The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [304]
Coincidentally, the very years when Tolstoy was entering this crisis, 1878 and 1879, were also a time when Hardy himself was entering on one of the unhappiest phases of his life. His relations with his own outward `other half' Emma were sharply deteriorating. They left Dorset again for London, where he produced three curiously artificial, superficial novels which might have come from a different author. He then returned to Dorset, to the town of Dorchester where he designed a rather ugly house for himself, and here he wrote easily his bleakest book to date, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Again this was on the theme of a rootless hero trying to put down new roots for himself; quite specifically in Dorchester. But it was also of a man who has committed an offence against his feminine `other half' so deep that it can never be expiated.
At the beginning of the story, in a fit of drunken bragadoccio, the hero Michael Henchard actually sells his wife and child; and it turns out that, in doing so, he has sold his soul. Initially he is filled with remorse and tries to make amends. He arrives in the far-off town of Casterbridge (Dorchester), where he builds up a considerable fortune and becomes the leading citizen of the community. He is even reunited with his wife and what he imagines to be his child. But he then gets sucked into an ever deeper mire of deception and self-deception; and, when his wife dies, the tragic reversal begins to close in on him. He discovers that his imagined daughter, his beloved Elizabeth-Jane, is not his child at all. Hardy is remorseless in showing how everything Henchard has built up is gradually stripped from him by Donald Farfrae, his former protege and partner, who has now become his shadow. He loses his business, his home, his good name. He loses to Farfrae the woman he had hoped to make his second wife. He turns to drink and is humiliated in every way.
Finally he loses to Farfrae the one thing he has come to prize above all else; Elizabeth-Jane, the shining anima-figure who has remained in his life like a reborn version of his lost wife. In this sense she turns out to be as illusory a vision as Helen to that other hero who had sold his soul, Faustus. Robbed of all he has ever hoped for, Henchard wanders out into the wilderness to die: leaving, as a wedding present for the daughter he has lost, at her marriage to the man who has usurped everything he once proudly owned, a little goldfinch in a cage. Eventually the `little creature' is found in its `wire prison', dead: an outward and visible sign of what has already happened to the soul of poor Henchard himself. And when, next to his corpse, they find his pitiful last will and testament, scrawled on a scrap of paper, asking that no one should mourn his death or even remember him, its lost, despairing words are as chilling as anything Hardy had yet written.
His next book was The Woodlanders (1887), in which he returns to the countryside to describe the polarisation between the rustic, rooted world and that of the rootless, intrusive outsiders more starkly than ever. On one hand is the natural world of the trees and the woodland folk who live among them; above all Giles Winterborne, the man of the trees, and little Marty South. On the other is the world represented by the weak, vain young Edred Fitzpiers, his head full of dreams of experimental science; by the rich, spoiled Mrs Charmond, who has taken the big house; and also, alas, by Grace Melbury, the woodland village girl whose ambitious father had sent her off to school in the outside world and given her ideas above her station, or certainly above any such absurd idea as that she should marry Giles Winterborne, whom she has loved since childhood. In a now familiar tangle of mismatches, Grace returns to marry Fitzpiers, who then begins an affair with Mrs Charmond, leaving Grace to run off for