Customer Reviews

The Mayor of Casterbridge

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

When Thomas Hardy penned The Mayor of Casterbridge, he brought to life a very authentic character in Michael Henchard. He is possibly the perfect tragic character. The only other character I can think of to compare him to as I struggle to describe him and the story - for he is so much the story - is King Lear. But where Lear was a King who was foolish, Michael is the common man, a simple hay trusser, with several character flaws ... most notably shortsightedness and a desire to "be on top". He at no point feels something that most people don't but where we restrain our first rash and selfish actions (most of the time), he goes full out until he has cost himself everything and too late finds redemption. His flaw is insidious and all too common, so we relate easily even through his most outrageous misadventures.

In a fit of drunken despondency, feeling that he is being pulled down by the responsibility of being a twenty-one year old husband and father, he jests that he would gladly part with his wife and daughter for the sum of five pounds. After having sworn this so vehemently for the entire evening, he has little recourse when someone takes him up on it and his wife, in shame and anger, agrees to go with the purchaser, taking their daughter with her. When sobriety brings full realization, it also brings a vow of temperance from Michael who in the following fifteen years builds himself up to a position respectability and public admiration in the nearby town of Casterbridge.

Though he seems to have learned his lesson, we are only on chapter two and his story is just beginning as his wife and child return and his friendship with a trusted friend and critical advisor becomes a bitter rivalry. Time and again he demands allegiance when he need only ask it and return it in kind.

Hardy's writing style is direct and straight-forward with no flourishes like you might find with Dickens or Twain. He has a story to tell and he tells it - no swashbuckling adventures like DeFoe or Dumas. However you feel about that, the character of Michael Henchard continues to skulk around in my head. He represents to me a very real possibility of personal failure and haunts my mind now just as Scrooge's deceased partner haunted him in A Christmas Carol. I would have given this book a fun factor of three stars when I first read it. Now I give it five stars because I have had the time to realize what a masterful job Hardy did when he created Michael Henchard.

Modern novels can be so pretentious, with their needless philosophizing and conscious experimentation with the language. So isn't nice to read a classic novel with straight-forward writing that aims for no insight into society or people? Actually no, it's kind of depressing. The Mayor of Casterbridge relies on coincidence, melodrama, and, as the afterword in my edition puts it, "the constant exploitation of chance happenings to determine situation and hence the fate of his characters." I chose this Hardy novel because it was supposed to be character-centered. The story starts with Michael Henchard selling his wife and child at a fair. I thought this book would examine his redemption, it would be a Lord Jim type tale of profound psychological insight. A strange event like that is a good way to get a book started, but the crazy, unlikely events just keep a-coming. You feel nothing for the characters, ever. You learn nothing in the end, except life is cruel and if something can go wrong, it will. Read something else.

I was nearly put off reading this by friends who termed it "depressing". This trivialises it, for it is, to my mind, truly tragic. In a shockingly irresponsible drunken act, protagonist Michael Henchard sells his wife at a local fair. The consequences, stretching over a couple of decades, sweep away both him and other characters.

The plot teems with journeys, coincidences, long-lost people showing up, and a strong vein of morality. In typical Hardyesque style, Henchard moves from the height of civic success to bankruptcy and alienation. A quasi-Greek-tragedy air of fate prevails, but Hardy manages to keep suspense alive. Protagonist and antagonist (Farfrae) are pitted against each other on civic and domestic fronts. There is not one Mayor of Casterbridge, but two, and success, failure and rivalry play a large part. There is also competition among the males as lovers, husbands and fathers.

This novel gives an insight into civic life, the worthy burgesses of Casterbridge networking in their council-rooms and taverns. But the animal instincts of the wife-sale, the gutter-press viciousness of the locals' "skimmity-ride", and the proximity of the countryside, where so many Victorian characters wander to survive and to lay bare their feelings, reveal the fragility of civilisation and our urban constructs.

Great stuff.

I had to read this book for my honors English class. The book will seem like worthless description if you don't look up biographical notes on Thomas Hardy. It has a great plot line but it is unfortunately chracterized by the bleak and gray atmosphere of Thomas Hardy. A great read.

I greatly enjoyed The Mayor of Casterbridge, not only for its clear and concise explanations, dialogue and emotional energy, but also for its themes. The loss of a wife, mother, daughter, love, husband, father and mentor are all carried off extremely well. I chose to read this book for a project I'm doing in my English class and although it was not my first choice, I do recommend it to anyone who loves English literature. I'm a big fan of Dickens and Hardy and truly loved this magnificent piece of work.

I'm re-reading this book that thrilled me years ago and thrills me today. Now, however, I realize just how "modern" it is, even more so than the works of Dickens, whom I also revere, but whose writing had a quaint quality that actually makes him the lesser artist, in my opinion. Hardy's writing is spare but nothing is left out. You feel it, you taste it, you live it. It has the firm, sure quality of a minimalist work of art, and yet the twists and turns of its plot are dizzying. I detect its influence on novelist Toni Morrison, I might add. I'd be willing to bet she's a Hardy scholar. I read many passages, many scenes, that reminded me of her "folksy" conceits. And I was amazed at Hardy's contemporary understanding of addiction, in this case alcoholism. In fact, Henchard is a "dry drunk." He abstains from liquor for 21 years, but his character defects and lack of spiritual awareness catapault him right back into his disease when he begins drinking again. In fact, his life spirals out of control faster and faster with his first return to drink, showing that alcoholism, like all addictions, is a progressive disease. A reviewer here said the book was depressing, and that Hardy is dark. However, the "light" in Hardy comes with his wisdom, not unlike Faulkner's, of human nature. There are so many themes of the enduring truths that one is uplifted just by the reading. Sometimes I mourn for the writers I will never meet, the ones who have passed on. Their teaching is so important to my own spiritual and artistic growth, that I have experienced a great love from them and for them. Hardy is one of those for me. Wherever he dwells now, I send him my appreciation.

One of my favorites works of English literature. The opening "wife selling" chapter is one of the best in all literate, setting the major tone and themes for the entire book. The ironic twits of fate provide a wild, entertaining ride that shows off Hardy's themes of the balance between fate and individual choice in a non-didactic way. The Mayor must be ranked as a tragic character in line with Shakespeare's best work. A work that makes profound psychological and philosophical statement while remaining engrossing on every level.

When one finisheds "Casterbridge," one is immediately struck by its place in the development of the novel. Hardy came after Dickens and before James, and his style intrigues as you connect parts of it to the former, parts to the latter.

His plotting is sort of Dickens "lite." There are mysterious benefactors, sudden tragic deaths, reversals of fortune, paternity mysteries, ect. His prose is cleaner and easier to read than both Dickens and James; "Casterbridge" scans better than "Bleak House" or "The Wings of the Dove."

The story begins when a pastoral laborer, in a drunken rage, sells his wife and child one evening. When he wakes the next morning, abhorred at what he has done, he swears off liquor and decides to make something of his life. The novel truly begins eighteen years later, when his wife and daughter come back to present themselves to him. In the course of the rest of the novel, we witness the fall of the now Mayor of Casterbridge, brought about by his own character flaws and the interventions of fate.

Henchard, the main character, is a facinating combination of hot-spirited volition and turn-on-a-dime repentance. He is quick to do things which damn him but just as quick to admit his guilt. He is a wonderful character and a precursor to the later "psychological" novels of James and Forster. The satellite characters remind one of Dickens, but they are not nearly as startling and interesting, but of course, a character such as Henchard never existed in all of Dickens.

The novel proceeds to its forgone conclusion inexorably, albiet with a few melodromatic touches, yet it sustains its tone and readibility due mostly to Henchard, and the dramatic situations Hardy puts him through.

Well worth a look.

This story STILL haunts me since first reading it in college, 20 years ago. It is about a man so destitute and desperate he sells his wife and baby daughter. Unburdeoned, his pockets full, he goes off to seek his fame and fortune. Though he becomes the wealthy and much-respected Mayor of Casterbridge, he is unable to escape the horror of what he has done. Everything he has built threatens to unravel when his dying wife shows up, almost-grown daughter in tow, seeking a guardian for her child. So well written, so cativating, it is like the making of a braid, every page woven together neatly, to a grand and shocking finale. This book turned me into a Hardy fan.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is undoubtedly one of the finest novels of the Victorian Era - quite a tribute given that the period produced a countless number of classics. The conflict between Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae reflects a clash between tradition and modernity. This dichotomy is perhaps best encapsulated in their contrasting styles of record keeping; Henchard relies entirely on intuition and memory while Farfrae maintains extraordinarily meticulous accounts of all his transactions. Furthermore the struggle between Farfrae and Henchard reflects a conflict of vastly different temperaments. Henchard proves to be of a passionate temperament while Farfrae is rational and levelheaded. For instance, despite his modest means and limited experience, Farfrae boldly ventures into agricultural trading and through a series of shrewd bets manages to unseat Henchard as Casterbridge's preeminent merchant. In order to regain his erstwhile position, Henchard engages in rash and seemingly desperate speculation - in contrast to the prudent risk taking of Farfrae - that ultimately culminates in his ruin.

While some AP students have chastised Henchard for his inability to overcome his animalistic nature, the more astute reader realizes that his inveterate character serves to illustrate a basic theme of most Hardy novels - the philosophy of determinism. The rise and fall of Henchard illustrates the unpleasant reality that one's life is subject to forces beyond one's control - in Henchard's case a deeply flawed character - and these forces often overwhelm the power of one's determination and ambition. This doctrine is certainly anathema to 21st century Americans who firmly believe in the concept of free will and a future holding great promise. While constantly lamenting one's ill fate is self-defeating, it would be naive to entirely disregard the power of destiny to shape one's life for worse as powerfully shown in the tragic tale of the Mayor of Casterbridge.