The Mayor of Casterbridge

I maintain a myspace page as the British author Thomas Hardy http://www.myspace.com/thomashardy and I wanted to take one of my blogs from that website and post on in this one.

I wanted to share something from my recent reading. I don't know if you are familiar with the story of the mayor or not but it begins when he is 21 years old and he is married to Susan and they have an infant daughter named Elizabeth Jane. Hardy states that the chief attraction of the woman is the mobility of her face, that when she looks down sideways she is pretty but in the shade "she had the hard-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fairplay."

Thus it starts with the family of three walking down the road towards the small town of Weydon-Priors which has no conventional suburb for "town and country meet at a mathematical line" and at this time the husband, who is to eventually become Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, is a lowly hay-trusser looking for work and is quite dissatisfied with his wife when they come upon a country fair where the family stops in at a furmity tent (think malt-o-meal/wheat puff cereal) for dinner where the furmity hag will pour rum in to your basin for two shillings. Michael Henchard does so and sets the action for the story on its course when after hearing the livestock auction in the tent next to theirs decides he should be able to do the same with his wife and auctions off her and the daughter to a sailor. Henchard then passes out drunk in the tent.

The sailor takes Susan and Elizabeth Jane to Canada where they live for twelve years and then return to England. Around the time the daughter turns 18, Susan has become unhappy with her sailor husband, Mr. Newson, and by the logic of a friend she realizes that this sailor has no real claim upon her and therefore Susan has no real duties to him as a wife. So as the sailor is out at sea one month, Susan begins wondering how she can rid herself of the sailor when fortuitously for Susan he just happens to drown out at sea. Now Susan decides she must seek out her old husband because after all they are still married and legally obliged to one another. But during all this time Susan has never told her daughter about what happened that day at the fair and all these 18 years Elizabeth Jane Newson has always known the sailor to be her father and no one else.

So at this point the story brings us back to the same dusty road the three were walking on at the very beginning but it is now just Susan and Elizabeth Jane looking for, as mom puts it to daughter, "a distant relation by marriage" for she doesn't want to mentally scar her daughter with the truth.

And here is what I love about Thomas Hardy, these little gems you come across like this, the last sentence from the third paragraph of Chapter 3 describing the pair as they walk down the dusty lane: "While life's middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother's face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother's knowledge from the girl's mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature's powers of continuity."

It's like chewing on a really good cut of meat.