The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy


The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

The premise of this story is pretty wild: in 19th century Britain, a wandering hay-trusser named Michael Henchard sells his wife to a sailor in a drunken lapse of judgement. Twenty years later, the sailor is presumed dead on a lost voyage and Susan Henchard, in the last days of her declining health, returns to her former husband, finding that he has turned his life around. Having given up alcohol and taken-up industry, he has risen to prominence in Casterbridge as the premier corn-merchant and mayor. But in a series of O Henry-esque twists, reveals, and tragedies, Henchard loses everything - both materially and socially, as his baser dispositions bubble to the surface in the face of rivalry and adversity.

Ultimately, I took this novel to be a cautionary tale against hardening yourself. In truth, the characters here had every right to do so in the straits they faced - holding grudges, entertaining envy, coveting what was taken from them - and yet these responses, however justified at the time, always made their situations worse. Their mental states deteriorated in brooding, and their already strained relationships all but broke from the callousness that shaded them. Lucetta arguably induced her own death through the stress of hiding her past relations, Elizabeth Jane sentenced herself to eternal regret through an unwillingness to forgive her step-father's paternal deception, and Henchard’s own resentment toward the usurping success of his former protege turned him against both society and himself.

Stoic philosophy says you can’t control what happens to you; only how you respond to it. And The Mayor of Casterbridge lends credence to this idea - both as a constructive, and destructive, device.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens

Image
  A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens This is a highly symbolic, theatrical take on the French Revolution, where Dickens’ language makes for uniquely poetic passages, but has the side effect of dehumanizing crucial moments of the story. Readers can feel distanced from the more visceral events by his telling them through personified concepts rather than his characters. That being said, this augmented lens by which he presents the Revolution is an effective translation of its horrific, confused fervor. The people themselves, like Dickens’ writing, lose their humanity for the sake of muddled ideals, and even the principal characters are symbolic of larger components within the revolutionary landscape (Darnay as the blameless victims of an uncompromising holocaust, Lorry as the self-preserving establishments floundering around national allegiances, Madame Defarge as the ruthless conviction blinding a revolutionary tide, etc.) The novel’s emphasis on characters as symbols als...
Read more

Blink (2005) by Malcolm Gladwell

Image
Blink (2005) by Malcolm Gladwell This is an incredibly fascinating book that explores the power of “rapid cognition” - that split-second thought process that we go through unconsciously when we encounter anything. Gladwell lays-out several examples of how this type of thinking can be more reliable and accurate than we give it credit for, but also how it can feed unconscious biases into our decision-making. Equally impressive are the subtle ways our rapid cognition is influenced to process things differently (down to minutiae like how lemon-lime soda tastes more like lemon from a yellow bottle and more like lime from a green bottle). I’ve always put a lot of stock in intuition (although Gladwell doesn’t like that term), and Blink has gone a long way to reinforce that trust. But it has also cautioned me about where to temper my rapid cognition with more calculated deliberation. Ironically, it’s difficult to gather my thoughts on this book about thinking - but needless to say I’d recommen...
Read more

The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper

Image
  The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper I’m generally not a fan of colonial American historical fiction, but The Last of the Mohicans is, at its core, a good old adventure story that has appeal beyond its genre. And consequently, I enjoyed the book even without a solid grasp on the historical battles, figures, and landmarks at its foundation. This widely-appealing narrative strength comes largely through Cooper’s diverse, yet compact set of central characters, whose exploits provide the reader with an intimately approachable microcosm of America’s early colonial conflicts. The English, French, and indigenous forces at play in the struggle are each distilled into the persons of Heyward, Montcalm, and the Mohican duo of Chingachgook and Uncas (with Hawk-Eye serving as an intriguing link between the natives and colonists). Cooper expertly plays their personalities off of each other to further color the stealthy rescue missions, violent combat, and rich tribal ceremo...
Read more