Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Henchard resents it when Farfrae’s corn business prospers while his declines. A collision occurs with the wagons of Henchard and Farfrae, and Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane who witnessed the accident claim the fault lies with Henchard’s man.

Henchard overhears Farfrae and Lucetta declare their love for one another. Elizabeth-Jane overhears him threatening Lucetta with exposing their past relationship unless she agrees to marry him.

Henchard as magistrate presides over a case in City Hall of the furmity woman who witnessed him selling his wife. She exposes him and Henchard confesses.

Lucetta escapes to the sea-side for a few days. Upon returning to Casterbridge, Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane are chased into a barn by an angry bull. Henchard rescues them.

Lucetta reveals she and Farfrae got married. Farfrae moves in with Lucetta. She tells Elizabeth-Jane of her marriage and says she is welcome to stay in the house. Elizabeth-Jane leaves that night.

Henchard’s reputation and business decline. He goes into bankruptcy and moves into a cottage owned by Joshua Jopp. He ignores Elizabeth-Jane’s attempts at reconciliation. Meanwhile, Lucetta and Farfrae move into Henchard’s former home.

Elizabeth-Jane nurses Henchard when he becomes ill. On the day his pledge to avoid alcohol expires, Henchard takes to drinking. Elizabeth-Jane takes him home when he is drunk. She decides to warn Farfrae of Henchard’s threats against him.

The complexity of Henchard’s character becomes very evident in this section.

On the one hand, we have seen him act rashly on several occasions, regretting his decisions the following day. On the other hand, he acts courageously when he rescues Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane from the bull even though he is estranged from both at what he deems is their betrayal.

He behaves with integrity when he corroborates the furmity woman’s accusation about auctioning his wife. He could have easily denied it. No one would have taken her word against his. But he chose to admit his guilt. Why?

There are so many coincidences and so many chance happenings that have gone against Henchard. For example, his fiasco of buying corn when he thought prices would go up due to bad weather. The furmity woman who witnessed the auction of his wife is still there years later to direct Susan to Casterbridge. And she appears in City Hall accusing Henchard of selling his wife. He has a relationship with Lucetta and proposes marriage to make amends for their past relationship. But Lucetta marries his rival, instead. He convinces Farfrae to abandon his trip to America to work for him. And Farfrae’s fortunes rise as Henchard’s plummet.

Hardy exposes Henchard to so many coincidences, chance encounters, and bad luck, all of which systematically erode his position in society, plunging him into bankruptcy and poverty. Are these exposures to bad luck, coincidences, etc. realistic, or is Hardy overdoing the obstacles facing Henchard?

A lot happens. Here are the plot points that really struck me:

- Worried that he will leave her if he discovers her checkered past, the manipulative and deceitful Lucetta maneuvers Farfrae into a hasty marriage. I suspect she uses the same wiles she used on Henchard in Jersey. I will be very disappointed if she is not somehow done away with so that Farfrae and E-J can LHEA.
- The starchy E-J thinks Lucetta, given her history, should marry Henchard or no-one. She moves out into her own lodging, supporting herself by knitting.
- The old furmity seller showing up out of nowhere adds social ruin to Henchard's financial ruin.
- Henchard endures his bankruptcy with admirable stoicism and dignity. Farfae buys his business and makes some handsome offers to relieve his penury. Henchard is sensible of the generosity, but also resentful, and moves in with Jopp, of all people.
- Jopp has the pleasure of informing Henchard that Farfrae has bought his old home also. Hopefully this will suffice as revenge.
- The term of his vow of abstinence having expired, Henchard starts drinking again. This will not end well. So far he has endured the hammer blows of fate with remarkable patience, but it's hard to see how he can refrain from lashing out at some point.
- Still no sign of Newson. I will be very disappointed if he does not show up before the end.

I must admit I don't like this section of the book as much as I did the beginning : too much bad luck, too many unfortunate coincidences. This novel is starting to feel like Murpy's law.

La_mariane wrote: "I must admit I don't like this section of the book as much as I did the beginning : too much bad luck, too many unfortunate coincidences. This novel is starting to feel like Murpy's law."

Unfortunate coincidences, or consequences of character, i.e., tempermental behavior and less-rational choices?

Unfortunate coincidences, or consequences of character; the outcomes of temperamental behavior and irrational choices?

Henchard’s visit to Mr. Fall (Wide-oh) reminded me faintly of Macbeth consulting the witches: a decision that feels ill-judged from the start. But there is no real textual support for a direct parallel. Mr. Fall’s name comes from his being most often consulted in autumn, and “Wide-oh” is simply local mockery for being wide off the mark.

The important point is that it is Henchard’s character that drives him to seek out and trust such a figure despite most people knowing better. What follows is not mere bad luck but the natural consequence of his own impulses, credulity, and need for certainty in a revenge motivated plot.

I have to add that despite Henchard's complexity, or maybe because of it, I cannot help but feel he is somewhat deserving of such consequences, however late it is in coming.

La_mariane wrote: "I must admit I don't like this section of the book as much as I did the beginning : too much bad luck, too many unfortunate coincidences. This novel is starting to feel like Murpy's law."

I am currently reading and enjoying Hardy's biography: Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin. Hardy might agree with you because he had a few complaints to make about this novel according to the biographer:

Hardy himself complained that he had been by the demands of serialization to over-elaborate, and, although his inventiveness is impressive, he was right about their being too many twists and turns.

The footnote tells us:

It was a story which Hardy fancied he had damaged more recklessly as an artistic whole, in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any of his other novels, his aiming to get an incident into almost every week's part causing him in his own judgment to add events to the narrative somewhat too freely.

David wrote: "Unfortunate coincidences, or consequences of character, i.e., tempermental behavior and less-rational choices?."

Why either/or? Can't it be both?

Yes, he is temperamental and behaves rashly and makes irrational decisions. But he has also been plagued with a series of bad luck and coincidences that have exacerbated his situation.

Some examples:

He just happens to come across Susan's letter about Elizabeth-Jane's real father before she had intended him to find it. This sets off a series of events by which Elizabeth-Jane leaves home, moves in with Lucetta whom she just happens to meet in the cemetery and who also just happens to be Henchard's Jersey woman. Farfrae shows up with the intention of courting Elizabeth-Jane. Instead, he meets Lucetta and they marry. A stab in the back for Henchard.

Henchard's bad luck when the weather doesn't cooperate and he ends up losing money.

The furmity woman who shows up in court where Henchard presides as a magistrate. She just happens to be the same furmity woman who witnessed the auction. Without her testimony, his past mistake would have been buried. Lucetta had already agreed to marry him and may have done so before she learned he had auctioned his wife.

The collision with Farfrae's wagon which just happened to be witnessed by the two women whom, he feels, have already betrayed him.

I could go on. But the point I'm trying to make is that it is not simply his character that has got him into such a mess. It is his character plus a series of bad luck and coincidences that have not worked in his favor.

Tamara wrote: ". . .the point I'm trying to make is that it is not simply his character that has got him into such a mess. It is his character plus a series of bad luck and coincidences that have not worked in his favor."

Regarding the letter about Elizabeth-Jane’s father, the essential point is that what looks like “bad luck” arises directly from Henchard’s own decision. The envelope was explicitly marked Not to be opened till Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding-day. He chooses to override that restriction:

Henchard had no reason to suppose the restriction one of serious weight, and his feeling for his late wife had not been of the nature of deep respect. “Some trifling fancy or other of poor Susan’s, I suppose,” he said; and without curiosity he allowed his eyes to scan the letter. . .

The consequences that follow are not accidental. They are the natural outworking of a habitual disposition to treat his own judgment as overriding all caution or restraint.

The same is true with Lucetta. Henchard’s difficulties later on do not originate in coincidence but in his earlier failure to act honorably when he had the chance. He had already set in motion a pattern of harm, and the “unexpected” outcomes are simply the point at which those earlier choices mature.

The furmity woman’s appearance in court feels like pure misfortune, but again the root cause is his act of selling his wife in a crowded tent, and it just happens to be the furmity woman that exposes him. He built his entire civic identity on the presumption that witnesses would never resurface. The eventual exposure is not bad luck; it is delayed consequence.

Even the wagon collision functions this way. The event itself is trivial, but Henchard’s temperament shapes how he interprets it. A more stable or modest character would have absorbed it as an accident. His sense of pride and grievance turns it into another perceived betrayal. The “misfortune” lies not in the occurrence but in the lens through which he sees it exemplifying his perception of anything else involving the women.

Taken together, these moments form a pattern: the narrative is not driven by coincidence but by Henchard’s own earlier actions interacting with later, unforeseeable circumstances. Hardy’s imaginative design makes this clear. As much as I dislike the phrase in real life, it is the case with many great works of imaginative literature, nothing happens without cause. What looks like bad luck is simply the return, at a later hour, of the seeds of his character planted long before.

Okay. But consider this:

Henchard’s temperament has remained consisted throughout the novel. As mayor, he exhibits the same rash decision-making as he did years earlier when he auctioned Susan. But in the interim, somehow, even with the same temperament, he managed to work his way up from being a simple hay-trusser to the position of mayor. We don’t know how he did this. But if his temperament is exclusively responsible for his current misfortunes, how could that same temperament be responsible for his elevation in status from hay-trusser to mayor?

There must be some other factors involved in his decline. Is it possible that temperament plus luck favored him in the past but worked against him with the return of Susan and Elizabeth-Jane?

A fair question, but I think the text actually supports the idea that Henchard’s temperament alone can account for both his rise and his fall; without needing to invoke luck as a decisive factor.

His temperament is not simply rashness. It includes:
1. immense willpower — the 21-year oath is proof of that
2. extraordinary energy and drive
3. commanding presence and force of personality
4. generosity and boldness when he is in a strong position
5. the ability to make sudden, decisive moves when others hesitate.

These are precisely the traits that could lift a man from hay-trusser to mayor in a pre-industrial town where personal force, reputation, and sheer capacity for hard work mattered as much as education or refinement.

The same temperament yields advantage when conditions align and disaster when conditions shift and conditions are shifting. His proud impulsiveness, which once allowed him to seize opportunities, becomes destructive when:
1. New forms of knowledge appear (such as Farfrae’s methods)
2. New relationships demand tact rather than authority
3. Past actions return to him with human consequences
4. The social environment becomes less tolerant of his old habits

His temperament is constant; the world around him is not.
What once propelled him upward now pulls him downward.

This is why Hardy calls him “a man of character” in the older sense: a fixed, rigid disposition that determines both what he can achieve and what he cannot survive.

Abel Whittle spells out how Henchard's character worked to his advantage in the past vs. working against him, and for Farfrae, in the present.

“Yaas, Miss Henchet,” he said, “Mr. Farfrae have bought the concern and all of we work-folk with it; and ’tis better for us than ’twas—though I shouldn’t say that to you as a daughter-law. We work harder, but we bain’t made afeard now. It was fear made my few poor hairs so thin! No busting out, no slamming of doors, no meddling with yer eternal soul and all that; and though ’tis a shilling a week less I’m the richer man; for what’s all the world if yer mind is always in a larry, Miss Henchet?”
The Mayor Of Casterbridge (Chapter 31)

David wrote: "A fair question, but I think the text actually supports the idea that Henchard’s temperament alone can account for both his rise and his fall; without needing to invoke luck as a decisive factor...."

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting Henchard's downfall is because his temperament is such that he is unable to adapt to new circumstances. In that sense, if we go back to what Hardy said about Henchard in Chapter 17, his character is his fate.

I have a hard time accepting that because it doesn't allow for growth and change. It sounds as if the temperament we are born with is the one we are stuck with, and whether we succeed or fail has little to do with us and everything to do with forces outside our control. This may be true of Henchard because his temperament remains consistent throughout. It reinforces Hardy's bleak view on life. But when I think about it, the same may be said of tragic heroes in literature, especially Shakespeare. It is their temperaments, i.e. their tragic flaws, that lead to their downfall.

Many years elapse between the action that precipitates Henchard's downfall and its consequences. In the intervening years, he prospers and becomes the leader of a community. My mind immediately leapt to Oedipus. His tragic flaw sets up a series of events that eventually lead to his downfall many years later. In the intervening years, he succeeds, prospers, and leads a community. Just like Henchard.

My mind is leaping about, making connections with other literary figures. So I better stop for now : )

Tamara wrote: "I have a hard time accepting that because it doesn't allow for growth and change."

In Chapter 17 we are explictely told:

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.

It reminds me of Evolution. In evolutionary terms, a trait that ensures survival in one environment may cause extinction in another once conditions shift. The trait hasn’t changed but the environment has, and failure to adapt becomes the decisive factor.

Henchard’s tragedy, in this sense, arises not simply from what he is, but from what he fails to become.

I like how Hardy uses the contrasting descriptions of the two bridges and the people who gravitate to them to describe Henchard's phsychological state, i.e., depression. I also imagine Farfrae's kind offers are a sort of a bridge building, or an attempt to repair their relationship.

It is easy to see Henchard grabbing the rough handle of Farfrae's offers as a rubbing of salt into the wounds, but one can hope he grabs the situation by the smooth handle. However, Henchard strikes me as one who would retain all of his humbug opinion of Christmas despite the visits from the three spirits.

I thought this was an interesting remark

During the whole period of his acquaintance with Lucetta he had never wished to claim her as his own so desperately as he now regretted her loss. It was no mercenary hankering after her fortune that moved him, though that fortune had been the means of making her so much the more desired by giving her the air of independence and sauciness which attracts men of his composition.

How should we unpack men of his composition?

I also found this interesting:

Henchard walked blankly, like a blind man, repeating to himself the last words of the singers—
“And the next age his hated name
Shall utterly deface.”

He seems to be having a quiet Ozymandias moment — a sudden awareness that his name, status, and achievements may be erased, but he can only register it through the words of a song instead of admitting it directly to himself.

David wrote: "I like how Hardy uses the contrasting descriptions of the two bridges and the people who gravitate to them to describe Henchard's phsychological state, i.e., depression. I also imagine Farfrae's ki..."

Thank you for bringing up the two bridges. I, too, enjoyed the description. I was struck by the symbolism behind the two types of people who frequent the different bridges.

The bridge closer to the town is frequented by villagers who feel down on their luck, like Mother Cuxsom and Abel Whittle. They don’t care who sees them on the bridge and have “no particular sense of shame in their ruin.”

Those who frequent the second bridge, the one further away, is frequented by people of the “professional class” who have experienced a loss of status and income. The interesting thing is people on the first bridge face the passers-by; the people on the second bridge face the water:

While one in straits on the townward bridge did not mind who saw him so, and kept his back to the parapet to survey the passers-by, one in straits on this never faced the road, never turned his head at coming footsteps, but, sensitive to his own condition, watched the current whenever a stranger approached, as if some strange fish interested him . . .

The villagers on the first bridge have their back to the water and face the passers-by. Although they are down on their luck, they continue to see themselves as part of a community. The people on the second bridge turn their backs on passers-by and face the water. They are alienated from community and feel isolated. They face the water and some do more than just gaze at the water:

some had been known stand and think so long with this fixed gaze downward that eventually they had allowed their poor carcasses to follow that gaze; and they were discovered the next morning out of reach of their troubles . . .

Henchard goes to the second bridge, the “suicide” bridge, which, as you say, tells a lot about his state of mind.

David wrote: "I thought this was an interesting remark
During the whole period of his acquaintance with Lucetta he had never wished to claim her as his own so desperately as he now regretted her loss. It was n..."

Way back in Chapter 12, Henchard reveals to Farfrae that he doesn't particularly like women:

. . . being by nature something of a woman-hater, I have found it no hardship to keep mostly at a distance from the sex.

Henchard's relationships have always been transactional. I think his lack of interest in women is because he feels they are weak, dependent, and have nothing to offer him. But now that Lucetta is independent and has money, she has something to offer. So he is attracted to her. His attraction to her has nothing to do with desire for her as a person. He is motivated by self-interest and seeks a quid pro quo relationship.

That's how I read the passage. But there may be other ways of reading it.

I'd like to draw your attention to something we haven't discussed yet, and that is Hardy's exquisite description of nature and his rural surroundings. He has a vivid imagination with an eye that sees things in minute details. One of my favorite examples is in the opening of Chapter 9:

Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around; not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistle-down floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains, and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages, with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

It's passages like this in Hardy that take my breath away and keep me coming back for more.

Tamara wrote, "That's how I read the passage. But there may be other ways of reading it."

Since the narrator explicitly states ‘It was no mercenary hankering after her fortune that moved him,’ Henchard’s desire is not for Lucetta’s money but for the change in her bearing that her fortune produces. The air of independence and sauciness that prosperity gives her is what stirs him.

It is worth remembering that when they first met in Jersey, both were in vulnerable positions. Henchard had been ill, and Lucetta was poor but took pity on him. As Henchard improved, he left her behind, while she remained exposed to gossip and consequence.

Now that she has risen in the world and carries herself with confidence, Henchard sees her differently. Her independence makes her seem more equal to him, more spirited, and therefore more ‘worthy’ in the peculiar sense that appeals to his pride. His desire comes not from affection, nor from material calculation, but from the way her new status and self-possession awaken his competitive, possessive nature.

Tamara wrote: "And in autumn airy spheres of thistle-down floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains, "

The description makes me imagine a nostalgically inviting town depicted inside of a snow globe.

Tamara wrote: "Hardy himself complained that he had been by the demands of serialization to over-elaborate, and, although his inventiveness is impressive, he was right about their being too many twists and turns.."

Thanks for this. I wasn't expecting the series of unfortunate events which the story has become, so this is helpful context. The plot seems slightly overblown at times, but the characters are strong enough to handle it.