Critical Appreciation 

 The Mayor of Casterbridge~ Thomas Hardy

Critical Appreciation of "The Mayor of Casterbridge"

1.  Hardy belonged to the Victorian age
2. But his poetry belonged to the 20th century 
3. He is best known for his novels
4. Almost all his novels were published in the mid to late
19th century.
5. His last novels Tess of d'urbervilles and Jude the Obscure
are considered to be the finest
6. His works challenged social mores.
7. The novels have sympathetic portrayals of the hardships
of working-class people.
8. His other works are The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From
the Madding Crowd, and many more.
9. Hardy himself classified hip novels under 3 headings -  

  • Novels of character and environment 

  • Romances and Fantasies

  • Novels of Ingenuity

  1. Wessex plays a significant area in the novel of Hardy

  2. Hardy named the area Wessex after the Medieval Anglo-Saxon 

The kingdom that existed in that part of the country. This was 

         prior to the unification of England by Athelstan.

  1. Thomas Hardy is famous for his novels of 19th-century rural life

  1. They are nice in description and dialect

  2. Hardy set them in Wessex, an imaginary region mapped onto    

The Geography of South and South-West England.

  1. Hardy was pessimist

  2. Being a pessimist, he always believed that man is born to suffer

  1. He is fatalistic because he believes that destiny is always hostile 

to man and that it governs over human life.

  1. Hardy is a writer with protean talent

  2. He is a versatile writer

  3. (a) His literary output includes short stories, novels, poetry, 

                drama 

         (b) Each one reflects his insight into the deeply disturbing  

social and religious issues of his time

  1. Hardy strongly believed in the incoherence of the empirical world 

  1. In his major fiction, Hardy illustrated his personal philosophy of 

chance, a blind force of nature, that can change the destiny of man

  1. Chance is for Hardy everything over which a man has no control 

  2. His realism prose style characterisation and social criticism in 

his novels are works of social commentary 

  1. He was a fierce critic of poverty with social stratification 

  2. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy’s cosmic pessimism is 

also Much in evidence 

  1. For Hardy pessimism isn’t just related to how an individual 

seizes the world 

  1. It’s the very nature of the world

  2. A world in which there is no God and people are vulnerable to 

the wiles of fate

  1. Hardy’s philosophy dramatises the human struggle between man 

and man and between man and fate

  1. Usually, it is fate or the arbitrary forces of the universe that wins

  2. Fate is all-powerful and its blindness on human suffering is of 

no importance 

  1. Michael Henchard is the tragic hero of The Mayor of 

Casterbridge 

  1. The move is his story

  2. The tone of the novel is tragic and melodramatic

  3. One major theme of The Mayor of Casterbridge is regret. In his 

drunken state, Henchard decides to sell his wife.

  1. This haunts him throughout his life.

  2. It ruins his life. He tries to overcome the circumstances, but he 

         fails.

  1. We see the malign and blind chances working upon the destinies 

of man.

  1. Fate and chance always work against the good of man. Fate and 

chances goes against human plans and then the human gets frustrated.

  1. And this is the philosophy of life of Hardy.

  2. For Hardy, fate is something to blame for human unhappiness. 

So he finds somebody to be responsible for the unhappiness.

  1. The symbol of the existing main character in the novel The 

Mayor of Casterbridge is red, black, bridge Casterbridge, ring, 

and the lagged goldfinch.

  1. The title The Mayor of Casterbridge is the life and death of a 

man of character.

  1. Hardy makes his character universal. Thus Henchard could be 

anyone.

  1. Hardy has used symbolism, imagery, and allegory.

  2. (Symbolism - the bull that threatens human life. The bull that 

chases Lucetta and Elizabeth Jane stand as brute force. 

  1. The bridge symbolizes the suffering in human lives and the 

way humans respond to hardship. 

  1. The bridge also symbolises the emotional decline of Henchard, 

from his confidence to a desire for suicide. 

  1. The Mayor of Casterbridge focuses on how a man is enabled to 

endure. 

  1. The skimming-ton ride did more evil.  The group at the inn had 

taken part in the skimming-ton ride.

  1. But they gave false witnesses and established could not apprehend 

this.

  1. Fate intervenes several times in the life of Henchard.

  2. We find the novelist describing landscapes objects and people 

with the same tons. There is a detachment throughout the novel.

  1. For Hardy, characters are not responsible for the suffering.

  2. Fate and destiny are responsible for the downfall. 

  3. Men are puppets in the hands of fate and chance. 

  4. Skimminton ride is a rowdy procession which is intended to 

make fun of a man whose wife is unfaithful. 

  1. The Mayor of Casterbridge is a story of the struggle of 

Henchard and between man and man, and his fate.

  1. Fate is all-powerful. Human suffering is of no importance. 

  2. Hardy called himself a ‘meliorist’, that is one who believes that 

the world could be made better by human efforts. 

  1. Henchard was racial white, but due to the work outdoors, he had 

 turned his skin toned by the sun.

  1. Henchard could not hide his emotions his blood rushed on his 

face whenever he was angry or upset.

  1. Bridges replace connections they connect different places. So 

 they suggest a connection of sides. 

  1. Lingering on a bridge could symbolise stagnation, while

The water below keeps moving.

  1. The five guineas are the coins that Henchard gets after selling 

Susan. It symbolises, later that he is buying her back. This was   

 after her return.

  1. The Casterbridge was for public entertainment. 

  2. The ring suggests the fact that the scenes tend to repeat 

 themselves. 

  1. Characters cannot escape history. 

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