SOURCE: Meisel, Perry. “The Mayor of Casterbridge.” In Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed, pp. 90-108. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.

In the following essay, Meisel assumes a Freudian orientation in his analysis of Michael Henchard's self-alienation.

With The Mayor of Casterbridge, we arrive at a full statement of Hardy's universe. “The story is more particularly a study of one man's deeds and character than, perhaps, any other of those included in my Exhibition of Wessex life” (author's preface). The definitive statement of Hardy's achievement in The Mayor [The Mayor of Casterbridge], a pronouncement of central importance to the body of his fiction, occurs directly after Donald Farfrae's crucial dismissal by Henchard and the Scotsman's establishment of his own business:

But most probably luck had little to do with it. Character is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae's character was just the reverse of Henchard's, who might...