Well, Well, Well is not how it always ends. Mr. Hardy’s novels are the proof of the pudding here. Michael Henchard has done got himself kilt. But it wasn’t a homicidal urge that threatened, though he pulled that trick on Farfrae he really could only do the thing to himself. So we end up with a married Elizabeth Jane and Donald Farfrae which makes the world of Casterbridge float gently ’round. Far from the bleak tragedy I was expecting, the reader becomes an uninterested party in this novel. Henchard is so hell bent upon destroying himself that the reader falls out of the groove of Hardy’s syntax only to care less and less of what actually does happen to Mr. Henchard.
As these late summer days turn to early autumn and the leaves color the trees around one can only think of days gone past and of lives lived in vain. That is what one thinks of when I reads this Hardy novel…
I have finished the first half of the Mayor of Casterbridge and it seems that Mr. Hardy is setting me up for an emotional fail. What do I mean by that? Well, simply that with my heart going out to Mr. Henchard, Elizabeth-Jane and Ms. Templeman I can only see ruin in the last 160 pages of the book, thus leading me to an emotional fail. My sentimental senses shall splinter with the inevitable indulgence of Mr. Hardy’s ever-pressing gloom.
The only candle in this hurricane is Donald Farfrae the plucky Scot. Mr. Hardy has deftly woven an intricate love triangle. With only the one angle being loved by the other two. The other two being women and that sort of thing being frowned upon in late Vi ctoriana. So what I am reading for is to find out if Mr. Farfrae 1.) dies in the end 2.) marries Elizabeth Jane 3.) marries Ms. Templeman 4.) becomes sage and moves back to Scotland before the omniscient narrator decides he doesn’t prefer him to Mr. Henchard.
Mr. Henchard, the ill-mannered wife-selling son of a pistol, whose heart can leap small ladies in a single bound, has effectively gotten rid of his first wife only to go to Jersey and land the affections of another woman. I can’t bear to mention the ill he bore on his first wife so let us angle in on the second woman. Ms. Templeman has come into some dough. “Plenty dough” And still Henchard basically ignores her. So naturally her affections turn to the corn and hay market man, Donald Farfrae.
Somewhere along the line there is a concatenation of events where a couple of these people will die. How do I know that, because I read a George Eliot novel once.
What I really enjoy about the novel, aside from the welcome, simple roundness of the characters and their motivations, is the implied (though not always) rusticity of the environs. From the drolleries of the commoners who inhabit Casterbridge to the smallness of the world that is Casterbridge one senses, but more than that, knows that Author Hardy completely delights in writing about his fellow countrymen and in preserving their peccadilloes for posterity.
More to come on this fascinating work…MEKM.
