[In the following essay, Meisel assumes a Freudian orientation in his analysis of Michael Henchard's self-alienation.]

With The Mayor of Casterbridge, we arrive at a full statement of Hardy's universe. “The story is more particularly a study of one man's deeds and character than, perhaps, any other of those included in my Exhibition of Wessex life” (author's preface). The definitive statement of Hardy's achievement in The Mayor [The Mayor of Casterbridge], a pronouncement of central importance to the body of his fiction, occurs directly after Donald Farfrae's crucial dismissal by Henchard and the Scotsman's establishment of his own business:

But most probably luck had little to do with it. Character is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae's character was just the reverse of Henchard's, who might not inaptly be described as Faust has been described—as a vehement gloomy being who had quitted the ways of vulgar men without light to guide him on a better way.

[p. 131] [all page references from The Writings of Thomas Hardy (NY: Harper & Bros.), 1940]

That the dialectic of complementary characters would be the logic of Hardy's mature poetics was decided by The Return of the Native. In The Mayor, that discovery is recognized by the artist to the point of explicit statement and, as a result, directs the movement of the entire work. The passage develops the rich metaphor of the bonfires on the heath and its modern translation as the “electric light” of reason in its direct relation to the structure of the novel. We suggested in the last chapter that “modern” consciousness in Hardy begins with the suspended moment between the individual's extinguishing of the self-blinding communal fires and his ensuing need, or willingness, to find his way in the darkness. It was here, too, that Hardy betrayed his true sympathy—that of the artist, not the thinker.

The Return of the Native showed that the old order is helpless before the new because of an inner defect, not simply because of external interference. The narrative of The Mayor is “the steadily developed decline of a protagonist who incarnates the older order, and whose decline is linked, more and more clearly, with an inner misdirection, an inner weakness.”¹ Hardy's advance in his tale of Casterbridge lies in the recognition that the energy diffused in The Return [The Return of the Native] because of the artist's residual hesitations now becomes concentrated in the person of Michael Henchard. The impulses of the earlier book that found expression in the psychological, symbolic landscape of the heath are now contained within a single individual. The backdrop of the psyche represented by the heath was the rugged canvas of the mind upon which the two conflicting, yet inexorably linked, instincts in the artist's imagination were expressed: first, in the oppressive love of inseparable counterparts; and then, in the mortal combat of that “mutually destructive interdependence.” After his exploration of the individual in The Mayor, Hardy will proceed to examine the isolated ego (the self-alienation discovered in Henchard) and its origins in an investigation of the individual and society in Tess [Tess of the d'Urbervilles] and Jude [Jude the Obscure].

Hardy's diary entry for April 1878, which helped to define the view that determinism exists within the world of character rather than as a force external to man, revealed the deepest contours of The Return; it may also serve to clarify the universe of The Mayor: “A Plot, or Tragedy, should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions, and by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events [so] produced.” With Henchard, the case is intensified, and the idea of “taking no trouble” becomes itself the issue of an internal struggle within the individual. The working-out of “Character is Fate” provides a detailed view of the inner determinants as they express themselves in events. But of course the novel is not an illustration of that concept. In fact, the power of Hardy's dramatic impulses is so overwhelming here that even his present ability to use symbolic landscape breaks down before the bare emotion of character itself, as we shall see late in the book: “To this he had come after a time of emotional darkness of which the adjoining woodland shade afforded inadequate illustration” (p. 330). The primacy of plot, the dialectic of character (now both between men and within the individual alone) and the events this dialectic produces, return with full force after the artist's modal explorations in The Return. The year after the publication of The Mayor, Hardy wrote: “July 14. It is the on-going—i.e., the ‘becoming’—of the world that produces its sadness. If the world stood still at a felicitous moment there would be no sadness in it” (Life [The Early Life of Thomas Hardy,] p. 202). The movement of character through narrative produces events at the same time that it reveals the meaning of Hardy's method. The narrative trajectory² brings us, time and again, to the suspended moment between the extinction of illusory guiding fires and the wandering in the darkness.³ Those moments of darkness occur when the artist, and, progressively, Henchard, recognize that

The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-organs.⁴

The forces in Henchard's own nature drive him to action. Robert Heilman observes that the “shock of realization that he has actually sold his wife to another man—the basic wrongdoing which not only works against him but which many of his later actions parallel astonishingly—makes possible an extraordinary period of self-discipline.”⁵ Thus, “he had [been able to use] his one talent of energy to create a position of affluence out of absolutely nothing” (p. 254). Similarly, Henchard's symptomatic outbursts, first evidenced by the sale of his wife, occur when life becomes too difficult for him to control by the efforts of his will alone. His “downfall is essentially the product of his own emotional and moral nature.”⁶

It would seem, then, that the possibility of tragedy in the conventional sense, the tragic figure's choosing and taking responsibility for his actions, is precluded. Yet Hardy reads “Plot, or Tragedy” as “the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions,” where even the ability to choose is foreclosed as a possibility, given the internal dialectic of character itself; his view of tragedy lies, instead, in his implied view of consciousness. In addition to the remorse that comes from the realization of actual deeds, the wish, too, becomes the deed in terms of the reality of recognition. Henchard is unable, finally, to carry out his destructive wishes; in his realization of that inability, he turns those urges upon himself. The Greek stage is transformed into the arena of consciousness, that twilight region in which gradations of vision and blindness alternate in each suspended moment. The imagery of light and darkness, and especially of twilight sequences that bear clear resemblances to the descriptions of Egdon Heath, directs our awareness of the movement of Henchard's consciousness within the narrative. While at first his realizations occur after his actions, he later comes to perceive desires in himself that he cannot act upon. Hardy's recasting of ancient tragedy lies in the fact that the protagonist recognizes his responsibility for his own destiny, not by seeing himself as a victim of external fate, but by viewing his consciousness as an instrument of his unknown, unconscious self.

This universe is defined as early as the scene following Henchard's sale of his wife. While at first there are signs that man's alienation from nature is a fact inherent in the state of things, we come to see a ground level where man and nature are one. Still, it is the consciousness of a present alienation that will be the final and distinctly modern tragic realization, because it reveals man as “self-alienated” (p. 380). The dynamics of that problem are to be the subject of Tess and Jude. Note, too, that the following scene occurs exactly at twilight:

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load. Some others followed, and they stood looking into the twilight. The difference between the peacefulness of inferior nature and the wilful hostilities of mankind was very apparent at this place. In contrast with the harshness of the act just ended within the tent was the sight of several horses crossing their necks and rubbing each other lovingly as they waited in patience to be harnessed for the homeward journey. Outside the fair, in the valleys and woods, all was quiet. The sun had recently set, and the west heaven was hung with rosy cloud, which seemed permanent, yet slowly changed. To watch it was like looking at some grand feat of stagery from a darkened auditorium. In presence of this scene after the other there was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe; till it was remembered that all terrestrial conditions were intermittent, and that mankind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet objects were raging loud.

[p. 13]

Henchard has immediately resolved that his crime “was of his own making, and he ought to bear it” (p. 17). When his wife and Elizabeth-Jane enter Casterbridge in search of him nearly twenty years later, they feel that, “recent as [the time] was, [Casterbridge seemed] untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism” (p. 30). But this is apparently the same judgment passed on Egdon Heath in The Return, before its “inner defect” was laid bare through the dynamics of the characters' consciousness (“The poetry of a scene varies with the minds of the perceivers”). Mother and daughter happen, also, to approach the town at the hour of twilight; yet the “dense trees … rendered the road dark as a tunnel, though the open land on each side was still under a faint daylight; in other words, they passed down a midnight between two gloamings” (p. 31). The “pillar” of this community “untouched by … modernism” is Michael Henchard—the shock to Susan and Elizabeth-Jane that he is now mayor of the town immediately suggests a possible defect in the present order because of the person who symbolizes it.

Had not Donald Farfrae's “advent coincided with the discussion on corn and bread” outside the King's Arms Hotel, “this history [would have] never been enacted” (p. 42). Henchard's characteristic “oppressive generosity” (p. 37) toward the Scotsman is not unlike the love “to oppressiveness” between Clym and Eustacia.⁷ The logic of the relationship between Henchard and Farfrae is similar, if not in many respects identical, to that between the lovers in The Return. The inhabitants of Casterbridge begin to view the newly arrived Scot “through a golden haze”: “he was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then” (p. 61). He plays Stephen Smith to Henchard's Henry Knight, the concept of Clym, (caricatured as propagandist in his parallel to Farfrae, see The Return, p. 204) to the drama of Eustacia. Farfrae is “of the age” like Stephen—the scientific, advanced businessman, the material representative of a new order that destroys the symbol of the old, Henchard. But Henchard is also Eustacia on the heath—with the difference that he will respond to his own inner defect and will gradually recognize “the central valley” in himself. The realization that occurs in a social metaphor through his combat with Farfrae is but one version of his tragic awareness to come. Henchard asks Farfrae to stay in Casterbridge less for business reasons than because he is “so lonely” (p. 64, one of at least three times he makes the statement) and finds a friend in the Scot. His “tigerish affection” (p. 104) for Farfrae, like his late, dependent love for Elizabeth-Jane, is really an expression of that same energy betrayed in his moments of fury. The nature of this energy is fully described later, after his unknowingly false revelation to the girl that she is his daughter:

He was the kind of man to whom some human object for pouring out his heat upon—were it emotive or were it choleric—was almost a necessity. The craving of his heart for the re-establishment of this tenderest human tie had been great during his wife's lifetime, and now he had submitted to its mastery without reluctance and without fear.

[p. 142]

The “strange warring” that existed in Eustacia's mind has become central in Henchard now that Hardy has conquered his past desire to retreat from such a character. The mayor's feeling for Farfrae is “half-admiring, and yet … was not without a dash of pity for the tastes of any one who could care to give his mind to such finnikin details” (p. 87) of business matters. He is compelled to confess his mind, including the two great secrets of his past, to the one man he can consider a friend; Farfrae's response, of course, is indicative of their differences:

“… I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from, on account of the loneliness of my domestic life, when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I curse the day that gave me birth.”

“Ah, now, I never feel like it,” said Farfrae.

[p. 90]

The contraries of Henchard's nature begin to emerge; they are not so much the contraries of Hardy's own imagination that we have seen in the juxtaposition of the mayor and Farfrae, Clym and Eustacia, or Smith and Knight. Rather, he is the product of Hardy's full investigation, at long last, of the darkest and most determining layer of the psyche. His “ambiguous gaze” seems at one moment “to mean satisfaction, and at another fiery disdain” (p. 97). He seeks to punish himself for the past in his dutiful love and care for Susan and Elizabeth-Jane (“to castigate himself with the thorns which these restitutory acts brought in their train,” p. 95). Here, his acts stem directly from his conscious intentions because his design is within the control of his willful energy: “He was as kind to her [Susan] as a man, mayor, and churchwarden [all his roles in harmony in this realm] could possibly be” (p. 99).

Henchard's amazement that things are working out well, however, is accompanied by trepidation. Twilight begins in this symbolic statement of the relationship between Henchard and Farfrae:

Friendship between man and man; what a rugged strength there was in it, as evinced by these two. And yet the seed that was to lift the foundation of this friendship was at that moment taking root in a chink of its structure.

[p. 110]

The fateful logic of Henchard's character pervades the world of the novel. Abel Whittle, who returns at the end of the book, tries to explain to Farfrae that his being late for work is beyond his control (“Ye see it can't be helped,” p. 113), just as Henchard himself described the supposed impossibility of turning bad wheat into wholesome wheat by declaring “it can't be done” (p. 41; the ramifications of even these incidents reveal the incredibly complex and interrelated aspects of every level of the book). When Farfrae criticizes Henchard for his outrageous treatment of Abel, he is “bitterly hurt” (p. 114). It is on the level of his needs that Henchard responds most deeply, for it is there that the true drama takes place. He now regrets having told his secrets to the Scotsman and begins to think of him with “a dim dread” (p. 116): once the giver feels rejected, the energy first directed as affection (really “emotive”) is transformed into its opposite, a burgeoning hostility (“choleric”). The translation of Clym's loves into hates that described Eustacia is not inapplicable here; the settings are similar too—the backdrop for Henchard is his own threatening mind; for Eustacia, the heath. Just as Henchard did penance for his first crime through an energy that created affluence out of nothing, he is “courteous—too courteous” to Farfrae after the Whittle incident, thus displaying a “good breeding which now for the first time showed itself among the qualities of a man he had hitherto thought undisciplined” (p. 117). When inner circumstances permit, Henchard is in full control. But the flaw exists within the very structure of the foundation; twilight comes slowly, but with a relentless inner logic.

Henchard's firing of Farfrae is determined by an internal impulse that acts upon him, and thus differs from those events he has been able to fashion to his liking through conscious energy. His remorseful awareness that his action is irreversible foreshadows the events to come:

Henchard went home, apparently satisfied. But in the morning, when his jealous temper had passed away, his heart sank within him at what he had said and done. He was the more disturbed when he found that this time Farfrae was determined to take him at his word.

[p. 124]

Hardy soon describes the underlayer of unconscious consistency that has occasioned the breach:

Those tones showed that, though under a long reign of self-control he had become Mayor and churchwarden and what not, there was still the same unruly volcanic stuff beneath the rind of Michael Henchard as when he had sold his wife at Weydon Fair.

[p. 129]

When Farfrae establishes his own business, the two become outright competitors, which was the secret desire of Henchard's “volcanic” core. Our growing awareness of the decrees of the interior allows the artist to introduce the definitive statement cited at the beginning of the chapter:

Character is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae's character was just the reverse of Henchard's, who might not inaptly be described as Faust has been described—as a vehement gloomy being who had quitted the ways of vulgar men without light to guide him on a better way.

[p. 131]

The consequence of Henchard's uncontrolled action is the narrative recognition of tragedy as Hardy conceives it. Immediately following the pronouncement, Henchard receives a letter from Lucetta and his fall becomes imminent. Again, the quality of Henchard's character permeates the fictional world: we are told, for example, of Elizabeth-Jane's “chaos called consciousness” (pp. 135-36) as she cares for her dying mother.

That the logic of the plot is a dramatization of the logic of Henchard's character becomes clear. His loneliness is now mirrored in the world of fact about him: “Henchard's wife was dissevered from him by death; his friend and helper Farfrae by estrangement; Elizabeth-Jane by ignorance” (p. 139). The next blow occurs when he illicitly reads Susan's note disclosing Elizabeth-Jane's true parentage: he “regarded the paper as if it were a window-pane through which he saw for miles” (p. 143). And he begins, too, to accept responsibility rather than to rely upon his usual moody attitude, “‘I am to suffer, I perceive’”: “through his passionate head there stormed this thought—that the blasting disclosure was what he had deserved” (pp. 143-44). But his “headstrong faculties” (p. 130) continue to dominate his conscious perception, while the artist reminds us again of the true nature of things:

Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it. His wife was dead, and the first impulse for revenge died with the thought that she was beyond him. He looked out at the night as at a fiend. 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. Yet they had developed naturally. If he had not revealed his past history to Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for papers, and so on.

[p. 144; my italics]

The narrative trajectory moves from the artist's revelation of Henchard's character to Henchard's own recognition of facts in the external sphere that reflect his still unknown inner nature. As the world of events closes upon him, he enters a tragic universe of his own making. As twilight begins, the landscape reflects his mood; yet his perception remains partial, as the tragic universe still lacks one element, the protagonist's recognition of his own position:

Above the cliff, and behind the river, rose a pile of buildings, and in front of the pile a square mass cut into the sky. It was like a pedestal lacking a statue. This missing figure, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth, the corpse of a man; for the square mass formed the base of the gallows, the extensive buildings at the back being the county gaol.

Another feature of the full tragedy to come, recognition by the community, is suggested, too, as the passage continues:

In the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont to gather whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune of the roaring weir they stood and watched the spectacle.

The exaggeration which darkness imparted to the glooms of this region impressed Henchard more than he had expected. The lugubrious harmony of the spot with his domestic situation was too perfect for him, impatient of effects, scenes, and adumbrations. It reduced his heartburning to melancholy, and he exclaimed, “Why the deuce did I come here!”

Then, the invocation of the suspended moment, as the fires die out and the gloom sets in:

He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. In words he could blame his wife, but not in his heart; and had he obeyed the wise directions outside her letter this pain would have been spared him for long—possibly for ever.

[pp. 145-46]

But to be “spared … for ever” by one less act is, of course, an impossibility in this universe. “The return of the repressed” has many pathways by which it may reach Henchard's consciousness; in this case, Newson's inevitable return is the result of an act of twenty years past, despite the mayor's present remorse.

The consequences of Farfrae's dismissal have shown that act to be of the “same unruly volcanic stuff” as Henchard's original crime of selling his wife. It is as though the results of the first act twenty years before remain latent while the ramifications of his second irreversible action take their toll. “His bitter disappointment at finding Elizabeth-Jane to be none of his, and himself a childless man, had left an emotional void in Henchard which he unconsciously craved to fill” (p. 169). Lucetta's return seems to provide him again with the opportunity he lost in the consequences of firing Farfrae, but he loses her to his former friend as well.

Farfrae's prosperity as a merchant in his own right signifies the advent of the new order in its material form, the result of the decline of the old community as embodied in Henchard's fall. “The character of the town's trading had changed from bulk to multiplicity” (p. 195), indicating an ominous fragmentation of the bonds of society. The original agricultural community in the novel was altruistic rather than competitive, where even “over-clothes [in the market-place] were worn as if they were an inconvenience, a hampering necessity” (p. 175). But the “multiplicity” of the new commercial order, symbolized, too, in Farfrae's introduction of a new agricultural machine (pp. 191-92), is a sign of the surfacing of an inner defect. The changes wrought in the harmonious, almost noncompetitive, old order emerge in a description of Farfrae's revealing his own self-alienation. However, because he encounters no setback in terms of the mediocre demands of his own nature (remember Henchard's “dash of pity” for him earlier), he remains unconscious of his inner fragmentation as well as of the one without: “the curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life—the commercial and the romantic—were very distinct at times. Like the colors in a variegated cord, those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling” (p. 183).

Consciousness of the inadequacy of the old order is “modern” consciousness; but the facts of the transition from old to new are material changes—externalizations of the inner defect which impress none but those characters capable of tragic possibilities. The bonfires on the heath have symbolized the fact that community is a matter of interdependence; for example:

Nearly the whole town had gone into the fields. The Casterbridge populace still retained the primitive habit of helping one another in time of need; and thus, though the corn belonged to the farming section of the little community—that inhabiting the Durnover quarter—the remainder was no less interested in the labor of getting it home.

[p. 223]

When the fires change from group centers to multitudes of individual locations (from “bulk” to “multiplicity”), collective altruism (which we see now not as altruism at all, but as a dependent love whose real roots come to light in the disclosure of Henchard's volcanic layers) becomes a vicious, egoistic struggle among divided men, fragmented as a society and fragmented within themselves. A true dialectic of need was operative in the old community:

The farmer's income was ruled by the wheat-crop within his own horizon, and the wheat-crop by the weather. Thus, in person, he became a sort of flesh-barometer, with feelers always directed to the sky and wind around him. The local atmosphere was everything to him; the atmosphere of other countries a matter of indifference. 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. Indeed, the feeling of the peasantry in this matter was so intense as to be almost unrealizable in these equable days. Their impulse was well-nigh to prostrate themselves in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests, which came as the Alastor of those households whose crime it was to be poor.

[pp. 211-12]

But the flaw in the structure, if not recognizable already, may become apparent—an ostensible altruism, is, in reality, an expression of egoistic concerns: “The townsfolk understood every fluctuation in the rustic's condition, for it affected their receipts as much as the laborer's” (p. 70). Thus, we see the irony of the “Royal Personage” passing through Casterbridge on his way “to inaugurate an immense engineering work out that way” (p. 302): the highest representative of the old order is engaged in the “zealous promotion of designs for placing the art of farming on a more scientific footing” (p. 302). The inner defect works from within the contradictions of its old shell to transform itself dialectically into the new order, whose self-immolation is laid bare.

The modern tragic figure, of course, finally recognizes the falseness of any fires, whether collective illusions or fragmented, egocentric palliatives. The struggle between Henchard and Farfrae “constitutes the narrative and the unity of the book, and … predominantly defines its significance.”⁸ Yet the struggle becomes Henchard's struggle with himself—Farfrae is the externalization of the mayor's, and the community's, inner defect, its “central valley.” Once it enters the realm of consciousness, it shows itself to be the same “hitherto unrecognized original” of which we had glimpses in The Return of the Native, and which is now revealed in a concentrated vision. The Scotsman functions in a manner which externalizes the development of Henchard's own contradictions. The mayor's gradual awareness of his inner self is the organizational and perceptive center of the novel. The prophet Fall's remark to Henchard lends traditional mythic significance to this distinctly modern tragedy: “'Twill be more like living in Revelations this autumn than in England” (p. 215). The November aspect of Egdon Heath broods behind the entire narrative.

Event upon event builds up the dramatization of “the momentum of his character [which] knew no patience. At this turn of the scales [Henchard's financial ruin] he remained silent” (p. 219). The artist emphasizes the difference between his perception of events and that of the still unconscious Henchard: “The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him” (p. 219). With the inevitable return of the repressed original crime in public, the furmity-woman's indictment of Henchard the judge, both past and present begin to enfold him:

Small as the police-court incident had been in itself, it formed the edge or turn in the incline of Henchard's fortunes. On that day—almost at that minute—he passed the ridge of prosperity and honor, and began to descend rapidly on the other side. It was strange how soon he sank in esteem. Socially he had received a startling fillip downwards; and, having already lost commercial buoyancy from rash transactions, the velocity of his descent in both aspects became accelerated every hour.

[p. 251]

Thus the tragedy, before recognition by the protagonist, displays a dual aspect: the personal and the historical, the private and the public. A discrepancy now exists between Henchard's individual life and his public identity, roles which were apparently in harmony when his drive alone was able to control his actions. The narrative begins to recognize the hitherto undiscovered original in the identity of Henchard's deepest impulses and the latent egoism of the ostensibly altruistic traditional community. The case is not unlike the one described by Conrad in The Nigger of the Narcissus, when he reveals the true bonds of the crew's community in relation to Wait: “The latent egoism of tenderness to suffering appeared in the developing anxiety not to see him die.”⁹ In The Mayor, landscape again takes on symbolic twilight significance: “The low land grew blacker, and the sky a deeper grey” (p. 260).

While, for a moment, the possibility of equilibrium appears in Henchard's working for Farfrae, it is as deceptive as Clym's supposed reharmonization with the heath in his furze-cutting. Both are aborted by the force of a necessary “mutually destructive interdependence”: for Clym, Eustacia; for Henchard, his deeper self. Even the parallel of Clym's blindness with Farfrae's unconsciousness becomes clear: “Henchard, a poor man in [Farfrae's] employ, was not to Farfrae's view the Henchard who had ruled him. Yet he was not only the same man, but that man with his sinister qualities, formerly latent, quickened into life by his buffetings” (p. 276). The full concentration of the tragedy occurs within Henchard's sphere alone: the entire world of the novel is but an external counterpart, a mirror, to the organizing perception of his mind. While he suggests he may act out his wishes by declaring that, if he meets Farfrae, “I won't answer for my deeds!” (p. 270),

… again he stopped short. The truth was that, as may be divined, he had quite intended to effect a grand catastrophe at the end of this drama [of his reading to Farfrae Lucetta's early love letters to himself] by reading out the name; he had come to the house with no other thought. But sitting here in cold blood he could not do it. Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond the nerve of his enmity.

[p. 284]

In fact, later, “Henchard had been as good as his word” (p. 292) in his promise to restore the letters to Lucetta. Henchard's conscious acts, when they prove devastating, are the work of inner powers beyond the control of his willful drive. And, almost as proof of his intention to be responsible to others, the damage that results from actions beyond his conscious control is pain to himself alone. Again, the laws of Henchard's nature work in the book as a whole: in the incident of the love letters, “though [Lucetta's] had been rather the laxity of inadvertence than of intention, that episode, if known, was not the less likely to operate fatally between herself and her husband [Farfrae]” (p. 301); in the form of a public act, too, the skimmington (paralleling in preparation and occurrence the arrival of the royal visitor).

After a physical struggle with Farfrae—supposedly to the death—the contradictions in Henchard's nature are glaring, as he crouches in “self-reproach” (p. 316) on the sacks in the barn: “Its womanliness sat tragically on the figure of so stern a piece of virility” (p. 316). At still another moment of possible equilibrium, when Henchard has reestablished affectionate ties with Elizabeth-Jane, Newson's appearance seems to set things off once more. But Henchard, of course, responds from the “volcanic” layer by misinforming the sailor that his daughter is dead. Even as soon as the mariner leaves, he knows that his new sin will come back to destroy him. The fact of recrimination becomes less and less necessary for the true nature of the process to be revealed: “Then Henchard, scarcely believing the evidence of his senses, rose from his seat amazed at what he had done. It had been the impulse of a moment” (p. 338), as “his jealous soul” viciously “[buries] his grief in his own heart” (p. 339).

Twilight has become night: “The whole land ahead of him was as darkness itself” (p. 341); there must he wander now that his deepest nature, in conflict with his one-sided conscious desires, has extinguished all light. The appearance of his own reflection in the river he intends to be his grave is an external statement of the self-recognition to come. His egoism, his love, and his hate battle within, as there “came to the surface that idiosyncrasy of [his] which had ruled his courses from the beginning and had mainly made him what he was. … Time had been when such instinctive opposition [to the marriage of Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae] would have taken shape in action. But he was not now the Henchard of former days” (pp. 350-51).

Henchard is finally becoming aware of his dual nature, and Hardy assigns to the recognition the qualities of universality, in his conceptual prelude:

There is an outer chamber of the brain in which thoughts unowned, unsolicited, and of noxious kind, are sometimes allowed to wander for a moment prior to being sent off whence they came. One of these thoughts sailed into Henchard's ken now. … [He] shuddered, and exclaimed, “God forbid such a thing! Why should I still be subject to these visitations of the devil when I try so hard to keep him away?”

[p. 354]

Here lies the core of Henchard's nature: it defines man's area of responsibility within this universe. Tragedy consists of the consciousness of these limitations and man's ability to make his way through its chaotic darkness, the fate dictated by his own unconscious. “I—Cain—go alone as I deserve—an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear” (p. 361). Yet the prospect of death also intrudes upon Henchard's mind: “Part of his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his perception of its contrarious inconsistencies—of Nature's jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles” (p. 368). Elizabeth-Jane's burial of the dead bird that was Henchard's “hitherto undiscovered” wedding-gift occasions further symbolic statement: “She went out, looked at the cage, buried the starved little singer, and from that hour her heart softened towards the self-alienated man” (p. 380).

Henchard's modern tragic stance is his final recognition that he is trapped within the prison of his ego, subject to the unknown forces of unconscious instinctual underpinnings whose inconsistencies are mirrored in an equally dark and unknown external nature. But Hardy does not imply that this condition is in itself a law of existence. The cell of the self is the result of a process within history, a dialectic of man and nature in the form of society. We have seen that Henchard is representative of a broader process: the dynamics of his nature are reflected in the movement of the community he once symbolized.

With the establishment of his notion of “modern” consciousness, Hardy will move to an examination of the workings of those processes themselves. The Mayor of Casterbridge is a study, finally, in the discovery of self-alienation. It was necessary to emphasize the social processes involved in that discovery because the recognition itself is the product of an inescapable dialectic of community—a dialectic between man and nature. “Nature's jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles,” given the revelation of Henchard's inner self, suggested a host of problems to be investigated, a new direction issuing from past and present discoveries.

Notes

1. John Holloway, “Hardy's Major Fiction,” in The Charted Mirror, pp. 99-100.

2. The term is Holloway's.

3. That The Mayor of Casterbridge is at least one hundred pages too long has been noted by many critics; the unnecessary overabundance of these “suspended moments” testifies to the validity of that criticism.

4. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5: 613.

5. See Heilman's introduction to The Mayor of Casterbridge (Boston: Riverside, 1962), p. v.

6. Heilman, pp. v-vi.

7. The problem of sex itself does not fully arise until Tess, Jude, and to some extent The Woodlanders. The similarity between the strong affection of Henchard for Farfrae and the love of Clym and Eustacia is borne out by the many parallels between the pairs.

8. Holloway, The Charted Mirror, p. 103.

9. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York, 1926), p. 138.