Hardy received criticism for the way that the plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge relies on coincidence, as unlucky meetings, chance encounters, and unexpected revelations are such a feature of the novel. The sudden reappearance of Richard Newson, for example, is a deus ex machina (a device in which a person, item or instance of plot is introduced suddenly and too conveniently or artificially to be plausible) that has an enormous effect on the lives of everyone in Casterbridge. Unexpected returns and departures like this, which result in coincidental and extremely dramatic aftereffects and repercussions, happen in almost every section of the book.
For example: Susan Henchard's return to Michael Henchard is dramatically coincidental, as is her death, as is her revelation of Elizabeth-Jane's true paternity. The fact that she had another daughter after her real daughter with Henchard died, in close enough proximity for Elizabeth-Jane to be believably Henchard's own child is also coincidental, and so on. Events in The Mayor of Casterbridge are broadly split into three categories: things that happen as a result of poor or good moral choices, everyday occurrences of quotidian English life, and dramatic coincidences that drive the plot forward.
The regularity of the unexpected in The Mayor of Casterbridge is the result of Hardy's convention of using determinism in his writing. The majority of Thomas Hardy's novels deal with the seemingly inescapable fact that humans do not have free will on a grand scale, or much control over their own lives. Their actions and their results are determined externally to their desires, as are the fundamental building-blocks of their characters and their "true nature." Fate deals a cruel and difficult hand to almost every character in Hardy's books at some point, and does so regularly as a result of unlikely coincidence. Unwieldy coincidence happens more regularly in The Mayor of Casterbridge than in Hardy's other novels, but coincidence itself is a key thread that runs through all of the author's writing. Whatever can happen will happen, and often with the worst possible results.
Hardy also implies through this use of coincidence as a plot engine that good moral action is the only remedy to the unkind twists of fate. Acting well, as Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae do, allows for a character to be supported by their community and weather the storm of coincidence and random chance. Acting poorly, as Henchard and Lucetta do, for example, makes them face their destiny alone and exposed.
Through free indirect discourse, the narrator often expresses a certain nostalgia for an unspoiled rural England that, Hardy tells us, seemed to be rapidly disappearing in the face of industrialization. Passages that describe a fairy-tale and cheerful country without the taint of the city as a motif abound, as in Chapter 16 when Henchard "organizes amusements" for the benefit of the people of Casterbridge:
Close to the town was an elevated green spot surrounded by an ancient square earthwork—earthworks square and not square, were as common as blackberries hereabout—a spot whereon the Casterbridge people usually held any kind of merry-making, meeting, or sheep-fair that required more space than the streets would afford. On one side it sloped to the river Froom, and from any point a view was obtained of the country round for many miles. This pleasant upland was to be the scene of Henchard’s exploit.
Hardy's Wessex scenes are often filled with this sense of nostalgia, which describes rural beauty and untouched landscapes as being threatened by technology and industry's encroachment. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, lists of charming vistas and country items "as common as blackberries" give a sense of the richness and profundity of the countryside. Hardy describes the blithe and lovely charm of the "merry-making" village as being in some ways a fantasy that minimizes the hardships of the poor, and in others as an element of a quickly-passing era that should be savored and protected.
There is also a somewhat classist nostalgia for the undereducated rural "serf" in contrast to the educated city-dweller that persists throughout The Mayor of Casterbridge. On one hand, Hardy seems to argue that the "innocence" of rural communities is being disturbed by the modernization and globalization of the Victorian world. However, Hardy also paradoxically seems to support modernization and advancement through his depiction of Farfrae's development and its positive effects on the town. The author's content and his tone are at odds with each other in these situations, which also echoes the dissonance between the views on social and technological change held by Farfrae and Henchard.
Hardy uses a simile comparing Michael Henchard’s nature to the sea, ultimately illustrating the many changes that people undergo throughout their lives and the strong pull that feelings have on their actions. In Chapter 33, Henchard describes how religious fervor moves him like the ocean both as a drunk and as a sober, successful man:
Hang Samuel Wakely’s tune, as improved by thee!” said Henchard. “Chuck across one of your psalters—old Wiltshire is the only tune worth singing—the psalm-tune that would make my blood ebb and flow like the sea when I was a steady chap. I’ll find some words to fit en.” He took one of the psalters and began turning over the leaves.
Henchard tells his appalled audience at the pub that the tune he is singing makes his blood “ebb and flow like the sea,” relating the ocean to the strong emotions provoked by stirring music. This was the case, Henchard tells them, even when he was a “steady chap,” implying that his body underwent tidal reactions to “psalm-tunes” even before he began drinking again. Language about the ocean also appears as a motif throughout the novel, as it plays a role of convergence and separation. This happens physically when people come to and leave England, and psychologically when people drift or are pulled apart.
People's interior emotions also move and flow like water, as Hardy shows in Chapter 25 when Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane discuss their relationship and Lucetta implores her to stay by her side:
When the young woman came in, sweetly unconscious of the turn in the tide, Lucetta went up to her, and said quite sincerely— “I’m so glad you’ve come. You’ll live with me a long time, won’t you?” [...] Her emotions rose, fell, undulated, filled her with wild surmise at their suddenness; and so passed Lucetta’s experiences of that day.
The language Hardy uses here is deliberately “watery,” which likens Lucetta’s emotions both to the ocean and to Michael Henchard’s experiences. For both of these characters, feelings “rise, fall and undulate” in a way that seems beyond their control, like the tidal pull of the sea. This is also important for Lucetta as a character because she is often associated with images of the moon in this book. Her actions as his wife and as his lover affect Henchard’s “ocean” like the lunar influence on the tides.
For a novel in which self-reflection and introspection play such an important role, The Mayor of Casterbridge employs the motif of a bustling, endless and watchful crowd extremely regularly. In Chapter 23, the throng of people in the marketplace loses all humanity and distinction and becomes a writhing mass of living bodies, taking this to an extreme:
The fair without the windows was now raging thick and loud. It was the chief hiring fair of the year, and differed quite from the market of a few days earlier. In substance it was a whitey-brown crowd flecked with white—this being the body of labourers waiting for places.
Hardy describes Casterbridge as a town in which someone's eyes are always on everyone else, as "lively as an anthill" and as stifling as a wool blanket. This central marketplace, visible from Lucetta's window at High-Place Hall is the busiest location in the novel, which the narrator tells us is the "node of all orbits." In this center of the Wessex universe, the sheer mass of people is overwhelming; a "whitey-brown crowd flecked with white." This language is unusually simple and repetitive for Hardy, echoing the content of the crowd at the hiring fair in their white shirts and brown work clothes. Although this crowd "differs from the market of a few days earlier" as the hiring-fair is a special event, "throngs" of people are always bustling about Casterbridge ready to dispense their opinions on the actions of others.
There is no way to escape the sense of constant company and observation in the town, as the sense and sound of the crowded streets penetrates all of the buildings. Even inside Lucetta's large house, the "babble" of the outside interrupts and cushions her private thoughts and discussions with indistinct but perceptible "voices as of wavelets on a looping sea, one ever and anon rising above the rest." Hardy uses this motif of crowdedness to give the novel a constant sense of interpersonal pressure. Everything new that happens is greeted with a rush of viewers, and every scandal is taken up by the endless cycles of gossip. It seems that unless enormous trouble is taken to conceal information it is immediately dispersed through the living body of the town.
The skimmity-ride that seals Henchard's fate and disgraces Lucetta relies on this function of the crowd to perform its principal job: public disgrace. Hardy relays the events of the ride to the reader through a series of people recounting what they have seen from afar or heard from others. Various servants, the landlady of the inn, Charl, Joshua Jopp, and Nance Mockridge all weigh in before it even happens. Nothing that happens in Casterbridge is without the potential for public discussion and scandal, the narrator implies, and anything might be "apt to wake riots." The claustrophobia of life in a small town and the "terrible oppressiveness" of so much crowding is a cloud that hangs over the entirety of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Much of the interpersonal conflict in The Mayor of Casterbridge comes from the motif of juxtaposing new innovations with old traditions. In Chapter 24, for example, the farmers and the populace of the town crowd around Donald Farfrae and a new invention he has brought into Casterbridge for the first time:
It was the new-fashioned agricultural implement called a horse-drill, till then unknown, in its modern shape, in this part of the country, where the venerable seed-lip was still used for sowing as in the days of the Heptarchy. The farmers crowded round it, women drew near it, children crept under and into it. [...] “It has something to do with corn,” said Elizabeth. “I wonder who thought of introducing it here?” Donald Farfrae was in the minds of both as the innovator, for though not a farmer he was closely leagued with farming operations.
Farfrae is himself the herald of change in this novel, and Henchard's resentment of him links him inextricably to the "days of the Heptarchy" (the seven minor kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England in the 5th century) and to old-fashioned country life. The "seed-lip" mechanism is consigned to being old-fashioned and outdated as quickly as Farfrae introduces his new "modern" technology. Henchard quickly begins to take the fact that Farfrae is "an innovator" as a personal affront, as it makes him feel obsolete by comparison. This combat between old and new is primarily symbolized through this dyad of character, as Henchard and Farfrae battle out the ways in which they will conduct their lives and their businesses in Casterbridge.
Conflicts between "old" and "new" are not only waged between separate people in this novel, however. The tension between the past and the present is also fundamentally internal for the villain of the novel. Henchard's "new" nature as the beneficent "Mayor" and father figure fights to suppress his "old" habits as a drunk disturbance. Hardy seems to support change and innovation, as it is Farfrae whose actions are rewarded with success, marriage and happiness, but the comparison that Hardy makes isn't without compassion for the "old world" too. Henchard's struggles to keep himself afloat are often staged very sympathetically, and Hardy implies that his failures are as much a result of the inevitability of change as they are of his own bad choices. The "romance of the sower" is disappearing, as Elizabeth-Jane sadly observes upon seeing the horse-drill and Henchard's distress. However, it is being replaced by positive change for almost everyone, as Farfrae tells her "must be so."
In contrast to the far-ranging and omniscient viewpoint of the narrator, Hardy employs the motif of limited and specific viewpoints joining or building up to show the humanity and the vulnerability of his characters realistically. For example, when Farfrae asks Lucetta if she looks out the window often, Lucetta describes her loneliness in High-Place Hall, talking about the world outside her window in the following way:
“I look as at a picture merely. But,” she went on, turning pleasantly to him, “I may do so now—I may look for you. You are always there, are you not? Ah—I don’t mean it seriously! But it is amusing to look for somebody one knows in a crowd, even if one does not want him. It takes off the terrible oppressiveness of being surrounded by a throng, and having no point of junction with it through a single individual.” “Ay! Maybe you’ll be very lonely, ma’am?” “Nobody knows how lonely.”
Lucetta and her companions are surrounded by a "throng" of "oppressive" social preoccupations and intrigue in Casterbridge, and can never be quite sure whether their actions are being observed and remarked upon. She feels that her own viewpoint is sorely limited, as she cannot understand the totality of all she sees; she can look at events "as a picture merely." This sense of only having a part of the information about events around her makes her feel isolated and anxious. When Farfrae asks why she stares out of the window, she describes the endless movement of events and scandal in the town as preventing her having "junction with a single individual." The narrator indicates to the reader that Farfrae actually sympathizes deeply with this paradoxical loneliness, but because he doesn't say so, she is left feeling that she is alone in this experience. Farfrae is the only character whom Hardy describes as being able to look at situations "from a distance," but even this partial objectivity doesn't allow him to predict or understand the endless coincidental dramas surrounding him.
Because Hardy's characters can only understand their world through their own personal lens, their interpretations of the complicated scenarios of the novel never include all the pertinent facts. Each person is mostly left to guess at how others see the world, and to piece together events from the limited amount they can learn or guess. Michael Henchard, for instance, is so lost in his own limited perspective and his grudges, and so concerned with manipulating everyone else's viewpoint that he becomes blinded to his actual problems. In this aspect, the motif of limited vision significantly affects the mood of the novel. The reader feels frustrated and helpless on behalf of almost everyone in the book, as they are given much more information by the narrator than the characters have access to themselves.
Hardy uses a simile comparing Michael Henchard’s nature to the sea, ultimately illustrating the many changes that people undergo throughout their lives and the strong pull that feelings have on their actions. In Chapter 33, Henchard describes how religious fervor moves him like the ocean both as a drunk and as a sober, successful man:
Hang Samuel Wakely’s tune, as improved by thee!” said Henchard. “Chuck across one of your psalters—old Wiltshire is the only tune worth singing—the psalm-tune that would make my blood ebb and flow like the sea when I was a steady chap. I’ll find some words to fit en.” He took one of the psalters and began turning over the leaves.
Henchard tells his appalled audience at the pub that the tune he is singing makes his blood “ebb and flow like the sea,” relating the ocean to the strong emotions provoked by stirring music. This was the case, Henchard tells them, even when he was a “steady chap,” implying that his body underwent tidal reactions to “psalm-tunes” even before he began drinking again. Language about the ocean also appears as a motif throughout the novel, as it plays a role of convergence and separation. This happens physically when people come to and leave England, and psychologically when people drift or are pulled apart.
People's interior emotions also move and flow like water, as Hardy shows in Chapter 25 when Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane discuss their relationship and Lucetta implores her to stay by her side:
When the young woman came in, sweetly unconscious of the turn in the tide, Lucetta went up to her, and said quite sincerely— “I’m so glad you’ve come. You’ll live with me a long time, won’t you?” [...] Her emotions rose, fell, undulated, filled her with wild surmise at their suddenness; and so passed Lucetta’s experiences of that day.
The language Hardy uses here is deliberately “watery,” which likens Lucetta’s emotions both to the ocean and to Michael Henchard’s experiences. For both of these characters, feelings “rise, fall and undulate” in a way that seems beyond their control, like the tidal pull of the sea. This is also important for Lucetta as a character because she is often associated with images of the moon in this book. Her actions as his wife and as his lover affect Henchard’s “ocean” like the lunar influence on the tides.
Many of the most important moments of plot in The Mayor of Casterbridge are dictated by the presence, absence, or lateness of legal and/or written evidence. Marriages, paternal identities, and sexual exploits are all complicated by a lack of proper documentation. For example, this happens in chapter 34 when Henchard is reading out Lucetta's "shameful" love letters to a dismayed Farfrae:
The truth was that, as may be divined, he had quite intended to effect a grand catastrophe at the end of this drama by reading out the name, he had come to the house with no other thought. But sitting here in cold blood he could not do it. Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond the nerve of his enmity.
In finding and using this written evidence, Henchard knows he has the power to effect a "grand catastrophe" on his rival Farfrae. However, some things are too harsh and horrible even for a villain like Henchard, and so leaving out Lucetta's name (the choice he makes here) is both a blessing and a deliberate instance of hiding documentation. Hardy tells us that Henchard could have told Farfrae who wrote the letters, as his "quality" of badness would have allowed for it, but he decides not to. Removing this evidence from the place it was intended to go changes a series of important events in the plot.
In a similar vein, Henchard's first marriage is not actually dissolved when he tells Susan Henchard that it is. She believes herself to have been "sold" into marriage for five guineas to the sailor Newson at the beginning of the novel. Hardy notes repeatedly that there was no evidence to suggest a formal separation, but Susan still took Henchard at his word (always a big mistake in The Mayor of Casterbridge). The reader also learns that Elizabeth-Jane Newson is not actually Henchard's daughter but is, in fact, Richard Newson's natural child—a piece of information that becomes apparent through a letter left by her dying mother. Henchard also conceals this document for his own benefit, causing difficulty and complicating his relationship to Elizabeth-Jane.
In typical Hardy fashion, Henchard's concealment and equivocation around documentation factors significantly into his doom. Things being improperly documented is actually the beginning of the end for Henchard in many ways, as the initial reason Farfrae gains purchase as an expert in Casterbridge is because Henchard cannot keep his written accounts straight.
In the 1840s, socially-bestowed titles (like "Mayor," "husband," or "manager") carried even more moral and social weight than they do now. Hardy emphasizes this by using the bestowal of titles as a motif signaling social belonging in the novel. For example, in Chapter 37 the narrator describes the visit of a member of the Royal Family to Casterbridge just after Farfrae has become the Mayor and Henchard has further disgraced himself:
The incident had occupied but a few moments, but it was necessarily witnessed by the Royal Personage, who, however, with practised tact affected not to have noticed anything unusual. He alighted, the Mayor advanced, the address was read; the Illustrious Personage replied, then said a few words to Farfrae, and shook hands with Lucetta as the Mayor’s wife.
The way that Hardy capitalizes the words "Royal Personage" and "Illustrious" here is meant to emphasize both the pomp and the silliness of this stop-in by an aristocrat interested in farming science; the title "Royal Personage" is a joke about titles. This "Personage" only meets with Farfrae because he is the Mayor and has made agricultural advancements for the town, and he only shakes hands with Lucetta "as the Mayor's wife." Their personhood is not important in this interaction, but the titles they have assumed are. The title of the novel itself makes it seem as though it will be the story of one "man of Character," but there is more than one "Mayor of Casterbridge" elected within it. The title confers behavioral expectations as well as legislative power. When the "Mayor" doesn't meet these expectations, he is dethroned and disgraced and a new "Mayor" is installed.
Michael Henchard has no social standing or "good name" and no title at the start of the novel, and he surprises Elizabeth-Jane and Susan immensely by having won the title of "Mayor" by the time they return from Canada. The title of "Mayor" is an effective mask over his true nature, and he clings to it as intensely as he rejects his past. When he loses both to Farfrae, in addition to his desired title of "husband" to Lucetta, his world collapses.
The titles of "husband" and "wife" are of great importance in this book too, as they dictate proper behavior and social acceptance. Which man holds the title of "husband" to which woman and vice versa is a central point of contention in many relationships. This is most evident in the case of Henchard, who has a slippery relationship to the title of "wife" with both Susan and Lucetta. The title of "spouse" is also very important to morally upright characters like Elizabeth-Jane. She believes that certain romantic interactions like Lucetta's indiscretions make not taking up a married title a public and private disgrace. To behave like a spouse (and to have sex like a spouse, Hardy implies) without using the word itself is confusing and shocking in a book where these titles are so important.
