Critical+Essay+excerpt+on+Casterbridge

From "The Mayor of Casterbridge: Whom the Goddess is Stalking," by Omote Masayuki, Indiana Univ. at Kokomo
(orig. published in the //Thomas Hardy Journal of Japan//)

If the “Greek tragedy appropriate for his own time” had been designed for //The Mayor of Casterbridge//, it could well be said that Hardy had aimed at the dramatic effect of Henchard’s impressing us as a prey to “Fate.” As one supposed result, we could easily be deceived that his tragedy is decreed by the powers above him. The mistaken belief will be all the firmer in that we are apt to perceive not Providence, but Fate who is arbitrary and pagan, on the strength of Hardy’s recurrent and exclusive references to the names of the Old Testament in the novel, such as Cain, Job, Saul, etc. As another, we could often hear Henchard making heroic remarks, like King Lear’s, such as “I — Cain — go alone as I deserve — an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!” (269) and consequently it could strike us that, of all the characters, only Henchard is fighting against the Weird [Fate].

As a matter of fact, between the supposed effects and Hardy’s scorn for the “machinery” and “unlikely beings,” the dichotomy often does not cause most readers to labor under the haunting impression that “Fate” plays a critical role in Henchard’s ruination so much as to suspect Hardy of some particular design lurking behind the texture woven out of the variegated fatalism. Thereupon, I will examine three passages referring to Henchard’s history that disprove the sovereignty of “Fate” over the vicissitudes of his life.

First of all, Hardy expressed utter disbelief in the variegated fatalism by writing that rule by “Fate” is not an infallible fact but Henchard’s false imagination. This occurs in the scene in which Henchard identifies himself as Elizabeth-Jane’s own father, and afterwards reads his late wife’s letter, saying that Elizabeth-Jane is not his own flesh and blood. Then Hardy wrote, “Henchard, like all his kind, was superstitious, and he //could not help thinking// that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him” (emphases added), immediately after which the author refuted Henchard’s thinking conclusively:


 * Yet they [events this evening] had developed naturally. (123)**

In this way Hardy denied the existence of what his hero believes in. It is no exaggeration to say that his very negation conveys indisputably the probability that he was utilizing fatalism and “Fate” differently from their original and innate purpose.

Secondly, the following passage reveals that the variegated fatalism is far from what it seems to be. In other words, Hardy drew a line between the mentality of his Victorian contemporaries and that of the people in the 1850s, and that this line of demarcation serves to expose divine intervention as ostensible.


 * The people, too, who were not farmers, the rural multitude, saw in the god of the weather a more important personage than they do now. [. . .] That aspect of the sky which they [the peasantry] now regard as disagreeable they then beheld as maleficent. (169)**

As this passage indicates, Hardy as a Victorian disclaims the fatalism of the 1850s, by intentionally keeping it at a distance. It can be safely said that his detachment is a material evidence of //raison d’être// of “Gods.” “Gods” are introduced not to present a presiding being, but to represent a mere semblance of it.

Finally, there is more in the following passage than meets the eye, because the unsubstantial fatalism is intended to mislead readers. Through divine embellishment, Hardy contrived to make Henchard out to be at the mercy of “Fate.” It is a passage that appears when Henchard loses money because of his breakneck transactions of corn:


 * From that day and hour it was clear that there was not to be so successful an ingathering after all. [. . .] At this turn of the scales he [Henchard] remained silent. //The movement of his mind seemed to tend to the thought// that some power was working against him. (emphases added) (173-4)**

The sentence beginning with the Italics not merely //seems// fatalistic but also is misleading enough to make us believe Henchard gets sacrificed on the altar of “Fate.” Now by using the verb “seemed,” Hardy ceased to be omniscient without any notice, and refused to make clear whether he shared Henchard’s fatalistic thought. Unexpectedly, this ambiguous attitude of his will add a finishing stroke to affecting to leave Henchard to the mercies of “Fate.”

What with Hardy’s negation, disclaim and ambiguity, there is no help for it but to notice his particular design in the texture. Here at this point, it is true that question marks remain over what his real intention is; but I can say safely enough that, even if Henchard appears to meet his fate at the very last, “Fate” proves to be not a veritable being but the intentionally misleading product of Henchard’s and his contemporaries’ imagining.