Lecture 3. Character and the built environment: The Mayor of Casterbridge

In 1883 Hardy returned to his native Dorchester, and  began to design his own house while renting another in the town centre. The Mayor of Casterbridge reflects the life of Dorchester in the mid 1840s when Hardy was a small child.

As a child Hardy had walked the road from Upper Bockhamtpon to Dorchester hundreds of times.

And it was from this same road that Susan Newsome and Elizabeth Jane came into Casterbridge when they first arrived. 

The layout of Dorchester was more or less identical with the ancient Roman city of Durnovaria

and when Hardy was building his new house at Max Gate he came upon a number of Roman graves that contained the skeletons of the inhabitants of the old city. The archaeology of the town fascinated him and the novel is punctuated with references to it.

The focus of the Roman city was the forum and the focus of the town of Casterbridge is the market both of which were located at the crossing of the major roads.

The most important buildings on the novel are grouped around or near this point, and it is here that Elizatbeth Jane find Henchard in his rich and imposing brick building.

Henchard's first appearance in Casterbridge occurs in an equally imposing building, The King's Arms where he is seen by the two women at the head of the town council.

Just a little along the High Street was another inn, The Three Mariners which is quite different in quality. The King's Arms is for the elite only; The Three Mariners is for the ordinary citizen. It is disorganized but homely, humbler, but more welcoming and as such is a microcosm of the town at large.

The residence of Lucetta Templeman, High Place Hall, Hardy moved from its position in Colliton Park to a point overlooking the market place.

It is double sided, with a rational front and a sinister area behind.

Moving further afield, the entertainments organised first by Henchard on Poundbury mound then by Farfrae in West Walks, take the action from the centre to the periphery of the town.

Here we have another temporary tent-like building, referring back to the tent from which Susan Henchard was first sold, and perhaps the sentiments that were associated with the tent in which Frank Troy performed.

Also on the periphery are the 'Rings' where Henchard first meets his wife Susan and later Lucetta. It is a secret place, hidden, and bodes no good. It carries with it memories of its violent Roman past and violent episodes of torture and execution in later periods. Boys will not play there because it has a brooding sinister quality.

Still further from the centre of Casterbridge life is Mixen Lane (Fordington) separated from the main town and the residence of the disaffected and the down and out. It is here that the 'skimmity ride' is hatched, a device to bring down Farfrae and Lucetta. It was a slum, which bred moral and physical contagion and disease.

The rejects from Casterbridge society find themselves, Henchard among them, passing time on one of the two bridges out of the town. The nature of their rejection is defined by the bridge they choose.

Moving round the river in an anti-clockwise direction we come to Friary Mill. A spot of darkness and desolation to which Henchard comes when he discovers that Elizabeth Jane is not his daughter and it is here that Jopp goes to live in a humble cottage after he loses his employment.

Further out in the water-meadows are the seven hatches, a sluice to control the flow of the river. 

It is here that Henchard attempts suicide in the aftermath of the skimmity ride, but is prevented from jumping the appearance of his Doppelganger in the water.

Various characters have the notion that they will leave Casterbridge and begin new lives. Lucetta wants to do this with Farfrae but dies before she is able. Henchard also leaves, but is drawn back by the marriage of Elizabeth Jane and Farfrae. Finally he goes. But to leave is to enter the wilderness. He is eventually found by Farfrae and Elizabeth Jane in the most derelict and humble cottage of the novel, a building which reflects the dereliction to which he has been driven.

Lecture 4: Man's Place in Nature 'The Woodlanders'

For The Woodlanders we have to leave Dorchester and travel north towards Yeovil. After about fifteen miles we come to a sign on the left to Melbury Bubb, the birthplace of Hardy's mother Jemima.

It is this group, Melbury Osmond, Melbury Sampford and Melbury Bubb that forms the nucleus of places in the novel.

 Melbury Osmund is the village of Hardy's mother's family, with its church, St Osmund and graveyard.

This provided the model for Great Hintock, where Grace and Fitzpiers, like Hardy's parents, were married. And where Hardy's mother was brought up.

The opening of the story that elides the human and the woodland world is set on the old carriageway between Dorchester and Yeovil.

Mrs Dollery's van with Barber Percombe aboad turns off the highway and down to Little Hintock (Melbury Bubb) which, now as then, was 'outside the gates of the world'.

The farmhouse in which Grace, her father and stepfather lives, stands at the bottom of the hill.

It provides for the novel a touchstone of the importance of being rooted in a place

From her window, Grace Melbury could look up to Bubb Down woods where she saw the strange lights coming from the cottage of the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, as he performed strange scientific experiments.

 The farmhouse was a reminder of the conditions necessary for a life that is integrated into its ambient environment. To understand oneself and the place in which one lives:

Giles Winterborne, off all characters in the novel embodies this sense of being established and rooted in his environment.

Giles is linked to the plentitude of the woodland world as it is symbolise in the apple-blossom and fruit harvest.

Grace Melbury, however, through the expensive eduction given to her by her father has begun to pull away from 'the good old Hintock ways' and between her primitive affection for Giles and her attraction to Fitzpiers is left suspended between 'two storeys' of society.

As for Fitzpiers, he chooses his for his dwelling the wood, a residence that is quite out of place.

The formal gardens with their rigid layout reflect the rigid, scientific aspects of Fitzpiers' mind. Affection and love he understands in dry philosophical terms.

But he has another side to him. He is sexually highly charged and this impulsiveness comes out in an operatically romantic temperament that pursues Suke Damson, Grace Melbury and Felice Charmond.

For Hintock House, Hardy decided to move away from the Illchester house at Melbury Sampford

and replace it with a manor house with which he was familiar at Turnworth in East Dorset.

This was a location entirely unsuited to the worldly Felice Charmond. Twenty eight, once an actress she was plucked from the stage by a northern engineer thirty years her senior and brought to the house and estate that he purchased. When he died she was left in the Hintocks that she hated. Loathing the woodlands, the seasons, and the people she longed (a little like Eustacia Vye) to be off to the south, to the continent and especially to Germany.

THE WOODLANDS

The woods above Little Hintock are the site for the Midsummer festival, a ritual where girls find out about their future husbands. It also provides and exemplary moment for the natural sexual selection that take place in the novel. Both Winterborne and Fitzpiers wait for Grace to return from the summit of the hill. Winterborne retires, Fitzpiers steps forward and captures her. When she passes on he then captures Suke Damson with whom he spend the night in the field, and he later goes on to capture Felix Charmond and run away with her to the continent.

The woods are also sites where humans readily lose themselves. When people have lost touch with nature, they forget the paths through the woods: such is the case with Grace and Mrs Charmond, who after a discussion plunge in opposite directions into the undergrowth. Grace once knew her way round the woods; Mrs Charmond hates the woods, and though they lose their directions they discover their shared sexual relationship with Fitzpiers.

Most of all, the woods are a site of struggle and conflict. The apple-orchards are associated with plenitude, but the oaks, hazel and other trees fight for existence in a continuing battle.

Everywhere, the human world merges or elides with the tree world and vice-versa. And the struggle Darwin identified in the organic world and amongst lower animals Hardy applies to humans.

Giles Winterborne and his female anima Marty South representative of an ancient ontology are losers in the struggle for survival. Giles's house is demolished by Felice Charmond and he withdraws (as he often withdraws in this novel) into the depths of a wood to one of the humblest of human habitations.

It is here that nature both strikes him down and draws her back into itself. Paralysed by obsolete ideas of propriety between the sexes he remains outside his hut during a storm rather than share it with Grace. He is already ill, and the combination of wind and weather kill him off.

His death is registered as slow fading away as Grace hears his voice merging with the natural sounds of the woodland.

Fitzpiers, canny, flexible, assertive is a surviver. He even survives the man trap set for him by Suke Damson's husband when he returns to Little Hintock to court his wife for a second time.

In fact far from wounding, the mechanical mantrap serves to bring Grace and Fitzpiers together again, though their reconciliation is far from positive. Giles, the representative of the old order has been swept away; Fitzpiers, and with him Grace, are representatives of the new dispensation, but as Grace's father predicts, it will not be long before Fitzpiers (since 'love is a subjective phenomenon') finds a new woman on which to focus his affections.