Writing Machine, Paper Money, and The Mayor of Casterbridge

Writing Machine, Paper Money, and The Mayor ofCasterbridge

著者 Hara Masakijournal orpublication title

SHIRON(試論)

volume 49page range 1-18year 2014-07-31URL http://hdl.handle.net/10097/57608

Writing Machine, Paper Money, and The Mayor of Casterbridge

Masaki Hara

Thomas Hardy’s The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is given the subtitle, A Story of a Man of Character. Although “a man of character” is a common idiomatic expression, what the word “character” means has been one of the biggest problems for readers of the novel, and it has been interpreted generally in three ways. First and quite naturally, many readers, comparing the novel with Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, have considered it to be the moral character or ethos that the protagonist Michael Henchard embodies (King; Kramer; Schweik). Second, psychoanalytic critics interpret the word “character” as the inner mind of the self.1 Third, putting it in the context of Victorian political economy, Simon Gatrell regards the word as about the individual character in liberal society, the importance of which J. S. Mill explains, for example, in his On Liberty (1859) (Gatrell 68-96).2 Although their ways of reading the word are different from each other, they rest on the one and the same tacit assumption that it must be something essential, metaphysical, or transcendental. However, deriving from the Greek verb meaning to cut furrow in or to engrave, the word “character” also has the meaning of marking or writing; moreover, it means a person in fiction such as plays or novels. Therefore, if the word is taken in that sense according to its derivation, The Mayor of Casterbridge will be read as writing about writing rather than a tragedy, a psychological case study, or a Buildungsroman whose theme is the self-cultivation.

This is not simply to play with the etymology because in fact various pieces of writing frequently appear in the novel and each of them plays a crucial role in developing the novel’s plot. One of the most decisive turning points in Henchard’s life comes when he sells

SHIRON No.49 (2014)

Writing Machine, Paper Money, and The Mayor of Casterbridge2

by auction his wife Susan and daughter Elizabeth-Jane to the sailor Richard Newson, who happens to be present at the auction. Gaining by this transaction “Bank of England notes for five pounds” and being a “free” man again, he succeeds in obtaining the position of the mayor of Casterbridge (13).3 What causes the decline of him is also a note: a Scot, Donald Farfrae, who will replace him as the mayor, appears as a kind of writing before him in their first encounter. On the way to America to gain business opportunities, happening to pass by the scene where some town folk blame the mayor for the bad bread made from his wheat, Farfrae sends him a “note” in which a method for improving bad quality wheat is written (37). In addition, the misdelivery of letters accelerates Henchard’s downfall: Susan’s last letter informing him that Elizabeth-Jane is really Newson’s daughter reaches its destination too early, which alienates him from Elizabeth-Jane Newson; furthermore, love letters sent by Lucetta Templeman to him at one time when they were lovers are purloined by Joshua Jopp, who plots and carries out the skimmington. Furthermore, he dies at the end of the novel, leaving “a crumpled scrap of paper” on which his will is inscribed with a pencil (308).

That critical role of writing to develop the narrative is also found in most of Hardy’s novels, to which some readers have recently paid attention. As Julian Wolfreys says in his Dickens to Hardy 1837-1884, “Hardy understands and demonstrates the strange powers of communication throughout his texts in its material forms such as letters, notes, or telegrams and their transmission. They are everywhere in Hardy” (222). Let’s take some examples. In A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), it is by correspondence that the stonemason Stephen Smith learns Latin from the writer Henry Knight, who also tells Smith that “the speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age” (49). In the end, however, Knight becomes his rival in love over Elfride Swancourt. In A Laodicean (1881), trying to break up the romantic relationship between the architect George Somerset and Paula Power, who has inherited Stancy Castle from her father, a railway magnate, William Dare repeatedly interferes with their communications by counterfeiting letters, photographs, or telegrams.4 Near the end of The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright writes a letter to Eustacia in order to repair their relationship, but it is not delivered to her and as a result she dies. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Tess Durbyfield’s letter to Angel Clare confessing what happened in the past between her and Arec d’Urberville does not reach him, which leads to a fatal

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misunderstanding between them. “Episodes involving documents are the characteristic events of the narrative and the triggers for many changes and crises”, says Patricia Ingham in her introduction to The Woodlanders (1887) (xix).5 As is suggested by the epigraph of Jude the Obscure (1895), “The letter killeth”, writing frequently causes a catastrophe in Hardy’s novels.

In this paper I attempt to read The Mayor of Casterbridge as a text about the materiality of character which undermines a story of a man of character. To be sure, this attempt is also to reread the novel based on a context reconstructed by Kevin McLaughlin, the context of the mass production of paper in “The Paper Age” coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837. My viewpoint, however, is different from McLaughlin’s. He focuses especially on Henchard, who, appearing for the first time in the novel, is “reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet” (Hardy, TMC 5), which “played an important role in the rise of paper as a material support for the modern mass media” (McLaughlin 110). I pay attention to Farfrae and Newson who hold sway over the life of Henchard, or, more exactly, to the horse-drill which Farfrae introduces into Casterbridge in chapter 24 and the paper money with which Newson appears before Henchard in chapter 1. As we shall see below, both of them are metaphors of writing, which cannot be controlled by those who write but makes them peremptorily subject to itself. From this point of view, we will find that what the novel tries to write about is the way how Henchard is written upon paper, and at last, transformed into a collection of letters written on “a crumpled scrap of paper”, or his will.

I

The story of The Mayor of Casterbridge centers round the confrontation between Farfrae and Henchard: using the latest science technology, an embodiment of which is the horse-drill, a new agricultural machine, Farfrae wins the battle and becomes the authority of Casterbridge while Henchard brings himself to ruin. That story, no doubt, represents the process of the drastic change of country under the industrial modernization. But it is important for us that Farfrae also has the technology of writing letters, which, the narrator suggests, causes the reversal of the power relationship between Farfrae and Henchard:


Meanwhile the great corn and hay traffic conducted by Henchard throve under the management of Donald Farfrae as it had never thriven before. It had formerly moved in jolts; now it went on oiled castors. The old crude viva voce system of Henchard, in which everything depended upon his memory, and bargains were made by the tongue alone, was swept away. Letters and ledgers took the place of “I’ll do’t,” and “you shall hae’t” (85).

It is with the introduction and diffusion of the writing system of Farfrae that the industrial modernization of Casterbridge advances. In the first place, Farfrae appears before Henchard as a note, the leaf torn out of his pocketbook in which a scientific method for improving bad quality wheat is written (37): the distribution of the wheat purified by Farfrae throughout the town, then, also implies that of his writing system. This is how it takes the place of the old crude viva voce system of Henchard.

That relation between Farfrae and Henchard seems to represent the binary opposition between writing and speech that is supposed to be the basis of Western thought: invoking Jaques Derrida, Earl Ingersoll considers Farfrae as “a writer” and Henchard as “a speaker”, and argues that the story of the novel shows the process in which writing threatens the superior position of speech and consequently takes the position of it (Ingersoll 300). Their relationship, however, should be analyzed in more detail. Firstly, Farfrae is not only a writer but also a speaker, like Plato, who, paradoxically, insists on the superiority of speech to writing by the very means of writing. That conspiracy between writing and speech is clearly found in Farfrae. For, while he introduces the technology to write, he also “completely take[s] possession of the hearts” of the inhabitants by reciting a Scottish poem. He is “to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then” (51): he can represent and speak for them, which suggests he will be the mayor sooner or later. Thus, just as the commercial and the romantic coexist in Farfrae, so speech and writing do as well. As the narrator puts it, “[l]ike the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling” (149). Secondly, while Farfrae’s voice is associated with articulation and aesthetics, Henchard’s is associated with vocal organs such as the tongue or “large mouth” (32) and with the crude vigor which is seen, for example, when he shouts

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or laughs loudly like “a perfect cannonade” (85). In other words, unlike Farfrae’s voice, Henchard’s is not transparent or logocentric but physical or material. Therefore, in the Derridean sense, Henchard is not a speaker at all.

This analysis suggests that the relationship of Farfrae and Henchard is more complex than Ingersoll supposes. In order to redefine their relation, it is expedient to examine the reason why many critics have not paid attention to Farfrae’s writing. It is firstly because his voice makes his writing transparent, taming skillfully its unstable materiality as a phonocentrist does; secondly, because the materiality hides behind Henchard’s coarse physicality; in other words, Henchard is structurally charged with the materiality of Farfrae’s writing. To put it more clearly, the rise of Farfrae and the decline of Henchard imply that the former, making a scapegoat of the latter, excludes him from Casterbridge in order to keep the town stable, into which his writing system has already been introduced. In other words, Henchard is cast as a structural other of the community the head of which is Farfrae. That structural relationship is, for example, seen where Susan’s last letter informing that Elizabeth-Jane is really Newson’s daughter reaches Henchard at the wrong time. The letter addressed to him is “with the restriction, ‘Not to be opened till Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding-day’”, but he does not care for the proviso at all and reads it because “the seal had cracked, and the letter was open” (117). As a result, the relation between Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane worsens suddenly. Her letter is not delivered to Henchard as intended whereas Farfrae’s letters always arrive at their destination. But, as Derrida argues, no postal system can block out the structural possibility of a letter wandering away, and moreover, a letter’s arrival hinges upon the structural possibility of its non-arrival: if it was impossible that every letter might not arrive, no letter could arrive as intended. Therefore,the misdelivery which occurs between Susan and Henchard is an accident and, at the same time, essential to Farfrae’s writing system. Paradoxically, the relation between Henchard and Farfrae is both opposite and interdependent: Casterbridge, where his writing system has been installed, really needs Henchard as a scapegoat who is to be removed from within.6

That relationship between Farfrae and Henchard that I have discussed above in terms of a speech-writing opposition is embodied in one of the most famous scenes in the novel, the scene where “the new-fashioned agricultural implement called a horse-drill, till then unknown, in its modern shape” is introduced into Casterbridge by


Farfrae (156). As we shall argue in detail below, the horse-drill not only symbolizes industrial modernization but also embodies his writing system. Significantly, he sings a poem when he understands its internal mechanism. He rises from the manager employed in Henchard’s firm to the mayor by, on the one hand, using the machine and, on the other hand, taming the “horse” with his voice.7

When the horse-drill is introduced into the town, its chimerical and uncanny exterior is described: “The machine was painted in bright hues of green, yellow, and red, and it resembled as a whole a compound of hornet, grasshopper, and shrimp, magnified enormously”. Importantly, however, the unnatural amalgam is made understandable and familiar by Farfrae’s “humming of a song, which sounded as though from the interior of the machine”. This is how the monstrous machine is transformed into an aesthetic object, “a sort of agricultural piano” (156):

They [Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane] could see behind it the bent back of a man who was pushing his head into the internal works to master their simple secrets. The hummed song went on—

“’Tw—s on a s—m—r aftern—nA wee bef—re the s—n w—nt d—n,When Kitty wi’ a braw n—w g—wnC—me ow’re the h—lls to Gowrie.” (157)

In the same way as having articulated the vague feelings and thoughts of the townsfolk by reciting a poem, he transforms the strange contraption into an intelligible mechanism in front of the audience by humming a song. Lucetta regards it, on the one hand, as an instrument playing beautiful music and, on the other hand, as “a stupid thing” from the practical point of view. But he, whose character is composed of that “curious double strands” or “the commercial and the romantic”, defines its practical value as follows:

“Stupid? Oh no!” said Farfrae, gravely. “It will revolutionise sowing heerabout! No more sowers flinging their seed about broadcast, so that some falls by the wayside, and some among thorns, and all that. Each grain will go straight to its intended place, and nowhere else whatever!” (158)

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This explanation that it enables sowers to seed according to their intentions can be also read as the very explanation for his writing system by which any letter can arrive as intended. To be sure, in the agricultural context, the verb “drill” means to plant seeds in rows, but the act also is to drill holes or to draw lines in the surface of the field, which easily reminds us of inscribing upon paper.8 The machine is, as it were, an enormous stylus or pen. Therefore, the drilling implies the act of signification: each signified is given to its intended signifier just as each seed is sown in its intended place. The horse-drill appears to be the very mechanical reproduction of Farfrae.

In addition, the word “drill” has another implication: the horse-drill is also a phallocentric machine by which dissemination of seeds is regulated and a relationship between father and his child is identified. As the novel develops, it becomes known to the townsfolk that Elizabeth-Jane’s father is not Henchard but Newson. This is how she is suddenly identified as Elizabeth-Jane Newson. In the end, while Henchard leaves Casterbridge, she is married to Farfrae and becomes Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae in turn. Thus, Farfrae becomes the author by writing the story of Casterbridge with the drill, and Elizabeth-Jane is written into the story: firstly by picking up “a portion of the draft of a letter on business in Donald Farfrae’s writing, . . . to copy the calligraphy” (104); moreover, by reading omnivorously and taking notes incessantly all on her own (124) and, furthermore, by borrowing books from him (284). This is the way the community of Casterbridge is reorganized by the horse-drill, Farfrae’s pen and phallus.

II

It is true that, animating the writing machine by his voice, Farfrae becomes a man of authority in Casterbridge. As David Musselwhite accurately points out, the “glorified writing machine or ticker-tape puncher” also operates as “genetic policing”, showing “the affinity between, on the one hand, the despotic signifying system that depends upon an exact alignment of signifier and signified and, on the other, the strict deployment of rules of affiliation and alliance centred upon the incest taboo” (69). Musselwhite’s reading is one of the most brilliant in the critical history of the novel. There is, however, still room for development in his reading. The critical moment when Farfrae inspires the revolutionary machine in front of the audience foreshadows that


he will replace Henchard as the mayor, and at the same time, that his authority is undermined by the very machine: it gets out of his control, absorbs him, and begins to write the story of Casterbridge by itself. Let’s return to the scene where Farfrae hums the song putting his head into the interior of the machine, and we can see that his poem is disarticulated and torn apart into the fragmentary letters, which cannot be pronounced and reveal the materiality of signifier. In other words, at the very moment when he tries to make the writing machine controllable by humming a song, the text tacitly shows that his voice loses control over its base material. From then on, not Farfrae but the machine comes to write the story of Casterbridge; it is by subjection to the writing machine that he becomes a man of authority in Casterbridge. Therefore, no author is present in the town. Readers have often considered the ending of the novel as Farfrae’s replacement of Henchard as the mayor. He, however, is himself displaced by the writing machine, which becomes the absent center of the town and assigns the mayoral role to him.

What shows the above situation most dramatically is the whole story of the skimmington-ride planned by Joshua Jopp, in which effigies of Henchard and Lucetta, his former lover but now Farfrae’s wife, are paraded on a donkey by a noisy multitude. Jopp bears a grudge against them because he could not become the manager of Henchard’s firm with Farfrae’s arrival, and because Lucetta sent him away with an arrogant attitude when he, seeking work, visited Farfrae’s house. Thus, he conspires with the poor living in “Mixen Lane—a back slum of the town, the pis aller of Casterbridge domiciliation” (170) to retaliate against them. First of all, it is important that the horse-drill has something to do with Mixen Lane: “It was the hiding-place of those who were in distress, and in debt, and trouble of every kind. . . . Rural mechanics too idle to mechanize. . . drifted or were forced into Mixen Lane”, which stretches out “like a spit into the moist and misty lowland” (236). This suggests that the horse-drill symbolizing mechanization has driven them into the slum: that the machine like a sanitary system has excreted them, the “mixen” (meaning refuse or excrement). The lane is a kind of excretory organ of Casterbridge’s body.

It is not by chance that both the horse-drill and the skimmity-ride are associated with horse-riding. Just as some inhabitants of the slum are those who cannot adapt themselves to mechanization, so the donkey used in the skimmington is a metaphor of the horse that

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is being replaced by a modern transportation, the railway, which has “stretched out an arm towards Casterbridge at this time” (245).9 It is also more than coincidence that, on the morning of the very day when the riot is going to be carried out, a royal personage passes through Castebridge, “on his course further west to inaugurate an immense engineering work out that way”. The corporation of Casterbridge, then, takes the occasion “to express its sense of the great services he had rendered to agricultural science and economics, by his zealous promotion of designs for placing the art of farming on a more scientific footing” (243), and Farfrae as the mayor meets and shakes hands with him. That scene is based on the historical fact that in late July 1849, Prince Albert traveled to Dorchester (being the model of Casterbridge) by railway. In short, the horse-drill, railway and royal procession are vividly contrasted with the donkey and “motley procession” of the crowd (279).

As William Greenslade says, Mixen Lane and its surroundings are the equivalents of urban slums and rivers dangerously polluted by human and industrial waste: just as “[t]he lowest urban poor were figured as shit, which in literal terms overwhelmed the efforts of sanitary reform of the nineteenth-century city” (49), so the skimmity-ride as the return of the repressed is “a subversive, if crude, resistance to the terms of incorporation and exile held out by the dominant social order” (64). Surely, the “uncanny revel” (259) which is carried out by the “motley” crowd, “making a devil of a noise” (262) and “spreading like a miasmatic fog” (248) contrasts strikingly with the intertwisted but not mingled double strands in Farfrae’s thread of life, his voice and “his dexterity in clearing up the numerical fogs” (72) which grow thick in Henchard’s account-books. However, the riot is not a mere resistance to authority because it results in the humiliation for Henchard who has already lost credibility with the townsfolk, the death of Lucetta, and the marriage between Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane; in fact, as Susan Keen rightly points out, the “punishing mob” plays an important part in evacuating Lucetta and Henchard from the town (129).10 That implies that the social residuum is effectively reused for keeping order in Casterbridge: just as mixen can be recycled as compost for fertilizing the fields; just as in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, John Harmon’s father has heaped up his wealth by recycling a dust-heap.11 Thus, the second point in the skimmity-ride is that the supposed opposition between what exercises its authority and what is repressed by it results in a complicity of the two.


Thirdly, it is significant that what triggers the riot is Henchard’s misdelivery of the love-letters, the “torrent of letters” which Lucetta “was addicted to scribbling” and sent to him in the past (138). Complying with her request that he should return the letters to her, he accidentally entrusts Jopp with the task to deliver them to her without knowing Jopp’s malice toward her. Moreover, “[t]he pen and all its relations being awkward tools in Henchard’s hands”, he does not seal up the package (235). This is why Jopp reads the letters surreptitiously, and then plots the skimmington. This misdelivery is interpreted in the same way as is that of Susan’s last letter: Lucetta and Henchard are made into the scapegoats for the horse-drill which embodies the writing system in Casterbridge. This is how the writing machine, as it were, makes itself invisible and runs through the town.

Lastly and most importantly, the skimmington is carried out during Farfrae’s absence. In addition, he remains without knowing the whole story of the event even after he has been given accounts of it by the people concerned: “he knew nothing of Jopp’s incitements” (279). For Mr. Grower, a prominent burgess, and two constables could not catch, not even find, the mob: while he says encouragingly to them, “‘Here, I’ll come with you. We’ll see what a few words of authority can do. Quick now’”, he demonstrates that a few words of authority can do nothing (261). This is, though, not to say that Jopp is the true author of the whole story since his aim was not to kill Lucetta, let alone to contribute toward purifying the town, but rather that no one can grasp the whole picture. Therefore, Farfrae decides to “regard the event as an untoward accident” (279). However, it is because of the very accident that Casterbridge does not decline; in fact it thrives more than ever. Farfrae is no longer the head of Casterbridge’s body because, ironically, he has lost control of the horse-drill by “pushing his head into the internal works to master their simple secrets”(157). Thus, the static hierarchy, the head of which is Farfrae and the bottom of which is the poor living in Mixen Lane, has changed into the dynamic self-recirculating structure, in which the head is chimerically connected to the bottom. Even though the recirculation autonomously maintains the order of the community, it is an arbitrary and contingent system because it is not reined in by the authorities. As the narrator puts it, Casterbridge has become one of “manufacturing towns, which are as foreign bodies set down, like boulders on a plain, in a green world with which they have nothing in common” (59).

As J. Hillis Miller points out, Casterbridge “is not so much

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a stable community . . . as a community in the midst of rapid and disruptive change”, which “is embodied in the shift from Henchard’s old-fashined ways of doing business to Farfrae’s. . . . from being an oral culture to being one based on writing” (46-47), and Miller concludes that in the community, “[w]ords operate autonomously, beyond . . . knowledge, control, or intention, to make things happen, often dismaying or disastrous things” (52). Although Miller does not examine the relationship between the horse-drill, skimmity-ride and writing, his view is complementary to mine. However, there is room for the further development of the interpretation of writing in the novel because critics including Miller have scarcely paid attention to Newson in spite of the fact that Newson’s bank-notes have the first decisive impact on the life of Henchard, and that “the apparition of Newson haunt[s]” Henchard from chapter 42 on (279). As we shall see in the following section, the sailor and his paper money are the metaphors of words operating autonomously outside the control of those who write them.

III

If readers try to think of writing in the novel, they have to pay attention to Newson. Certainly, it is reasonable for them not to be concerned with the sailor, who hardly appears in the story developing in Casterbridge. Not settling anywhere and always travelling by sea, he is one of the “rovers and sojourners” (293). Even if he has any presence in Casterbridge, it is that of a ghost at most because he is considered to be drowned until he appears suddenly from the open moor which is separated from Mixen Lane by a stream.12 Moreover, even after the discovery of his daughter and her marriage to Farfrae in the end of the novel, “the returned Crusoe” dares to settle in a town near the sea, which is “a necessity of his existence”, not Casterbridge in which she lives (304). However, it is his floating from place to place, and his absence from or ghostly presence in Casterbridge that is the first reason why he is associated with writing independent from the one who writes. Second, he is similar to Farfrae in the respect that he lives a rootless life: being far from his home in Scotland and on his “way to Bristol, and on frae there to foreign parts”, Farfrae (meaning “far from”) happens to remain in Casterbridge (51). Third, his name (New “son”) is highly suggestive of writing, which has often been likened


to an illegitimate son in the tradition of phallogocentrism.13 That he is also a “new” son, however, also implies that he embodies writing circulating around the world without the help of a father.

Newson embodies such a wandering signifier in a different way from Farfrae: Newson’s money is parallel with Farfrae’s pen. It is surely no accident that Newson appears like a revenant in an inn of Mixen Lane, where Jopp and others are planning the skimmity-ride, and then he funds the project. Not knowing its target and Jopp’s motive at all and just wanting “to see the old custom”, “he threw a sovereign on the table” (241), and the sovereign, though indirectly, makes Farfrae free from Lucetta and Henchard. That is to say, the skimmity-ride is the point of contact between Farfrae and Newson, or more precisely, the writing machine and the sovereign. Furthermore, when it appears in the form of paper money, we can clearly understand that his money is a kind of writing. In chapter 1 of the novel, having “real cash”, Newson emerges from the entrance of the tent in which Henchard puts his wife up for auction.14 “All eyes were turned…A dead silence followed his affirmation” that he would purchase her:

The sailor . . . came in, unfolded five crisp pieces of paper, and threw them down upon the tablecloth. They were Bank of England notes for five pounds. Upon the face of this he chinked down the shillings severally—one, two, three, four, five. (12-13) (italics mine)

Undoubtedly, the bank-notes correspond to that “hasty note” of Farfrae. The notes seem to be supported by the authority of the “Bank of England”, representing it, and convertible into gold. Newson’s rootlessness, however, tacitly undermines the substantial ground of the notes. The words “paper”, “tablecloth” and “face” also emphasize the superficiality of the notes. Moreover, as soon as the notes and shillings appear on the table, the marriage between Henchard and Susan as a covenant made in the presence of God starts to be dissolved and replaced by the trading contract in the presence of writing, or in the absence of authority.

That deadly silent and tense scene shows that the emergence of money is both an accidental and inexorable event. It changes the atmosphere completely and abruptly, passing without any assistance of authority and laying its own foundation by itself:

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Up to this moment it could not positively have been asserted that the man [Henchard] . . . was really in earnest. The spectators had indeed taken the proceedings throughout as a piece of mirthful irony carried to extremes. . . . But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The mirth-wrinkles left the listeners’ faces, and they waited with parting lips. (13) (italics mine)

It seems as if, in order to write a new story, the real cash draws a “parting” line between past and future, smoothes away the wrinkles and puts a new “face” on all therein. It, then, peremptorily makes itself the center of attention, putting the surrounding people into the “dead silence”:

The sight of real money in full amount . . . had a great effect upon the spectators. Their eyes became riveted upon the faces of the chief actors, and then upon the notes as they lay weighted by the shillings on the table. (13) (italics mine)

The real money has transformed Henchard, Susan and Newson into actors, and the surrounding people into spectators; moreover, it looks as though the faces of the actors have been drawn in the notes, and as though the picture has been fastened upon the table with both the eyes of spectators and the shillings. In other words, all of them, inscribed upon the table, form a tableau vivant. The notes have swept all therein and changed all of them into characters drawn in the picture.

As a result, Henchard is almost immediately made to stand on the stage of Casterbridge as the mayor, “a man of character”. His wish that he should sell his wife to be “a free man again” and “be worth a thousand pound” has been satisfied almost the instant that the notes and shillings emerges (10). Strangely, the specific details of his climbing up the ladder of success over a span of about twenty years are not narrated at all in the novel: he sells his wife in chapter 1, reaches Casterbridge in chapter 2, and appears suddenly as the mayor in chapter 5. “This narrative elision”, Michael Valdez Moses argues in his influential essay, “lends greater credibility and force to one of the governing myths of bourgeois culture: the heroic tale of the self-made man”(181). In other words, Hardy gives the heroic stature to his protagonist by covering over the prosaic and unheroic details: “the drudgery of physical


labour, the painstaking process of capital accumulation, the mundane commercial disappointments and successes”, and so on (181). My view, however, is exactly the opposite of Moses’s: the narrative gap implies that Henchard’s self is not a seamless whole but a sequence of patchy texts: that he is not a self-made man but is inscribed into the notes and made one of the characters in Casterbridge; that his life story is not a Buildungsroman but a picture drawn in paper; that the novel is a writing about the materiality of writing, and not about the importance of self-help. Therefore, what is shown in the scene of the auction is the disruptive force of writing rather than the violent deed of the heavily drunken husband which readers’ eyes have been riveted on; as the narrator repeatedly hints in the scene, Henchard’s act would remain nothing but a joke if Newson did not appear.

The skimmington is the very scene where that arbitrarily positing power of writing is shown most dramatically in the novel. Also called “[t]he satirical mummery” (257) or “performance” (278), the procession is a kind of puppet play dramatizing the past relationship between Lucetta and Henchard with their effigies. These “stuffed figure[s]” with “falseface[s]” (258) are mere characters representing the originals in the play, but those figures made of old clothes displace them. Looking at her effigy and repeatedly saying, “‘’Tis me’” (259) or “‘She’s me—she’s me’” (260), Lucetta falls heavily to the floor; then, the effigy is thrown away by rioters into a stream called “Blackwater” (meaning literally sewage, and connoting not only death but also ink staining clothes); at last, she collapses, miscarries and dies. It seems as if discharging her figure into Blackwater causes her death, or as if her representation displaces herself. Such a displacement is seen more clearly in the relationship between Henchard and his effigy. Looking into the stream, he sees something floating:

At first it was indistinct, by reason of the shadow from the bank; but it emerged thence, and took shape, which was that of a human body lying stiff and stark upon the surface of the stream.

In the circular current imparted by the central flow the form was brought forward, till it passed under his eyes; and then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was himself. Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all respects his counterpart, his actual double, was floating as if dead in Ten-Hatches-Hole. (276)

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In order to make sure of what he has perceived, he asks Elizabeth-Jane to look into the pool and tell him what she sees: first, she tells him that it is “[n]othing”; second, “a bundle of old clothes”; third, “[t]he effigy”, which has been thrown into Blackwater (277). Consequently, through Elizabeth-Jane’s help, he makes certain that it is the image of him not himself, and narrowly escapes death, unlike Lucetta. However, as the chain of paraphrases ironically suggests, it is he who is the effigy, a mere bundle of old textiles, or “nothing” floating on the surface of the inky river. In the last scene of the performance, which is associated with Farfrae’s horse-drill and Newson’s money, Henchard is transformed into a blurred character of old rags, or a wandering signifier.

Governed by the writing machine and money, Casterbridge itself is also a tableau now. Brought to ruin, Henchard goes away from the world made of writing: “He had no wish to make an arena, a second time, of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him” (297).15 Apparently, he succeeds in taking refuge from writing in a humble cottage in Egdon Heath, and in departing in peace with Abel Whittle at his side, who says, “‘not being a man o’ letters I can’t read writing’” (308). However, Henchard has pinned upon the head of his bed “a piece of paper”, that is his will with his signature, in which he directs that nobody is allowed to see his dead body, or that no man should remember him. The will is read by Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane, who, riding a horse, have searched for and finally found Henchard, or more accurately, Henchard as “a crumpled scrap of paper” (308). As some critics rightly point out, it is paradoxical that he writes the will in order to be forgotten (Beer; McLaughlin; Miller, J. Hillis; Wolfreys). My primary concern, though, is how closely the last scene is connected with the theme of writing. His act to write the will shows how infectious writing is: he could not die if he did not write about his death and if the will were not read by them. In other words, it is in the text of his will that the event of his death takes place. At last, he has completely become a collection of letters written upon paper. Elizabeth-Jane considers “the directions to be a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of” (309).

The directions are also read as what touches the core of the structure of writing. They suggest that writing presupposes the absence of the one who writes and the thing which is written about, that is, the absence of the signatory and the referent. Then it follows that, when Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane read the will, they discover themselves


there: they find themselves to be characters in Casterbridge, “a mere painted scene”. Moreover, the will is also the metaphor of The Mayor of Casterbridge itself: at last, the novel finds itself to be a kind of writing, a mere bundle of paper, which is produced by paper machines, exchanged for paper money, and circulates through markets. Thus, what we have found in the end of the act of resuscitating the textual body drowned in the inky river is The Mayor of Casterbridge neither as Buildungsroman, realism, nor tragedy, but as writing about writing.

Notes

1 Meisel’s study is representative of this approach.2 On the significance of “character” in Victorian literature and culture, see Goodlad. For a wide-ranging analysis of the concept of character in Mill’s thought, see Carlisle.3 All further citations of The Mayor of Casterbridge refer to The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).4 For an illuminating reading of various kinds of texts in A Laodecean, see Shad. 5 Comparing The Woodlanders with contemporary detective novels written by Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, Ingham indicates that they share concern about the subject of decoding signs.6 For other readings of the relationship between Farfrae and Henchard, see Wilson and Wright. Their interpretation is similar to mine in that they consider Farfrae and Henchard to be a pair. Comparing The Mayor of Casterbridge to R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wilson finds the idea of doubling in that relationship. Wright interprets it as homoerotic.7 For a detailed and interesting study of the representation of machines in Hardy’s works, see Ferguson. He, though, does not refer to the horse-drill. 8 For an informative account of the comparison of writing and cultivation in medieval literature, see Curtius, chapter 16, section 5.9 For an informative account of the relation between railway and horse in the nineteenth-century, see Dorré and Shivelbush.10 Keen argues that the skimmington ride “eliminates Lucetta, frees Farfrae, and brings down Henchard”; that “he [Hardy] uses a separate zone and a residual custom (the skimmington) to make his laborers and low-lifes lawlessly enforce conventional morality. The relationship between folk ways and social control suggests Hardy’s uneasiness with the enfranchisement [Reform Bill of 1884] he supported” (127-128). For more details, see Keen 111-144. My interest, though, is the relationship between the horse-drill and the skimmity-ride: it is possible to consider the denizens of Mixen Lane to be disciplined to keep order by the “drill” (also meaning “train”). For an interpretation of the relation between the disciplinary procedures of the Victorian state and Victorian novels, see D. A. Miller.11 Chappell’s paper on the representation of paper production from the waste of other materials in Dickens’s novels, especially, Bleak house is highly useful in

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interpreting the skimmity-ride. Chappell argues that recycling of paper is parallel with that of minor characters in Bleak House.12 For a hauntological reading of the novel, see Wolfreys’s “Haunting Casterbridge or, ‘the persistence of the unforeseen’” and Thomas Hardy 164-179.13 My understanding of that tradition in Western thought is based on Derrida’s argument in Dissemination, chapter 1, “Plato’s Pharmacy”.14 It is also worthy of note that what prompts Henchard to sell his wife by auction is that he has happened to hear an “auctioneer selling the old horses in the field outside” (10). Horses appear repeatedly in the significant scenes of the novel.15 Many critics have discussed the theatricality abounding in the novel in various ways (Goode; King; Kramer; Schweik). However, they have hardly paid attention to such a relationship between the theatricality and writing as I have examined.

Works Cited

Beer, Gillian. “Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative.” Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

Carlisle, Janice. John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Caharacter. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.

Chappell, Patrick. “Paper Routes: Bleak House, Rubbish Theory, and the Character Economy of Realism.” ELH. 80. 3 (2013): 783-810.

Curtius, E. R.. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge, 1953.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Dorré, Gina M.. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006.

Ferguson, Trish. “Hardy’s Wessex and the Birth of Industrial Subjectivity.” Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes. Ed. Trish Ferguson. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Gatrell, Simon. Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind. London: Macmillan, 1993.

Goode, John. Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.Goodlad, Lauren M. E. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character

and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880-1940.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Patricia Ingham. Oxford: Oxford UP,

2002.---. A Laodicean. Ed. John Shad. London: Penguin Books, 1997.---. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Ed. Dale Kramer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.---. A Pair of Blue Eyes. Ed. Alan Manford. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.---. The Return of the Native. Ed. Simon Gatrell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.---. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 2005.---. The Woodlanders. Ed. Patricia Ingham. London: Penguin Books, 1998.


Ingersoll, Earl. “Writing and Memory in The Mayor of Casterbridge.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 33. 3 (1990): 299-309.

Ingham, Patricia. “Introduction.” The Woodlanders. Ed. Patricia Ingham. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Keen, Suzanne. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

King, Jeannette. Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.

Kramer, Dale. Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy. London: Macmillan, 1975.McLaughlin, Kevin. Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age.

Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005.Meisel, Perry. Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven and

London: Yale UP, 1972.Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California

P, 1988.Miller, J. Hillis. “Speech Acts, Decisions, and Community in The Mayor of

Casterbridge.” Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies. Ed. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Moses, Michael Valdez. “Agon in the Marketplace: The Mayor of Casterbridge as Bourgeois Tragedy.” South Atlantic Quarterly 87:2 (1988): 219-249.

Musselwhite, David. Social Transformations in Hardy’s Tragic Novels: Megamachines and Phantasms. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Schweik, Robert C. “Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.” Hardy: The Tragic Novels. Ed. R. P. Draper. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Shad, John. “Introduction.” A Laodicean. Ed. John Shad. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Shivelbush, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1986.

Wilson, Keith. “Introduction.” The Mayor of Casterbridge. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Wolfreys, Julian. Dickens to Hardy 1837-1884: The Novel, the Past and Cultural Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

---. “Haunting Casterbridge or, ‘the persistence of the unforeseen’.” New Casebooks: The Mayor of Casterbridge. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.

---. Thomas Hardy. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Wright, T. R. Hardy and the Erotic. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

Documents

Writing Machine, Paper Money, and The Mayor of Casterbridge