The Mayor Of Casterbridge - Hardy's Philosophy

Many Critics have attempted to undercover some underlying consistency in Hardy’d treatment of the relationship of Henchard’s character to his fate. John Peterson has interpreted the novel – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard is a man of guilty of having violated a moral order in the world and thus brings upon himself a retribution for his crime. According to Fredrick Karl, “Henchard is an essentially good man who is destroyed by the chance forces of a morally indifferent world upon which he has obsessively attempted to impose his will. 

Following the brief prefatory account of Henchard’s economic and moral nadir at Weydon Priors in the very first chapter of the novel and his resolution to make a “start in a new direction”, Hardy abruptly bridges an intervening eighteen years to reveal the outcome of Henchard’s vow. He reappears transformed into a figure of affluence and social standing. He soon gains commercial and personal support from Farfrae, effects reconciliation with his lost wife and child and seems about to find a solution to the awkward aftermath of his affair with Lucetta. 

However, Hardy implies, certainly, that Henchard has undergone no equivalent moral transformation – his aloofness, his harsh laugh, the hint of moral callousness in his stiff reply to complaints about his bad wheat – tend to support, as Hardy remarks, ‘conjectures of a temperament which would have no pity for weakness, but…admiration to greatness and strength.’ 

The next chapters of the novel reverse the course of Henchard’s fortunes. His temperament re-emerges, and becomes the dominant feature of Henchard’s character. The first sign of this progressive deterioration in Henchard – is grotesque attempt to punish Abel Whittel – is almost immediately countered by a revelation of Henchard’s previous charities to Whittl’s mother and by the frankness he displays in his reconciliation with Farfrae. But the action continues as he at the annoyance at his loss of popularity dismisses Farfrae and regards him as an ‘enemy’. 

Henchard’s turning on Farfrae is followed by his more cruelly felt coldness to the unsuspecting Elizabeth Jane, who is the innocent victim of Henchard’s anger over the ironic turn of events by which he has discovered the secret of her parentage. And, finally, in his last exasperated effort to best Farfrae, Henchard takes the still more obviously course of wringing an unwilling promise of marriage from Lucetta by mercilessly threatening to reveal their former relations. 

Thus, throughout the long first movement of the novel, Hardy uses both action and authorial comment to shift our impression on Henchard’s moral stature in a curve which parallels his economic rise and fall. Henchard himself comes to feel that some intelligent power is ‘bent on punishing him’ and is ‘working against him’.  

The Mayor of Casterbridge does seem to exemplify the dictum that ‘character is fate’. It does so largely because Hardy maintains a general correspondence between the changes in Henchard’s apparent moral stature and the changes in his fortunes. But having predicted the imminent collapse of Henchard’s fortunes, Hardy shifts to a situation, which seems to offer renewed hope. Thereafter, we learn that it was the failure of a debtor whom Henchard had ‘trusted generously’, which brought Henchard’s misfortunes. Henchard also sells his watch in order to repay a needy cottager.  

In short, Henchard now begins to appear in a character which seems worthy of the general approval of his townsmen, who regret his fall. Hardy suggests then Henchard’s reconciliation with Farfrae as the former Mayor says – ‘I – sometimes think I’ve wronged’ee!’. This is followed by Henchard’s reconciliation with Elizabeth Jane, who tends him through a brief illness. However, Henchard soon undergoes a ‘moral change’ and returns to his ‘old view’ of Farfrae as the ‘triumphant rival’. His drinking brings on a new ‘era of recklessness’ and that ‘his sinister qualities, formerly latent’ have been ‘quickened into life by his buffetings’. 

The action continues through the events which culminate in the death of  Lucetta, it is the frustration of Henchard's attempt to redeem himself which brings about his personal catastrophe. The death of Lucetta marks another major turning point in the novel. Shorn of other interests, Henchard now begins to feel his life centering on his step daughter and dreams of a “future lit by her filial presence”. 

By one desperate and unthinking lie he turns away Newson and manages for a while to preserve in the hope that he can fulfill his dream. But just as the furmity woman returned to ruin Henchard by her exposure of his past, so Newson now returns to expose Henchard’s lie and dash his hope. Henchard appears in a greatly altered character and Hardy’s account of his loss of Elizabeth Jane and his withdrawal from Casterbridge as a self-banished outcast is clearly intended to evoke quite another kind tragic effect. Hardy now presents Henchard in a character so soberly chastened as to seem ‘denaturalized’. 

Hardy makes clear that Henchard fails ultimately because he lacks those qualities of character by which he might make the most of his opportunities, he clearly expects, at the same time, to have brought his readers to see that Henchard must finally be classes among those ‘others receiving less who had deserved much more’. 

Hardy’s treatment of Henchard’s character implies his continued respect for an older, pre-scientific conception of man’s dignity and worth as a moral agent. The conclusion of the novel seems to be an affirmation of faith in the transcendent worth of the human person. It is also an acknowledgment of man’s precarious situation in a blind and uncertain universe.  

TITLE of PYGMALION

The Story of Pygmalion is of an eminent professor who undertakes, for a bet with Colonel Pickering, a student of Indian dialects to tech a flower girl from Covent Garden the received pronunciation of Standard English and passes her off as a Duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. 

The title of the play however suggests that more is involved than winning of a wager. The story of Pygmalion is told as the 9^th story of the tenth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shaw took his title from the ancient Greek legend of the famous sculptor named Pygmalion, who lived on the island of Cyprus noted for its worship of Venus, the goddess of love. He was disgusted by the behavior of the women of Amathus and as a result, resolved never to marry but to devote himself to his art. He became so proficient a sculptor that he made a statue of a woman so beautiful and fell in love with it. At his prayer, the goddess Venus transformed the statue into a live woman called Galatea, whom he then married. 

Shaw uses a classical title to remind his audience that he is a dramatist in the classical tradition and that he is investing into the parameters of a myth a “play of ideas”. Shaw proclaims in his Preface that – “I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic…”

Shaw never ceased to be a dramatist even when writing his prefaces and essays. In this preface, he dramatically displays a practical truth – the play is didactic. But it also deals with an important question of human institution contained in class structures. The most visible and distinguishing marks in the England of the nineteenth century were speech and accent. 

The very first appearance of Higgins proves the audience that he is a true artist of phonetics, the Pygmalion of the play who is confident in his abilities. It is revealed when he declares to Pickering – “in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s party.” Like Pygmalion, Higgins is a confirmed bachelor. He is condescending and patronizing in his attitude towards women. He seems incapable of a relationship with women and is quite content with stating that the only woman he could love was a woman as much like his mother possible – “Oh, I can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible. I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young woman: some habits lie too deep to be changed. Besides, they’re all idiots.”

Higgins also draws similarity with the Greek hero Pygmalion, who makes a statue of an ideally beautiful woman by training Eliza to the point where she talks and behaves like a beautiful automaton. Higgins like Pygmalion in his view of women cynical and derogatory says – “I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance.” And where as in the myth, Pygmalion carved something beautiful out of raw stone and gave it life, Shaw’s Higgins takes a “guttersnipe”, a “squashed cabbage leaf” up out of the slums and makes her into an exquisite work of art. In the legend Pygmalion falls in love with his statue, pays court to it, showers it with gifts and dresses it in robes and jewels. On the other hand, Higgins cajoles Eliza with deceitful promises, gives her chocolates, buys her clothes, gives her a ring and hires jewels for her to wear. 

Soon after Eliza passes as a duchess in the London Embassy, Higgins makes it possible for the poor ignorant flower-girl after a few months to go among cultured and aristocratic people without anyone detecting or suspecting that she was born into a different social class. When Higgins first met the girl, her mind and emotions were so undeveloped that she was little more than a statue, but even though Higgins ignored her feelings, he nevertheless made the statue alive. However, the statue comes to life as Eliza becomes a real lady and asserts her independence of her teacher. Higgins rakes no interest in Eliza as a living woman but is concerned with her only as a human talking-machine. 

Although in the Greek story, Pygmalion marries his ideal beauty, Higgins evades marrying Eliza. This is no more than a professional experiment to Higgins, who takes no interest in Eliza as a living woman, which is revealed by Eliza herself – “I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will…” She knows, Higgins does not care a bit for her and thus claims her independence from his clutches – “I won’t care for anybody that doesn’t care for me”

In the popular film version and in the even more popular musical comedy version (My Fair Lady), the ending allows the audience to see a romantic love interest that blends in with the ancient myth. This, however, is a sentimentalized version of Shaw’s play. Shaw provided no such tender affection to blossom between professor and pupil.