The Mayor of Casterbridge (Modern Library Classics) | Thomas Hardy

The Mayor of Casterbridge (Modern Library Classics) | Thomas Hardy | Powerful read, but not a happy one

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	The Mayor of Casterbridge (Modern Library Classics) Thomas Hardy Modern Library, 2002 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 79 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of Hardy?s most powerful novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a shocking and haunting scene: In a drunken rage, Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a visiting sailor at a local fair. When they return to Casterbridge some nineteen years later, Henchard?having gained power and success as the mayor?finds he cannot erase the past or the guilt that consumes him. The Mayor of Casterbridge is a rich, psychological novel about a man whose own flaws combine with fate to cause his ruin.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reprints the authoritative 1912 Wessex edition, as well as Hardy?s map of Wessex.

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Hardy's Classic Tragedy

In Michael Henchard, Thomas Hardy created a tragic figure of Shakespearean dimension. The opening scene of a drunken Henchard selling off his wife and infant child at a country fair immediately establishes him as a rash and impetuous character. These qualities will return to haunt him and those nearest to him again and again as his fortune rises and falls.
Henchard is contrasted with the genial and almost too innocent Scotsman Donald Farfrae who starts as his friend but becomes his rival in almost all things. Farfrae has an easy charm about him that makes him an unwitting competitor that stirs additional dark forces in Henchard as his rashness mixes with a growing envy.

The Mayor Of Casterbridge is one of Hardy's great works alongside Tess and Jude The Obscure. Hardy's vision is dark and the relentless sadness in his work may put off some but in the end these characters he created are as strong as tragic figures as those of any writer in the English language.

Finally Hardy's descriptions of rural England and the people who inhabit including their dialects of the time are priceless.

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Powerful read, but not a happy one

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is a story about Michael Henchard attempts at redemption and the many sorrows, pain, and misery that comes with his decision to uphold his pride and name. To say that Henchard is the only character that suffers in this novel would be a misrepresentation; almost every character at some point suffers immensely in some trial of life, whether it is death of someone close, pain of separation, or the frustration of a relationship. For these reasons, this work is not a "light" read by any stretch of the imagination, and will probably test even the optimist's patience in getting through. Still, Hardy's story, the descriptions of the countryside and the characters' inner feelings, as well as the way he ties together every character in this book, is a remarkable feat and makes for a powerful read.

The story begins with Michael Henchard walking with his wife, Susan, to the fair as they cross the countryside. While there, in an act of drunkenness, Henchard sells his wife to a sailor, and seemingly sets in motion his irreversible bad fortune. Not being able to find his wife the next day, he makes an oath to not drink alcohol for 21 years, the exact amount of years he has lived. The novel then fast forwards 19 years to find Henchard the Mayor of Casterbridge, and a noteworthy man of respect. Susan finds him, marries him after forgiving him, but there are many secrets that both parties have and will have until the end of the novel. It seems that many of these secrets are the character's downfalls. Henchard, while Mayor of Casterbridge, meets a man named Donald Farfrae, who he comes to like and implores to stay in town; however, eventually he and Farfrae become bitter rivals in not only their business and society, but also in their relationship with Lucetta, a woman who had an affair with Henchard in the past.

Henchard's fallacy of character lay in his stubborn pride and his foolish belief that name and appearance is everything. He sometimes tries to create a façade, or cover up one sin with another secret or problem. When he tries to persuade Lucetta to marry him, so as to not destroy her name, he retorts: "But it is not by what is, in this life, but by what appears, that you are judged." He is a tragic individual who seems to not be able to change his views long enough to make something right occur; when something does go well, it is short lived. He even gets to a point where he connects himself with an ominous and unpreventable fate, at one point referring to himself as Cain. He never really heeds Elizabeth's attempts at love until very late in the novel when tragic occurrences seem to be set in motion.

Still, despite all his problems, and all his pride, he is a "likeable" character because he makes the effort at retribution and is sorrowful each time he gets hit with a dilemma or makes an unfavorable decision. He has the willingness and conscience to try to amend his deficiencies, but, in the end, he just makes too many mistakes, and has too much pride to reverse his fortunes.

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Allegory of the King Saul/David story

Thomas Hardy has a reputation for writing bleak, sad stories. The Mayor happens to be my first Hardy read, and I can't tell you how saddening I found the overall tale.

Many points are made by Hardy: dealing with the past and its haunting effects; pride before the fall; and even the folly of mental inflexibility.

I couldn't shake the parallel of the King Saul/David story from the Bible while reading this. You have the powerful man who takes in an apprentice then becomes overcome with jealousy and envy as his apprentice eventually outshines him. And rather than putting his usurped life in perspective, allows his anger and envy to make matters much worse.

I saw Michael as a flawed man who is redeemed by his sense of duty and obligation.

I think the theme of duty to world versus self is important here. Michael's duty to his first family overrides his desire to be with his new girlfriend Lucetta. He probably would have been happier with Lucetta; but wouldn't we as the audience have seen him as selfish if he had chosen her instead of Susan? Both women were manipulative, one aggressively, one passively, so it probably didn't matter. But it does raise the question of how much of our personal happiness should be sacrificed for societal duties.

Donald Farfrae, the Scottish apprentice is put here purely to provide Michael Henchard with a foil. I don't feel he is developed at all, and is kind of dull, as is Elizabeth Jane.

There are character driven stories and plot-driven stories. And in plot-driven stories, you know that the characters' personalities or decision-making won't really matter in how things end. That's an aspect of Mayor...that some may find the most frustrating. You never could shake the feeling that destiny was unalterable. I, however, had no problem with it. It was a good ride.

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Despite the melodrama, a worthy read

In some ways this is a hard book to get into since it is set in a totally different culture from ours -rural England of the mid-nineteenth century. You would think that that is close enough in time to not be a problem. But to me the things like their courtship customs, or what is considered scandalous/honorable behavior, are really at a variance with the way we act today that I found it hard to relate to. Add to this some of the implausible melodrama and coincidences that make up the plot and I almost ended up putting down the book.

However I kept reading and in the end I thought it was an excellent story. This is because it illustrated a truth about life that I could empathize with. How a man through pride, anger, stubbornness and alcoholism could end up destroying his relationships with all of the people he is close to and in middle age end up being alienated from everyone who was important to him in his life. Since this story was written there have been millions of guys like Michael Henchard. The details of their lives are different, their endings may have been different. But there is an underlying truth that is the same. That aspect of the story is timeless.

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A Successful Novel About A Failed Life

"The Mayor Of Casterbridge" captures a lot of what makes Thomas Hardy resonate with people today: hard existential truths playing out amid pastoral splendor; naturalistic descriptions of fantastic events; an agnostic worldview that centers around a sense of Christian guilt and loss. The countercurrents create a lot of creative tension.

But what makes "The Mayor Of Casterbridge" so powerful more than a century after its 1886 publication is its multifaceted, emotionally conflicted depiction of the central character. Like King Lear and Ibsen's Solness the Master Builder, Hardy's Michael Henchard has no one but himself to blame for most of the misery that befalls him. Still he compels sympathy and a growing sense of investment from the reader.

We meet him, in one of the all-time great openings of noveldom, selling off his timid wife and child in a fit of rum-tinged pique. He regrets this almost immediately, but fails to relocate them. Instead, he swears off liquor and remakes himself years later as a prosperous leader in a town he chances upon in his travels, Casterbridge.

Alas the dark spikes of his id are never far from the surface, especially after his wife and her daughter come to Casterbridge. "Though under a long reign of self-control he had become Mayor and churchwarden and whatnot, there was still the same unruly volcanic stuff beneath the rind of Michael Henchard as when he had sold his wife at Weydon Fair," Hardy writes.

Henchard is a portrait in grayscale, nothing too black or white. In one scene, Hardy shows him mercilessly humiliating a lazy farmhand, then tells us Henchard keeps the farmhand's mother stocked with coal in winter. When the wife returns, Henchard has a romance brewing but puts it aside to do right by the woman he wronged. He's definitely not happy about it, and prone to self-pity and lashing out, but Hardy's intuitive narration keeps you identifying with Henchard, never leading you too far from his point of view.

For a character study the story moves fast, even if the prose style is ornate. Hardy's descriptive abilities are on constant display, with scenic rides through the country. There's much local Wessex color (Hardy's own quasi-mythical kingdom, where most of his novels are set) and a chorus of memorable townspeople, like a fellow whose theft of coins from the eyes of a corpse is excused thus: "Money is scarce, and throats get dry. Why should death rob life o' four pence?"

Death is omnipresent in "Mayor Of Casterbridge", but Hardy justifies the novel's gloomy tone with a memorably powerful, courageously bleak conclusion. "Casterbridge's" greatness lies at its two ends. In between, the story keeps your interest but keeps hitting the same notes, with some sketchy melodrama and improbable coincidences amid brighter moments. Hardy even gets maudlin with a dead goldfinch metaphor.

Most problematic of all is the absence of interest in the main characters beyond Henchard. Except for a jilted lover who forces her way back into Henchard's life with minxish self-possession, they are an entirely boring crew, existing only to be contrasted with Henchard's more forceful personality.

"Casterbridge" may leave you wishing you chose something else to read in a lighter vein, say "The Painted Bird" or "The Bell Jar". But it's worth reading for that same emotional toll, a reminder of life's harder truths that may leave you sad but perhaps a bit more conscious of the truth behind the line: "There but for the Grace of God go I."

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