I introduction II. Chapter 1

2. Gender in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge

First, I will place The Mayor of Casterbridge within the historical context of the Victorian period and illustrate the Victorian ideal of women. Then, I will discuss Hardy’s view of women in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

2.1.The Mayor of Casterbridge within the Historical Context of the Victorian Age

Victorianism is the “era of Queen Victoria’s reign” from 1837 to 1901, which was a period of intensive activity in literature that highlighted contemporary concerns like the industrial revolution and moral values.^[10] Accordingly, Newsome marks the early Victorian period by socio-political crises and assigns the mid-Victorian period to the “Age of Equipoise” (cf. 8), which Gilmour explains as a widely accepted moral code based on appropriate sexual behaviourism, obligation, and domesticity, in which the belief in the family represents the major life force. Finally, late Victorianism is characterized by the manifestation of the “Great Depression” (cf. 4, 8, 262).
In the first place, the Victorian age is defined by constant change and the Victorians’ awareness of it, which they perceived as “[…] the inescapable condition of life in the modern world”.^[11] There was the general “[…] sense of a society in transition to less hopeful destinations […]”.^[12] New views of the world occurred, such as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) which found application to Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (cf. Gilmour 3; Newsome 8, 260). Because of technological and industrial progresses, materialism, urbanization, and the population increased (cf. Gilmour 2-3; Newsome 3, 263). Railway networks stimulated regional changes, whereas Hardy is considered England’s most eminent regional novelist (cf. Cuddon 568; Gilmour 3, 5).
The Victorian period is also called “the golden age of the English novel” because “the supreme literary achievement of the Victorian age is in its prose fiction”.^[13] Many Victorian novels can be read as a reaction to the commotion of the time, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and The Mayor of Casterbridge (cf. Gilmour 1-2, 4). Hence, many Victorian novelists preferred hybrid forms which “[…] can be seen as […] the Victorian compromise”, because of the reflection of the “[…] hesitant state the Victorians talked about as ‘doubt’”,^[14] which underlies the Victorian sense of alienation.
Then, the Victorian belief that “[…] art should take its material from ordinary life and deal with it in an appropriate manner” is fundamental to the “[…] debate between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’” in Victorian fiction.^[15] Accordingly, Elizabeth-Jane’s life ideals like charity oppose Henchard’s materialistic view of life.^[16] Actually, “[… the Victorians] believed that fiction was an art of the real, that novels could tell the truth about reality [… to] change their readers” (sic).^[17] However, realist stimuli resulted in the writers’ stress of anti-heroic character traits and were subject to determinism and probability of failure, as in Thackeray and Hardy, and contradicted the Victorian preference of the happy end (cf. Gilmour 9-12). Hardy, like many contemporaries, acknowledged the real in his fiction but was not fixed by it because alternating styles were predominant (cf. 10).
During the mid-Victorian period many domestic fictions illustrated everyday middle-class life such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, for which the Victorian era is also called “[…] the great age of domestic realism” (cf. 5). Eagleton explains the novel’s emphasis of the middle-class as their vision of independence from restriction.^[18] The principal concern of the novel with the middle-class is further indicated by the readership that was mainly middle-class because “[…] most Victorian novelists were conscious of writing for a middleclass and predominantly family audience […]”.^[19] Nevertheless, illiteracy was decreasing throughout the nineteenth century and literature became increasingly accessible to the lower classes because of the 1870 Education Act.^[20] In this way, “didacticism […] was the norm” that explains the stress of educational purposes in Victorian literature like Elizabeth-Jane’s approaches to autodidacticism (cf. Hardy 152; ch. 20; Newsome 9). In fact, publishing conditions contained strict censorship to maintain the family readership and the novel’s focus on moral and educative intentions (cf. Gilmour 8-9). On the contrary, the novel of sensation marks “the […] antitype of the domestic novel, dealing melodramatically with a hidden world of middle-class nightmare”.^[21] Features like “[…] improbable, melodramatic, and lurid” as well as “the guilty secret [… as] a favourite theme” suit The Mayor of Casterbridge (cf. Cuddon 602), for the story is as melodramatic as the secrets of the characters are incriminating.
Moreover, the tendency to modern literary forms and the issue of women that are entrapped in dissatisfying marriages mainly constitute the nucleus of late Victorian fiction, such as Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (cf. Gilmour 5, 6). The Mayor of Casterbridge can be read as a tragic novel both with regard to Henchard’s downfall and Hardy’s depressing vision of marriage, and thus suits the trend of Victorian novels to become more tragic (cf. 12), and matches Eagleton’s claim that “[…] the novel shifts from being a primarily comic to a predominantly tragic form” (19). However, many late Victorian writers attempted to break away from the moods of anxiety “[…] which Hardy in Tess […] called ‘the ache of modernism’”, that is rooted “[…] both in Christianity and Victorian social
institutions”.^[22] Thus, late Victorian novels are “[…] caught between two worlds, feeling the unavailability of comic resolution as an ‘ache’, […] unable to break through into new fictional forms” (Gilmour 180). This alludes to “the air of defeat” which is prevalent in many late Victorian novels (cf. 180), like in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Because of the tension between traditional norms and modern views of the world, the connection of inverses like present and past (cf. 11-12), which is particularly eminent in The Mayor of Casterbridge, was central to Victorian writers.
Then, Emile Zola’s pessimism, as a consequence of the Victorians’ mood of stagnation and weariness, and his advance of Naturalism mark a new phase in literature (cf. 10, 180-81). The Mayor of Casterbridge can be read as a novel of soil because of its naturalistic and deterministic influences like heredity and environment.^[23] Many Victorian novels are marked by “[…] the spaciousness of narrative description […]”^[24] like Hardy’s naturalistic descriptions of the countryside in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Furthermore, the novel of courtship changed into the family saga, “[…] in which the paternal figure is either sidelined or […] absent”.^[25] The Mayor of Casterbridge investigates Elizabeth-Jane’s origin because both her stepfather and father are alternately absent for a long period.
In conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge belongs to the late Victorian era and matches dominant trends of Victorian fiction. Nonetheless, it violates traditional norms and notions of realism because of the conflict between conventional and modern values, whereupon Hardy’s fiction can be placed both in the Victorian and the modern period.