The Role of Festival in The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Role of Festival in The Mayor of Casterbridge

One of the most striking aspects of The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example,

is the role of festival and the characters’ perceptions of, and reactions

to, the festive. The novel opens with Henchard, his wife and baby daughter

arriving at Weydon-Priors fair. It is a scene of festive holiday in which

‘the frivolous contingent of visitors’ snatch a respite from labour after the

business of the fair has been concluded. Here Henchard gets drunk and vents

his bitterness and frustration at being unemployed on his marriage.

Henchard negates the festive and celebratory nature of the fair by his egotism.

What the people perceive as a joke permissable under the rules of topsy-turvy,

the licence of the temporary release from the world of work, Henchard means seriously

and in that act which refuses the spirit of festival he places himself in a

position of antagonism to the workfolk, an antagonism which grows with time.

From this opening the motif of festival shadows the story and mimes the ‘tragic’

history of this solitary individual culminating in the ancient custom of the

skimmington ride. This motif forms a counterpoint to the dominant theme of work

and the novel develops on the basis of a conflict between various images of the

isolated, individualistic, egotistical and private forms of ‘economic man’

(Bakhtin’s term) and the collectivity of the workfolk. The many images of

festivity - the washout of Henchards’ official celebration of a national event,

Farfrae’s ‘opposition randy’, the fete carillonnee which Casterbridge mounts to

receive the Royal Personage, the public dinner presided over by Henchard where

the town worthies dra...

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... situation (H.C.Duffin is quoted to the effect

that The Mayor of Casterbridge is ‘the most hopeless book ever written. The tone of the telling,

in the latter half of the story is stony despair’) and of man’s stoical endurance in face of

the blows meted out to him by fate. And the phrase ‘they do not come out of their experiences

finer than they went in’ is repeated like a litany, a silent accusation of Hardy’s Godlessness.

The more sophisticated York Notes commentaries have a firmer authorial imprint

(each being written by a different academic/critic) and perhaps by virtue of their being

representative of a point of view rather than a distillation of many points of view they

appear to be more authoratitive, more ‘critical’, less dogmatic. This is because we are

moving into a higher and more sophisticated articulation of aesthetic ideology.