After Bathsheba rejects Oak's marriage proposal, Oak’s thoughtlessness, pride and anger come to the surface. He tries to embody the countenance of an affectionate, spurned suitor, but Hardy casts doubt on his performance with a simile:
“Upon my heart and soul, I don’t know what a maid can say stupider than that,” said Oak. “But dearest,” he continued in a palliative voice, “don’t be like it!” Oak sighed a deep, honest sigh—none the less so in that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere.
“Why won’t you have me?
After Bathsheba rejects him, Oak insults her reasoning (“I don’t know what a maid can say stupider than that”) but then quickly recovers and tries to win her over. He tries to sigh passionately, and Hardy compares this to the “sigh” of a pine plantation (a wind passing over a group of pine trees). Like the wind, this sigh is noticeable as a “disturbance of the atmosphere,” a total change of tone. Then he asks again, “Why won’t you have me?”
Oak’s proposal is impulsive and presumptive. He barely knows Bathsheba and is insulted when she says she doesn't love him, though they’ve only spoken a handful of times. In this scene, he plays the role of the persistent, if spurned, lover, believing that if he can just speak to her long enough he can win Bathsheba over for good.
This role is at odds with his own personality and his jilted feelings in the moment, which is why Hardy draws attention to the change in his attitude with this simile. Gabriel’s condescending assumption that he can trick Bathsheba into a permanent commitment within one conversation, so long as he acts the part, is the engine that drives the “disturbance” here noted by Hardy. This simile reflects Gabriel’s lack of respect for Bathsheba at the beginning of the novel.
After seeing Bathsheba once again, Gabriel cannot stop thinking about her, as Hardy illustrates with a simile:
That night at Coggan’s, Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of closed eyelids, was very busy with fancies and full of movement, like a river flowing rapidly under its ice. Night had always been the time at which he saw Bathsheba most vividly, and through the slow hours of shadow he tenderly regarded her image now.
In this chapter, Gabriel only sees Bathsheba for a minute, standing at her bedroom window after Fanny’s disappearance. Bathsheba steps out to ask the men what they might know about Fanny and to instruct them to ask around the village for more information about her. Gabriel is standing as one of the men in the crowd; she neither looks at him nor addresses him. He returns to his lodgings at Coggan’s and is full of imaginings of Bathsheba. His thoughts run like a river under ice.
Below his cool exterior and feigned indifference to her, Gabriel cannot stop obsessing over Bathsheba and the possibility of pursuing her. Hardy chooses a simile rooted in the natural world, suggesting that Gabriel’s imaginings of Bathsheba are similarly natural, a product of his condition as a sexual being.
Nature comes up again and again in the novel, usually with positive connotations with beauty (as when Bathsheba’s face is described as a “fair product of Nature”), sometimes as a bridge between the prosaic and the profane (as when the maltster suggests that swearing and “unholy exclamations” are demanded by Nature). Hardy’s choice of simile suggests that Gabriel’s interest in Bathsheba is normal and healthy (however obsessive it may seem).
