In his Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy depicts three forms of sexual desire, and their manifestations.
… entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood. (Chapter LI)
Three men desire one woman, the one woman desiring only the one, the one to whom she is physically attracted. Of the other men, one is well-to-do, and in thrall to the unfulfilling fantasies of the rich; the other, knowledgeable of and able in the ways and requirements of life, intellectually and supportively attractive but by that insufficiently sensual in aspect to warrant mating with. All three are overlain with the human characteristic of carelessness of action.
The physical attraction always surpasses the attraction of wealth or ability. In this human beings are no different from all other living creatures, whether animal or vegetable, for all seek there own physical perpetuation. In the human being, this is unaffected by the capacity to think—a capacity not restricted to us as a species—for the impulse is innate and is not put aside, though it may be placed in perspective, by reason—which is also a faculty not restricted to human beings. This also informs humanity’s obsession with immortality, through procreation when alive, and through religion in anticipation of death. Human beings almost invariably attach the word love to search and acquisition of a mate and to imagined omniscience and omnipresence of what, for convenience, is often termed sacred and divine, as distinct from profane and secular. At least by men.
‘It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.’ (Chapter LI)
These three desires are types. Sometimes they blend or conjoin; but presented starkly and separately, as Hardy does, they are easier to identify, and to identify with; which is the point of novelist: if we are not the one, we would, despite the risk, be one of the other. Moreover, the story could have been constructed with one man and three women; and so on; and the depictions would remain unchanged. Hardy intimates this strongly in a subplot that represents one of the types, and that both parallels and reinforces the main story, and, through the device of behavoural inversion, intersects it.
… the more emphatic the renunciation the less absolute its character … there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. (Chapter V)
The fifth presence in the novel is the earth herself, described with great majesty and understanding, and awareness of her superiority and implacability. In the present, this majesty is undervalued and often not even known of. The black of the night, the brilliance of the stars, the virgin land, the purity of waters, and much else that is natural, either forsaken or degraded. It is both pain and the fond attachments found in remembrance that is experienced when one reads of what is no more. Far from the Madding Crowd is a remarkable novel, its prose exceptional, and its observations calm and pointed.
… a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible. (Chapter XVIII)
Hardy selected one ending, but could have selected either of the other two possible. What becomes clear that, whatever course, and its likely ending, that one selects, it may remain possible to select another, though its impassionment and inherent attributes will be different, and thus so will its possibilities.