1
Introduction
Theories about tragedy are about as ancient as tragedy itself. In his Poetics, Aristotle gives his
theory of his ideal tragedy, based on Greek tragedies that he himself has seen. His theory has
not gone unnoticed, and has travelled beyond the borders of Greece, having reached, for
example, the shores of Britain. However, time lapses, circumstances change, new ideas
develop, and English literature has seen the concept of tragedy being tackled by many
different writers from many different eras, each giving a new meaning to this literary genre,
and either copying, appropriating, adapting, or challenging Aristotle’s Poetics, whether
consciously or unconsciously. Geoffrey Chaucer was familiar with the tragic hero falling from
heights into misery. Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus shows a tragic hero in the context of a
Christian society, as opposed to the polytheistic faith of the classic age. William Shakespeare
has written a great number of famous tragedies, putting his own stamp on the genre. Lord
Byron and Emily Brontë have contributed to creating the Byronic, Romantic tragic hero.
Having thus travelled from Greece to England, from the Renaissance to Romanticism,
we arrive at a writer called Thomas Hardy, who stood in a confusing world, in fact, one could
say two worlds. He had one foot in the nineteenth century, and the other foot in the twentieth
century. Living in an age in which much literary history had already gone before him, in
which new ideas were still developing, and in which society underwent many changes too, all
this inevitably contributed to Hardy’s writing of his tragic novels, and to creating his own
unique Hardeian tragedy. In his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, the reader sees the
complexity and multiplicity of literary ideas that influenced Hardy. After so many years, did
Aristotle’s theory still stand a chance? Was it still relevant, appropriate, and useful? How did
Hardy use or challenge his theory, and how did he use other ideas, and created his own ideas?
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Based on Hardy’s novel, what can we conclude about the use and relevance of Aristotle’s
Poetics?
The reason I have chosen The Mayor of Casterbridge is that it is a complex work and
that it is perhaps not entirely clear what Hardy wants to say with this novel. While his books
Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are seen as novels in which the main
characters are basically passive puppets and victims of external circumstances, Hardy makes
the role of agent and victim far more ambiguous in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It is this that
makes The Mayor of Casterbridge so interesting to compare to Aristotle’s Poetics.
A similar thesis was written by Josien de Ruiter in 1999, called Thomas Hardy’s The
Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure Read as Tragedies in Accordance with
Aristotle’s Poetics. However, the fact that De Ruiter focuses on two works in one thesis,
makes the analysis of The Mayor of Casterbridge more superficial, while in my opinion the
novel’s complexity allows for a thesis to be written about this book only. For example, I will
pay more attention to Hardy’s ideas on nobility and heroism as opposed to Aristotle’s ideas on
these factors. Also, I will pay more attention to the context in which Hardy lived, proving
with this that there were many influences to shape Hardy’s writing and therefore that
Aristotle’s theory became less relevant, although in other ways Aristotle’s theory indeed
proves to be relevant.
I will start off by explaining Aristotle’s theory on tragedy, and commenting on it. In
my chapter on Aristotle I will mainly focus on his views on plot and character, because I see
these elements as the most interesting and the most relevant in this thesis.
In my analysis of Hardy’s novel, I will try to demonstrate how Hardy, with The Mayor
of Casterbridge, conforms to Aristotle’s Poetics, but also how Hardy challenges Aristotle’s
theory by developing his own style of writing tragedy. In chapter 2 I will provide some
relevant background information. In chapter 3 the novel’s multiple plot structure will be
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discussed, and the way in which it challenges Aristotle, and the nature of Hardy’s tragedy will
be questioned by comparing it to Aristotle’s ideas. In chapters 4 and 5 I will show how Hardy
evokes pity and fear. This subject covers many areas, such as the hero’s character, the
circumstances that work against him, and the hero’s “heroic” traits and whether these traits
are Aristotelian or otherwise, for example, Romantic. I will discuss these topics by describing
the views of several critics, commenting on them, and giving my own view. Then I will show
how Hardy has portrayed his hero Michael Henchard, and whether this fits in with Aristotle’s
Poetics or not. In chapter 6 I will explain how Hardy challenges Aristotle by adding absurdity
and comedy to his tragedy. Finally, in chapter 7, I will discuss the significance of Hardy’s
tragedy. After this a conclusion can be drawn.
Because the chapters on my analysis of Hardy’s novel are not strictly divided subjects,
I have found it inappropriate to give conclusions at the end of every chapter. That is why I
save most of the conclusions that are to be drawn from the analysis until the end.
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Chapter 1. Aristotle’s Poetics and Its Introduction Into England
1.1
Introduction: Aristotle and his Poetics
The Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle lived from 384 to 322 BC (Classical and
Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry – Isabel Rivers 208). He was a “[p]upil of
Plato at his Academy, tutor of Alexander the Great, [and] founder of the research institute
called the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school of philosophy” (Rivers 208). Aristotle “[w]orked
in many fields: biology, physics, cosmology, logic, metaphysics, politics, ethics, [and] literary
theory” (Rivers 208). His logical and scientific works formed the basis of medieval education,
while his ethical and critical works were more valued in the Renaissance (Rivers 208).
Aristotle’s Poetics was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, and was “especially influential
in Italy” (Rivers 208).
Aristotle’s Poetics is rather vague at times and not easy to understand. Sometimes
Aristotle seems to contradict himself, and his prescriptions may at times seem restrictive and
clinical. It could be argued, however, that his theory is descriptive rather than prescriptive,
because Aristotle based his thoughts on the Greek tragedies he had seen and had considered to
be successful or not. Denken over Dichten describes Aristotle’s Poetics as a “working text”
(25).
In my analysis I will mainly focus on Aristotle’s theory on plot and character; his
thoughts on diction and song are not as relevant as the other factors, so they will not be
considered. I will first briefly explain Aristotle’s definition and view of mimesis, then I will
consider the relationship between plot and character as prescribed or described by Aristotle,
after which I will consider plot and character separately, giving some more Aristotelian
characteristics of plot and character. I will then briefly explain the remaining parts of
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Aristotelian tragedy, and the distinction that Aristotle makes between tragedy and epic.
Finally I will explain how Aristotle was introduced in England.
My analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics is mainly descriptive, although I will comment here
and there when Aristotle is vague or obscure or when he seems to contradict himself. Stephen
Halliwell’s analysis and interpretation of the Poetics is very helpful and will be used to clarify
those parts that need more help with interpretation.
1.2
Mimesis
At the beginning of his treatise, Aristotle explains his ideas on mimesis, meaning imitation.
He argues that art is an imitation of life, with some adjustments here and there. In tragedy, the
artist portrays human beings that are noble and better than the norm. In comedy, the artist
portrays human beings that are base and worse than the norm (Aristotle – Translation Golden
4-5). In chapter VI, Aristotle defines tragedy as
an imitation of a noble and complete action, having the proper magnitude; […] it is
presented in dramatic, not narrative form, and achieves, through the representation of
pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents. (11)
This action
is accomplished by certain agents, [and] the sort of men these agents are is necessarily
dependent upon their “character” and “thought”. […] [T]he two natural causes of
human action are thought and character. (11)
1.3
Plot and character
Aristotle claims that a tragedy should consist of six parts, being plot, character, diction,
thought, spectacle, and melody. As pointed out earlier, the main focus in this analysis will be
on plot and character.
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1.3.1 Plot over character
Aristotle argues that the plot is the most important element of the play, “for tragedy is not an
imitation of men, per se, but of human action and life and happiness and misery” (12). He
describes the plot as the arrangements of the incidents in a tragedy. Important elements in the
plot are peripeteia, meaning reversal, and anagnorisis, meaning recognition. Character comes
in second place to plot and action for Aristotle, being not as important as plot because
“according to their characters men have certain qualities; but according to their actions they
are happy or the opposite” (12). Aristotle even goes as far as to say that without “character”
tragedy would still be possible, while without “action” it would be impossible.
Although it is plausible that character study alone does not make a tragedy, Aristotle
seems to contradict himself when he says that character could be excluded from a play.
Action and character are often connected: it is because people have certain characters that
they act the way they do, so action in a tragedy is inevitably bound up with character.
In Aristotle’s Poetics, Stephen Halliwell points out that modern readers may object to
Aristotle’s subordination of character to action, because of
the wide discrepancy between the view of drama which this subordination represents
and the dominant post-Romantic belief in the centrality of psychological
characterisation both to drama and to other forms of literature (above all, the novel).
(139)
Aristotle suggests that human excellence, success, and happiness “call for active
embodiments, rather than being regarded as achieved or static conditions” (Halliwell 149),
which modern readers may not necessarily agree with either. When describing characters in a
tragedy, Aristotle argues, the most important thing is to show whether these characters have
“dispositions to act virtuously or otherwise” (Halliwell 151), and “[t]hese dispositions are
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both acquired and realised in action” (151). Aristotle mainly concerns himself with whether
the characters are good or bad: “it is […] in virtue and vice that the characters of men differ”
(Halliwell 164). Halliwell explains that Aristotle does not concern himself with deeper
psychological notions of character, as modern readers do:
[Character] may remain concealed in the inner life of the mind, or be only partially
and perhaps deceptively revealed to the outer world […]. Such ideas and possibilities,
which find their quintessential literary embodiment in the novel (whose conventions
allow privileged access to the minds of characters), are by their very intricacy and
indefiniteness the antithesis of the theory of dramatic character presented in the
Poetics. (150)
However, Halliwell also points out that “[t]he suggestion that character may be bound
up with all our actions […], does not contradict the prevalent belief in a firm, internal locus
for the individual character” (150). It can therefore be concluded that Aristotle may not have
denied that a character consists of an internal as well as an external world, but nevertheless
prioritises external actions above anything else when illustrating character in a tragedy. In
Halliwell’s view, Aristotle does so because the audience must have a clear idea of the
characters’ ethical dispositions:
Because of a range of contingent factors, we may not always be able to make a secure
judgment of the function of character in individual actions. It is this which explains
Aristotle’s attitude to character in drama: if character is to play a part in tragedy […]
there must be no uncertainty or ambiguity about it; we must be able to identify it as a
specific dimension of the action, embodied in clear evidence for the ethical
dispositions of the agents. (152)
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1.3.2 Plot and the causal role of character in it
Tragedy is the imitation of a complete and whole action, consisting of a beginning, middle,
and end (Aristotle 14). Aristotle defines “beginning” as “that which is itself not, by necessity,
after anything else but after which something naturally is or develops” (14). The opposite is
meant by “end”: “that which is naturally after something else […], but after which there is
nothing else” (14). The middle is “that which is itself after something else and which has
something else after it” (14). The length of a tragedy should be “proper” (15), more
specifically, “that whatever length is required for a change to occur from bad fortune to good
or [vice versa]” (15).
Aristotle also requires that a tragedy’s incidents should be “in accordance with
probability and necessity” (15). The unity of action is essential in a tragedy’s plot. The plot
should contain one action: this does not mean that it should be concerned with one individual,
for many actions and events occur in the life of one person, without there necessarily being a
unity in it. Nothing irrelevant should happen in a plot: “[T]he parts of the action [should] be
put together in such a way that if any one part is transposed or removed, the whole will be
disordered and disunified” (16).
Aristotle emphasises that causality in a plot is crucial: because a plot should respect
the laws of probability or necessity, episodic plots are inferior since they do not respect these
laws (18). The incidents should be fearful and pitiable, and these emotions are especially
evoked “when they occur unexpectedly, yet because of one another” (18). This is because
there is more of the marvellous in them if they occur in this way than if they occurred
spontaneously and by chance. Even in regard to coincidences, those seem to be most
astonishing that appear to have some design associated with them. (18)
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It may be helpful to illustrate this with an example that Aristotle gives. In the story of the
statue of Mitys in Argos, the statue falls and kills the man who caused Mitys’ death. This
event is coincidental but not without meaning, Aristotle argues, and is therefore a chance plot
of a superior kind (18).
Aristotle therefore does not allow for random incidents and twists of fate to happen in
a tragedy. However, it could be argued that meaningless events occur regularly in life: as
Aristotle states that art should be an imitation of life, this contradiction may puzzle the reader.
Aristotle’s favouring of design gives the impression that he approves of the
appearances of the Greek gods in several Greek tragedies, but that is not the case. He argues
that the plot of a tragedy should mainly evolve around human action and the hamartia that a
tragic hero makes. Hamartia is described in the glossary of The Cambridge Companion to
Greek Tragedy as “mistake / tragic error (not, as often claimed, ‘tragic flaw’)” (349).
Aristotle also stresses that a plot should be resolved “through the plot itself and not by
means of the deus ex machina” (26). The glossary of The Cambridge Companion to Greek
Tragedy explains that the deus ex machina is “a god who appears at the end of a tragedy
suspended by the mēchanē/crane (literally ‘god from the machine’) to solve an otherwise
intractable ending” (349). This phenomenon, according to Aristotle, “must be reserved for the
events that lie outside the plot” (26).
However, in “Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?”, Edith Hall wonders why
Aristotle pays hardly any attention to external factors such as the Greek gods:
Particularly problematic is [the Poetics’] neglect of the gods. Although […] the use of
the god from the machine receives brief attention, Aristotle seems almost wholly
uninterested in the genre’s preoccupation with fate, with death and dying, with
mortality and immortality, and with the nature of the divine. […] His version of
tragedy is quite startlingly anthropocentric, but its focus on humans at the expense of
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the gods also excludes from consideration the central defining features of the human
condition explored in tragedy: that destiny is ultimately beyond human control, and
that people die. (296)
In Aristotle’s Poetics, Stephen Halliwell makes a similar point: that Aristotle focuses
on the characters as active agents and not as passive victims. Aristotle excludes “from the
structure of the plot all those sources of causation which are external to the actions of the
human figures themselves” (146), those sources being “the full range of traditional religious
explanations for events in the world” (146). The treatise emphasises the agent-centred
perspective: the agents themselves are “the prime causative force in the action of the play”
(146). Through their hamartia they direct “the development of events which gives the plot its
structure and unity” (146).
An explanation for Aristotle’s neglect of external causes could be that the cause of
misfortune in a tragedy can be traced more easily when the focus is on human agency, as
Halliwell suggests:
Unity of action, which is also unity of plot-structure, is regulated by necessity and
probability, whose operation is much less easy to interpret with reference to passive
experience than to the scope of purposive action. (148)
Halliwell argues that the concept of chance must not have fitted in with Aristotle’s thoughts
on the unity of plot:
The exclusion of chance from tragedy, then, is entailed in the central Aristotelian
requirement of unity of plot, which itself is a reflection of the need for necessary or
probable clarity in the structure and logic of the dramatic action. (210)
It could also be argued that Aristotle regards tragedy, in ethical terms, as a means of
educating the audience, in which human failure plays an important role: human actions are the
main cause that people fall from happiness to misery (or vice versa), and although the
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misfortune of a character is to be pitied, the audience is to draw a lesson from the mistakes of
the character(s) and is to avoid making those same mistakes. As Simon Goldhill points out in
“The Audience of Athenian Tragedy,” Aristotle recognised the didactic power of tragedy over
an audience and the tragedy’s ability to contribute to the construction of a citizen (67).
Halliwell adds to this that tragedy can contribute to the study of philosophy, so that
therefore tragedy should be an ordered unity:
History may frequently demonstrate the random strokes of fortune […]. [However,] it
is not to history that poetry’s portrayal of human life approximates, but to philosophy,
and it must therefore be that tragedy, on Aristotle’s model, can seek to present some
order and pattern in the transformations of fortune which it dramatises. (210)
Furthermore, the role of gods in tragedy does not fulfil Aristotle’s requirement of
rationality in a play:
[The Poetics’ conception of tragedy comes into conflict] with the general status of the
gods in Greek myth, and hence in tragedy, as active forces which lie at and beyond the
limits of human comprehension, and which therefore cannot be reduced to the level of
steady and rational expectations. (Halliwell 233)
However, a passage from chapter XIII of the Poetics is rather confusing:
[O]ur poets accepted any chance plots; but now the best tragedies are constructed
about a few families, for example, about Alcmaeon, Oedipus, […] and any others who
were destined to experience, or to commit, terrifying acts. For as we have indicated,
artistically considered, the best tragedy arises from this kind of plot. (22)
Aristotle seems to contradict himself here. He turns away from chance plots and emphasises
human action as the driving force of a plot, but when he uses the phrase “destined to,” he
seems to say that some higher power is at work, making the characters ultimately not
responsible for their actions. Of course we are working on the basis of a translation here, and
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the translator may not have captured the full import of the Greek original, which may well
have been less confusing.
However, it can be quite safely concluded that Aristotle focuses on human action and
responsibility above anything else. As Peter Burian argues in “Myth into muthos: The
Shaping of Tragic Plot,”
[The Aristotelian] schema emphasises hamartia, […] and its punishment. The tragic
hero, although caught in circumstances beyond his ken and control, is finally to be
understood as destroyed by the gods (or fate) because of his own failings. (Burian 181)
1.3.3 More characteristics of plot
Aristotle divides plots into the simple and complex: when an action’s change of fortune arises
without reversal and recognition, it is a simple plot. When an action’s change of fortune arises
through recognition or reversal or both, and when these aspects occur from prior events, it is a
complex plot (Aristotle 18-19).
Reversal is “the change of fortune in the action of the play to the opposite state of
affairs […]; and this change […] should be in accordance with probability and necessity”
(19). Aristotle gives an example from Sophocles’ Oedipus: “[I]n the Oedipus the messenger
comes to cheer Oedipus and to remove his fears in regard to his mother; but by showing him
who he actually is he accomplishes the very opposite effect” (19).
Recognition is “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (18). Aristotle claims that
“[t]he most effective recognition is one that occurs together with reversal, for example, as in
Oedipus” (19).
Another part of a tragedy is “suffering,” being a result of a destructive or painful
action, such as death or injury. All these aspects lead to misery (or happiness, when the
fortune turns from bad to good), and evoke pity and fear in the audience (20).
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There are several kinds of recognition. Firstly, there is the recognition that is achieved
through external signs, such as birthmarks, scars, or objects. Aristotle considers this kind of
recognition to be the least artistic (27).
Secondly, there are “those recognitions that have been contrived for the occasion by
the poet and are therefore inartistic” (28). For example, in the Iphigenia, Orestes achieves
recognition by revealing himself and “says what the poet wishes him to say but not what the
plot requires” (28).
Thirdly, a recognition can arise “from our being stimulated by something that we see
to remember an event that has an emotional significance for us” (28). For example, in the
Cyprioe of Dicaeogenes and the story of Alcinous, “it was by their emotional reactions [to
something] that the characters were recognised” (28).
Fourthly, a recognition can occur through reasoning, as for example in the
Choëphoroe, the Tydeus, and the Phinidae (28). In the Choëphoroe, “it is achieved by the
deduction: Someone like me has come; there is no one resembling me except Orestes; he,
therefore, has come” (28). Aristotle sees this kind of recognition as second best.
To Aristotle, the best recognition is “the one that arises from the incidents themselves”
(29):
[These incidents strike] us […] with astonishment through the very probability of their
occurrence as, for example, in the action of the Oedipus of Sophocles and in the
Iphigenia, where it is reasonable for the heroine to wish to dispatch a letter. (29)
A tragedy should consist of a complication and a resolution. The complication is “that
part of the play from the beginning up to the first point at which the change occurs to good or
to bad fortune” (31). The resolution is “the part of the play from the beginning of the change
in fortune to the end of the play” (31).
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Aristotle lists four kinds of tragedy: the complex, the tragedies of suffering, the
tragedies of character, and the tragedy of spectacle (31). How to separate these kinds from
each other is not made clear by Aristotle. It could be argued that these genres could be mixed
(for example that complex tragedies could also contain suffering, character, and spectacle),
but Aristotle does not explain this concept any further.
Another specification that Aristotle makes is that a tragedy should not be “an epic
body of incidents” (32), in other words, a multiple plot. This is further explained in paragraph
1.5. Furthermore, the realism of a tragedy and the feasibility of performing a tragedy are only
possible “by visualising the events as distinctly as [the poet] can” (29), so as to avoid
incongruities.
1.3.4 More characteristics of character
In chapter XIII, Aristotle requires that a tragedy should contain characters that are neither
extremely virtuous nor extremely evil. When a tragedy contains unqualifiedly good characters
falling from good fortune to bad, it is repellent rather than pitiable or fearful. When a tragedy
contains an evil man moving from bad to good fortune, it is neither pitiable nor fearful and it
violates the audience’s human sympathy. When an evil character in a tragedy falls from good
fortune to bad, it evokes neither pity nor fear, since these emotions are evoked by undeserved
misfortune experienced by someone like ourselves (21-22).
Therefore, Aristotle argues, the hero of a tragedy should be between these extremes: a
person who is not perfect, but who is better than the norm. He should not fall into misfortune
through vice, but rather through an error. Furthermore, Aristotle claims that the hero must be
a person of great reputation and fortune, such as Oedipus. Also, Aristotle prefers a single plot
construction to a double one.
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Aristotle argues that pity and fear are evoked to the greatest extent when tragic actions
take place between friends or family members, for example when a man kills his brother.
Such actions would not be pitiable or fearful if they happened between enemies or people who
are unknown to each other (23-24).
Actions can be done either in ignorance or knowledge of the identity of their victim.
When the actions are done in ignorance, they are either about to be done when recognition
replaces ignorance, or are done after which recognition comes too late (24). Doing a deed
knowingly is the least favourable action to Aristotle. It is better when a deed is done in
ignorance, after which comes recognition, for then “the recognition is startling” (25).
However, Aristotle considers it best when recognition takes place before the deed is about to
be done, causing the action not to take place (25).
Here Aristotle contradicts himself. In chapter XIII – which is the chapter before – he
prefers it when a tragedy shifts from happiness to misfortune. However, if Aristotle prefers it
when physical fulfilment of misfortune is avoided, he seems to favour a tragedy’s shift from
misfortune to happiness. Halliwell suggests that this may derive from “a desire to avoid facing
up to the worst that tragedy can offer” (236). However, these two different views remain
puzzling, also because a tragedy’s shift from misfortune to happiness can hardly be called a
tragedy.
Aristotle makes four requirements of a character: it should be good, appropriate,
consistent (and if the character is inconsistent, it should be consistent in its inconsistency),
and like reality. Again Aristotle emphasises the necessary and the probable that has to occur
in both plot and character (26).
According to Aristotle, tragedy should be “an imitation of the noble sort of men” (26),
and therefore poets should portray characters as good portrait painters do: faithfully, but better
than they are; prone to failings, but good as well (26-27).
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Halliwell argues that when Aristotle paradoxically requires the tragic hero to both be
“like reality” and be “better than the norm,” he means that morally the hero should be like the
audience that is watching him, while in terms of status, he should be above the norm:
[T]he point made in chapter 13 [of Poetics], [is] that the characters should not stand at
an ethical extreme, but should be such that an audience can experience a sympathetic
moral affinity with them, […] while in terms of status, by contrast, the tragic
characters can be allowed a more striking pre-eminence. […] [For example,] we must
be able […] to recognise in Oedipus the qualities and grandeur which raise him above
other men, but also his true humanity. (160-61)
Halliwell concludes therefore that
in Aristotle’s perspective the heroism of the tragic agent is incorporated essentially in
the fabric of status, for it is the vulnerability of prosperity, not of virtue, which the
philosopher identifies as the proper subject-matter of tragedy. (167)
Therefore Aristotle requires that the hero of a tragedy should be prosperous, because then he
is vulnerable to a fall.
Still, Aristotle’s different views on character can be quite confusing, as can be seen in
Halliwell’s list of Aristotle’s required character traits for the tragedy’s hero:
i.
a moderately good character […]
ii.
who has enjoyed, but loses, great prosperity […]
iii.
and who does not deserve his adversity […]
iv.
but who yet is also not the victim of arbitrary misfortune and whose downfall must
therefore be the result of an intelligible causal factor […] which leaves his
innocence intact. (220)
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1.4
The remaining parts of tragedy
Thought, the third part of a tragedy, consists of the speeches a character utters in which he
expresses what he approves and disapproves of and in which he expresses universal
propositions (13).
Diction is the expression of thoughts through language, melody is the part that
contains songs, and spectacle is the visual aspect of tragedy which according to Aristotle is
the least important part of a tragedy, “for the power of tragedy is felt even without a dramatic
performance and actors” (13-14).
In chapter XII, Aristotle mentions the parts of which a tragedy consists or should
consist, being prologue, episode, exode, and the choral part (consisting of parode and
stasimon). However, I consider these aspects to be no longer as relevant as in Aristotle’s time
and therefore will not discuss this section in my analysis.
1.5
Tragedy versus epic
In the last few chapters, Aristotle briefly discusses epic. The narrative should have the same
requirements as tragedy, such as reversal, recognition, and suffering, and should contain a
single, whole, complete action (42-43). However, Aristotle also says that “because of the
narrative quality of epic it is possible to depict many simultaneous lines of action that, if
appropriate, become the means of increasing the poem’s scope” (43-44). Here again, Aristotle
appears to contradict himself: on the one hand he requires a single action in narrative, while
on the other hand he argues that an epic can afford to have several actions.
In the last chapter, Aristotle considers which genre is superior: tragedy or epic. He
concludes that tragedy is better, for tragedy contains poetry, music, and spectacle, and the
action is more compact, more unified, and less diluted than in an epic (51).
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1.6
Aristotle’s Poetics in England
Most probably, England got acquainted with Aristotle’s Poetics in the thirteenth century
because, as Marvin Theodore Herrick points out in The Poetics of Aristotle in England, “[t]he
first Englishman to mention Aristotle’s Poetics was Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294)” (8). In the
medieval period Aristotle was known, but his Poetics was not a prominent feature in the
curriculum of the thirteenth-century universities, because his works on logic were given
priority over his political and rhetoric works (Rivers 126).
Only in the Renaissance did his theory receive more attention, when Petrarch and
other humanists put neglected classical works on the map again, such as Aristotle’s Poetics
(Rivers 127). His work was not the only theory on poetry to circulate, however, nor was his
theory taken over literally:
A number of different theories about the nature of poetry and the poet coexisted in the
Renaissance. In their formulation of these theories Renaissance poets and critics drew
on certain key classical texts, but modified them in the light of their Christian beliefs.
Aristotle’s Poetics (scarcely known in the Middle Ages) and Horace’s The Art of
Poetry were the most important of these. (Rivers 150)
Although Aristotle and his Poetics became better known in Renaissance England, his
work was not always interpreted correctly, as Rivers points out:
The term ‘imitation’ is frequently to be found in Renaissance theorists, but in a
different sense from Aristotle’s. It means the imitation not of nature but of literary
forms, genres and other poets. Imitation in this sense is an important humanist
concept, and it implies a view of the poet not as inspired priest but as responsible
craftsman. (Rivers 153)
Italian critics may have been partly responsible for the misinterpretation of Aristotle,
because, as Herrick points out,
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at the close of the [sixteenth] century the ‘rules’ of Aristotle, as formulated by the
Italians, arrived in England to take almost undisputed possession of the critical field,
and to make serious inroads upon creative literature. (34, italics mine)
However, other European countries had their influences too:
[F]rom the first these English interpretations of Aristotle’s theories were hopelessly
adulterated with Horatian maxims and Continental scholarship, first with Italian, then
with Dutch, and finally, and most influential of all, with French. (Herrick 34)
Another example of a free interpretation of Aristotle is the three unities introduced by
Italian and French critics as part of the rules of drama. As Aristotle requires unity of action in
a play, they concluded that a play also requires the unity of place and the unity of time. This
was in order to achieve the illusion of reality in a play. Therefore the critics required the unity
of place, meaning that the action should be limited to a single location. They also demanded
the unity of time, meaning that “the time represented be limited to the two or three hours it
takes to act the play, or at most to a single day of either twelve or twenty-four hours” (A
Glossary of Literary Terms - Abrams 320).
Aristotle became an influential authority in the world of English literature, to which
Sir Philip Sidney contributed by introducing classical and Aristotelian criticism in England.
This type of criticism was to dominate for nearly two centuries (Herrick 34), although “the
unities of place and time never dominated English neoclassicism as they did criticism in Italy
and France” (Abrams 321).
The first English translation of the Poetics appeared in 1623 (Herrick 35). However,
this did not mean that Aristotle’s work became a ruling principle. Herrick points out how John
Upton, in his Critical Observations on Shakespeare, observed how Shakespeare disregarded
or challenged Aristotle:
20
[Upton observes that Shakespeare’s] tragedies, since they combine the qualities of
drama and heroic poem, cannot strictly conform to the ancient models. Further, unlike
the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare is both a tragical and a comic poet. (Herrick 111)
Although Aristotle’s rules may not have been entirely accepted and followed, by the
end of the seventeenth century “classical criticism was common material for polite
conversation in London” (Herrick 78). Aristotle and Horace were discussed extensively, as
can be seen in William Congreve’s play The Double-Dealer (Herrick 78-79).
In the eighteenth century, when neo-classicism began to take over, “England was far
more positively critical than [in] the seventeenth” (Herrick 80), but “[b]y the middle of the
eighteenth century the neo-classical spirit showed signs of waning” (Herrick 112). However,
at the end of the eighteenth century, “English criticism gained, in Tyrwhitt’s work, one of the
notable editions of the Poetics” (Herrick 140), and Twining provided “a highly respectable
English translation” (Herrick 140) of the Poetics. Therefore, Herrick concludes,
If the contemporary admiration of natural genius and the force of the “romantic
movement” were fast triumphing over the outworn “rules,” we may yet be sure that,
with an excellent apparatus for the study of the Poetics, that study would not be
altogether neglected in the next generation. (Herrick 140)
At the end of the nineteenth century, “Aristotle returned to literary criticism, but his followers
no longer were forced to wear the ‘Aristotelian yoke’” (Herrick 180).
1.7
Conclusion
Although there are several interpretations of Aristotle, and despite the fact that some of
Aristotle’s ideas contradict each other, a few conclusions can be drawn from Aristotle’s
Poetics.
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The plot is the most important element in Aristotelian tragedy, in which the characters
perform as active agents and are the main drive of the plot, displaying their character through
their actions. Although the Aristotelian hero commits a hamartia, he should preferably
commit it in ignorance, and he should be generally good, so that the audience can experience
pity and fear. The hero should be better than the norm in the sense that he should be
prosperous, which makes him vulnerable to a fall. External factors should not play a role in a
tragedy: the events and actions should be necessary and probable, and must lie within the
human scope, illustrating that the hero causes his own downfall, which contributes to the
didactic shaping of the audience.
A tragedy should ideally contain a complex plot with reversal, recognition, and
suffering. Whether the tragedy should preferably shift from happiness to misfortune or vice
versa, is not entirely clear, but the first option seems to be the most plausible one.
A tragedy should not be like epic in the sense that it must be more compact and less
diluted: this is why Aristotle favours tragedy above epic.
Now that an outline has been given of Aristotle’s Poetics and its introduction into
England, Aristotle’s theory will be applied to Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of
Casterbridge.
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Chapter 2. About Thomas Hardy
Before embarking on my analysis of The Mayor of Casterbridge, I will first supply some
necessary background information about the author in question. The multiplicity of ideas in
The Mayor of Casterbridge finds its roots in the social context in which Hardy lived. The
social, intellectual, and ideological changes as well as Hardy’s knowledge of literature from,
among others, the classical age, are all present in Hardy’s novel. Therefore I will briefly
discuss Hardy’s background, his views on tragedy, and his acquaintance with Aristotle.
2.1
Thomas Hardy: Background Information
Thomas Hardy, son of a stone-mason, was born in 1840. His mother was very well-read: she
stimulated her son’s interest in stories and encouraged his education (A Hardy Companion –
F.B. Pinion 1-2). In 1849, Hardy was transferred to a school in Dorchester, where he was
taught Latin (Pinion 2). In 1856 Hardy left school to become an architect, but he continued
studying the Latin classics (Pinion 3) and he also began to study Greek (Pinion 3). In his
Greek he was assisted by Horace Moule, “the son of a distinguished minister at Fordington”
(Pinion 3) and “a fine Greek scholar” (Pinion 3). Moule “lent Hardy books, discussed
classical literature with him, and advised him to give up the study of Greek plays if he wished
to become an architect” (Pinion 3-4). There were several other influences to shape Hardy,
because “scientific thought and critical research were making their early undermining impacts
on the foundations of established beliefs” (Pinion 4). Hardy acclaimed works such as Charles
Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and Essays and Reviews (1860) by “The Seven against
Christ” (Pinion 4).
In 1862 Hardy went to London for his work, and during his stay there he wrote poems
that show “the complete overthrow of his faith” (Pinion 4). An example of such a
23
poem is “Hap,” written in 1866, which is a passionate accusation of “Crass Casualty” (Pinion
5). In writing these poems, Hardy was very likely influenced by “contemporary scientific
philosophy and the poetry of Swinburne” (Pinion 5-6). But Swinburne was not the only writer
to influence Hardy: “Hardy’s reading of Spencer, Huxley, and John Stuart Mill had made him
an independent thinker” (Pinion 4). He also read and admired Shelley, Browning, and Scott
(Pinion 4). But the older masters captured the interest of Hardy too: he read Shakespeare, and
saw several plays of him (Pinion 4 and 9).
During his stay in London, Hardy “developed Radical sympathies” (Pinion 180),
although he regarded himself later as an “Intrinsicalist” (Pinion 180): he held the opinion that
“a person should be judged by his intrinsic worth, not by class or conventions” (Pinion 18081). This attitude “lies at the root of much of Hardy’s writing, particularly his fiction” (Pinion
181).
Hardy’s writing career began in 1867, when he moved back to the region of
Dorchester, and started to write his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (Pinion 5). He had
his first favourable reception with Under the Greenwood Tree in 1872 (Pinion 7). In 1874 he
gained success with Far from the Madding Crowd and married Emma Lavinia Gifford (Pinion
7). Their marriage would be one of ups and downs:
[Emma] had encouraged [Hardy] and assisted him in his writings, but was obsessed
with her social superiority and at times possessed with the idea that she was a writer of
genius. Occasionally her eccentricities reached a point which it was difficult not to
label “insanity.” (Pinion 10)
Several novels later, from 1884 to 1885, Hardy wrote, “off and on,” The Mayor of
Casterbridge for weekly serial publication (Pinion 9). The fact that this novel was published
in parts, requiring at least one event per episode, made The Mayor of Casterbridge a highly
24
eventful novel: “[T]he economy demanded by weekly serialisation helped to produce a
compact and highly charged novel” (Pinion 40-41).
After the negative reception of Jude the Obscure in 1895 Hardy turned away from
writing novels and concentrated on his poetry (Pinion 12). He died in 1928 (Pinion 14).
The social and intellectual unrest of Hardy’s time led to his bleak vision of life.
According to Pinion,
[c]ontemporary scientific thought led Hardy to believe in the insignificance of
humanity in the stellar universe, and the cruelty of Nature, which everywhere evinced
the struggle for existence and the Unfulfilled Intention. (Pinion 144)
The critics W.R. Rutland and H.C. Webster add to this that “evolution through natural
selection, the origin of man, […], the displacement of a transcendent personal Deity by
immanent process without mind or purpose” (Jean R. Brooks, Thomas Hardy – The Poetic
Structure 8) as well as “the ‘Higher Criticism’ of sacred texts, Herbert Spencer’s philosophy
of the Unknowable, John Stuart Mill’s essays on the religious and social liberty of the
individual” (Brooks 8-9) left a considerable trace on Hardy’s vision of man’s place in nature.
The critic Douglas Brown emphasises the impact of the Industrial Revolution. He
stresses “the destructive effect on a stable peasant culture of the revolution in industry”
(Brooks 9). Together with “the revolution in thought” (Brooks 9), these changes defined man
as “product and victim of a soulless mechanism” (Brooks 9).
Pinion points out a letter, which is to be found in The Life of Thomas Hardy by
Florence Emily Hardy, in which Hardy denies that Nature works according to a moral system:
it “refutes the idea that Nature ‘may practice a scheme of morality unknown to us, in which
she is just’” (Pinion 175).
Although Hardy very much had his doubts about religion, he stressed the importance
of Christian compassion in an uncaring universe. Against this uncaring universe, Hardy
25
proposed “the Christian doctrine of ‘charity’ or ‘loving-kindness’, and an alliance between
this humanitarian religion and ‘complete rationality’” (Pinion 179). Therefore Hardy had
great faith in the human being himself: “The Immanent Will was not percipient, but
percipience was to be found in humanity” (Pinion 179-80). That is why Hardy called himself
a meliorist rather than a pessimist. In a conversation with William Archer, he said:
“[M]y practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist. What are my books but one long
plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ – to woman – and to the lower animals?
Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it much
worse than it need be.” (Pinion 178)
Several of the influences discussed above can be traced in Hardy’s novel The Mayor of
Casterbridge. Brooks argues that the novel’s plot is archetypal: “The myth of human
responsibility and rebellion against the human condition is deep-seated” (Brooks 199). The
novel’s main character, Michael Henchard, is compared with classical heroes such as Achilles
and Oedipus, biblical heroes such as Cain and Job, and Renaissance heroes such as King Lear,
and Faust (Brooks 199), while “his self-alienation and impulse to self-destruction recall more
modern heroes [such as] Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff [and] Melville’s Captain Ahab” (Brooks
200). These are literary influences from the past, but Hardy also manages to leave his own
mark upon tragedy due to the social and ideological influences of his own time, creating an
original, Hardeian tragedy.
2.2
Hardy’s Views on Tragedy
The struggle between man and indifferent forces and circumstances plays an important role in
Hardy’s novels. According to Hardy, “circumstance implies not only the network of
environment (cf. Life, 274), but also the character of the person centrally involved” (Pinion
144). In Hardy’s first definition of tragedy, “circumstance or ‘situation’ includes ‘ordinary
26
human passions, prejudices, and ambitions’ (cf. the remarks on Jude: Life, 433)” (Pinion 14445). Hardy stresses the element of the unforeseen:
[People] live in hope, and the simple reason why they do not take measures to ward
off disastrous events is that they are unforeseen. Human nature deceives itself, and it is
in the element of the unforeseeable that the tragic irony is implicit. (Pinion 144-45)
Later on, Pinion points out, Hardy defines tragedy as follows: “‘The best tragedy – highest
tragedy in short – is that of the WORTHY encompassed by the INEVITABLE. The tragedies
of immoral and worthless people are not of the best’” (Pinion 145). This definition comes
very close to Aristotle’s definition. What Hardy defines as worthy, however, may differ from
Aristotle’s definition, as will be proved later on.
Hardy does challenge Aristotle in that he prioritises the probability of character over
the probability of plot, while Aristotle sees plot as the most important element in a tragedy:
[Hardy] consistently felt that a story must present the unusual; it must be exciting or
“worth the telling” (Life, 362). To make the unusual credible, the characters must be
probable (Life, 150). (Pinion 145)
Another aspect in which Hardy challenges Aristotle, is that he likes to combine
grandeur with “littleness.” In an epigrammatic statement which he wrote on completing The
Mayor of Casterbridge, he says: “‘The business of the poet and novelist is to show the
sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things’
(Life, 291, 171)” (Pinion 150).
The comparison between Hardy and Aristotle will, of course, be elaborated later on in
the analysis of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
27
2.3
Hardy’s Acquaintance with Aristotle
In Thomas Hardy – The Forms of Tragedy, Dale Kramer quotes “The Profitable Reading of
Fiction,” in which Hardy argues that “‘a story should be an organism’” (Kramer 12). Hardy
uses the words of Addison when he claims that in a story “‘nothing should go before it, be
intermixed with it, or follow after it, that is not related to it’” (Kramer 12). For Kramer, this is
reason to believe that Hardy knew Aristotle’s Poetics: “Hardy’s frame of reference in these
remarks is obviously Aristotle’s dictum that the art work should contain a beginning, a
middle, and an end” (Kramer 12). According to Kramer, it also includes, “as does Aristotle’s
outline of dramatic principles, the necessity that all narrative devices be appropriate to the
plot, atmosphere, and final significance” (Kramer 12).
According to Kramer, Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge “is modelled to a large
degree on Aristotle” (Kramer 14). However, he does admit that the novel cannot be merely
termed as Aristotelian, and that it cannot be easily defined:
[Hardy] does not adhere consistently to Aristotle’s ideas on tragedy or to those of any
clearly defined school. Indeed, the terms under which Hardy can be considered a
tragedian have always been rather problematic. (Kramer 14)
Hardy’s quote from “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” certainly suggests that Hardy knew
Aristotle’s Poetics, but Kramer may be going a little far in defining The Mayor of
Casterbridge as “modelled to a large degree on Aristotle” (Kramer 14, italics mine), as I will
try to prove later on.
In her thesis Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure Read
as Tragedies in Accordance with Aristotle’s Poetics, Josien de Ruiter points out that Hardy
mentions Aristotle in the preface to Jude the Obscure, in which Hardy argues that the novel is
“‘a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was universal, and not without a
hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein’ (41-42)” (De Ruiter
28
6). This quotation, De Ruiter argues, “indicates that Hardy was aware of Aristotle’s ideas”
(6), but she admits that “[although] it is clear that Hardy was well-read in the classics, […] we
cannot establish with complete certainty whether he read Aristotle” (De Ruiter 6). What can
be concluded, however, as De Ruiter says, is that “Hardy’s novels as well as his own ideas on
tragedy reveal that he must have been aware of Aristotle’s theory” (6).
Therefore it seems that Hardy was familiar with Aristotle’s Poetics, but to what degree
is unclear. It may be going too far to state, as Kramer does, that Hardy used Aristotle’s theory
as an important model for The Mayor of Casterbridge, as will be researched now in the
analysis.
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Chapter 3. The Plot and Set-up of The Mayor of Casterbridge
3.1
The multiple plot structure of The Mayor of Casterbridge
Aristotle’s concept of plot cannot be applied so easily to Hardy’s novel. Aristotle’s idea of a
plot containing a beginning, middle and end may not be entirely applicable to The Mayor of
Casterbridge. Not all the novel’s events may be logical and meaningful, and not all events
may result from merely the fatal error (hamartia) that the protagonist commits, as Aristotle
would have it. Aristotle requires a lucid and rational course of events in a tragedy, so that the
audience can understand how the tragedy came to be, while Hardy lays more emphasis on the
unforeseen and leaves the reader guessing who and what is actually to blame in the coming
about of tragedy. There is not one single plot in the novel, with one single rise and fall and
with one single recognition (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia). It could be argued that
The Mayor of Casterbridge can be divided into several smaller plots, with several rises and
falls and with several discoveries and reversals.
The most obvious plot of the novel to which Aristotle’s Poetics can be applied, is the
plot in which Henchard sells his family and when, later on, the furmity woman reveals this
fact in public. The novel’s tragic hero, Michael Henchard, commits his hamartia when in a
drunken fit he sells his wife and child. The recognition (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia)
take place when the furmity woman, having been witness to the sale, recognises Henchard
twenty years later during a court case and reveals his shameful secret in public. The fall and
suffering of Henchard takes place after this revelation. He loses his reputation and wealth as a
mayor:
Small as the 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 honour, and began to descend rapidly on the other side. (Hardy 216)
30
The main thread of the story therefore could be Henchard’s hamartia in the beginning,
in the form of the sale of his wife and child. It could be argued that this one error has its effect
on almost everything in the novel. Most obviously, it causes Henchard’s loss of wealth and
reputation after the furmity woman’s revelation. It causes Lucetta, Henchard’s former lover,
to mistrust him and marry someone else. In a way, in the long run, it causes Henchard to lose
his step-daughter Elizabeth-Jane. This is when Newson, Elizabeth-Jane’s real father and the
buyer of Henchard’s wife and child, re-appears. Henchard would not have had such a
complicated relationship with Elizabeth-Jane and Newson if the whole selling experience had
not taken place. He would not have told Elizabeth-Jane (in ignorance) that he and not Newson
is her father, he would not have lied to Elizabeth-Jane by maintaining this story, and he would
not have lied to Newson that Elizabeth-Jane is dead. He would not have grown to love
Elizabeth-Jane and would not have experienced the pain of her loss when her real father
Newson turns up and the truth is revealed. This is because Henchard would never have met
them in the first place. If the reader sees Henchard’s error at the start of the novel as the cause
of all the events mentioned above, it would appear that the novel has a single plot.
However, Hardy shows that the situation is far more complicated. Henchard’s
separation from Lucetta is caused by several other factors, and Henchard makes up for his
mistake. Also, his conflict with Farfrae has nothing to do with Henchard’s hamartia in the
beginning. Furthermore, there are several other plots to be observed, as will be described now.
When Henchard loses his position as mayor, the novel is not finished yet: it is only
two thirds of the way. At the stage when Henchard loses his mayoral position, he has not lost
everything yet. His personal life is still a point of interest. Many events still take place in
Henchard’s post-mayor phase, and still the reader feels that Henchard is the main character,
the hero in whose course we are interested. His stepdaughter Elizabeth-Jane has not rejected
him yet, and Farfrae also wants to help Henchard. Therefore, his career and material
31
happiness may be over, but his private life is not yet completely devoid of hope. The reader
gains hope again when Elizabeth-Jane nurses Henchard, and Henchard pulls himself together
again:
The effect [on Henchard], either of [Elizabeth-Jane’s] ministrations or of her mere
presence, was a rapid recovery. He soon was well enough to go out; and now things
seemed to wear a new colour in his eyes. He no longer thought of emigration, and
though more of Elizabeth. […] [O]ne day, with better views of Farfrae than he had
held for some time, and a sense that honest work was not a thing to be ashamed of, he
stoically went down to Farfrae’s yard and asked to be taken on as a journeyman haytrusser. (225-26)
This is where Hardy challenges Aristotle. He proves that a story does not have to be over,
merely because the story’s hero has lost his wealth and reputation. A hero can still be
interesting and stand out, even in poverty. Henchard still has the company and affection of
Elizabeth-Jane, and honest work, however lowly it may be, is not a shameful occupation. As
Hardy puts it, self-respect is “the last mental prop under poverty” (283): when people lose
their wealth, they always have their self-respect to keep them going. This was proved earlier
in Pinion’s description of Hardy as an Intrinsicalist: he judges people by their intrinsic worth
and not by class or conventions (Pinion 180-81). Hardy writes about a different kind of
nobility from Aristotle. This point will be illustrated further later on.
After Henchard’s material downfall another plot starts. It starts, as mentioned above,
with Henchard’s recovery, his reconciliation with Elizabeth-Jane, and his work for Farfrae.
However, Henchard finds it hard to deal with the fact that Farfrae married his former lover
Lucetta, and, as Robert C. Schweik argues in “Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of
Casterbridge,” his second deterioration takes place when he starts drinking again, when he
wants to reveal his past affair with Lucetta to Farfrae, as a kind of revenge, and also when he
32
attacks Farfrae in the hayloft (Schweik 255-56). Henchard’s discovery of Farfrae and
Lucetta’s love affair could be seen as a discovery and a reversal. Schweik argues that “[i]t is,
finally, the failure of his well-intentioned acts which brings about Henchard’s second
catastrophe – that loss of self-respect which verges on despair” (257). Schweik is referring to
Henchard’s attempt to reconcile with Farfrae and to bring him home to his wife Lucetta who
is ill at that moment: Henchard fails in this because Farfrae no longer believes in his good
intentions. When Henchard fails, he “curse[s] himself like a less scrupulous Job, as a
vehement man will do when he loses self-respect, the last mental prop under poverty” (Hardy
283). Henchard’s loss of self-respect marks his mental downfall, after already having had his
material downfall.
Also, within the first two-thirds of the story, in which the plot discussed above takes
place, several other plots may be discerned. The storyline between Henchard and ElizabethJane can be divided into two plots. The first of these plots starts when Henchard is reunited
with his wife Susan, and with Elizabeth-Jane, whom he at that point still thinks is his
daughter. After Susan’s death, Henchard decides to reveal to Elizabeth-Jane that he is her real
father. Up until that point Elizabeth-Jane thinks that Newson, the sailor who bought
Henchard’s wife and child twenty years before, is her actual father, which ironically is true.
When Henchard tells Elizabeth-Jane that he is her father, he goes to look for documents to
prove it. However, as he does so, he discovers a document that proves the opposite: it is a
letter from Susan, written on her deathbed. Although she requested that the letter would not be
opened until Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding day, Henchard opens it anyway, and then reads the
startling news that Elizabeth-Jane is not his daughter. His own child had died three months
after the sale: Susan had a daughter with Newson, whom she also called Elizabeth-Jane, to
make up for the loss of the first child.
33
Henchard’s reading of this letter could be seen both as a hamartia and as a discovery
(anagnorisis), also bringing about the reversal. Henchard’s hamartia is that he fails to respect
the wish of his wife to open the letter only on Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding day: this brings about
Henchard’s miserable discovery. The reversal (peripeteia) is that Henchard distances himself
from Elizabeth, causing a gap to grow between them. The fall and suffering could be
Henchard’s grief for the death of his child. This novel’s episode can also be seen as a tragedy
in its own right: the reader feels the tragedy of Henchard having to process the sad loss of his
first child, the child he thought he had recovered. The irony in this tragedy is great: when
Henchard goes to find documents to prove to Elizabeth the truth of his parenthood, full of
hope that he can now officially claim Elizabeth as own, he discovers a document that proves
the untruth of it.
With this plot, Hardy proves that a discovery can take place via a letter, opened by
coincidence, and that a discovery does not necessarily have to take place through reasoning or
through the incidents themselves, which Aristotle found the superior kinds of discovery. It
could be argued that Henchard’s discovery through a letter is more shocking, because it is
more unexpected, making it a more impressive kind of discovery. At the same time this
discovery fits in very logically with the story, adding to the tragic irony. Because Henchard
goes to find documents proving his parenthood, he discovers Susan’s letter. Therefore this
discovery may be interpreted both as being inspired by, and a challenge to Aristotle’s ranking
of kinds of discovery.
The second plot involving Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane is when Newson makes his
appearance. The plot starts when Henchard and Elizabeth have renewed their friendship.
Ironically, at this point when Henchard feels a great longing to be in Elizabeth’s company in
all his loneliness, Newson reappears. At first Newson only meets Henchard, and asks after
Elizabeth-Jane. In a fearful fit that Henchard might lose Elizabeth-Jane again, he commits
34
another hamartia by telling Newson that she is dead. However, later on, Newson returns when
he has found out the falsehood of Henchard’s story. Henchard leaves Casterbridge, realising
that his game is up, and Newson meets Elizabeth-Jane, who learns the truth: this causes her to
distance herself from Henchard. Newson’s reappearance and the revelation of the truth could
be seen as another recognition and discovery, causing the reversal and fall of Henchard to
take place: Henchard leaves Casterbridge and dies lonely.
It could be argued that this plot can be divided into two subplots. After leaving
Casterbridge, Henchard returns to visit Elizabeth-Jane on her wedding day. The reader gains
hope again that Henchard and Elizabeth may be reconciled, but this hope is thwarted when
Elizabeth rejects him. Henchard leaves Casterbridge again, and when Elizabeth feels remorse
and decides to reconcile with Henchard, it is too late: Henchard has died. So it is possible to
see two plots here, because there are two moments of rise and fall. However, in the last plot,
Henchard commits no hamartia. It could be argued that Elizabeth commits a hamartia here by
rejecting Henchard. Her rejection is also the moment where the reversal from hope to despair
takes place. The plot does not really contain a discovery, however. Therefore, this plot does
not exactly fit in with Aristotle’s theory, and Hardy simply disregards Aristotle here.
Another plot in the novel is the storyline involving Henchard and Farfrae. However,
where this storyline exactly ends is not easy to define. It begins when Henchard and Farfrae
meet. Henchard recognises Farfrae’s business skills and takes a keen liking to him, employing
him as his manager. At the same time, Henchard commits a hamartia here, because in
employing Farfrae he rejects Joshua Jopp, the man who was supposed to get the job.
Therefore Henchard awakens Joshua Jopp’s wrath, and Jopp takes his revenge later on by
exposing Henchard’s love affair with Lucetta. The first shift of power from Henchard to
Farfrae takes place in chapter 15, where Henchard humiliates one of his workmen, Abel
Whittle, for regularly showing up too late at work. Much to Henchard’s dismay, Farfrae tells
35
Henchard off for being too harsh and unreasonable. Henchard then feels that his power is
fading and that Farfrae’s star is rising:
[…] Henchard continued moody and silent, and when one of the men inquired of him
if some oats should be hoisted to an upper floor or not, he said shortly, “Ask Mr,
Farfrae. He’s master here!” (98)
The narrator continues to say: “Morally he was; there could be no doubt of it. Henchard, who
had hitherto been the most admired man in his circle, was the most admired no longer” (98).
From then on the friendship between Henchard and Farfrae is under pressure and
Henchard feels that he has to compete with him. In chapter 16, when Farfrae wants to
organise some festivities to celebrate a national event, Henchard feels driven to do the same,
or to do even better than Farfrae. This results in Henchard organising unpractical and
expensive events in the open air: on the festive day the weather turns bad and everyone flocks
to Farfrae’s festivities, which are organised indoors, leaving Henchard behind. Again
Henchard feels that Farfrae is overshadowing him. It is the last straw for Henchard and in an
impulse he goes up to Farfrae and fires him on the spot, committing his next hamartia. After
that, Henchard realises the mistake he has made:
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. (106-07)
Much to Henchard’s dismay, Farfrae remains in Casterbridge and buys a business in the same
trade as Henchard, making the two men competitors. This is where the reversal takes place: it
ultimately leads to Henchard’s failing as a businessman, and therefore to his material
downfall. However, the bad weather and bad harvest in chapter 26 could also be seen as a
reversal, because this is what definitively brings about Henchard’s material downfall. But it is
36
his unsuccessful dealings with the weather that cause Henchard’s failure and Farfrae’s correct
calculations that cause his success, and had the two still been a team, Henchard would not
have failed. So perhaps the reversal is not so easy to define here. Also, there is no discovery in
this plot. So Aristotle’s plot scheme does not fit in entirely here either.
Finally, the storyline between Henchard and Lucetta could also be seen as another
plot. It starts hopefully, when Lucetta renews her friendship with Henchard after Susan’s
death. However, Henchard commits a hamartia by not visiting Lucetta for a while, which
results in Farfrae being there before him. At the point when Lucetta loses her patience with
Henchard, she meets Farfrae and falls in love with him. When Henchard commits his
hamartia, the reversal takes place too: Lucetta turns away from Henchard towards Farfrae. It
is not easy to define a discovery and downfall in this plot, however. So here again, Hardy
does not conform completely to Aristotle.
Also, the fact that Henchard starts an affair with Lucetta in the first place could be
seen as a hamartia. The discovery takes place when Joshua Jopp reads Henchard’s love letters
in public, and the reversal takes place when the Casterbridge people organise a skimmington
ride and expose Henchard and Lucetta’s affair. However, this does not cause Henchard’s
downfall, but Lucetta’s: she dies soon after the skimmington ride. Here again Hardy does not
entirely match Aristotle’s theory.
It is difficult to say whether Hardy conforms to Aristotle’s concept of a plot having to
contain a beginning, middle, and end. The multiple plots of the novel make it hard to say
whether all events in the middle of the novel are the logical consequences of the beginning, as
Aristotle requires. For example, Henchard’s conflict with Farfrae does not have anything to
do with the beginning where Henchard sells his family. As The Mayor of Casterbridge is a
novel, Hardy’s work has a bigger scope and is longer, and perhaps more diluted, which may
make the novel seem more like an epic than a tragedy. However, when one looks at the
37
requirements that Aristotle makes of a tragedy – that nothing irrelevant should happen in the
story, and that all events should evolve around and contribute to the hero’s flaws and his
downfall – then Hardy’s novel does indeed conform to these principles. Therefore, it could be
argued that The Mayor of Casterbridge has the scope of an epic, but the storylines and the
emotions that these storylines evoke can certainly be placed in the genre of tragedy.
Therefore, Hardy has used several Aristotelian elements, but not all these elements
appear in every plot. Also, the Aristotelian elements are sometimes applied in different ways,
for example in Henchard’s discovery of Susan’s letter, and in Elizabeth’s hamartia by
rejecting Henchard. Also, the plots sometimes blend with each other. For example, the
revelation of Henchard’s sale of his wife and child cause Lucetta to turn away from Henchard
definitively and marry Farfrae. Hardy proves that plots are not always as clear-cut as Aristotle
would have them. As Kramer says:
The repetitive action in The Mayor of Casterbridge communicates Hardy’s view that
human history is not linear but cyclic, and that the dominant motif of movement is not
steady and unwavering progress but pulsating and irregular advances. (Kramer 71)
Also, Hardy challenges Aristotle by not having the story end after Henchard’s material
downfall. Finally, because Henchard commits several hamartiae, it is more appropriate to
speak of a tragic flaw rather than a tragic error. Therefore, although Hardy certainly proves
that Aristotelian elements are useful, he challenges them too.
3.2
Tragic plot or lament?
In “Jude the Obscure in the Age of Anxiety,” Barry N. Schwartz argues that Hardy’s novel
Jude the Obscure is a lament and not a tragedy, because “[u]nlike Oedipus or Ahab, whose
tragedies result from their characters, Jude never has a chance” (803). Although in The Mayor
of Casterbridge Henchard’s downfall is partly caused by his own flaws, the sense of
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melancholy and lament that Schwartz speaks of is partly discernable in the novel. The overall
tone of the novel is melancholic: there is never a state of complete happiness in the novel. The
novel can be read as a study of the struggle of man. Hardy seems to suggest that it is naïve to
think in terms of shifts from happiness to misfortune, because at the close of the novel he
terms happiness as being merely “the occasional episode in a general drama of pain” (322).
With this he seems to argue that life is but one large lament, therefore seeming to challenge
the Aristotelian shift from happiness to misery.
However, Hardy certainly recognises the value of Aristotelian tragedy: only he
replaces the Aristotelian shift from happiness to misfortune with shifts from hope to despair.
The overall tone is melancholic, but at several points Hardy gives the reader hope that things
may be looking up for the hero, but then the reader’s hope is thwarted again, creating a tragic
effect. Hardy must have realised that if these dynamics were absent, the reader would lose
interest, as Duane D. Edwards points out in “The Mayor of Casterbridge as Aeschylean
Tragedy”:
If we did not hope for a favourable outcome each time we read about [for example]
Hamlet or Oedipus, we would soon lose interest. Desirable alternatives to a hero’s fate
must be suggested in a work of fiction, or the work ceases to be tragedy. (Edwards
618, note 20)
Therefore Hardy proves that Aristotle’s concept is valuable in this case.
3.3
The Roman Amphitheatre as a metaphor for Greek tragedy
Hardy’s affinity with classical tragedy becomes quite clear when he introduces the Ring, a
Roman Amphitheatre. The fact that Henchard meets two important women here – Susan and
Lucetta – contributes to the dramatic aspect of the novel, with actors and actresses performing
a tragedy that is not unlike classical drama. As Brooks argues, “[t]he action grows out of
39
dramatic conflict, and life is seen as a vast arena where the battle for survival takes place”
(202). The violent, tragic, and spectacular past of the Ring also “add[s] pathos to Henchard’s
furtive meetings there with Susan and Lucetta” (Brooks 202).
This does not tell much of the novel’s relation to Aristotle’s Poetics, but it does
demonstrate Hardy’s affinity with and love for dramatic action and heroism.
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Chapter 4. Pity, Fear, and the Hero’s Downfall
In this chapter, I will discuss the novel’s interplay of character and circumstance and how this
evokes pity and fear, and what this says about the hero’s downfall.
4.1
D.A. Dike and John Paterson: a moral system?
There are some critics that argue that The Mayor of Casterbridge contains a just moral
system, and that the protagonist Henchard gets his just deserts. These critics would have one
believe that Henchard does not arouse pity and fear, and that his misfortune is not undeserved,
which would make The Mayor of Casterbridge very un-Aristotelian indeed. However, the
critics in question are deeply mistaken, as will be demonstrated after their analyses have been
summarised.
In “A Modern Oedipus: The Mayor of Casterbridge,” D.A. Dike argues that Henchard
embodies a selfish economic system, for which he is punished:
Alienation is the penalty for Henchard’s sin. Separateness from society, particularly
from the family he might have had, is a logical extension of the irresponsible
economic individualism which has been his ruling principle. (Dike 178)
Although the economic system may have made Henchard into what he is, he is still
responsible for his own actions, Dike argues: “[H]enchard is not [...] the hapless victim of his
cultural circumstance, index to that cultural circumstance though he be” (Dike 179).
Dike argues that the novel contains a moral system in which it is logical to talk of
Henchard’s crime and punishment:
[A]ll his actions and feelings are morally significant, and his entire transaction with
crime and punishment, with nature and society, represents for the reader a coherent
and therefore responsible moral experience. (Dike 179)
41
However, Dike’s focus on Henchard’s “irresponsible economic individualism” (178) seems to
be irrelevant. It is only part of Henchard’s flaws, and it is certainly not the main point that
Hardy wants to make. Also, Dike’s argument on the novel’s moral system is not entirely
waterproof, as will be explained later on.
In “The Mayor of Casterbridge as Tragedy,” John Paterson argues that Hardy’s The
Mayor of Casterbridge is one of the few nineteenth-century novels that is devoid of
“humanistic biases” (92) and “romantic sympathies and naturalistic assumptions” (92), and
that it contains “the existence of a moral order, an ethical substance, a standard of justice and
rectitude” (92). Paterson speaks of Henchard in terms of crime and punishment, as Dike does,
and argues that nature plays an important role as a judicial system in the novel.
For example, Paterson compares the bad weather – which ruins the harvest and
therefore financially ruins Henchard – to the tempests of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Paterson
argues that nature serves as the judicial force that punishes Henchard for his crime:
[The rains and tempests] reflect, as the symptom of a demoralisation in nature, the
demoralisation of the order that Henchard’s unnatural act has, much in the manner of
Lear’s, produced. (Paterson 100)
Paterson explains further that nature serves a moral purpose in Hardy’s novel: “Where
nature [enters] the novel, it enters as a force obedient and instrumental to a moral order whose
rights and claims take priority over a man’s” (100). He illustrates his point further by referring
to the passage where Henchard sells his family. Henchard’s violent behaviour is contrasted
with the peaceful image of nature: “The difference between the peacefulness of inferior nature
and the wilful hostilities of mankind was very apparent in this place” (Hardy 14). Paterson
points out that
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[t]he barbarous violence of [Henchard’s] deed and the Babylonian character of the fair
that is appropriately its setting are opposed […] to a piety in nature that is a reflex of a
piety in the universe. (100)
However, Paterson does not consider the sentence that follows the passage concerning
peaceful nature:
In presence of this scene, [...] 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. (Hardy 14)
Hardy’s description of nature as a raging force against innocent and defenceless mankind
illustrates quite a different point from Paterson’s.
Paterson also goes so far as to compare Henchard’s occupation as mayor in
Casterbridge to Claudius’ position as king of Denmark in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, causing the
place that they rule over to be blemished and unsound. He also makes a comparison to
Oedipus:
[Casterbridge’s] corruptions and demoralisation register, as in Oedipus and Hamlet,
the corruption and demoralisation of its chief magistrate. […] Like fate and nature,
society here operates within a traditional moral frame. (Paterson 109)
Paterson argues how the reappearance of Susan Henchard “schematises the determined
revenge of a supernatural authority for which a wrong left uncorrected and unpunished is
intolerable” (93) by the fact that Susan is called “The Ghost” (Hardy 80), implying a
comparison with the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet.
According to Paterson, the blemish on Casterbridge is reflected in the novel’s sinister
characters of Mixen Lane, who “are less the causes of the moral and social disorder than its
victims” (106), arguing that “they express the bitterness and despair of a society whose
43
magistrates, in having offended against justice, have forfeited their clear moral authority to
rule” (106).
However, Paterson’s and Dike’s arguments on the moral system are patently unjust. It
is more than inappropriate to compare Henchard to a criminal like Claudius. The moments of
remorse that Claudius feels are always superficial, because he is never willing to give up the
position that is unjustly his. Henchard’s feelings of remorse are much deeper, because, unlike
Claudius, he takes steps to correct his mistake: he swears a twenty-year abstinence from
alcohol, he searches for his family – but has to give up his search when his family seems to
have left England – and he takes his family back into his care when they reunite.
Also, the comparison to Oedipus is not entirely sound. Henchard differs from Oedipus
in that Oedipus commits his error in ignorance, so that for a score of years he lives happily
and is blissfully unaware of the serious offence he has committed. Henchard is well aware of
what he has done, and has to carry his burden of guilt around with him for the rest of his life.
Henchard’s unhappiness concerning his wife and child is illustrated further in the passage in
which Henchard says to Farfrae: “[…] I sank in one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer
from, on account o’ the loneliness of my domestic life” (Hardy 77). This burden of guilt, and
the eighteen-year absence of his family alone already contribute to Henchard’s punishment,
and cannot be excluded from the experiences that must generate the reader’s pity and fear.
Furthermore, if Paterson wants to describe Susan as an avenging ghost, surely Susan’s
letter – in which she reveals that Elizabeth-Jane is not his daughter and that his legitimate
daughter had died soon after the sale – is the appropriate revenge or punishment, or at least
appropriate from Susan’s point of view. Susan’s letter is also termed as such in the novel:
after reading the shattering news, Henchard feels “that the blasting disclosure was what he
had deserved” (Hardy 123), and later on, when Henchard reflects on his deed of selling his
family, he contemplates the fact that “his attempts to replace ambition by love had been as
44
fully foiled as his ambition itself. His wronged wife had foiled them by a fraud so grandly
simple as to be almost a virtue” (Hardy 313).
After this episode, which is quite shattering already, all the misfortunes that befall
Henchard are definitely to be pitied, even though they are partly the cause of Henchard’s
actions. When bad weather strikes Henchard, the reader feels that rather a random force
unaware of justice is at work, and that, in terms of King Lear, Henchard is a man more sinned
against than sinning.
Paterson admits that the novel does contain nineteenth-century romantic and scientific
doctrines – which illustrate the powerlessness of man and therefore contribute to the reader’s
pity for the hero – but he argues that
they appear […] only at the superficial level of authorial commentary and are
contradicted and ultimately overwhelmed by the novel’s fundamental assumptions, by
the traditional moral or religious values rendered at the crucial level of character and
action, form and structure. (111)
One of the examples that he mentions is the one mentioned before: the fragment on page 14 of
the novel, in which Hardy describes the potential rage of the universe while mankind is
innocently sleeping. Paterson brushes this aside by arguing that Hardy “must pay his respects
to the contemporary scientific doctrine that has taken nature out of its traditional frame”
(110). Another example he gives is Hardy’s critical comments on the more modest Farfrae
and Elizabeth:
Elizabeth’s “craving for correctness” [Hardy] denounces as “almost vicious” (248);
Farfrae he mocks as celebrating the “dear native country that he loved so well as never
to have revisited it” (373). (Paterson 111)
With these comments, Hardy contrasts Henchard’s sincere and well-meant passionate
character with the extreme correctness of Elizabeth and the superficial feelings of Farfrae,
45
therefore taking a positive stance towards Henchard and awakening more pity for the hero.
Instead of treating these examples as minor incidents, as Paterson does, these fragments
should be seen as contributing to Hardy’s main message: that the protagonist suffers
undeserved misfortune. This is because there are several other examples of undeserved misery
in the novel, as will be illustrated later on.
Paterson and Dike claim that The Mayor of Casterbridge reflects a moral system and
that the hero is justly served for his crime, suggesting that the novel does not evoke pity or
fear, nor demonstrates any undeserved misfortune on the hero’s part, which would make The
Mayor of Casterbridge un-Aristotelian indeed. However, Hardy’s novel does evoke great pity
and fear, and the hero suffers great undeserved misfortune, as has already been partly
demonstrated. Therefore the novel does contain Aristotelian traits, although the means by
which pity and fear are evoked, and the kinds of misfortune that are described in the novel,
may not always be typically Aristotelian. This is because the misfortunes are not only caused
by the hero himself, but also by external circumstances: this is where Hardy’s romantic and
scientific ideas overwhelm Aristotle’s theory. This point will be elaborated later on.
4.2
Lawrence J. Starzyk: No justice, just character
In “Hardy’s Mayor: the Antitraditional Basis of Tragedy,” Lawrence J. Starzyk challenges
Paterson. He denies the presence of a moral system that Paterson speaks of:
Far from being a realm of existence determined by law, order, or purpose,
Casterbridge – in fact the entire universe – lacks any determination whatever. [...] It is
a world [...] devoid of any absolute values, moral or religious. (594)
Instead of a judicial order, Starzyk argues that rather a natural kind of causality plays an
important role in The Mayor of Casterbridge:
46
Although it is inaccurate to state that in Hardy’s universe every cause necessarily has
an effect, and specifically a determined effect, it is correct to remark that in
Henchard’s case a particular act of his has certain consequences which form the major
plot line of the novel (593).
In challenging Paterson, Starzyk quotes the passage on nature (Hardy 14) that Paterson
brushes aside as a minor detail: Starzyk defines this passage as illustrating the “indeterminacy
of nature” (Starzyk 594). Another passage that proves this, Starzyk points out, is Henchard’s
musing at the end of the novel that “It was an odd sequence that out of all this tampering with
social law came that flower of Nature, Elizabeth” (Hardy 313).
Starzyk argues that, rather than a supernatural moral force punishing Henchard,
Henchard brings about his own downfall. His ambitious and headstrong character causes
tragedy to befall Henchard:
If there is a necessary law in Hardy’s universe, it is that he who seeks the vortex of life
in an effort to control its “contrarious inconsistencies” by imposing his own will upon
its random developments precipitates tragedy upon himself. (596)
A passage that illustrates this, Starzyk argues, is when Henchard opens Susan’s letter
with the crushing revelation that Elizabeth-Jane is not his daughter. Henchard wonders
whether there is “some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him” (Hardy 124). However,
right after that, Henchard realises that the event “had developed naturally” (124). As Starzyk
says,
[Henchard] quickly recognises and then disregards the superstitious element in his
character once he understands that his own impulsiveness and disregard of Susan’s
injunction not to open the fateful letter regarding Elizabeth-Jane’s identity precipitates
the crushing revelation. (596)
47
Starzyk illustrates his point – that the hero rather than supernatural forces bring about
the hero’s downfall – further with two quotes from Hardy’s novel. Firstly, Hardy quotes
Novalis: “Character is Fate” (112), and secondly, in the chapter in which Henchard visits
Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding, Hardy describes Henchard in the following fashion: “He rose to his
feet, and stood in dark despair, obscured by ‘the shade from his own soul upthrown’” (376).
Starzyk explains that this quote is from Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, a poem in which
Shelley argues that “divinity is nothing more than ‘the shade from [man’s] soul upthrown’”
(Starzyk 599). Starzyk claims that
[T]he implication of these two quotations is the admission of a supernatural force
beyond man’s control as nothing more than a figment of man’s imagination […]. […]
Consequently, it is not the malicious machinations of forces extraneous to man that are
responsible for tragedy and the consequent recognition of the world as a painted scene,
but man himself. (599)
The lack of justice, Starzyk argues, is also reflected in Hardy’s descriptions of
Casterbridge and its people. Starzyk denies Paterson’s view that Casterbridge falls into decay
because its mayor Henchard has yet been unpunished, pointing out that “Casterbridge has
implicated itself in a ‘crime’ long before Henchard ever arrives on the scene” (Starzyk 602).
This is proved, Starzyk argues, by the passage in which the character Buzzford tells the
Scotchman Farfrae that
Casterbridge is a old, hoary place o’ wickedness, by all account. ’Tis recorded in
history that we rebelled against the King one or two hundred years ago, in the time of
the Romans, and that lots of us was hanged on Gallows Hill, and quartered […].
(Hardy 51)
The absence of justice is also discernible in the behaviour of the Casterbridge police:
“Lawlessness prevails to such an extent that the police of the town, responsive to numbers,
48
capitulate in the face of crime and conceal the very symbols of their office” (Starzyk 603).
This happens in chapter 39: the police go in hiding when the Casterbridge people organise a
skimmington ride, in order to humiliate Lucetta and Henchard for their past affair. Starzyk
argues that the Casterbridge people do not do this out of a sense of justice, but out of glee:
It is not some violation of ethical or even social values which inspires Casterbridgeans
to punish those who call attention to themselves but the basest of all passions or
motives, vindictiveness, jealousy. (Starzyk 603)
This is also reflected in Henchard’s thoughts on the skimmity ride, and the motivation of the
Casterbridgeans behind this:
The tempting prospect of putting to the blush people who stand at the head of affairs –
that supreme and piquant enjoyment of those who writhe under the heel of the same –
had alone animated them. (Hardy 295)
Therefore Starzyk proves that Paterson’s theory holds no ground: there is no moral order in
The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the Casterbridge people reflect this. The moral corruption of
Casterbridge is not caused by Henchard: it rather illustrates that Henchard stands in a world
which does not work in terms of crime and punishment, and that Henchard’s fall is rather a
logical consequence of his own actions. As Starzyk points out,
The real greatness of Henchard as a tragic figure is not that he recognises in the end
that the universe is ordered and just, that his suffering is deserved; it is rather that he
has accepted his lot as something almost entirely of his own making and in part of the
very essence of life. (Starzyk 605)
This conclusion is Aristotelian indeed: the novel does not describe a case of moral justice in
which the protagonist gets his just deserts – that would deflate the Aristotelian principles of
fear, pity, and undeserved misfortune, while these factors are certainly present in Hardy’s
49
novel – but rather illustrates a situation in which the protagonist brings about his own
downfall.
However, Starzyk fails in his argument in certain respects. Although it is certainly true
that much of Henchard’s misfortune is brought about by his own mistakes, Hardy evokes pity
not only by making Henchard a basically virtuous character, but also by the fact that chance
and external circumstances play an important role in the novel. This is where Hardy
challenges Aristotle: he uses a mix of the agent’s actions plus pure chance and circumstances
as the causes of the protagonist’s downfall, which will be proved later on. It is therefore not
entirely accurate to say that only necessity and not chance appear in Hardy’s works. Starzyk
should have realised this when he quotes Elizabeth’s final thoughts at the close of the novel:
If happiness was unexpectedly afforded man, it was simply to be regarded not as a
blessing from some superhuman power pleased with the actions of man but rather as
“the occasional episode in a general drama of pain (386).” (Starzyk 606)
This proves that pure randomness is at play here, and that pure chance and external
circumstances can influence somebody’s fate too.
Also, Starzyk should have realised this fact when mentioning the forces of nature. The
fickle weather has an important influence on the hero’s fate, because his profession as a corn
merchant is dependent on the weather. Hardy could not have chosen the corn merchant
industry as the novel’s dominating profession for nothing: it illustrates how forces outside of
people’s power can influence their fate, and how certain people’s characters are not equipped
to face such circumstances.
Henchard’s profession is also vulnerable to the Industrial Revolution, and to the
competition of other people: his former friend and working partner Farfrae, who personifies
the Industrial Revolution, triumphs over Henchard in the corn industry because his working
50
method is more modern than Henchard’s. Farfrae also has different qualities from
Henchard’s:
Farfrae has other qualities which enable him to triumph over Henchard. Farfrae is
deliberate and patient, Henchard impulsive and impatient. The interaction of these
qualities ruins Henchard and makes Fafrae wealthy in the grain-buying season of
uncertain weather. (Kramer 73)
Henchard points out his differences from Farfrae himself, ironically at the point when they are
about to do business together and are not competitors yet:
In my business, ’tis true that strength and bustle build up a firm. But judgment and
knowledge are what keep it established. Unluckily, I am bad at science, Farfrae; bad at
figures – a rule o’ thumb sort of man. You are just the reverse – I can see that. (47-48)
All of this proves that Henchard is vulnerable to external circumstances too. He is both agent
and victim: external circumstances work against him, and his character is not equipped to
defeat those circumstances. Both Henchard and Farfrae experience bad weather, but Farfrae’s
character is better equipped against this mishap than Henchard. With this Hardy demonstrates
the close interconnection between character and circumstance. Therefore, in this sense Hardy
challenges Aristotle.
4.3
Duane D. Edwards: The joint force of character and circumstance
In “The Mayor of Casterbridge as Aeschylean Tragedy,” Duane D. Edwards argues that it is a
combination of circumstances and character that brings about Henchard’s downfall.
Edwards points out that Hardy stresses character, and that character is something that
cannot be easily overcome. It is something that human beings carry with them for the rest of
their lives. One of the passages to support this claim is:
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[T]hough under a long reign of self-control he had become Mayor and church-warden
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. (Hardy 110)
As Edwards explains, passages like these prove that “those traits which formerly governed
Henchard could do so again” (Edwards 612).
However, Edwards also points out that circumstances play an important role in The
Mayor of Casterbridge, because if the circumstances had been different, Henchard might well
have had a different fate. This is proved in the appearances of several characters: “If Farfrae
or Susan or the furmity woman or Newson had not appeared in Casterbridge, Henchard’s fate
would have been different; his prosperity might have continued” (Edwards 612). The fact that
one of these characters might not have appeared, is for example suggested in the chapter of
Farfrae’s appearance:
He might possibly have passed by without stopping at all, or at most for half a minute
to glance in at the scene, had not his advent coincided with the discussion on corn and
bread; in which event this history had never been enacted. (Hardy 37)
As for the appearance of the furmity woman: she and Henchard would never have met if Dr.
Chalkfield had been present to attend the Petty Sessions (a court case in which the furmity
woman appears) instead of Henchard. Edwards therefore concludes that, “if any one of these
four characters had not acted impulsively, events would have progressed differently and
Henchard’s fate would have been different” (Edwards 613).
Also, according to Edwards, it is a combination of events that overthrows Henchard:
“[Henchard] is ruined not by one event, but by a combination of unlikely events” (613).
Because of this combination of events, the relationship between past and present in the novel
is “indeterminate rather than causal” (Edwards 610). Edwards argues that Henchard’s sale of
52
his family is not the only fatal error that causes all of Henchard’s misfortune, and the furmity
woman is not the only factor generating Henchard’s downfall. Edwards refers to chapter 31
[…] where the narrator stresses […] the lapse of time between the original deed and
the townspeople’s discovery of the deed, and, secondly, the amends Henchard has
made for his deed. Furthermore, and most important, when the narrator says, “New
events combined to undo him” (p. 215), he suggests that the furmity woman’s
revelation alone could not have destroyed Henchard; a combination of events is
required. Finally, it is not the deed itself, but the fact that the townspeople respond to
the deed as if it were a recent deed that causes Henchard to decline socially and
morally. (Edwards 611)
Edwards therefore argues that
if Hardy is intent on writing tragedy, he must suggest, first of all, that, given the
particular combination of events which comprise Henchard’s life, his downfall was
inevitable and, secondly, that individual events – and therefore the combination of
events – might have been different. (612)
Edwards points out that such a plot structure – a plot in which different courses and
combinations of events are possible – is crucial to keep the reader interested:
If we did not hope for a favourable outcome each time we read about Hamlet or
Oedipus, we would soon lose interest. Desirable alternatives to a hero’s fate must be
suggested in a work of fiction, or the work ceases to be tragedy. (Edwards 618, note
20)
This suggests, as has been noted before, that Hardy conforms to Aristotle’s principles. If his
novel expressed misery all along, and created no hope for a different fate of the hero, there
would be no Aristotelian shift from happiness to misery, and there would be no arousal of
Aristotelian fear on the part of the audience. The difference is, however, that in an
53
Aristotelian tragedy, the hero’s fate might have been different had he not committed his fatal
error, while in Hardy’s tragedy it is a combination of the hero’s tragic flaw and external
circumstances that brings about the hero’s downfall.
Edwards therefore makes a good argument in stating that in The Mayor of
Casterbridge it is a combination of factors that creates the tragedy. However, he speaks of
“unlikely events” (613): if the novel’s events were indeed unlikely, Hardy would not conform
to Aristotle’s principles of probability. However, although the combinations of events are
sometimes horribly unlucky in the novel, and can be termed as freak accidents, they are, in
principle, possible. Hardy demonstrates that certain events can be extraordinary, but indeed
possible: therefore Hardy does conform to the Aristotelian probability principles fairly well.
4.4
Robert C. Schweik: From internal to external force
In “Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Robert C. Schweik argues
that the novel can be divided into four movements. According to Schweik, each movement
provides a variation on a common pattern: an initial situation which seems to offer
some hope for Henchard is followed by events which create doubt, fear, and anxious
anticipation for an outcome that comes, finally, as a catastrophe. (250)
Schweik makes this division because each movement, he argues, highlights a change in
Henchard’s character.
The first and longest movement, Schweik argues, covers slightly more than half of the
novel, and focuses on Henchard’s successful dealings with Farfrae, his lost wife and child,
and Lucetta (Schweik 251). Henchard’s first deterioration takes place when he ends his
friendship with Farfrae, treats Elizabeth coldly after discovering the secret of her parentage,
and tries to force himself upon Lucetta (Schweik 253). His downfall finally takes place when
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Henchard is financially ruined, and when the furmity woman publicly disgraces Henchard by
revealing his past secret (Schweik 253). Schweik argues that
Henchard’s first downfall is the product of a variety of interconnected causes, some
related to Henchard’s character (as he is variously prompted by instinctive
antagonism, superstitiousness, Southern doggedness, disappointment, unconscious
cravings, rashness, rivalry in love) and some more clearly matters of chance
(coincidental discoveries, inopportune revelations, the vagaries of the weather) […].
(Schweik 253, note 5)
The second movement, as Schweik suggests, “again opens on a note of rising hope
that is followed by a reversal and a falling action which terminates in catastrophe” (254). It
starts when Henchard pulls himself together and decides to work for Farfrae (Schweik 254).
Henchard reconciles with Elizabeth, and there is even some hope that he might reconcile with
Farfrae (Schweik 255). However, Henchard finds it hard to deal with the fact that Farfrae
married his former lover Lucetta, and his second deterioration takes place when he wants to
reveal his past affair with Lucetta to Farfrae, as a revenge, and also when he attacks Farfrae in
the hayloft (Schweik 255-56). The difference here, though, is that Henchard does not fulfil
those wicked deeds that he intends to do, because his conscience catches up with him.
Schweik argues that “[i]t is, finally, the failure of his well-intentioned acts which brings about
Henchard’s second catastrophe – that loss of self-respect which verges on despair” (257).
Schweik is referring to Henchard’s attempt to reconcile with Farfrae and to bring him home to
his wife Lucetta, who is ill at that moment.
After Lucetta’s death, the third cycle opens (Schweik 257). There is hope for
Henchard again when he and Elizabeth-Jane fully reconcile, and Henchard sees her as his
beacon to happiness (Schweik 257). However, when Newson appears, Henchard feels that his
role as a father is in jeopardy and turns Newson away with “one desperate and unthinking lie”
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(Schweik 257). Henchard “now suffers through moments of self-doubt and agonised
casuistry” (Schweik 258). When Newson reappears, Henchard realises that the game is up and
leaves Casterbridge “as a self-condemned man” (Schweik 258): this marks Henchard’s third
fall.
The fourth movement from hope to catastrophe covers the last two chapters of the
novel (Schweik 259). Henchard returns to Casterbridge for Elizabeth’s wedding, but
Elizabeth, who has learned the truth by now, turns him down, “which leads to his second
departure from Casterbridge and his lonely death” (Schweik 259).
In the course of these movements, Schweik argues, Henchard’s character improves: it
is decreasingly his flawed character determining his fate and increasingly the circumstances
that work against Henchard, and “it is [Henchard] who is made to appear more sinned against
than sinning” (Schweik 260). As Schweik further explains,
[In the last chapters of the novel] Hardy emphasises most strongly the disjunction
between Henchard’s moral stature and the circumstance which has blindly nullified his
repentance, his recantation of ambition, and his new capacity for a higher kind of
achievement; and in doing so Hardy seems intent on reversing the fable-like
correspondence between character and fate which figures so conspicuously in the first
half of the novel. (Schweik 260)
Schweik therefore concludes that
Hardy began The Mayor of Casterbridge with an action which strongly implied a
connection between Henchard’s moral stature and his fate […]. But […] the gradual
shift in aspect and emphasis which takes place throughout the second half of The
Mayor of Casterbridge suggests that […] Hardy […] tended to reflect more
deliberately upon the implications of Henchard’s fall and did so within the framework
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of his consciously considered views on man’s place in a Darwinian world. (Schweik
262)
If Schweik’s conclusion is true, it could be argued that Hardy’s novel starts off being typically
Aristotelian, with the hero’s character and actions determining his fate, and ends being more
typically Darwinian and reflecting nineteenth-century ideas, with external circumstances
overwhelming the powerless human being. It makes good sense when one compares this
pattern of events with the passage on page 14, when Hardy starts with describing man as “the
blot on an otherwise kindly universe” (Hardy 14) and ends with the contrasting statement that
“mankind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet objects were raging
loud” (Hardy 14).
However, Hardy’s novel cannot be so easily divided into such rigorous movements. In
the first movement, the external circumstances are too strongly present to conclude that it is
mainly Henchard’s wrong-doing that causes his downfall. What is true though, is that in the
course of the novel, Henchard’s flaws are toned down, and that in the end he is more sinned
against than sinning. It must be remembered, however, that Hardy awakens sympathy for
Henchard throughout the novel, even though Henchard’s flaws are perhaps strongly present in
the first half of the novel. This will be examined further at a later stage.
4.5
Jean R. Brooks: the close interaction of character and circumstance
In Thomas Hardy – The Poetic Structure, Jean R. Brooks convincingly argues that The Mayor
of Casterbridge evolves around a close interaction between character and circumstance, and
that it is sometimes difficult to tell the two factors apart.
Brooks admits that sometimes character and circumstance, as the determiners of fate,
do operate separately. The character of Henchard is responsible when
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Henchard’s impulse to self-punishment places him in the way of bad luck. Nothing
else can account for his entrusting Lucetta’s letters to his enemy Jopp, or his rashness
in acting on the long-range forecast of the weather-prophet without waiting for the
oracle’s full development. (Brooks 199)
The moments when Henchard stands powerless against fate is when certain people make their
reappearance and when bad weather strikes:
The return of Susan, Newson, Lucetta, and the furmity hag (who appears on the one
day when Henchard is sitting as substitute magistrate): the appearance of Farfrae at the
very moment when Henchard needs his knowledge to get out of a difficulty; the bad
weather that intensifies his failure by the failure of others involved in his speculations
– stress the long arm of coincidence. (Brooks 199)
However, on the whole Brooks claims that “The Mayor of Casterbridge […] is
primarily a novel of environment in relation to character” (196). The social changes at the
time play an important role in this: “[T]he factor that controls the action is the evolving social
organism of Casterbridge the county town” (Brooks 196). The novel reflects the nineteenthcentury changes that were taking place in Casterbridge:
[T]he increasing mastery over environment, the advance of mechanisation, the
development of new business methods to keep pace, the importance of education for a
rapidly changing world, the breaking down of social barriers, the spread of cooperative and humanitarian principles. (Brooks 196)
Brooks points out that the successes and failures of the personages are determined by the way
they deal with these changing circumstances:
In the conflict between old and progressive ideas, in the foresight and judgement
needed to safeguard Casterbridge crops and Casterbridge entertainment from uncertain
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weather, Farfrae gains ground and Henchard’s wrongheaded impulsiveness leads to
bankruptcy. (Brooks 197-98)
Henchard, Brooks argues, is “flawed by a tragic vulnerability that unfits him for the particular
tragic situation he has to face” (14), because “Henchard’s rash and inflexible temper cannot
ride the agricultural changes that overtake Casterbridge” (14). Therefore Brooks claims that
Henchard’s tragedy is that he is a basically virtuous character, but that the external
circumstances hit him where it hurts, so to speak, and bring out his flaws:
In the tragic universe human errors become tragic errors which cooperate with Fate
(those circumstances within and without, which man did not make and cannot unmake,
incarnated as natural forces, the clockwork laws of cause and effect, the workings of
chance, coincidence, and time, irrational impulses, man-made conventions, and the
search for happiness) to bring evil out of his goodness and good intentions, and to
bring down on him, and innocent people connected with him, tragic suffering and
catastrophe out of all proportion to its cause. (Brooks 14)
Therefore, Brooks argues, tragic pity and fear are aroused not only because the reader
can sympathise with the protagonist, but also because fate can take unexpected turns and the
protagonist’s character cannot face these unforeseen changes of circumstance:
[These errors] release forces of death and destruction which inspire tragic terror at the
contemplation of the painful mystery of the workings of inexorable law. Tragic pity is
aroused, as Dobrée points out, ‘not because someone suffers, but because something
fine is bruised and broken’ – something too sensitively organized for an insentient
world of defect. (Brooks 14-15)
Here again Hardy challenges Aristotle. While Aristotle stresses sympathy and identification
with the hero as the main cause for pity and fear, and rejects the role of unexpected random
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incidents, Hardy uses these unforeseen incidents in order to add to the emotions of pity and
fear.
Hardy maintains a balance between character and circumstance by making the
interaction between them ambiguous:
Hardy’s double vision of man’s greatness in values and littleness of the cosmic
scheme keeps the tragic balance between fate – the impersonal nature of things – and
personal responsibility. (Brooks 18)
An example of this, Brooks argues, is “[w]hen Henchard disregards his wife’s last wishes and
reads the letter in which she discloses that Elizabeth-Jane is not his child” (Brooks 18). In this
scene,
[Henchard] 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. (Hardy 124)
Brooks points out that scenes such as these reflect
[…] the painful ambiguity and inscrutability of things; a poetic asset. While it is true
that Hardy’s poetic pattern stresses the action of fate, it does so to stress too the human
responsibility to deflect fate from its path before it is too late. (Brooks 18-19)
This is where Henchard fails, despite his heroic character. Henchard is heroic in that he
defiantly endures misery, but his failing is that he cannot conquer it, which makes him an
utterly tragic hero. Brooks makes a similar point by comparing Henchard to other Hardeian
characters:
Misery, which teaches Henchard ‘nothing more than a defiant endurance of it’, teaches
Clym [from The Return of the Native] to limit his ambitions and Oak [from Far from
the Madding Crowd] to keep one step ahead of an infuriated universe. The adaptive
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resourcefulness of Farfrae […] [modifies] a fate that seemed predetermined. Their
conscious purpose redefines the concept of fate as what must be only if no resistance
is made. (Brooks 19)
Hardy shows that changes are continuous and inevitable: “The environment that
changes lives is itself in a continuous process of change, without which there is no progress”
(Brooks 204-05). The proof of this is to be found in his descriptions of
clocks, chimes, and curfews; the seasonal character of the shop-window display;
reference to Casterbridge features no longer in existence […] [and also] [t]he weatherand time-nibbled church […]. (Brooks 205)
These “cyclic rhythms of rise and fall” (Brooks 205) suggest an inevitability of fate with
which every human being will be sooner or later confronted. Times change, which is not only
proved with the Industrial Revolution, but also with the Roman remains in Casterbridge. With
this Hardy seems to suggest that anyone, not only Henchard, can come to a fall, if the
circumstances are not in his or her favour. Brooks points out that “Farfrae is faced with the
same chances and conditions of success or failure [as Henchard], [b]ut his character and the
needs of the time are on his side” (209) because
[Farfrae] provides the education, method, intelligence, foresight, drive, judgment,
sympathy and respect for others, and swift adaptation to conditions of environment,
which is lacking in Henchard’s ‘introspective inflexibility.’ (Brooks 210)
It remains to be seen however, how long fate will stay on Farfrae’s side. Hardy already gives
a suggestion when Farfrae becomes mayor:
Fafrae was still liked in the community; but it must be owned that, as the Mayor and
man of money, engrossed with affairs and ambitions, he had lost in the eyes of the
poorer inhabitants something of that wondrous charm […]. (Hardy 264-65)
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From this can be concluded that Hardy emphasises the close interaction between character
and circumstance. He seems to say that all people can rise and fall, depending on whether
their characters match their circumstances or not. Therefore Hardy supplements Aristotle’s
theory. Like Aristotle, Hardy sees character as being largely responsible for someone’s fate,
but Hardy shows that character and circumstance together determine someone’s destiny.
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Chapter 5. Pity, Fear, and the Hero’s Downfall (part 2)
In this chapter, I will elaborate on the issues of pity, fear and the hero’s downfall, by now
focusing on Hardy’s study of Henchard’s character and on the way in which Hardy makes a
hero of Henchard.
5.1
Character study
Hardy lays much emphasis on character study in The Mayor of Casterbridge. With this he
proves that, although character is an important factor in determining one’s fate, people are
paradoxically victims of their own character. It is not easy for people to change the make-up
they have, and although it is too extreme to conclude from this that people cannot be held
responsible for their own actions, Hardy does prove that people are more or less stuck with
the character they have, and have to deal with their character and its consequences during
their lifetime. With this Hardy also proves that certain characters may be more prone to
happiness than others. Therefore, not only someone’s actions, but also someone’s character
can evoke tragedy. This is where Hardy challenges Aristotle, who prioritises action above
everything else.
This last point does not mean, however, that circumstances have nothing to do with the
outcome of someone’s destiny. It seems that Hardy wants to make two points: that certain
characters are more easily prone to happiness than others, but also that outside influences
contribute to someone’s fate as well. On the one hand Hardy seems to suggest that
Henchard’s life was never going to be easy, and on the other hand Hardy emphasises that
circumstances do not work in Henchard’s favour either. That Henchard can be fortunate, is
proved by the fact that he is a successful mayor for a score of years, at a time when the more
old-fashioned circumstances suited his old-fashioned character. That Henchard’s character
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may not be easily prone to happiness, is proved by the fact that he is far more sensitive and
feels things more extremely than for example Farfrae. So when Henchard is unhappy, he is
extremely unhappy, while Farfrae, when he for example loses his wife Lucetta, feels merely a
“simple sorrow” (Hardy 297). However, as I pointed out in the former paragraph, we do not
know whether Farfrae may be vulnerable to certain circumstances that could lead to his
downfall. What could be concluded is that Henchard’s character does not match the changing
circumstances he is in, and combined with this, he has the sort of character that is prone to
great sombreness, so this combination is fatal for Henchard.
With its emphasis on character, Hardy’s novel deals with tragic flaw rather than tragic
error (hamartia). Also, Hardy creates sympathy for Henchard by letting the reader look at his
character intently. The fact that the novel’s subtitle is “The Life and Death of a Man of
Character,” proves that the novel wants to be a study of character, but also that the novel
portrays a noble individual.
Henchard’s tragedy is that he has not got the character that takes things in its stride. As
Schweik points out,
[While] Elizabeth-Jane has learned the “secret…of making limited opportunities
endurable” […][,] Henchard obviously has not learned that secret, and, by contrast, he
remains characteristically excessive and tragically mistaken even in his last acts – in
“living on as one of his own worst accusers” and in executing a will which bears
testimony to his final acceptance of a terribly disproportionate burden of guilt. (260)
Therefore Henchard does not have the character that can lead him to happiness so easily:
“Henchard fails ultimately because he lacks those qualities of character by which he might
make the most of his opportunities” (Schweik 261). In Thomas Hardy – The Forms of
Tragedy, Dale Kramer makes a similar point: “The Mayor of Casterbridge traces the career of
a man impelled by his very character to take actions the least advantageous to himself” (16).
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Henchard could make his life much easier if it were not for his headstrong character.
This is proved when Henchard refuses to reconcile with Farfrae, and writes Farfrae a letter,
telling him to stop paying his addresses to Elizabeth-Jane:
One would almost have supposed Henchard to have had policy to see that no better
modus vivendi could be arrived at with Farfrae than by encouraging him to become his
son-in-law. But such a scheme for buying over a rival had nothing to recommend it to
the Mayor’s headstrong faculties. With all domestic finesse of that kind he was
hopelessly at variance. Loving a man or hating him, his diplomacy was as
wrongheaded as a buffalo’s […]. (112)
Hardy’s focus on character study already becomes apparent in the first chapter, where
Hardy describes Michael Henchard as a man “of fine figure, swarthy, and even stern in
aspect” (3), having a “measured springless walk [that] was the walk of the skilled countryman
as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer” (3), and expressing in his body
language “a dogged and cynical indifference” (3). The reader acquires an image of a selfmade man, poor but having something more noble than any regular man. Hardy’s
characterisation of Henchard as being springless, dogged, cynical and indifferent, portrays
someone who does not have a positive stance towards life, and who is probably not easily
prone to happiness.
That Henchard’s character basically stays the same is proved in chapter 5 when,
eighteen years later, Susan Henchard and her daughter find him in the King’s Arms, the chief
hotel of Casterbridge. He is described as being “matured in shape, stiffened in line,
exaggerated in traits” (32), proving that his traits are still very much present. This is
underlined in Hardy’s description of Henchard’s appearance, being “of heavy frame” (32),
having “large features, [a] commanding voice, […] a rich complexion, which verged on
swarthiness, a flashing black eye, and dark, bushy brows and hair” (32). He is described as
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possessing a “loud laugh [which] was not encouraging to strangers; and hence it may have
been well that it was rarely heard” (32). Hardy speculates on what Henchard’s laugh says
about his personality:
It fell in well with conjectures of a temperament which would have no pity for
weakness, but would be ready to yield ungrudging admiration to greatness and
strength. Its producer’s personal goodness, if he had any, would be of a very fitful cast
– an occasional almost oppressive generosity rather than a mild and constant kindness.
(Hardy 32)
This description fits in with the earlier illustrations of Henchard. It is a description of a man
who shows grand and noble traits, but also shows some coarse features of the self-made man
who has worked himself up to being the mayor of Casterbridge. This makes Henchard
different from the Aristotelian hero, because unlike Aristotelian heroes, Henchard is not
upper-class to begin with. The description also tells of a man who has an uncertain temper
with perhaps uncontrollable passions and intimidating traits, being perhaps able to make good
friends but also able to make great enemies, and lacking rationality and inner harmony and
balance. Henchard admits this himself later on when talking to Farfrae: “I am the most distant
fellow in the world when I don’t care for a man, […] but when a man takes my fancy he takes
it strong” (Hardy 63).
The fact that Henchard’s hot-tempered character follows him around, is proved when
Henchard’s temper is awakened when someone complains about the bad bread: “Henchard’s
face darkened. There was temper under the thin bland surface – the temper which, artificially
intensified, had banished a wife nearly a score of years before” (36).
Hardy challenges Aristotle in the sense that he focuses on human flaw rather than on
human error, which is proved when Henchard says: “[I]t is impossible that a man of my sort
should have the good fortune to tide through twenty years o’ life without making more
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blunders than one” (76). This also foreshadows the several mistakes that Henchard makes
throughout the novel.
In “Thomas Hardy’s Tragic Hero,” Ted R. Spivey also argues that Hardy’s heroes
have tragic flaws, while the Aristotelian hero commits a tragic error:
Aristotle tells us that the tragic hero is not pre-eminently virtuous but must make some
error of judgment. Hardy’s great heroes […] are all driven by forces within them that
act as tragic flaws. (184)
5.2
Henchard’s heroic stature
Throughout the novel, Hardy emphasises both Henchard’s flaws and strengths. In this way
Hardy makes the reader understand why Henchard comes to his downfall, but evokes pity for
him too. When Henchard displays a flaw, it is often followed by a strong point. Sometimes
Henchard’s strengths can also be his weaknesses. Schweik argues that Hardy awakens
sympathy for Henchard by emphasising his “fitful personal goodness” (251). This is observed
in
Henchard’s consistent if “rough benignity,” his gruff friendliness and frankness with
Farfrae, his concern for Lucetta, his efforts to make amends to Susan and ElizabethJane, his determination to “castigate himself with the thorns which restitutory acts
brought in their train,” and his humanising acknowledgments of his own loneliness
and need for companionship. (Schweik 251-52)
Another good example is when
[Henchard’s] grotesque attempt to punish Abel Whittle (xv) […] is almost
immediately countered by a revelation of Henchard’s previous charities to Whittle’s
mother and by the frankness he displays in his reconciliation with Farfrae. (Schweik
252)
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Although Henchard at times seems capable of violent acts, his conscience always catches up
with him and the reader sees how vulnerable he actually is. An example is when he goes to
Farfrae’s house to pick up the letters he had received from Lucetta during their affair, reads
some of the letters out to Farfrae and is tempted to reveal the identity of the writer, but in the
end does not:
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.
(Hardy 244)
Another example is when Henchard wants to attack Farfrae in the hayloft. Despite his
violent plan, even here Henchard shows some nobleness in binding one of his arms, in order
to let his fight with Farfrae go “fairly”. As he waits for Farfrae, Henchard shows his human
and vulnerable side when Farfrae enters humming a tune: “Nothing moved Henchard like an
old melody. He sank back. ‘No; I can’t do it!’ he gasped. ‘Why does the infernal fool begin
that now!’” (267). Eventually he does confront Farfrae, but when he is about to throw Farfrae
down the hayloft, he breaks down:
Henchard looked down upon [Farfrae] in silence, and their eyes met. “O, Farfrae
[…]!” he said, bitterly. “God is my witness that no man ever loved another as I did
thee at one time…..And now – though I came here to kill ‘ee, I cannot hurt thee! Go
and give me in charge – do what you will – I care nothing for what comes of me!”
(Hardy 271)
Another passage proving that, when all is said and done, Henchard is a humane
individual, is his desire for Elizabeth-Jane’s affection:
[I]n the midst of his gloom [Elizabeth-Jane] seemed to [Henchard] as a pin-point of
light. […] [A]bove all things what he desired now was affection from anything that
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was good and pure. She was not his own; yet, for the first time, he had a faint dream
that he might get to like her as his own – if she would only continue to love him. (283)
This makes the reader not only sympathise, but also identify with Henchard.
Henchard’s self-condemning character, being both his heroic strength and his
weakness, becomes clear once more at the end of the novel, when Elizabeth and Farfrae read
Henchard’s will:
“Michael Henchard’s Will
“That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of
me.
[…]
“& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
“& that no flours be planted on my grave.
“& that no man remember me.
“To this I put my name.
“Michael Henchard.” (321)
Aristotle’s concept of undeserved misfortune is not easy to link to Hardy’s novel.
Aristotle argues that the protagonists should ideally commit their hamartia in ignorance.
Whether this is the case in Hardy’s novel, is debatable. When Henchard commits his first
error – the sale of his family – he is drunk: in this case intoxication serves as a replacement
for ignorance. The same could be said when Henchard physically attacks Farfrae: at that point
he is probably drunk as well. His affair with Lucetta is started in a state of depression. His
firing of Farfrae comes from impulsiveness and from a fear of losing his own reputation. And
his behaviour towards Newson and Elizabeth-Jane comes from despair:
[T]here was nobody to set before Elizabeth the palliatives of the absent one’s great
faults – that he himself had been deceived in her identity, till he had been informed by
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her mother’s letter that his own child had died; that in the second case his lie had been
the last desperate throw of a gamester who loved her affection better than his own
honour. Even had he been present Henchard might scarce have pleaded these things,
so little did he value himself or his good name. (Hardy 311)
All these errors may not have been committed in ignorance. However, it is usually because of
certain circumstances that Henchard commits them, and also often due to a constant flaw in
his character, which could be described as headstrong, reckless impulsiveness. Hardy seems
to argue throughout the novel that a flaw cannot be easily shaken off. People are more or less
stuck with the make-up they have. Paradoxically, Henchard is a victim of his own character.
What should be noted, however, is that Henchard acts virtuously several times, and the reader
sees that Henchard has a basically good character. Moreover, Henchard may even excel
Aristotle’s model of a moderately virtuous character, in the sense that Henchard is at times
more virtuous than the people around him. While his surroundings are often superficial and
unfeeling, Henchard is none of these things. Henchard’s nobility is different from the nobility
of the Aristotelian hero. While Aristotle’s hero is noble mainly in a material sense, Henchard
is noble in a psychological sense. We always feel that Henchard is better than the
Casterbridge people, whose customs border on savagery (such as the skimmington ride). He
is, in a way, better than Farfrae, because Farfrae is more superficial. The tragedy of the novel
is that nobody sees Henchard’s compensating good characteristics. Therefore Henchard’s
undeserved misfortune is perceived in a different way to Aristotle’s concept of undeserved
misfortune.
According to Aristotle, a tragedy evokes fear when the audience sees the downfall of
someone who is morally like themselves. The tragedy that befalls the hero could therefore
also happen to them, which arouses the audience’s fear. In some respects Hardy’s hero
Henchard is not someone like the reader. Like everyone else, Henchard has his strengths and
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weaknesses, but Henchard’s traits could be called quite extraordinary, which makes one
wonder whether Henchard can be compared to anyone. However, the audience can certainly
identify with Henchard: his vulnerability and longing for companionship is recognised by
everyone, and do indeed make Henchard someone like the reader. Therefore, Hardy conforms
to Aristotle’s principles on fear.
5.3
Spivey: Henchard as a romantic hero
Hardy challenges the Aristotelian notion of nobleness in a hero. In “Thomas Hardy’s Tragic
Hero,” Ted R. Spivey points out that Hardy’s tragic heroes are noble in spirit rather than
noble in the materialistic sense, and that the great souls created by Hardy fit in with the
tradition of romantic heroes.
Spivey quotes from The Greek Way to Western Civilisation by Edith Hamilton:
“‘Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly. Given such a one and any catastrophe
may be tragic’” (Hamilton 131, Spivey 182). And also: “‘[The] great soul in pain and in death
transforms pain and death’” (Hamilton 133, Spivey 182). Spivey adds to this that “[i]f Hardy
created anything he created souls capable of great feeling, souls capable of exaltation” (182).
The reader sees that every feeling that Henchard has, he feels strongly: the reader feels more
for Henchard than for Farfrae, because Henchard is far more interesting, despite the fact that
Farfrae succeeds in more because of his moderate, rational character. Spivey argues that
[b]ecause of the very strength of their passions Hardy’s [tragic] characters demand our
sympathy, and we experience a feeling that someone of great worth has been lost when
we see them destroyed. The glory of man cannot be fully realised except at the sight of
the fall of a great soul. (182-83)
At the same time, Spivey argues that Hardy’s tragic heroes are great because they both accept
and defy their fate:
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It is the passionate defiance of fate […] which makes their downfall more than merely
pathetic. A character who goes to his doom without having some insight into and
realisation of the forces of evil which work to bring about his downfall may be
pathetic but cannot be tragic. (Spivey 183)
In The Mayor of Casterbridge we see this defiance and acceptance for example when
Henchard tries to keep Newson away from Elizabeth-Jane and when he finally accepts that his
game is up and leaves Casterbridge like a fugitive, comparing himself to Cain: “‘I – Cain – go
alone as I deserve – and outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can
bear!’” (Hardy 307). Spivey points out another example of defiance and acceptance, when
Henchard sees Elizabeth-Jane for the last time:
Henchard can cry out in defiance at Elizabeth-Jane: “What do you say? – Mr.
Henchard? Don’t, don’t scourge me […]!” (Hardy 376). With this final realisation that
he has forfeited her love he also accepts with “proud superiority”: “I’ll never trouble
‘ee again, Elizabeth-Jane – no, not to my dying day! Good-night. Good-bye!” (377).
His will reveals an attitude of both defiance and acceptance. In it is a deep realisation
of some ingrained evil in the scheme of things. The defiance of the protagonist who
fails to realise the full extent of the evil pitted against him is meaningless. (Spivey
184)
This defiance and acceptance, plus the strong passions, make Hardy’s heroes noble in a
spiritual way.
What also makes Hardy’s heroes great, Spivey argues, is that they come to recognise
their own shortcomings: “Along with their realisation of the evil of the world Hardy’s
characters usually come around to realising their own fatal flaws” (185).
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Spivey argues that Hardy’s heroes evoke pity and fear because of their awesome
heroism and deep feelings, making it clear to the reader what a tragic waste it is to see these
heroes come to their downfall:
Tragic awe and terror result from seeing a passionate but noble person defy and finally
accept the forces of destruction. At the same time pity follows the realisation by the
reader of the waste of an awesome person. Despite their flaws we sympathise with
Hardy’s characters. Their passion and their ability to suffer help to reveal their great
worth. The characters finally prove themselves to be far nobler than the forces that
destroy them. (Spivey 185)
The loftiness of these heroes is something typical of the romantic heroes of the nineteenth
century, Spivey argues:
Power is the mark of the romantic hero – power and the need for more power in order
to attain some far-off, ever-receding goal. The power they have and the power they
seek gives them an heroic stature; they thus have the necessary loftiness to make their
fate truly tragic. (Spivey 189)
Hardy’s heroes can be placed in the romantic tradition, according to Spivey. Hardy was “akin
to earlier romantics such as Shelley and especially Emily Brontë” (Spivey 187), and Hardy’s
hero Henchard is “very much in the tradition” (187) too.
Therefore, in this sense Hardy evokes pity and fear in a different way from Aristotle’s
theory. In the romantic tradition, Hardy created noble souls that both defy and accept their
tragic fate, arousing admiration and sympathy with the audience.
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Chapter 6. Absurdity and Comedy Combined with Grandeur and Tragedy
With his use of coincidence, Hardy challenges Aristotle in two ways. Firstly, we have already
seen that by using coincidence Hardy demonstrates the tension between man and his
surroundings, therefore not only casting light upon character but also upon circumstance,
whereas Aristotle hardly pays any attention to the latter factor in his Poetics. Secondly, the
element of coincidence in Hardy’s novel enhances the irony in the story. As Brooks points
out,
The pattern of what is runs in tension with the pattern of what ought to be according to
human values. Mismatings, mistimings, and undesired substitutions for an intended
effect point to the “if only” structure of Hardeian irony. If only Newson had entered
the tent a few minutes earlier or later […]. (Brooks 12)
It even adds the element of the absurd and the comic to the tragedy, while Aristotle sees
tragedy and comedy as two strictly separate genres. Brooks argues that “Hardy’s notorious
use of coincidence […] demonstrate[s] cosmic absurdity” (12) and “brings him close to the
modern Absurdist form of tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy” (13). Brooks quotes from The Life
of Thomas Hardy, in which Hardy says himself: “‘If you look beneath the surface of any farce
you see a tragedy; and, on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy
you see a farce’” (Life) (Brooks 13).
Brooks gives a few examples of the mix of absurdity and tragedy in The Mayor of
Casterbridge, such as “[t]he comic court-room scene […] in which the furmity hag works
Henchard’s downfall” (13) and “the comic constables who take the foreground while Lucetta
lies dying from the shock of the skimmity ride their incompetence has been unable to prevent”
(13). Another example is the awkward scene in which Henchard, Farfrae, Lucetta and
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Elizabeth dine together. It is the point when Farfrae and Lucetta have already fallen in love,
and although nothing of that sort has been expressed yet, Henchard has started to become
suspicious. Henchard and Farfrae’s rivalry over the same woman is absurdly symbolised
when both men pull at the same peace of bread:
“More bread-and-butter?” said Lucetta to Henchard and Farfrae equally, holding out
between them a plateful of long slices. Henchard took a slice by one end and Donald
by the other; each feeling certain he was the man meant; neither let go, and the slice
came in two. (Hardy 181)
This mix of the comic and tragic challenges Aristotle’s rigid division of genres, and
demonstrates that the absurd and the tragic can be tightly entangled with one another. This
does not mean, however, that Hardy discards the elements of tragedy and heroism:
[T]he Kafka-like distortions of figure or scene, stress the ironic deflation of romance,
heroism, and tragedy by the objective incursion of absurdity; without, however,
denigrating the value of romance, heroism, and suffering. (Brooks 13-14)
In fact, by describing the absurd workings of the universe Hardy enhances the nobility of the
human being. As Brooks points out,
The dissonance of the multiple vision dramatically enacts Hardy’s metaphysic of
man’s predicament as a striving, sensitive, imperfect individual in a rigid, nonsentient, absurd cosmos, which rewards him only with eternal death. (Brooks 14)
Brooks gives a quote by Dobrée, which comes close to Hardy’s notion of tragedy:
“The end of tragedy […] is to show the dignity of man for all his helpless littleness in
face of the universe, for all his nullity under the blotting hand of time.” (Bonamy
Dobrée, The Lamp and the Lute) (Brooks 14)
Hardy shows with his description of the universe that something can be grand and powerful,
but absurd. At the same time he shows man as being powerless and “little,” but dignified.
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The grandeur of “littleness” is also expressed in Hardy’s novel by the fact that the
novel is about “ordinary” people. Whereas the Aristotelian tragedy concerns itself with the
“upper class,” and whereas Aristotle places the “lower class” in the genre of comedy, Hardy
portrays the grandeur of the labourer in his tragedy. As Brooks argues, the first two
paragraphs of The Mayor of Casterbridge are an “amalgam of homely simplicity, awkward
periphrasis, triteness, and sharp sensuous vision that invests an ordinary scene with the
significance of myth and Sophoclean grandeur” (Brooks 14). Hardy gives a detailed
description of Henchard’s countryman clothes, but also gives a vivid account of his body
language, which betrays much of Henchard’s personality, describing his “springless walk”
(Hardy 3) as expressing “a dogged and cynical indifference, personal to himself” (Hardy 3).
Hardy’s zooming in on these psychological details makes the reader become involved in a
character who is more than “just” a labourer. Also, the fact that Hardy places his description
of the countryman and his wife in the context of “the present century [before it] had reached
its thirtieth year” (Hardy 3), suggests a kind of grandeur, as if the story deserves to be placed
in the history books.
Hardy stresses the significance of the labourer (in general) again when he gives an
important role to Able Whittle. He is the messenger of Henchard’s death, and he is also the
only one who shows compassion for Henchard at the end of his life. Hardy shows with this
that a simple labourer can make grand, serious announcements and can serve as a role model.
Therefore Hardy goes against Aristotle’s principles by showing that absurdity,
comedy, and “ordinary” people can be incorporated and even play a significant role in a
tragedy.
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Chapter 7. The Moral and Significance of Hardy’s Tragedy
In Thomas Hardy, Irving Howe argues that The Mayor of Casterbridge is not typically
Aristotelian, because the story lacks magnitude:
What seems lacking in the story and character of Henchard […] is that “proper
magnitude” of which Aristotle speaks. By this admittedly vague phrase I take Aristotle
to mean a resonance of large philosophic and cultural issues: the destiny of a race, the
fate of a people, the ordeal of a hero who embodies the strivings of a nation. (100)
According to Howe, Henchard’s character is too restricted to embody such great issues:
Impressive as Henchard may be, he cannot be said to embody in his character or
conduct issues of such magnitude. He is too clearly related to the particularities of a
historical moment and a social contest; he is too clearly a character with only the most
limited grasp, or growth, of consciousness; and he does not elicit, in my judgment, that
blend of pity and terror amounting to awe which is characteristic of the tragic hero.
(100)
Therefore Howe does not see Henchard as a tragic figure, but as a figure of romantic poetry:
My own sense of Henchard would place him not in the line of tragedy but in the
tradition of romanticism. He strikes me as a descendent of those stubborn figures in
romantic poetry and fiction who refuse to submit to their own limitations and demand
more from the world than it can give them. (100)
However, the fact that Henchard resembles heroes in the tradition of romanticism,
does not mean that romantic heroes cannot be tragic. In Spivey’s argumentation, it has already
been proved how awesome these romantic characters can be. Also, while Howe seems to
compare Henchard to a stubborn child who wants his own way, it is more accurate to state
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that Hardy wants to show with Henchard that, what people want and what external
circumstances can give them, can lie far apart and that this can be tragic.
In fact, Hardy’s characters are heroic because they are willing to battle against
indifferent circumstances: Hardy argues that people should not give in to and become as
indifferent as the cosmos they live in. As Brooks points out,
Hardy’s tragic figures, rooted in an unconscious life-process more deterministic than
their own, try to mould their lives according to human values, personal will, feeling,
and aspiration. Though their self-assertion is overcome by the impersonality of the
cosmos, including those instinctive drives they share with the natural world, their
endeavour to stamp a humane personal design on cosmic indifference makes them
nobler than what destroys them. Hardy had no time for Nietzsche. “To model our
conduct on Nature’s apparent conduct, as Nietzsche would have taught, can only bring
disaster to humanity” (Life). His characters’ close and conscious relationship to
unconscious nature defines the hope that is contained in the tragic suffering. (Brooks
15-16)
This suggests that Hardy makes an urgent claim on human compassion, because of the very
reason that the world humans live in is indifferent, uncaring and nihilistic. Hardy has faith in
the human being: humans should be the ones giving meaning, morality and sympathy to life,
since life will not do so for them. So Hardy may be telling his audience to learn from
Henchard’s mistakes, but he lays more emphasis on Henchard’s tragedy, and the values he
stands for. Therefore his main message to his audience may be that we should remain
compassionate towards each other, even though certain human beings may not entirely fit in
with the circumstances present around that time. As Elizabeth-Jane has the final word in the
novel, Hardy suggests that her way of life is the one to strive for: “[T]he finer movements of
her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she
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had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable” (Hardy 322). Elizabeth-Jane is
aware of the persistent presence of the “unforeseen” (Hardy 322) and realises that “there were
others receiving less who had deserved much more” (Hardy 322). Therefore, Hardy seems to
say, through the voice of Elizabeth-Jane, that people should both try to ride the circumstances
they are in, as well as maintaining their moral values and compassion. As Brooks also says,
The sublime tragic simplicity of Whittle’s elegy on Henchard, with its physical details
of his last hours offset by the bond of compassionate love (“‘What, Whittle,’ he said,
‘And can ye really be such a poor fond fool as to care for such a wretch as I!’”) which
has become Henchard’s ultimate value, defines the meaning of his life with a fierce
affirmation of love and pain that makes the negations of his Will positive. (Brooks
214)
Furthermore, the story does contain proper magnitude and can indeed be put into a
wider perspective. True, the story does not concern the fate of a race or nation, but it does
concern the destiny of people. And although the book describes historical events such as the
Industrial Revolution, this does not mean that the story is too limited and too restricted to the
time in which it is set. Elizabeth-Jane’s closing thoughts put the story into a broader
perspective, pointing out “the persistence of the unforeseen” (Hardy 322) and trying to make
“limited opportunities endurable” (Hardy 322). She thinks about the “sorry world” (322) and
about larger issues of life and happiness. The historical changes at the time say something
about changes in general: that changes are continuous and inevitable, and that some characters
cannot deal with these changes, which indeed adds to the magnitude of the book and places it
in the line of tragedy. Therefore the story is indeed tragic, and can also be called Aristotelian
in this sense, although the way that Hardy presents grandeur and magnitude may differ from
Aristotle’s principles. The Mayor of Casterbridge is a personal story, but its themes can be
called universal and therefore it does contain the “proper magnitude.” As Brooks argues,
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Henchard’s tragic plight is threefold: cosmic (representative of man’s predicament in
an uncaring universe), social (showing the plight of a rural community when old
methods are swept away by new) and personal. (Brooks 215)
The relatively modern times in which Hardy lived, caused Hardy to create new visions
on tragedy. Some critics, such as George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy, argue that “tragedy
died with the gods and an ordered system of Hellenic or Christian values shared by artist and
audience, which gave reasons for the suffering and struggle” (Brooks 16). Brooks rightly
points out that the lack of an ordered system is exactly why Hardy’s works are tragic: his
characters long for significance, but because of the absence of Providence, it cannot be given
them (Brooks 16-17). Brooks points out that
Hardeian man, sustained only by his own qualities as a human being, defies the
chaotic void as Hellenic and Shakespearean man, placed in reference to cosmic myth,
defied powers which were, if cruel and unknowable, at least there to be defied.
(Brooks 16)
Hardy expresses this same sentiment in his poem “Hap,” which Brooks gives a fragment
from:
Then I would bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. (‘Hap’) (Brooks 16)
This tension between naturalism and existentialism on the one hand and human values,
significance and compassion on the other hand can be explained by the fact that Hardy
bridges the world of the nineteenth century and the world of the twentieth century, as Brooks
points out:
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The integrity of his personal search for meaning and self-supporting attitudes in an
absurd world, his refusal to be comforted by ready-made formulae, myths and
illusions, or to take refuge in cynicism, the unpretentious rough-hewn voice talking
quietly of intense suffering and joy, speak to their own condition, while the backbone
of certainties about fundamental human values which he inherited from his own
century offsets the modern permissive confusion. (Brooks 302)
These factors contribute to Hardy’s novels containing a blend of different styles, making them
unique and creating a new kind of tragedy, therefore supplementing Aristotle’s theory.
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Conclusion
While Hardy certainly makes use of Aristotle’s tragedy model and has proved that Aristotle’s
theory is certainly useful and still applicable in some respects, Hardy has very much his own
style of writing tragedy. Although he uses several Aristotelian instruments, he plays them in a
different way. All events in Hardy’s novel centre around the hero Henchard and his tragic
downfall, but Hardy challenges Aristotle in that his novel contains several plots. As Henchard
commits several hamartiae, it is more appropriate to speak of the hero’s tragic flaw rather
than tragic error. This proves that Hardy pays considerable attention to the study of character,
while Aristotle places action on top of tragedy’s priority list. Hardy also uses several
Aristotelian elements such as anagnorisis and peripeteia, but in his own style. One of the
novel’s discoveries takes place via a letter, for example. Another way in which Aristotle is
challenged, is the fact that Henchard is noble in spirit rather than socially superior, proving
that Aristotle’s theory in this sense is no longer relevant. Hardy incorporates nineteenthcentury elements into the novel by portraying a struggle of man not only against his character,
but also against circumstances to which he stands powerless, and by portraying a Romantic
hero who both defies and accepts his tragic fate. Thus the feelings of pity and fear are at times
evoked in an Aristotelian way, and sometimes in a new, late Romantic, Hardeian way.
Furthermore, Hardy proves that the elements of tragedy and comedy can be mixed, therefore
defying Aristotle’s strict division of the genres. The tragedy of Hardy’s novel lies also in the
fact that the story is set in an existentialist and indifferent world. Hardy therefore makes an
urgent plight on human compassion: because the world in which the human being lives is not
compassionate, it is vital that the human being battles against this and does show compassion.
Therefore, Hardy proves that Aristotle is a useful model, but no more than just a model:
Aristotle’s Poetics is a canvas on which many colours and shapes can be changed and added.
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