Abstract
The Mayor of Casterbridge is haunted. Spectres are everywhere, even in the faces or actions of the living. The town of Casterbridge is a haunted place, its topographical, architectural and archaeological structures resonating with the traces of the spectral. The ghosts of other textual forms, of which the tragic is only the most persistent or obvious, haunt the very structure of the novel. Michael Henchard particularly is troubled by the past, by a certain spectral revenance. The Mayor of Casterbridge is haunted.
Having reached the analytical stage [novel writing] must transcend it … Why not by rendering as visible essences, spectres, &c. the most abstract thoughts of the analytic school.
Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy
We two kept house, the Past and I.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Ghost of the Past’
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Notes
Keith Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Keith Wilson (London: Penguin, 1997; xxi-xli), xxxi.
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8.
Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 156–7.
See, for example, John R. Cooley, ‘The Importance of Things Past: An Archetypal Reading of The Mayor of Casterbridge’, Massachusetts Studies in English, 1 (1967), 17–21
W. Eugene Davis, ‘Comparatively Modern Skeletons in the Garden: A Reconsideration of The Mayor of Casterbridge’, English Literature in Transition (1880–1920), 3 (1985), 108–20
Rod Edmond, ‘“The Past-Marked Prospect”: Reading The Mayor of Casterbridge’, Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form, ed. Ian Gregor (London: Routledge, 1993), 111–27.
J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)
Bruce Johnson, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders’, in True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy’s Novels (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1983), 76–83
Tess O’Toole, ‘Fictitious Families’, in Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1997), 17–23.
Suzanne Keen, Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127, 132, 134, 140.
Raymond O’Dea, ‘The “Haunting Shade” That Accompanies the Virtuous Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge’, The Victorian Newsletter, 31 (1967), 33–6.
Robert Langbaum, Thomas Hardy in Our Time (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1995), 128.
Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, rev. edn, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 64. Hereafter MPdM.
Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993), 65.
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 6.
Florence Emily Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Milgate (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1985), 183.
Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 61. Hereafter AfD.
Scott Durham, Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.
Marjorie Garson, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Bounds of Propriety’ in Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 94–129.
See also Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 17–44. Hereafter AU.
J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 20–1.
J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 110. On the effects of the will, see also Ingersoll (‘Writing and Memory’, 307–8). Also on the will, see
Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1992), 134–5.
On questions of destination and receipt, and the transformation of addressees, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘Thomas Hardy, Jacques Derrida, and the “Dislocation of Souls”’ in Tropes, Parables, Performatives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 171–80.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Desistance’, trans. Christopher Fynsk, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–42; 27. Hereafter D. On this passage, and Derrida’s reading of rhythm as the haunting of the space of tradition, see Wigley (AD 162).
Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On • Border Lines’, trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176; 76. Hereafter LO.
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 150. Wigley draws on Heidegger’s discussions of dwelling and of the uncanny in relation to Being throughout his study.
Arguably, this is the project of that area of Hardy criticism, prominent in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which sought to read Hardy as a social historian or ‘sociologist of Wessex’. At the risk of being reductive, such criticism tends towards reading Hardy’s novels as documents of rural life, and the losses to a way of life attendant on changing technologies of farming. See, for example, Douglas Brown, Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Edward Arnold, 1962)
Noorul Hasan, Thomas Hardy: The Sociological Imagination (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1982)
Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989)
Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1972).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 9. Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the signifying functions of language is highly suggestive for readings of the various spectral effects in The Mayor of Casterbridge which would intersect with a number of the readings put forward here. At a number of points, and in particular in suggesting that ‘I become the one to whom I am listening’ (118), Merleau-Ponty anticipates the discussions of Hillis Miller and Derrida on the effects of communication on the addressee in the former’s essay on Hardy, already mentioned, and Derrida’s essay ‘Telepathy’, on which Miller draws: ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review, 10 (1988), 3–41.
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© 2002 Julian Wolfreys
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Wolfreys, J. (2002). ‘The persistence of the unforeseen’: The Mayor of Casterbridge. In: Victorian Hauntings. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1358-6_6
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