Hardy uses personification to describe the day that Gabriel chooses to propose to Bathsheba:
On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution—a fine January morning when there was just enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully disposed people wish for more, and an occasional sunshiny gleam of silvery whiteness, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket, and stalked across the fields to the home of Mrs Hurst the aunt [...]
The day itself is described as having a “summer face” and a “winter constitution,” an interior and exterior that do not match, in the same way that the appearance and manner of a person may not match. In the most literal sense, the day appears warm because some blue sky is visible, but it ultimately remains wintry and cool.
The incongruity between the day’s reality and appearance is thematically resonant in a book in which appearances often reveal a character’s interiority. Hardy describes Gabriel earlier on as midway between the “beauty of Saint John and the ugliness of Judas Iscariot,” another way of saying he is neither strikingly beautiful nor hideously ugly (and neither truly good or bad). This is a reference to long-held, religiously informed conventions in art that hold that beauty is good and ugliness is evil. Gabriel’s physicality reveals something about his character.
While no moralistic reference is made in physical descriptions of Bathsheba, there is a noted discrepancy between her physical appeal to men and her internal insistence on independence. The personification of this morning, the morning she will reject Gabriel’s proposal, could echo (in perhaps a misogynistic way) Bathsheba’s inner coldness toward the idea of marriage or commitment.
This act of personification also foreshadows what the day holds for Gabriel. Upon first glance, the day looks auspicious. The weather is beautiful, and he expects his proposal to Bathsheba will go over well. However, the day is not as welcoming to his efforts as he suspects, and what looks like a change in the weather turns out colder than expected.
In this scene, Gabriel shears a sheep while Bathsheba watches. As she does so, Bathsheba personifies the ewe:
He lopped off the tresses about its head, and opened up the neck and collar, his mistress quietly looking on.
“She blushes at the insult,” murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink flush which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe where they were left bare by the clicking shears—a flush which was enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would have been creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world.
As Gabriel removes the sheep’s wool (her “clothing”), Bathsheba notes that the ewe “blushes” with embarrassment. The narration picks up the personification and notes the “pink flush” that has spread over the naked animal (really, the pink of the ewe’s skin). The flush is described as “delicate,” a pink that would be enviable and credible on the face of any young woman.
The personal tension between Gabriel and Bathsheba came to a head in the chapter previous, culminating in Gabriel’s near abandonment of the farm and his return at Bathsheba’s request. The romantic and sexual undercurrent of this bond are on display in Bathsheba’s personification of the ewe. Bathsheba likens Gabriel’s act of grooming to a disrobing, and the narration reflects how her choice of words changes the mood of the scene.
