Like Adrian Chiles (What did I learn from Thomas Hardy? Great characters don’t need a back story, 19 April), I too sat that English O-level on Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge 40 years ago (I got an E), and like him I also re-read it recently. Our impressions diverge, however.
I was struck by the way four decades of feminism, topped off by #MeToo, has laid bare the novel’s back-to-front moral concerns. Michael Henchard is angry, selfish and cruel, but above all he is a misogynist – “something of a woman-hater”, as he himself puts it – and every female who crosses his path comes away scarred.
At the famous country fair, he sells not only his wife, but his baby daughter, who never sees him again; he opens and reads private correspondence between his wife and her daughter, prevents this young woman from discovering he is not her father, and mendaciously informs her real father that she has died; he “ruins” another woman by an extramarital liaison, only later to blackmail her into agreeing to marry him by threatening to make this public in Casterbridge.
Men selling and sex-shaming women, or using controlling behaviour: all burning topics today, but Hardy sidelines his female protagonists to concentrate on the destiny, the “life and death” of this “man of character”, as his subtitle has it. Chiles too sees Henchard as a “great character”, but admiring the tormentor for his complexity betrays a peculiarly male worldview, which has accompanied the novel since its publication.
Matthew Pires
Department of English, University of Franche-Comté
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
