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A review by gremily
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
3.0
I had good memories of reading this just out of university, but it was a rather dismal experience this time around.
Hardy is always genius at tragedy and here he has taken on a very flawed protagonist and subjected him to a great deal of pain and suffering, as per usual. But the morality of this book has not aged as well as some of Hardy’s most famous works.
A man sells his wife and daughter for five guineas at the country fair, repents but cannot find her, and goes on to become rich and successful. Many years later, the wife’s return sets in motion a train of events which proves his undoing.
The plot is enjoyable enough, but requires contrasting good with bad – the troubled mayor with a pleasant young Scotsman; the virtuous daughter with a woman with a past. But while Hardy is skilled at making the reader like the good and hate the bad, modern morality muddles the issue. The “bad” woman is guilty of nothing worse than once having an (unconsummated) passion for another man; the “good” man is shallow and priggish. And while heroines like Hardy’s Tess are battered by circumstance but strong in their suffering, here we have that stalwart of Victorian fiction, a woman who succumbs, weakens, perishes, due to a shock! Overall, it makes for an unsatisfying twenty-first century reading experience, which is not helped by a peculiar decision by Hardy to cut a climatic scene (though I believe this was restored in later editions).
Hardy is always genius at tragedy and here he has taken on a very flawed protagonist and subjected him to a great deal of pain and suffering, as per usual. But the morality of this book has not aged as well as some of Hardy’s most famous works.
A man sells his wife and daughter for five guineas at the country fair, repents but cannot find her, and goes on to become rich and successful. Many years later, the wife’s return sets in motion a train of events which proves his undoing.
The plot is enjoyable enough, but requires contrasting good with bad – the troubled mayor with a pleasant young Scotsman; the virtuous daughter with a woman with a past. But while Hardy is skilled at making the reader like the good and hate the bad, modern morality muddles the issue. The “bad” woman is guilty of nothing worse than once having an (unconsummated) passion for another man; the “good” man is shallow and priggish. And while heroines like Hardy’s Tess are battered by circumstance but strong in their suffering, here we have that stalwart of Victorian fiction, a woman who succumbs, weakens, perishes, due to a shock! Overall, it makes for an unsatisfying twenty-first century reading experience, which is not helped by a peculiar decision by Hardy to cut a climatic scene (though I believe this was restored in later editions).