapter 23, we see that Farmer Boldwood proposes to Bathsheba for the second time. Out of guilt for the valantine and under pressure from Boldwood she decides to consider his proposal even though she is not in love with him. She tells Boldwood, “I will try to love you, but, I would rather ask you to wait a few weeks till I can see my situation better”. At this point Bathsheba is really confused about her life. She has no idea how to handle the situation she is in. What started as a joke in the beginning has now led to serious conscequences. <br><br>In the following chapter, which takes place on the same night as Boldwood proposes to her, Bathsheba goes to survey her property. “Among the multifarious duties which Bathsheba had voluntarily imposed upon herself by with despensing with the services of a bailiff, was the particular one of looking round the homestead before going to bed, to see that all was right and safe for the night”. As can be seen from this quote she was a woman who preferred to be in control and this was one of the few reasons why she is reluctant to marry Boldwood. We can also see that she’s not afraid of anything, not because she’s a brave person but because she doent believe that there can be anything to fear on her property, “This coolness may have owed its existence not so much to her fearlessness of expected danger as to her freedom from the suspicion of any”. That night while making rounds she encounters Troy for the first time.<br><br>On her return, she has to walk through a path in the fir plantation. Hardy describes it as. “It was gloomy there at cloudless noontide, twilight in the evening, dark as midnight at dusk, and black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight”. The emphasis here is on absolute darkness at all times of the day especially at this time of the night. The fact that Bathsheba’s skirt gets entangled in Troy’s spur “in the darkest point of her route” suggests both mental and physical danger to Bathshea. One of the first questions Troy asks her in the darkness before actually seeing her is “Are you a woman?…” and then tells her “I am a man”. It is obvious she knows that he is a man but still he tells her. Thus we can notice an emphasis on their sexuality and also the physical difference between them.<br><br>It is at this point that Bathsheba opens her lantern and she sees Troy for the first time. “His sudden appearance was to darkness what the sound of a trumpet is to silence”. This description lets us see Troy from Bathsheba’s point of view. Troy looks extrordinarily dashing in his scarlet uniform and polished buttons and this also is a stratigic contrast to the initial picture of darkness. However at the same time this description of Troy and the colours that represent him remind us of the description of Satan in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, “ And Carbuncle his eyes; With burnished neck of verdant gold.” [501]. Troy’s description sounds like a poitive image because it contrasts with the dangerous darkness, “Gloom, the genius loci at all times hitherto, was now totally overthrown, less by the lantern-light than by what the lantern lighted”. But even though it sounds positive, Hardy seems to say that there is something dangerous and fake about Troy’s outward appearance and behaviour as can be seen when he says, “The contrast of this revelation with her anticipations of some sinister figure in sombre garb was so great that it had upon her the effect of a fairy transformation”. Troy is a kind of light in the darkness but we can see that this light has a false aura around it because of the words ‘fairy transformation’. This gives us the idea that Troy lacks substance or alternatively that the image that Bathsheba sees in front of her is not something true, it is insubstantial like the fairies. Furthermore light is supposed to give you knowledge and reveal the truth but this light just shows her his physical appearence and not his inner self. So we see that the light in which Bathsheba sees Troy is a kind of delusive light, which again brings to mind the light described by Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’, “Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads th’amaz’d Night-wanderer from his way, To Boggs and Mires, and oft through Pond or Pool.” [641].<br><br>Hardy then emphasises this imagary by describing the shadows which are cast up by the lantern: “Gigantic shadows of both man and woman, each dusky shape becoming distorted and mangled upon the tree-trunks till it wasted to nothing” and we have an aweful premonition of what could happen in the future and it does later on in the novel. Hardy continues to emphasize onthis light which he says gives the, “effect of a large glowworm”. Again the word ‘worm’ gives us a very unpleasant image suggesting one of Satan’s names in the Old Testamet. In any acse this light doen not reveal any truth but distorts and deludes.<br><br>After Troy sees Bathsheba we see that he starts speaking to her with “newborn gallantry”, terms which stress artifice and this is especially evident in the way Troy praises Bathsheba’s beauty later on, “I've seen a good many women in my time, but I've never seen a woman so beautiful as you” which can be compared to the way Satan flatters Eve’s beauty, “Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair, Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine, By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore, With ravishment beheld.” [541]<br><br>We can easily see from Troy’s behaviour that he is not a person who follows convention. “He looked hard into her eyes when she raised them for a moment….Thank you for the sight of such a beautiful face!”. Which should make both bathsheba and the readers suspicious. Also when he refers to Bathsheba as ‘Beauty’ we can see that he is not courting her in a way Boldwood or Gabriel did, but being very direct and open with her. However we can see that even if Bathsheba tries to look as if she is getting angry with him, she is actually enjoying it. Firstly we know this because since Bathsheba heself is not a very conventional woman, that is why we suspect that she would probably like someone who goes against convention. Also she just doesn’t tear the dress right from the spur as she could have and go away in a hurry like an other woman in her positon would have done when insulted by a man. “The dress -- which she had put on to appear stately at the supper -- was the head and front of her wardrobe; not another in her stock became her so well” So from this line we can see her vanity because she doesn’t want him to tear her dress as it was one of her favourites. Finally the last line of the chapter “It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful” not only shows us her vanity and that Bathsheba liked the way Troy spoke to her and was flattered with his words but also gives us a pretty clear image that she is likely to fall for Troy. Later on we see that this prediction is true since Troy marries her and almost causes her to lose her property by getting the farm-workers drunk.<br><br>Hardy has not tried to obfuscate details of Troy’s life to the readers but has instead has gone out of his way to make us understand right from the start of the novel what kind of a man Troy is. Before his meeting with Bathsheba we had already seen that he was going to marry Fanny, but walked out on her after she went to the wrong. So the readers know more about Troy than Bathsheba herself does and soon after this meeting Hardy dedicates a separate chapter to Troy entittled: ‘The New Aquaintane Described’ in which we are left in no doubt about his character “The sergeant’s vicious phases being the offspring of impulse, and his virtuous phases of cool meditation, the latter had a modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen.” Therefore the reader is pretty certain that Bathsheba’s relationship with Troy is not going to have a happy ending and this is exactly what happens. Bathsheba does fall deeply in love with Troy and marries him and this in turn almost leads to her ruination. Their relationship is based on passion and physical attraction rather than love itself. <br><br><br>