Character Clues
Character Analysis
Clothing
The moment the narrator tells you about the three stripes on the arm of Sergeant Troy's jacket, you can just hear all the local girls oohing and aahing. He's dashing. He's flashy. He dresses in a way that is sexy and (because he wears a military uniform) dangerous. And guess what? He turns out to be both sexy and dangerous.
Meanwhile, Farmer Boldwood tends to dress in a solemn, dignified way because… you got it; that's exactly what his personality is like. Gabriel Oak also dresses in a financially stable way; he doesn't spend money on duds that make him look fancier than he is.
When he's poor, he wears boots with holes in them. But the moment he starts making some good scratch, he buys fancy new clothes and becomes the talk of Weatherbury. That just goes to show that even though he's modest, Gabriel Oak is still a young, single man who doesn't mind being looked at.
Names
Everything you need to know about Gabriel Oak comes from his name. For starters, Gabriel is the name of an angel. Oak is a solid tree that tends to stand for a long time. And Gabriel Oak himself is kind of sweet and angelic, what with all that lamb-saving he does, and his love for Bathsheba is seriously solid and long-lasting, like an oak tree.
Farmer Boldwood, on the other hand, is a little… bolder than Gabriel when it comes to making advances on Bathsheba Everdene. His love for her, however, is just as sturdy and wood-like as Gabriel Oak's. It's also a little more insane. Hmm. Maybe Boldwood should have been named Boldcrazywood?
Bathsheba, Bathsheba, Bathsheba. This is not a name you hear everyday, and so its symbolism packs more of a punch than if she had been named, say, Jessica. Bathsheba was a Biblical beauty that King David spied bathing. The problem was that Biblical Bathsheba was already married. So what did King David do? He arranged to have her husband sent to the front lines and killed in combat.
Does that ring a few bells? A guy being so attracted to Bathsheba that he kills her husband? Yeah, that sounds a little Boldwood-y to us, too.
Let's not forget Sergeant Troy. "Troy" might sound familiar to you, because of the famous Trojan War. In Greek mythology, Troy was seen as an impenetrable city. For nine years soldiers tried to siege Troy but failed, until someone came up with the bright idea of making a large wooden horse and hiding soldiers inside of it. The Trojans thought "Oooh, pretty horsie!" and brought the horse inside the city walls. Then the soldiers finally sacked Troy.
In Far from the Madding Crowd, Sergeant Troy is emotionally impenetrable until one day a wooden box (a coffin) comes within the walls of his house. The wooden box contains none other than Troy's dead ex-lover and his dead child. The sight of these dead people lays siege… to Troy's heart. Badoom-ching!
Direct Characterization
Thomas Hardy is a Victorian writer, which means that he's not going to shy away from telling you exactly what a character is like. In his introduction of Farmer Boldwood, for example, Hardy spends paragraphs letting us know what kind of guy he is, saying stuff like: "If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him: a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent" (18.6).
The same goes for the descriptions of Sergeant Troy, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene. Showing what a character is like through action or dialogue is all well and good; but sometimes it can be refreshing to just have an author tell you, "Okay, here's this person's whole deal." The Victorians were closed-mouthed when it came to writing about a lot of stuff (like sex), but they were pretty generous when it came to telling readers pertinent details about characters.