Not fables, but gory stuff

I won't pretend that I don't enjoy some moralizing literature every once and a while. There is certainly something to be said about books where the willful sinners get the dramatic and allegorical death and the simply foolish ones mostly commit suicide or sacrifice themselves for the betterment of society.

I once suggested to a friend back in my english-ing days that we should amass all of the books about English girls who are awfully fond of nature as a metaphor for their loose morals and then die in childbirth, usually cursing their own weakness and asking for the nature-baby to be baptized. I wanted to try and get 70s and 80s movie adaptations for these novels and compare them (all of them tend to have dramatic hair and lots of saxiphone), perferrably in a marathon format.

Currently I am reading Far From the Maddening Crowd which I chose based on the name, thinking that perhaps it would contain excellent passages on how annoying people are that I could use while cursing people on the freeway. It is actually about some sassy young farm chica who is pursued by three men/metaphors. Thus far the able-bodied, prudent, and wise shepherd is pitted against the sulky and obsessive baron and the flippant soldier for the love of the fickle damsel.

Being a bit of a sap for shepherds I'm pulling for him, but I'm not entirely sure he'll pull it off. The solider is a classic rendition of 18th century, smooth-talking, first-name-callin' sleeze, so I'm not worried about him. He's already damned himself by impregnating a servant and then running off briefly to become a professor of gymnastics. However, the old fellow does pose a threat. 18th Century writers love to put the sassy young woman with the sulky rich fellow, when they aren't setting them up for a martyrs death against a backdrop of smooth jazz.