If someone overheard the plot of Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth-century novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, they would probably say something like, “well, that is karma for you.” They would hear of Michael Henchard’s cruel treatment toward women and his eventual demise and assume that he got what he deserved. If the same person carefully read Hardy’s novel, though, and saw Henchard’s eventual remorse, regret, and misery, their reaction would be more complicated and perhaps ambivalent. In essence, the closer one reads Hardy’s novel, the fuzzier its moral becomes. A number of mid-twentieth-century scholars practicing what they called “feminist critique” argued that novels such as this reinforce repressive views and images of women. Hardy’s novel does reproduce oppressive views of women, but only half-heartedly condemns their oppressor. The Mayor of Casterbridge may intend to give ill-used women of the time a voice, yet inadvertently takes it away in its closing pages.
Michael Henchard’s behavior is appalling at the novel’s start. Overserving himself one night at dinner with his wife Susan and their daughter Elizabeth-Jane, he does the unthinkable. Standing up to a group of strangers, he announces that he will “sell [his wife] for five guineas to any man that will pay [him] the money and treat her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear [from Henchard]” (Hardy, 2008, p. 16). The reader discovers that this is not the first time his wife has received such a threat. Henchard proceeds to kill two birds with one stone, happily giving up his wife and daughter to the same auctioneer. The five guineas he receives for his helpless family members equate to about seven hundred dollars today. He wakes up physically and morally hungover upon realizing the severity of his actions. Still, his ego derails the search effort he attempts to conduct for the two. “The truth was a certain shyness of revealing his conduct prevented Michael Henchard from following up the investigation with the loud hue-and cry such a pursuit demanded to render it effectual” (Hardy, 2008, p. 23). Here, the reader sees that even after doing something as inhumane as selling his own family, the thought of publicly humiliating himself is worse to Henchard than the thought of losing them to a stranger. Privately, Henchard expresses remorse, vowing to abstain from alcohol for the next twenty-one years. The work initially depicts Henchard as an abominable husband and father.
The book reintroduces Susan and Henchard after eighteen years, and the reader perceives how differently time has affected the two. Though presumably under the age of fifty, as her husband was twenty-one at the novel’s start, Susan is already dying. Her daughter, the second Elizabeth-Jane that Susan mothers after her first baby dies, sees that “her mother’s health was not what it had once been…she would not be very sorry to quit a life she was growing thoroughly weary of” (Hardy, 2008, p. 33). After being sold by one man and purchased by another just to mourn the death of her child and second husband, it is no surprise to the reader that Susan is losing her will to live. Her declining health highlights the toll taken on the lives of powerless women of that time. While Susan suffered, Henchard thrived. With no familial obligations, his only focus was himself. The young man moved to a town called Casterbridge, earned himself a fortune, and was eventually elected mayor. Though eighteen years changed his outer appearance, the text suggests that internally, he stayed the same. “There was a temper under the thin bland surface- the temper which, artificially intensified, had banished a wife nearly a score of years before” (Hardy, 2008, p. 43). Henchard’s success highlights male liberty of the time and contrasts female subjugation and misery.
Believing word that her second husband died at sea, Susan is unable to support her daughter alone. In Mary Childers’ article “Thomas Hardy, The Man Who ‘Liked’ Women,” she says that “The situation of women makes them appropriate representations of a powerlessness,” a quality portrayed in Susan (Childers, 1981, 333). The helpless woman becomes desperate enough to seek out her first husband, despite his cruelty towards her, in hopes that he will take care of her daughter after her approaching death. When the two meet, though, Susan proves to have a trick or two up her ragged sleeve. She introduces Elizabeth to Henchard as his daughter, knowing that the egotistical man will never question that she is his own. When the two make amends, rather than viewing their rekindling with gratitude or relief, Henchard sees himself as “lowering of his dignity in public opinion by marrying a comparatively humble woman” (Hardy, 2008, p. 94). In his second marriage to Susan, he treats the ill-used woman kindly, except in his “moments of irritation” with her (Hardy, 2008, p. 131). Had he been genuinely remorseful, Henchard would have put Susan on a pedestal, never uttering a harsh word to her again, but that is not the case. On Susan’s dying day, rather than mourning the woman’s early demise, Henchard rejoices that “Elizabeth was his at last” (Hardy, 2008, p. 140). Such details as these are clues to the reader that despite his effort, Henchard has not truly changed. Though he keeps his vow of sobriety for twenty-one years, he makes no such promise for life, indicating that sooner or later, he will go back to his old ways. Henchard’s selfishness may be subdued, but it is far from gone.
Susan is not the only woman that Henchard mistreats. This is no surprise to Hardy’s readers, as Henchard refers to himself as “something of a woman-hater” while speaking to a friend (Hardy, 2008, p. 88). Though he dotes on his Elizabeth while believing that she is his daughter, after finding a note left behind from Susan for him to open on Elizabeth’s wedding day, his sentiments change. Henchard prematurely learns that his child died long ago, and makes his stepdaughter suffer for it. Finding problems with any of her actions, a gesture as mundane as Elizabeth bringing food to Henchard’s staff puts her under his attack. At this, “Elizabeth shrank so visibly at the exclamation that he became sorry a few minutes after” (Hardy, 2008, p. 147). Through Henchard’s extreme anger and later regret, it becomes clear time and time again that he only sees the repercussions of his actions after they have done their damage. As time went on, living with Henchard became so “unbearable” that the now-orphan would rather live under any roof than his (Hardy, 2008, p. 155). Though this time Henchard does not sell his family member to a stranger, he does encourage her to go live with one, only regretting the decision after it is far too late to be undone.
Ironically, the stranger that Elizabeth moves in with is yet another woman that Henchard wrongs. Lucetta Templeman meets Henchard before he remarries his wife. After the two stay at the same lodge and Henchard falls sick, Lucetta nurses him back to health, falling in love with him all the while. Henchard says that “she got to have a foolish liking for me,” and eventually, “There arose a scandal, which did me no harm, but was of course ruin to her” (Hardy, 2008, p. 89). In essence, their affair ruined the woman’s reputation but left Henchard unscathed. He explains to his friend Donald Farfrae that “she suffered much on my account, and didn’t forget to tell me so in letters one after another; till, latterly I felt I owed her something” (Hardy, 2008, p. 89). Again, Henchard feels no guilt for tarnishing Lucetta’s reputation, one of the essential assets of the life of a woman of the times, until she repeatedly explains the severity of it to him. He vows to marry her out of guilt until Susan returns into his life, and he leaves Lucetta to fend for herself. Lucetta’s luck changes, and after inheriting her aunt’s money and taking up a new name, she moves to Casterbridge to win over the widower once and for all. Through Lucetta, the work highlights what kind of treatment women of the time were willing and even excited to tolerate from men.
When Lucetta settles into Casterbridge though, the tides between her and Henchard change. Meeting Donald Farfrae, Henchard’s friend turned enemy, her feelings toward Henchard falter. Coming to visit her one day, he is shocked to see her sudden coldness towards him. He finds himself feeling lesser than the woman he had “hitherto been dreaming of as almost his property” (Hardy, 2008, p. 195). Upon realizing that Lucetta’s heart belonged to Farfrae, his rival in business and life, Henchard resorts to blackmail.
Henchard’s actions towards Lucetta become more than she can handle. Knowing she has no desire to marry him, Henchard plays the only card he has left. He tells her that “unless you give me your promise this very night to be my wife, before a witness, I’ll reveal our intimacy” (Hardy, 2008, p. 218). At this, Lucetta “fell back in a fainting state” with “her limbs hanging like flails, from very misery and faintness” (Hardy, 2008, p. 219). This shows the reader that Henchard is not motivated by love or affection, but rather by jealousy and control. He pays no mind to the toll he takes on the woman, only thinking of himself. Lucetta accepts Henchard’s promise, but the reader soon sees that she too has a trick up her luxurious, handmade sleeve. Having secretly married Farfrae before Henchard’s proposition, Henchard realizes the “property” he sought would never be his. Though he too married another when Lucetta longed for his heart, when the roles reverse, he is not nearly as accepting. Saying to Lucetta, “I’ve a mind to punish you as you deserve,” Henchard seeks retaliation (Hardy, 2008, p. 234). Going to her husband’s home, he reads him the love letters Lucetta once sent him without giving away her name. Hearing from upstairs, “Her own words greeted her in Henchard’s voice, like spirits from the grave” (Hardy, 2008, p. 273). Though Henchard plans to tell Farfrae that the words are from his wife, he backs down, realizing this could cause her ruin.
Unfortunately for Lucetta, though, Henchard concedes too late. To get her love letters back from Henchard, Lucetta “decided to employ persuasion…It seemed the only practicable weapon left her as a woman” (Hardy, 2008, p. 275). From this, the reader can see the work reiterating the fact that women of the time had little agency. The two meet, and Henchard realizes how cruelly he behaved towards her, vowing to give her the letters back. Unaware of his recent dislike for Lucetta, Henchard sends Joshua Jopp to deliver her the letters in hopes of staying out of her way. Before delivering them though, Jopp discloses their contents to a group of women who suggest they publicize their former relationship as an expression of disapproval of adultery. Just as Lucetta is relieved, finally believing her secret has been put away for good, she finds that life-size figures of Henchard and herself are parading around the town. The threat alone of her secret’s publication made her faint, but its release takes much worse of a toll on the recently pregnant young woman. “Lucetta, whose death in such fullness of life and amid such cheerful hopes of maternity was appallingly unexpected” (Hardy, 2008, p. 319). Hearing Henchard read her letter’s contents to her husband greeted like spirits from the grave, but hearing that the whole town knew of her past put her in one.
Henchard’s life begins to take a downward spiral. Though he never intended for their affair to become public knowledge, he knows that his choice to toy with the letters is what caused Lucetta’s and her unborn child’s demise. Though he was formerly prosperous and adored throughout Casterbridge, he suddenly finds himself broke and even detested among the community. As things begin to look down for the remorseless misogynist, it seems as though the novel will come to an unsurprising close. In her article, Mary Childers says that Thomas Hardy “was indeed appalled at the economic and social injustices suffered by women historically” (Childers, 1981, p. 320). At this point in the novel, Thomas Hardy’s feelings seem to correlate with his novel’s plot. Caring so much about women, it seems probable that he will unapologetically punish the character who wronged so many. Towards the novel’s final pages, though, Hardy throws his readers for a loop.
After wronging far too many people, Henchard attempts to turn a new leaf. One day, as his daughter in law sleeps in his home, her birth father comes to Henchard’s door looking for her. Henchard, surprised that the man is even alive and worried his reappearance would take the one person he comes to love away from him, tells her father that his child is dead. Eventually, though, her father finds out the truth and returns to Casterbridge to rekindle their relationship. Henchard urges Elizabeth to meet with him after he sends her an anonymous note. Though previously Henchard might have urged her against this meeting, it becomes apparent to the reader that “he was not now the Henchard of former days” (Hardy, 2008, p. 354). Knowing that hiding such a secret from her is unforgivable, Henchard tells Elizabeth that he will be departing from town. As he solemnly leaves Casterbridge and Elizabeth, the only light in his dark life, “Henchard formed at this moment much the same picture as he had presented when entering Casterbridge… except…the serious addition to his years had considerably lessened the spring of his stride, that his state of hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders, as weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend” (Hardy, 2008, p. 344). Though his moroseness is the result of his actions, the picture Hardy paints of him leaving so much weaker and dejected than he once was has the effect of making him seem changed.
Henchard’s death leaves the reader with an unclear message. In R. Schweik’s article “Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge,” he says that “Hardy strenuously insisted that both as a novelist and as a poet he dealt with ‘impressions’ and made no attempt at complete consistency” (Schweik, 1966, pp. 249-250). Henchard’s last words, in comparison with how he spoke throughout the novel, are anything but consistent with his character and have a way of proving Hardy’s point. Dying a slow and lonely death after leaving Casterbridge, Henchard asks in his will, “That Elizabeth- Jane Farfrae be not told of [his] death, or made to grieve on account of [him]. & that [he] be not bury’d in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that nobody is wished to see [his] dead body.& that no flours be planted on [his] grave.& that no man remember [him]” (Hardy, 2008, pp. 365-366). In essence, after regularly taking from others in life, he asks for nothing in death. Though Henchard can never atone for his many sins, the selflessness evoked in the words of his will suggest his sincere regret. Elizabeth, one of Hardy’s most trustworthy characters in the novel, has an “independent knowledge that the man who wrote them meant what he said” (Hardy, 2008, p. 366). As many readers grow attached to the level headed girl throughout Hardy’s pages, her pity for her stepfather likely makes his readers think. Was his lonely death an act of karma, or was it undeserved?
The novel’s relationship between character and fate seems to evolve throughout its pages. The work references a poet, author, and philosopher in its earlier pages: “Character is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae’s character was just the reverse of Henchard’s” (Hardy, 2008, p. 129). For some time, this reference aligns with the book’ s plot. The more Henchard torments others, the less popular and successful he becomes; while as Farfrae acts righteously, his prosperity rapidly increases. In Henchard’s will, though, it becomes clear that his dying wish is to be forgotten so that his stepdaughter may live happily, seeming to change how he is viewed. R. Schweik finds that “Hardy seems intent on reversing the fable-like correspondence between character and fate which figures so conspicuously in the first half of the novel” (Schweik, 1966, p. 260). So, upon closing Hardy’s work, one might find themselves questioning what karma is.
Though at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, a close reader might view his character Michael Henchard with hatred, by the end of the work, they might feel some pity for him too. One can understand why mid-twentieth-century scholars practicing “feminist critique” argued that the work reinforces repressive views of women, as the misogynist in the novel is not depicted as purely evil. R Schweik says that “Hardy’s treatment of Henchard’s character implies his continued respect for an older, prescientific conception of man’s dignity and worth as a moral agent, and the conclusion of the novel seems to be as much an affirmation of faith in the transcendent worth of the human person as it is an acknowledgment of man’s precarious situation in a blind and uncertain universe,” (Schweik, 1966, p. 262). So although it is clear that Hardy punishes his protagonist for his treatment toward Susan, Lucetta, Elizabeth- Jane, and many more, by the end of the novel, one might suspect that he sympathized with him too. The Mayor of Casterbridge may intend to give ill-used women of the time a voice, yet inadvertently takes it away in its closing pages.
Childers, M. (1981). Thomas Hardy, The Man Who “Liked” Women. Criticism, 23(4), 317-334. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23105071.
Hardy, T. (2008). The mayor of Casterbridge. New York: Penguin.
Schweik, R. (1966). Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21(3), 249-262. doi:10.2307/2932588.
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Hilltopics 
If someone overheard the plot of Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth-century novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, they would probably say something like, “well, that is karma for you.” They would hear of Michael Henchard’s cruel treatment toward women and his eventual demise and assume that he got what he deserved. If the same person carefully read Hardy’s novel, though, and saw Henchard’s eventual remorse, regret, and misery, their reaction would be more complicated and perhaps ambivalent. In essence, the closer one reads Hardy’s novel, the fuzzier its moral becomes. A number of mid-twentieth-century scholars practicing what they called “feminist critique” argued that novels such as this reinforce repressive views and images of women. Hardy’s novel does reproduce oppressive views of women, but only half-heartedly condemns their oppressor. The Mayor of Casterbridge may intend to give ill-used women of the time a voice, yet inadvertently takes it away in its closing pages.
Michael Henchard’s behavior is appalling at the novel’s start. Overserving himself one night at dinner with his wife Susan and their daughter Elizabeth-Jane, he does the unthinkable. Standing up to a group of strangers, he announces that he will “sell [his wife] for five guineas to any man that will pay [him] the money and treat her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear [from Henchard]” (Hardy, 2008, p. 16). The reader discovers that this is not the first time his wife has received such a threat. Henchard proceeds to kill two birds with one stone, happily giving up his wife and daughter to the same auctioneer. The five guineas he receives for his helpless family members equate to about seven hundred dollars today. He wakes up physically and morally hungover upon realizing the severity of his actions. Still, his ego derails the search effort he attempts to conduct for the two. “The truth was a certain shyness of revealing his conduct prevented Michael Henchard from following up the investigation with the loud hue-and cry such a pursuit demanded to render it effectual” (Hardy, 2008, p. 23). Here, the reader sees that even after doing something as inhumane as selling his own family, the thought of publicly humiliating himself is worse to Henchard than the thought of losing them to a stranger. Privately, Henchard expresses remorse, vowing to abstain from alcohol for the next twenty-one years. The work initially depicts Henchard as an abominable husband and father.
The book reintroduces Susan and Henchard after eighteen years, and the reader perceives how differently time has affected the two. Though presumably under the age of fifty, as her husband was twenty-one at the novel’s start, Susan is already dying. Her daughter, the second Elizabeth-Jane that Susan mothers after her first baby dies, sees that “her mother’s health was not what it had once been…she would not be very sorry to quit a life she was growing thoroughly weary of” (Hardy, 2008, p. 33). After being sold by one man and purchased by another just to mourn the death of her child and second husband, it is no surprise to the reader that Susan is losing her will to live. Her declining health highlights the toll taken on the lives of powerless women of that time. While Susan suffered, Henchard thrived. With no familial obligations, his only focus was himself. The young man moved to a town called Casterbridge, earned himself a fortune, and was eventually elected mayor. Though eighteen years changed his outer appearance, the text suggests that internally, he stayed the same. “There was a temper under the thin bland surface- the temper which, artificially intensified, had banished a wife nearly a score of years before” (Hardy, 2008, p. 43). Henchard’s success highlights male liberty of the time and contrasts female subjugation and misery.
Believing word that her second husband died at sea, Susan is unable to support her daughter alone. In Mary Childers’ article “Thomas Hardy, The Man Who ‘Liked’ Women,” she says that “The situation of women makes them appropriate representations of a powerlessness,” a quality portrayed in Susan (Childers, 1981, 333). The helpless woman becomes desperate enough to seek out her first husband, despite his cruelty towards her, in hopes that he will take care of her daughter after her approaching death. When the two meet, though, Susan proves to have a trick or two up her ragged sleeve. She introduces Elizabeth to Henchard as his daughter, knowing that the egotistical man will never question that she is his own. When the two make amends, rather than viewing their rekindling with gratitude or relief, Henchard sees himself as “lowering of his dignity in public opinion by marrying a comparatively humble woman” (Hardy, 2008, p. 94). In his second marriage to Susan, he treats the ill-used woman kindly, except in his “moments of irritation” with her (Hardy, 2008, p. 131). Had he been genuinely remorseful, Henchard would have put Susan on a pedestal, never uttering a harsh word to her again, but that is not the case. On Susan’s dying day, rather than mourning the woman’s early demise, Henchard rejoices that “Elizabeth was his at last” (Hardy, 2008, p. 140). Such details as these are clues to the reader that despite his effort, Henchard has not truly changed. Though he keeps his vow of sobriety for twenty-one years, he makes no such promise for life, indicating that sooner or later, he will go back to his old ways. Henchard’s selfishness may be subdued, but it is far from gone.
Susan is not the only woman that Henchard mistreats. This is no surprise to Hardy’s readers, as Henchard refers to himself as “something of a woman-hater” while speaking to a friend (Hardy, 2008, p. 88). Though he dotes on his Elizabeth while believing that she is his daughter, after finding a note left behind from Susan for him to open on Elizabeth’s wedding day, his sentiments change. Henchard prematurely learns that his child died long ago, and makes his stepdaughter suffer for it. Finding problems with any of her actions, a gesture as mundane as Elizabeth bringing food to Henchard’s staff puts her under his attack. At this, “Elizabeth shrank so visibly at the exclamation that he became sorry a few minutes after” (Hardy, 2008, p. 147). Through Henchard’s extreme anger and later regret, it becomes clear time and time again that he only sees the repercussions of his actions after they have done their damage. As time went on, living with Henchard became so “unbearable” that the now-orphan would rather live under any roof than his (Hardy, 2008, p. 155). Though this time Henchard does not sell his family member to a stranger, he does encourage her to go live with one, only regretting the decision after it is far too late to be undone.
Ironically, the stranger that Elizabeth moves in with is yet another woman that Henchard wrongs. Lucetta Templeman meets Henchard before he remarries his wife. After the two stay at the same lodge and Henchard falls sick, Lucetta nurses him back to health, falling in love with him all the while. Henchard says that “she got to have a foolish liking for me,” and eventually, “There arose a scandal, which did me no harm, but was of course ruin to her” (Hardy, 2008, p. 89). In essence, their affair ruined the woman’s reputation but left Henchard unscathed. He explains to his friend Donald Farfrae that “she suffered much on my account, and didn’t forget to tell me so in letters one after another; till, latterly I felt I owed her something” (Hardy, 2008, p. 89). Again, Henchard feels no guilt for tarnishing Lucetta’s reputation, one of the essential assets of the life of a woman of the times, until she repeatedly explains the severity of it to him. He vows to marry her out of guilt until Susan returns into his life, and he leaves Lucetta to fend for herself. Lucetta’s luck changes, and after inheriting her aunt’s money and taking up a new name, she moves to Casterbridge to win over the widower once and for all. Through Lucetta, the work highlights what kind of treatment women of the time were willing and even excited to tolerate from men.
When Lucetta settles into Casterbridge though, the tides between her and Henchard change. Meeting Donald Farfrae, Henchard’s friend turned enemy, her feelings toward Henchard falter. Coming to visit her one day, he is shocked to see her sudden coldness towards him. He finds himself feeling lesser than the woman he had “hitherto been dreaming of as almost his property” (Hardy, 2008, p. 195). Upon realizing that Lucetta’s heart belonged to Farfrae, his rival in business and life, Henchard resorts to blackmail.
Henchard’s actions towards Lucetta become more than she can handle. Knowing she has no desire to marry him, Henchard plays the only card he has left. He tells her that “unless you give me your promise this very night to be my wife, before a witness, I’ll reveal our intimacy” (Hardy, 2008, p. 218). At this, Lucetta “fell back in a fainting state” with “her limbs hanging like flails, from very misery and faintness” (Hardy, 2008, p. 219). This shows the reader that Henchard is not motivated by love or affection, but rather by jealousy and control. He pays no mind to the toll he takes on the woman, only thinking of himself. Lucetta accepts Henchard’s promise, but the reader soon sees that she too has a trick up her luxurious, handmade sleeve. Having secretly married Farfrae before Henchard’s proposition, Henchard realizes the “property” he sought would never be his. Though he too married another when Lucetta longed for his heart, when the roles reverse, he is not nearly as accepting. Saying to Lucetta, “I’ve a mind to punish you as you deserve,” Henchard seeks retaliation (Hardy, 2008, p. 234). Going to her husband’s home, he reads him the love letters Lucetta once sent him without giving away her name. Hearing from upstairs, “Her own words greeted her in Henchard’s voice, like spirits from the grave” (Hardy, 2008, p. 273). Though Henchard plans to tell Farfrae that the words are from his wife, he backs down, realizing this could cause her ruin.
Unfortunately for Lucetta, though, Henchard concedes too late. To get her love letters back from Henchard, Lucetta “decided to employ persuasion…It seemed the only practicable weapon left her as a woman” (Hardy, 2008, p. 275). From this, the reader can see the work reiterating the fact that women of the time had little agency. The two meet, and Henchard realizes how cruelly he behaved towards her, vowing to give her the letters back. Unaware of his recent dislike for Lucetta, Henchard sends Joshua Jopp to deliver her the letters in hopes of staying out of her way. Before delivering them though, Jopp discloses their contents to a group of women who suggest they publicize their former relationship as an expression of disapproval of adultery. Just as Lucetta is relieved, finally believing her secret has been put away for good, she finds that life-size figures of Henchard and herself are parading around the town. The threat alone of her secret’s publication made her faint, but its release takes much worse of a toll on the recently pregnant young woman. “Lucetta, whose death in such fullness of life and amid such cheerful hopes of maternity was appallingly unexpected” (Hardy, 2008, p. 319). Hearing Henchard read her letter’s contents to her husband greeted like spirits from the grave, but hearing that the whole town knew of her past put her in one.
Henchard’s life begins to take a downward spiral. Though he never intended for their affair to become public knowledge, he knows that his choice to toy with the letters is what caused Lucetta’s and her unborn child’s demise. Though he was formerly prosperous and adored throughout Casterbridge, he suddenly finds himself broke and even detested among the community. As things begin to look down for the remorseless misogynist, it seems as though the novel will come to an unsurprising close. In her article, Mary Childers says that Thomas Hardy “was indeed appalled at the economic and social injustices suffered by women historically” (Childers, 1981, p. 320). At this point in the novel, Thomas Hardy’s feelings seem to correlate with his novel’s plot. Caring so much about women, it seems probable that he will unapologetically punish the character who wronged so many. Towards the novel’s final pages, though, Hardy throws his readers for a loop.
After wronging far too many people, Henchard attempts to turn a new leaf. One day, as his daughter in law sleeps in his home, her birth father comes to Henchard’s door looking for her. Henchard, surprised that the man is even alive and worried his reappearance would take the one person he comes to love away from him, tells her father that his child is dead. Eventually, though, her father finds out the truth and returns to Casterbridge to rekindle their relationship. Henchard urges Elizabeth to meet with him after he sends her an anonymous note. Though previously Henchard might have urged her against this meeting, it becomes apparent to the reader that “he was not now the Henchard of former days” (Hardy, 2008, p. 354). Knowing that hiding such a secret from her is unforgivable, Henchard tells Elizabeth that he will be departing from town. As he solemnly leaves Casterbridge and Elizabeth, the only light in his dark life, “Henchard formed at this moment much the same picture as he had presented when entering Casterbridge… except…the serious addition to his years had considerably lessened the spring of his stride, that his state of hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders, as weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend” (Hardy, 2008, p. 344). Though his moroseness is the result of his actions, the picture Hardy paints of him leaving so much weaker and dejected than he once was has the effect of making him seem changed.
Henchard’s death leaves the reader with an unclear message. In R. Schweik’s article “Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge,” he says that “Hardy strenuously insisted that both as a novelist and as a poet he dealt with ‘impressions’ and made no attempt at complete consistency” (Schweik, 1966, pp. 249-250). Henchard’s last words, in comparison with how he spoke throughout the novel, are anything but consistent with his character and have a way of proving Hardy’s point. Dying a slow and lonely death after leaving Casterbridge, Henchard asks in his will, “That Elizabeth- Jane Farfrae be not told of [his] death, or made to grieve on account of [him]. & that [he] be not bury’d in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that nobody is wished to see [his] dead body.& that no flours be planted on [his] grave.& that no man remember [him]” (Hardy, 2008, pp. 365-366). In essence, after regularly taking from others in life, he asks for nothing in death. Though Henchard can never atone for his many sins, the selflessness evoked in the words of his will suggest his sincere regret. Elizabeth, one of Hardy’s most trustworthy characters in the novel, has an “independent knowledge that the man who wrote them meant what he said” (Hardy, 2008, p. 366). As many readers grow attached to the level headed girl throughout Hardy’s pages, her pity for her stepfather likely makes his readers think. Was his lonely death an act of karma, or was it undeserved?
The novel’s relationship between character and fate seems to evolve throughout its pages. The work references a poet, author, and philosopher in its earlier pages: “Character is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae’s character was just the reverse of Henchard’s” (Hardy, 2008, p. 129). For some time, this reference aligns with the book’ s plot. The more Henchard torments others, the less popular and successful he becomes; while as Farfrae acts righteously, his prosperity rapidly increases. In Henchard’s will, though, it becomes clear that his dying wish is to be forgotten so that his stepdaughter may live happily, seeming to change how he is viewed. R. Schweik finds that “Hardy seems intent on reversing the fable-like correspondence between character and fate which figures so conspicuously in the first half of the novel” (Schweik, 1966, p. 260). So, upon closing Hardy’s work, one might find themselves questioning what karma is.
Though at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, a close reader might view his character Michael Henchard with hatred, by the end of the work, they might feel some pity for him too. One can understand why mid-twentieth-century scholars practicing “feminist critique” argued that the work reinforces repressive views of women, as the misogynist in the novel is not depicted as purely evil. R Schweik says that “Hardy’s treatment of Henchard’s character implies his continued respect for an older, prescientific conception of man’s dignity and worth as a moral agent, and the conclusion of the novel seems to be as much an affirmation of faith in the transcendent worth of the human person as it is an acknowledgment of man’s precarious situation in a blind and uncertain universe,” (Schweik, 1966, p. 262). So although it is clear that Hardy punishes his protagonist for his treatment toward Susan, Lucetta, Elizabeth- Jane, and many more, by the end of the novel, one might suspect that he sympathized with him too. The Mayor of Casterbridge may intend to give ill-used women of the time a voice, yet inadvertently takes it away in its closing pages.
Childers, M. (1981). Thomas Hardy, The Man Who “Liked” Women. Criticism, 23(4), 317-334. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23105071.
Hardy, T. (2008). The mayor of Casterbridge. New York: Penguin.
Schweik, R. (1966). Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21(3), 249-262. doi:10.2307/2932588.
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