The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy.

The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character
Thomas Hardy
New York: The Pocket Library. 1886/1956.

Why read it? Twenty years ago, when I was an English supervisor in a K-12 school district, a parent asked me, "Why is all the literature we read in English so depressing?" She might have been talking about this novel, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. A man gets drunk at a fair and sells his wife and daughter to another man. He repents. But he cannot overcome the consequences of his evil act.

This novel is about a negative view of life. If someone had drawn a cartoon about it, it would have been Charles Schultz, whose cartoon character Charlie Brown in Peanuts is a born loser. Why read it? To help us understand losers and the effects of losing. For some of us, to help understand ourselves.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is a novel and a mood piece. The mood is of futility, irony and despair, that sees life as primarily tragic, punctuated by occasional moments of happiness. Character is fate. Our mistakes in the past strike back at us in the present. Life is not to be lived, but to be endured. A mood of pessimism. Vengeance might be the theme of the novel, that vengeance that seeks us out and punishes us for our actions in the past. The wheel of fortune, from being poor, to achieving wealth, back to destitute poverty in both physical circumstances and mind.

While this novel might almost seem to be a negative caricature of life, its picture of life seems to accord with my own--that life is a series of humiliations, a series of mistakes, with only a few moments of achievement, happiness, serenity and gaiety to break up the general mood of despondence.

The novel might almost be a "How-to" on enduring life. The novel is a vision of life as acceptance of continual disappointment. Of life as being crushed by fate, which seeks people out for destruction. The character of Michael Henchard is of a man who tries to right himself, but who, in trying to right himself, actually creates the conditions for his own self-destruction. In trying to deal with his guilt, he is actually seeking his self-destruction. He is guilty and he needs to be destroyed for it. He know this and he tries, unconsciously, to bring destruction upon himself.

But his destruction is not all of Henchard's doing. Things happen to him, things that he can't control. His wife comes back. He does not know that Elizabeth-Jane is not his own daughter, that his own daughter has died, that she is the daughter of the man to whom he sold his wife and daughter. He is the victim of misunderstanding between him and his step-daughter. They are not able to communicate their understanding of the situation in which their relationship has fallen apart. [The Return of the Native, another of Hardy's novels, was also based on misunderstanding in communication.]

The town is not only indifferent to Henchard, but to everyone else.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is a mood piece and the mood is that life is a Hell created by ourselves, abetted by the machinations of others and by coincidental circumstance. A mood piece.