The Mayor of Casterbridge Themes

In almost all of his novels, Hardy explores and questions the institution of marriage. We see it from the very beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge, when Henchard complains about being unhappy in...

If there are a lot of marriages without love in The Mayor of Casterbridge, there's also a lot of love without marriage. Lucetta falls in love with Henchard, then their marriage is postponed and the...

It's hard to say what first attracts Henchard to Farfrae, but whatever it is, he trusts him immediately – not just with his business, but with his personal life and secrets. The two men are p...

For such a long novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge has relatively few main characters: two men (Henchard and Farfrae) and three women (Susan, Lucetta, and Elizabeth-Jane). Their great differences of...

The events of The Mayor of Casterbridge span more than twenty years – most of Henchard's adult life. In a sense, you can read Henchard's downfall as a commentary on the way the past always co...

Casterbridge is about as "natural" of a town as you can imagine. It's set in the middle of agricultural fields and doesn't have a lot of the "unnatural" industrial mills and factories that were spr...

It's clear that almost all of Henchard's misfortunes are caused by his own mistakes; it's hard to blame "fate" or "destiny" for the bad things that happen to him. But at the same time, how much con...

There are a lot of broken dreams in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Elizabeth-Jane is hopelessly in love with Farfrae for most of the novel and is forced to watch him marry her best friend. Henchard has...