The Furmity Woman
The furmity woman runs the shop in which Michael, at the beginning of the novel, gets drunk and sells Susan. She appears again eighteen years later, when Susan and Elizabeth-Jane return to the village where the sale occurred to try to find Henchard. The furmity woman is still there and remembers that Henchard returned a year after the sale. She tells Susan that Henchard told her that he was moving to Casterbridge and that if a woman ever came asking for him, the furmity woman should pass on this information.
The furmity woman makes a final appearance in Casterbridge to seal Henchard’s fate. Henchard is a judge, and the furmity woman, when brought before him on a public obscenity charge, recognizes him and tells the court about this shameful past.
Elizabeth-Jane Henchard
As the novel opens, Susan is carrying an infant daughter named Elizabeth-Jane. She takes the baby with her when she goes off with Newson, and when readers see Susan eighteen years later, again with her daughter, Hardy gives the impression that this is the same infant grown up. Only later do readers learn that Henchard’s daughter died a few months after he sold Susan and that this girl is Newson’s daughter.
As Susan and the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth- Jane set about finding Henchard, Elizabeth-Jane knows nothing about her mother’s marriage to Henchard. She thinks that her mother and Newson were legally married and that now Susan is in search of a distant relative by marriage who may be of some help to them.
Early in the novel, both Elizabeth-Jane’s natural beauty and her innate intelligence have been compromised by her poverty. She has no education and no prospects in life. This is why Susan is willing to risk the possibility of being rejected and humiliated again by Henchard; she sees him as her daughter’s only hope for a better life.
Once Henchard begins providing for her, Elizabeth-Jane blossoms both physically and socially. She becomes the town beauty and is admired by young men, including Farfrae, with whom Elizabeth-Jane has been quite taken since their first meeting.
Hardy draws Elizabeth-Jane as a healthy mixture of levelheadedness and deep feeling. When Henchard’s money allows her nice clothes, she enjoys them but doesn’t overspend or flaunt her position. She also takes advantage of her newfound leisure by reading and studying to improve herself; she has always been embarrassed by her lack of education. When Farfrae abandons her for Miss Templeman, Elizabeth-Jane simply withdraws quietly although she loves him.
Unable to hold a grudge or remain bitter, Elizabeth-Jane finally marries Farfrae after Miss Templeman dies. And although she lashes out at Henchard when she finds out that he has lied to keep her from Newson, she soon forgives him and goes to find him. She is touched by Henchard’s will and honors his wishes.
Michael Henchard
Michael Henchard is the towering but tragic hero of The Mayor of Casterbridge; the novel is his story. He is physically large and powerful. His character is a strange mixture of the light and the dark. Henchard is true to his word. Until he hires Farfrae, he runs his business with few written records, and the townspeople know that they can trust him to keep the contracts he makes orally. Yet he sometimes says things that are rash and even cruel and then follows through on them just as if they were contracts made in good faith. Such an outburst causes him to sell his wife at the beginning of the novel. Henchard has the willpower and determination to keep an oath for twenty-one years, yet he seems to rarely think ahead, and, in a single moment of ire, he can do a deed that ruins years of effort. He is so honest that when the furmity woman exposes his past, he readily admits that she is telling the truth, and when he declares bankruptcy, he willingly turns over everything but the clothes on his back to his creditors. Yet when Newson comes looking for Elizabeth-Jane, Henchard tells him she is dead.
Henchard begins the novel a young man who is poor but who at least possesses a skill, the vigor of youth, and a wife and child. Yet he is convinced that his early marriage has ruined his chances in life. After shamefully ridding himself of the wife and child, he forswears the alcohol that undoubtedly fueled the deed and almost completely forswears the company of women, channeling all his energies into his business. And so, at first, the punishments that he imposes on himself for selling Susan lead to his success.
But fate and Henchard’s own abiding guilt conspire to destroy him. Fate places Donald Farfrae in his path, and Henchard chooses first to bring the man into his business and then to make him an adversary—the thoughtful, self-possessed adversary who will end up with impetuous Henchard’s public office and stature, his wealth, his business, his home, his furniture, his lover, and, finally, his stepdaughter. To help cruel fate along, Henchard indulges in one self-destructive act after another. When he would like to ruin Farfrae’s business, he instead speculates foolishly and ruins his own. When he wishes to return some highly inflammatory letters to a former lover, he entrusts the delivery to a man who openly hates him. When Elizabeth- Jane is all he has left in the world, he tells lies that are sure to estrange her from him.
Henchard ends up much poorer than he began, having lost, for a second and final time, his wife and her child and having lost the strength and potential of youth. At the end of the novel, he walks away from Casterbridge utterly alone and soon dies in the hut that has been his final home. He dies before he can know that Elizabeth-Jane has softened toward him, and his will makes clear that he would have wanted it so. His final wish is, in effect, to be obliterated for his sins, which a lifetime of penance was insufficient to obliterate in his own mind. His will asks that Elizabeth-Jane not be informed of his death, that no ceremony mark his passing, that no flowers mark his grave, and “that no man remember me.”
Susan Henchard
Susan Henchard is Michael’s wife as the novel opens. Hardy portrays her as being naïve and resigned to an existence over which she is powerless. The small efforts she makes to control her fate are useless; she steers Henchard away from what is clearly a saloon to a place that appears not to serve alcohol only to find that the proprietor in fact sells rum on the sly.
When Michael sells her to a sailor, Susan assumes that the transaction is valid and that she must stay with him. She lives peaceably with him for many years and bears him a daughter before a friend finally makes her realize that she is not bound by Henchard’s act.
After the sailor is presumed dead at sea, Susan sets out to find Henchard, hoping to benefit her daughter. It never seems to occur to her that he might have an obligation to Susan herself. Once she finds out that Henchard is mayor of the town and well off, far from desiring to take advantage of him or ruin him, she wishes she could leave Casterbridge without meeting him. For the sake of her daughter, she goes through with her plan to approach him.
Even the townspeople of Casterbridge see that Susan has no sense of self; they call her a “ghost.” Soon after she has seen Elizabeth-Jane on her way to being established in the way Susan had hoped for, Susan dies.
Jopp
Jopp is a lowlife villain who is driven by dark emotions. The day that Henchard hires Farfrae to be his business manager, Jopp shows up in the office having been previously offered the job that Farfrae now has. Informed that the position is no longer available, Jopp goes away steaming and bent on revenge.
Further events fuel this desire. Among other things, Henchard does finally hire Jopp but then fires him unreasonably when Henchard’s own business decisions prove disastrous. Henchard foolishly gives Jopp his chance for revenge when he asks Jopp to deliver to Miss Templeman a package of scandalous letters. Jopp reads the letters aloud to a tavern crowd, which then plans the “skimmityride” (a parading of effigies through the town to call attention to adultery) that ends in Miss Templeman’s death and Henchard’s further humiliation.
Newson
Newson is the sailor who buys Susan at the beginning of the novel. He shows that he does have some scruples when he says that he will take Susan only if she is willing to go with him. His relationship with Susan and with Elizabeth-Jane is portrayed as kind and cordial. When Susan comes to understand that their relationship is not legitimate, Newson does her a kindness by having himself reported lost at sea, allowing her to leave his house without guilt and with a small amount of money.
Newson’s basic decency is seen later in his desire to share his wealth with Elizabeth-Jane, in his acceptance of Henchard’s word that she has died, and in his lack of bitterness when he discovers that Henchard has lied to him. At the end of the novel, Newson lives within sight of the sea but also near his daughter.
Lucetta Templeman
Lucetta Templeman is a superficial, unthinking woman who, like Henchard, suffers several reversals of fortune and ends badly. Henchard has an affair with her before Susan arrives in Casterbridge, and this affair ruins Lucetta’s reputation. To try to repair the damage, Henchard, thinking that Susan is probably dead, offers to marry Lucetta. Before the marriage takes place, though, Susan returns, and Henchard must call off the wedding.
After Susan dies, Lucetta inherits wealth, and Henchard renews his interest in her. Lucetta is more interested in Farfrae, though, and marries him. When Lucetta’s old letters to Henchard become public, the scandal of their affair returns to haunt them both, and Lucetta is so distraught by this that she suffers a seizure and dies. Farfrae soon realizes that Lucetta was not a good match for him and that, had she lived, their marriage would not have been happy. Themes
