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.
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