One Way In Which to Justify a Happy Ending in Fiction

 Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd" is a comedic novel, which means it has a happy ending.  That's as opposed to a tragic novel, which doesn't.

When it comes to Hollywood movies, just about any excuse will do, since the public by and large doesn't like films that end as "downers."  That was traditionally true of Broadway musicals as well, which is one reason "West Side Story" was a breakthrough: it doesn't end happily.

But back to Hardy (1840 -1928): his heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, by the time she was only about 24 years old, had already rejected one suitor, married the wrong man and then when he appeared to have died, promised to marry an older man she didn't love as a result of a thoughtless Valentine's Day gesture sometime earlier. Fortunately (for her), the former was shot and killed by the latter who then turned himself in to serve essentially a life term in prison.  That left her free to marry the right man, the man who had first proposed to her only to be rejected.

But why should readers believe this man, Garbriel Oak,  really is the right man and that their future together will be a happy one?  In Hardy's view it has to do with the nature of real, or true, love.

Briefly by way of background, Oak, an exceptionally competent and reliable fellow had, following a stroke of ill-fortune, come to work for Bathsheba when she inherited a prosperous farm and gained considerable social stature in the process. Whenever problems arose, Oak was there to take care of them, never again pressing his suit as he worked closely with Bathsheba and eventually became her second in command.

Then, just as Bathsheba is finally free of those other entanglements, Oak announces a plan to go to America (the novel being set in rural England), leaving Bathsheba unjustifiably distraught. "She was aggrieved and wounded that the possession of hopeless love from Gabriel, which she had come to regard as her inalienable right for life, should have been withdrawn just at his own pleasure in this way." She is, after all, far from a worldly woman in age and experience despite her pluck and independence. 

Thinking about it, Bathsheba comes to realize she is about to lose the only true friendship she had and, taking matters into her own hands, convinces Oak that if he will only propose again, she will marry him. Somewhat bemused, he does: he has always wanted her.

The reason, in Hardy's mind, that their love for each other will now last is because if "a substantial affection" survives an initial knowledge of  the rougher sides of each other's character, and only develops into romance "in the interstices of hard prosaic reality," it will make for a solid bond.

"This good fellowship -- comaraderie --  usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the two sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is as strong as death -- that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name (love) is evanescent as steam."

And there the novel ends, on page 428 in the Penguin Random House 2015 Vintage Classics Edition.