The Individual and his/her relationship
with society
The mayor of Casterbridge is set in rural England at the time of the Industrial revolution. It is about the rise of Michael Henchard from a lowly hay trusser to a powerful mayor of Casterbridge, it tells us the way he rose and fell to and from power and how he went from being so popular to being friendless. In this essay I will show the relationship between each of the main characters in this novel and the society, which they live in.
Michael Henchard
Michael Henchard starts off as a hay trusser with a wife and baby daughter who he sells for five guineas to a sailor at Weydon fair while in a drunken state. Once he sobers up in the morning Henchard realises that what he did was wrong and makes an oath in a church that he will not drink for 20 years. Henchard then travels to Casterbridge and gains high status in society, so high that he is elected as mayor after setting up his own hay and corn business. He lives in the biggest house in the village with very expensive furnishings. He hires a young man called Donald Farfrae as his assistant but they fall out and Farfrae sets up in competition with Henchard, which was not what he meant but was how Henchard saw it. While staying here he is reunited with his wife Susan, he talks to her in secret and decides with her that they should re-marry, they do this but a few years later Susan dies leaving Henchard a note that tells him that he is not Elizabeth Jane’s father but the sailor is, however, Henchard does not discover this note until he has told Elizabeth Jane. Lucetta (a woman Henchard had an affair with while visiting Guernsey) then comes to the village in order to marry Henchard as he had promised her, however, Lucetta falls in love with Farfrae and decides to marry him, before the marriage Henchard falls out with Elizabeth Jane and so she goes to live with Lucetta and Henchard predicted the weather wrong and bough a lot of wheat that was not needed and in the end this mistake made him bankrupt. This was not all bad though because after this he makes peace with Elizabeth Jane and she went back to live with him in Joshua Jopp’s house as lodgers. Henchard gets a job working for Farfrae’s hay and wheat merchant company, which is strange because the man that once was master is now worker and the man that once was worker, now is master. Soon the people of Mixen Lane (a dark side of town where outcasts of society live) find out about Henchard and Lucetta’s affair and set up a skimmity ride, which gives Lucetta a fit, and kills her. The sailor, that bought Susan from Henchard then turns up on Henchards door one night asking about Elizabeth Jane but Henchard tells him that she is dead along with her mother. Later he regrets this when he realises what it would do to his and Elizabeth’s relationship when the sailor realises and comes back for her. Elizabeth decides to marry Farfrae after getting Henchards permission but a few days before the wedding the sailor came back and Henchard leaves Casterbridge before Elizabeth Jane finds out that he is not her father and he is left with nobody.
