Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge

We can say that character is our decision when faced with an event. An event, meanwhile, can be a thing of chance, or a thing of fate. Fate suggests an external ordering impulse, unlike random chance . Fate and character can be essentially the same if we say that each event that happens to someone is caused by a previous reaction of that character to an event so that everything is linked. Fate seems to presuppose the impossibility of the growth of character except within defined bounds, while randomness lets character change randomly. Randomness is real, whereas fate is generally reserved for stories that are consciously stories. To give us a neat little moral, this sense of cause and effect ought to be maintained. There is no room for randomness.

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, subtitled “the Life and Death of a Man of Character”, is a grand drama about the fate of Michael Henchard, a man who makes decisions that are not usually very good. It is my first Hardy, and going into it I was aware that I was likely to become acquainted with a pessimistic worldview and challenging local accents. One reason why the work is interesting is that it sheds some light on a problem regarding this connection between character and fate.

The novel begins with Henchard selling his wife and daughter one evening while drunk. It is a shocking scene, as we witness Henchard becoming drunker and drunker, and his attempts to rid himself of his wife Susan ever more serious. At last, he succeeds, and his wife disappears to a sailor (who is only there for a page) in what we could call a thing of absolute chance – indeed, perhaps the only time where chance figures in the novel. The next morning Henchard wakes up and regrets his rash decision, makes a vow to quit drinking for twenty-one years, and half-heartedly tries to find his wife.

The next time we meet him almost twenty years have passed and Henchard is now the mayor of the town of Casterbridge. While he was selling his wife, he declared that she had been holding him back. So, indeed, it seems. But the rest of the novel becomes a downhill race for Henchard, as his wife and daughter return, his past keeps popping up, and he ruins himself through awful decisions. His character, brash, confident, powerful, and mercurial is to blame for these decisions. He fires an excellent manager, the Scot Donald Farfrae because he danced with his daughter. He disobeys his wife’s dying request and in so doing estranges himself from his daughter. It seems, to some extent, that Henchard’s character is responsible for his fate. Things do not happen to him so much as he, through his character, causes the events that bring about his downfall. In a brilliant phrase, Hardy declares that “the momentum of his character knew no patience.”

Henchard believes in fate. He obeys the oath to stop drinking that he swore in a church. And when things start going wrong, he believes a hostile, “occult”, force is working against him and grows increasingly paranoid. But Henchard’s faith in fate, even his damnable one, is not absolute. Late in the novel, Henchard visits a man who appears capable of magic to discover the fate of the upcoming harvest so that he can speculate profitably and destroy Farfrae, now a commercial rival. The seer provides an accurate forecast, but just before the harvest Henchard gets nervous and adjusts his financial position, losing all of his money when things go as predicted.

Henchard is right to believe in a hostile fate. His author is not a kind one. While Henchard’s character seems partly responsible for his miseries, it is certainly not the only thing. Hardy’s novel is peppered with ridiculous encounters orchestrated especially to make its protagonist miserable. If halfway through a chapter Henchard declares to himself that he will love his daughter, something is certain to happen a few pages later that dashes his hopes. People turn up who should have been dead precisely at the moment when they will cause the most suffering. It becomes increasingly ridiculous. Where Henchard’s character may have damned him to poverty, Hardy’s fate weaving damns him to an early grave and abject misery.

There is something important in this that is worth looking into. I liked the novel and agree with those assertions that Henchard is this larger-than-life, Shakespearian monster of a man. But there is something about its structure that is unsatisfying, and it relates to this very element of fate.  Stories, at least originally, seem to have been about unstoppable fate. Chosen ones fight chosen enemies. The universe has a plan and order that is God-given. Fate here determines the shape of lives before they are lived. The oracles, the prophecies, that haunt tragedies, are all bearers of this word. Characters attempt to fight their fates, but they always comply in the end, albeit often through ways unexpected.

But the fates that we think of are all simple. A dragon is slain, a mother is bedded, and a child is killed. They can be reduced to a single act. A tragedy, generally, works similarly – a single decision is what is necessary for the fall. Othello’s refusal to reflect, for example, seals Desdemona’s fate. By reducing the number of events to a small number, the character becomes more important. In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy writes that “in the end… no man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending?” This is the case with lives that are made of small events. Henchard’s life, seen by a reader, has a shape, but for himself, it is like the one McCarthy describes – it takes time for his own character’s role within it to become visible to himself.

In a world where we have to make big decisions, a world of tragedy and high drama where the stakes are high, we see immediately the consequences of our actions and the role of our character in shaping the fundamental direction of our lives. You cannot drift in a tragedy; you can drift through ordinary life. Henchard’s daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, simply lives, passively, for most of the novel. She cannot be the main character. But you only need to force her to make one real decision to have a story. Any more, and you run the risk of getting something that seems picaresque, unreal. There are only so many serious decisions we can face in life. For a story, however, only one is often enough.

We cannot ask our stories both to show us character and to show us the world – the emphasis must be on one or the other for maximum effect. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy seems to want to do both – both show an objectively “sorry world”, and also a character that makes it sorrowful for himself. This undermines his artistic purpose here, I think. If bad things keep happening to Henchard, that is bad luck in real life or authorial cruelty in a work of fiction. If Henchard keeps making awful decisions, then it is his character that is to blame for his bad luck. But in the novel, Hardy seems to orchestrate matters so that it is precisely when Henchard seems most determined to make good decisions that bad luck creeps in. That is not fair, and though life itself is not fair, as noted it seems to dilute Henchard’s responsibility in the text whilst strengthening the resonance of his tragedy.

Donald Farfrae comes to Casterbridge and sets himself up as a successful merchant, eventually toppling without malice the man who gave him his first role there, Henchard himself. He marries, gains prestige, and life is good for him (mostly). His world is not that miserable one inhabited by the other characters, like Elizabeth-Jane or Henchard’s wife Susan. Their misery, however, in many cases stems from a refusal to utter a certain piece of information – in short, from decisions stemming from character, which takes us around in a circle. The point is that misery is the result of character in The Mayor of Casterbridge, except when it is the result of Hardy being mean. 

I spent most of the novel wondering how exactly Hardy was going to make me and all of the characters miserable at the end. He did not, of course, disappoint in this. And it is true that to have character failings make a tragedy, fate, or even just a story, we need events. Information, or its absence, can only have an effect when something happens whose outcome that information could have changed. But Hardy’s events are too much, too cleanly orchestrated. It made me conclude that if we want to make a truly blunt argument about the links between character and fate, we should probably rely upon those single powerful decisions and events that reveal character to the utmost, rather than attempting to substitute for them many smaller events. Or if we wish to use smaller events, making them seem like chance events, rather than forced events. We tolerate the deliberate tendency of a tragedy towards a single grand and silly conclusion, but the composite tragedy, built of many smaller but still deliberate things, is harder to stomach. It is hard to read The Mayor of Casterbridge and not think that Henchard is going to have struggles ahead. But he did not need Hardy standing behind him, constantly kicking him down the stairs.