THOMAS HARDY'S "THE MOCK WIFE," MAUMBURY, AND

THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE

Donnelly, Brian.Victorian Literature and Culture;
Cambridge 44.1 (Mar 2016): 97-110.
Abstract
In a 1908 review article for the Times of London, Thomas
Hardy commented on the previous months of excavation of
the Neolithic earthwork amphitheater in Dorchester, known
as the Maumbury Ring(s). Hardy had returned to Dorchester
from London in 1883, and the town is most famously
fictionalized in the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Hardy's description identifies the defining moment in the
Ring's history as the execution there in 1706 of the nineteen
year-old Mary Channing for allegedly having poisoned her
husband. Quoting extensively from a contemporary report of
Channing's trial and execution, Hardy asserts that he could
find little in the statements of the case to support
Channing's execution. His opinion is rather that this was a
high spirited young woman forced by her parents to marry a
man she did not love, whose weak indulgence of his new
wife merely served to contribute to the sense of her being a
woman of "careless character" that would see her wrongly
condemned.
In a 1908 review article for the Times of London, Thomas
Hardy commented on the previous months of excavation of
the Neolithic earthwork amphitheater in Dorchester, known
as the Maumbury Ring(s). Hardy had returned to Dorchester
from London in 1883, and the town is most famously
fictionalized in the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Hardy's description identifies the defining moment in the
Ring's history as the execution there in 1706 of the nineteen
year-old Mary Channing for allegedly having poisoned her
husband. Quoting extensively from a contemporary report of
Channing's trial and execution, Hardy asserts that he could
find little in the statements of the case to support
Channing's execution. His opinion is rather that this was a
high spirited young woman forced by her parents to marry a
man she did not love, whose weak indulgence of his new
wife merely served to contribute to the sense of her being a
woman of "careless character" that would see her wrongly
condemned.
Maumbury was the scene of as sinister an event as any
associated with it, because it was a definitive event. . . .
This was the death suffered there. . . of a girl which had not
yet reached her nineteenth year. . . the story is a ghastly
one. . . . [T]his girl was the wife of a grocer in the town, a
handsome woman "of good natural parts," and educated "to
a proficiency suitable enough to one of her sex.". . . She was
tried and condemned for poisoning her husband, a Mr
Thomas Channing, to whom she had been married against
her wish by the compulsion of her parents. The present
writer has examined more than once a report of her trial,
and can find no distinct evidence that the thoughtless,
pleasure-loving creature committed the crime, while it
contains much to suggest that she did not. ( Thomas Hardy's
Public Voice 287)
Hardy's interest in Channing's story extends into The Mayor
of Casterbridge itself, significantly when the Maumbury Ring
becomes the site of reconciliation after a period of twenty
years between the protagonist Michael Henchard and his
wife Susan, whom Henchard sold at auction in the novel's
dramatic opening scenes against the backdrop of a
conversation regarding "[T]he ruin of good men by bad
wives" (9; ch. 1). The site is significant in bringing together
the instances of wife execution and wife auction, and in
consequently drawing attention to the ways that public
spectacle serves to marginalize women in the novel. The
historical spectacles of both wife execution and wife
auction push against the dominant struggles of masculinity
the novel is normally seen to frame, revealing a somewhat
sympathetic portrait of women, in distinction I will suggest,
to the way the novel is traditionally seen to represent them.
The relationship between these spectacles is further
crystallized in Hardy's late poem "The Mock Wife." 1Based
on Channing's story, the title provokes an image of
deception or sham, an implied falsehood at the heart of the
spectacle that marginalizes these women. Hardy's interest
in mockery, substitution, and evidence (or the lack thereof),
is given focus through his use of the spectacle of Channing's
execution in The Mayor of Casterbridge, to cast doubt over
public forms of the regulation of women's bodies.
Recognized as Hardy's most developed and sustained
imaginative engagement with history and archaeology in his
novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge sees the recurring
evidence of histories and past deeds announce the
destructive possibilities inherent in the vicissitudes of time.
Casterbridge itself "announced old Rome in every street,
alley and precinct. . . . It was impossible," the narrator
suggests, "to dig more than a foot or two deep about the
town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall
soldier or other of the Empire" (55; ch. 11). 2The broad reach
of history described here is matched by the narrative's
narrower insistence on what J. Hillis Miller has called "the
persistence of the past" (21), and more recently, Julian
Wolfreys identifies as "haunting" (153). These critics both
read a novel characterized by a recurring presence or
presences, a series of uncanny traces, images, and
memories of the past that reappear throughout the text,
creating untimely irruptions in the narrative present. This
persistence is understandably read largely through its effect
on Michael Henchard, a man subject to "certain archetypal
patterns of tragic experience which have echoed through
the centuries incarnating themselves now in this person"
(Miller 24). 3Wolfreys points to the uncanny doubling in the
text as instances of resemblance that signal a spectral
return (153-69). These accounts both elide the haunting of
this text by Channing's execution, focusing rather on the
function of women as echoes of the Henchard narrative,
punctuated by ghosts of the past, and fulfilling some long
awaited tragic destiny that is inherently patriarchal. Miller's
criticism has been influential in shaping subsequent
scholarship on this aspect of the novel, focusing on the
"material persistence of the past in the present as the trace
of history" (Wolfreys 9).
Readers of Hardy's work and of this novel will no doubt be
familiar with the prodigious method of unearthing the past
that characterizes his writing, if Casterbridge "announced
old Rome in every street," then the novel itself announces
local history at every turn, from wife-sales to re-marriages,
from mayoral banquets to bankruptcy hearings, complete
with visits from royal personages. 4Hardy knowingly and
skillfully plunders the annals of, in particular, the Dorset
County Chronicle for historical precedent and local custom
which he suggestively fleshes out in his fiction.5As Bharat
Tandon observes, "[T]he Wessex novels have an abiding
concern with bits of the past which are supposedly dead,
but will not lie down" (473). In Casterbridge a conventional
notion of history is colored by the lens of local folklore and
custom, and it is a history that is always present - ready to
excavate the town's past and bring it to the surface at any
given moment. Allison Kroll contends that Hardy's
"engagement with emerging archaeological and
anthropological accounts of the cultural past crucially
informs his conception of English identity, which he
envisions as in-progress, accumulative, and, in a world of
ineluctable change, grounded in the materiality of the
artifactual" (335). Where Miller, Kroll, and Tandon consider
the material nature of the historic relic in his novels as
evidence of the way Hardy links the distant past to the
present, I want to suggest here that cultural memory
located in and expressed through the presence of bodies
past is what resonates through this novel, the particular
revenant in Casterbridge being that of Mary Channing. This
is what Hardy describes as "real flesh and blood," in his
account of Maumbury's history, as opposed to "uncertain
visions of possible Romans" ( Hardy's Public Voice 287). This
article reads the ways Hardy imaginatively reconfigures the
"flesh and blood" drama of Channing's execution to stage a
marginalized history of Casterbridge through three
interlinked public spectacles. My interest here is twofold:
the first lies in the redaction of Channing's story in the
narratives of both Susan Henchard, the supposedly "bad"
wife famously sold at auction at the beginning of the novel;
and Lucetta Templeman, another supposedly "bad" wife
whose death is prompted by a traditional "skimmity-ride"
intended to shame her.
It is late in the novel when Casterbridge's lower-class
residents contrive to shame Lucetta Templeman for her past
indiscretions, and stage the skimmity-ride, a form of
charivari or rough music.6This spectacular punishment sees
a mocked up figure of the wrongdoer riding perhaps by
donkey or cart, and paraded through the streets serenaded
with raucous music, and takes its name from the skimming
spoon with which the mock-wife would traditionally beat the
mock-husband during the ride. An 1834 publication on the
history of Lyme Regis provides the following account:
Skimmington riding is a great moral agent, not perhaps so
much in restraining the vicious as in causing them to shun
public observation, thereby not holding out bad examples to
the rising youth of both sexes; - in a word, it checks those
instances of openly profligate and licentious conduct. . . it
brands with infamy all gross instances of licentiousness,
and exposes to lasting ridicule those couples who by their
dissensions disturb the quiet and order of their
neighbourhood, and so set a bad example, either by
struggles for domestic ascendancy, or arising from
quarrelsome dispositions. 7
The description makes evident the purpose of the ride - to
shame couples whose indiscretions are not to be tolerated.
However, in Hardy's novel the ride specifically targets
Lucetta rather than Michael Henchard, the man with whom
she has committed those indiscretions, or even her husband,
whom the charivari might identify as cuckold, Donald
Farfrae. 8The Casterbridge version of the ride, planned
during what amounts to a public hearing, is described to a
stranger in the novel as, rather, "a' old foolish thing they do
in these parts when a man's wife is - well, not too
particularly his own" (197; ch. 36). As with the dramatic wife
auction that opens the novel, the skimmity-ride represents
the survival of a rural tradition that underpins an interest in
socially constructed codes of control, particularly where the
persistence of traditional spectacle appears to mock or
imitate the conventional society the novel describes.
Secondly, I want to consider the shared elements of each of
the public spectacles to which these women are subject as
part of the author's critique of this kind of arbitrary form of
justice. In each case a public spectacle is produced, it is
taken as evidentiary by representatives of the community,
and subsequently it justifies public control over private
bodies. This reading is underpinned by E. P. Thompson's
contention that "[R]ough music is a vocabulary which
brushes the carnival at one extreme and the gallows at the
other" ("Rough Music Reconsidered" 13). Carnival, informed
throughout by the presence of mockery, and enabling the
achievement of one's fantasy through proxy, provides the
accoutrement for the spectacularly staged dramas that are
played out in the novel. As Julia Kristeva observes, carnival
makes visible the staged nature of representation, and
exposes a culture's "underlying unconscious: sexuality and
death" (78). In this novel Mary Channing's body provides
evidence of that underlying unconscious, exposed in the
public sphere through the staged spectacle of her execution
at the Maumbury Ring, and subsequently rehearsed through
the spectacles involving Susan Henchard and Lucetta
Templeman.
As the most visible relic of antiquity in
Dorchester/Casterbridge, the Maumbury Ring presents an
unmistakable measure of difference from the rest of the
town itself, the geography of which is described as "clean-
cut and distinct like a chess-board on a green tablecloth"
(71; ch. 14). The earthwork ring described in the novel as
"still smooth and circular" (71) then, abutting a chessboard
of squares, signals an irregularity that distinguishes it from
the chartered streets of the town itself. Critics have
commented on the alterity the Ring represents. Suzanne
Keene notably identifies the site as a "narrative annex"
symbolizing otherness, a site of difference mapping a
marginal social space (130). In Casterbridge there are
several such sites, and this paper will concentrate on the
Maumbury Ring and its urban counterpart the Casterbridge
market-place, also a "centre and arena" (127; ch. 24), as loci
for a particular kind of staging that shapes the concerns of
this novel. These spaces, often perceived of as liminal, or as
annexes to the central narrative of the novel, are, rather,
fundamental to the novel's preoccupation with bringing the
margin to the center through acts of recurring spectacle. As
Kroll suggests of Hardy's fiction, "once a place becomes
storied, it not only recalls and reproduces the narratives
attached to it, it draws further narratives to it. Hardy's
narrative layering of humanly significant sites, exemplified
first in his vision of Egdon Heath, recurs in all of his
subsequent work" (347). In The Mayor of Casterbridge it is
the story of Mary Channing's death at Maumbury that
"reproduces the narratives" of display and violence that I
discuss here. If these spaces are "narrative annexes," then
the ritual survivals that take place in and around them are
social annexes, signaling an inversion of conventional
modes of behavior. However, where the term annex
suggests these events are marginalized from the central
action of the novel, this account relocates them as central
to a reading of Hardy's interest in the way the past impinges
uneasily on the present. Liminality in this instance describes
a cultural threshold, an ambiguous time and space where
the past and present commingle at critical junctures in
Hardy's narrative.
When, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the Maumbury Ring first
appears as the site of reconciliation between Henchard and
his wife Susan, the previously sacrificed woman re-emerges
at the scene of Channing's execution, prompting a
recounting in the text of Channing's death and suggesting a
symbolic symmetry between the events of wife-sale and
execution:
a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled
and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand
spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the
burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the
terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand
people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. (56;
ch. 11)
Significantly in this version of the story, Hardy retains the
detail of Channing's heart as it "burst and leapt" from her
body, given a certain veracity in his review for the Times
due to the claim that the details had been handed down by
an ancestor who witnessed the event.9The voracious
onlookers, the ten thousand who gather, are somewhat
thwarted in their eagerness to devour this spectacle,
another gesture to the unpalatable nature of Channing's
sentence in Hardy's opinion. Channing's heart, literally
exposed to the spectator, stands as symbolic evidence of
her innocence; it is laid bare, exposing the deceitful nature
of her prosecution in full public view. 10
As Andrew Radford observes, the reference in this passage
to the delicate digestion of the onlookers suggestively links
this episode to the furmity woman who appears at the
beginning of the novel, and who later declares that her
wares have been sampled by "the richest stomachs in the
land" (Radford, Mapping 37; Mayor 20; ch. 3). Even the
strongest stomach, though, cannot suppress the ghastly
spectacle of Mary Channing's body, as the heart "burst and
leapt" out of it, the image a reminder of the extremely public
nature of social punishment, as Channing's heart is very
literally exposed to public view. The oddly distinctive image
of Channing's heart being exposed or laid bare is evocative
of affairs of the heart, of broken-hearts, and of the broken
promises that recur in the novel and are played out under
the unremitting gaze of the public gallery. The reminder of
the witch-like furmity woman, whose rum-laced concoction
undoubtedly played a role in Henchard's misguided decision
to auction his wife, is suitably placed, coming as it does
when Henchard's reunion with the wife he sold is set to take
place at the Maumbury Ring. Their meeting is thus haunted
by the ghost of Channing's public execution a century
before, crucially, at a moment when this couple seeks to
keep private their very public display of twenty years prior.
Always this novel stages returns - priors - Radford calls
them, and the reader is invited at this juncture to recall the
fair at Weydon-Priors that opens the novel, where Henchard
dismantled his family for profit in a haze of drunkenness and
disillusionment. 11
When Susan Henchard utters the familiar performative "I do"
(12; ch. 1) in the novel's dramatic opening, she effectively
undoes her marriage to Henchard, setting in motion a chain
of events that are later described as "certain peculiarities of
reverberation" (209; ch. 38). The reverberations between the
furmity woman at Weydon-Priors Fair, the tented auction,
the assembled witnesses to the event, and the marriage that
is undone in their presence; and the reunion at Maumbury
Ring, is informed by Mary Channing's execution, a similarly
spectacular public sacrifice of a supposedly bad wife who
had ruined a good man. Hardy's representation of the events
surrounding Channing's execution suggest that he sees a
woman punished for being a bad wife in the eyes of the
community, as opposed to the crime of murdering her
husband: "she was found guilty," he writes, "after a trial in
which the testimony chiefly went to show her careless
character before and after her marriage." Further, he
suggests, the decision to condemn her was "influenced by
the desire of the townsfolk to wreak vengeance on
somebody, right or wrong" ( Thomas Hardy's Public Voice
288), suggesting the diminished power of judicial authority
in favour of the public voice, emphasizing the role the public
plays in constructing the visceral entertainment provided by
the spectacle of Channing's death. This account suggests
that Mary Channing's crime has more to do with her behavior
in social terms than the fact that she may have poisoned her
husband, and her execution provides a grisly template for
the kind of regulated social justice offered through the
subsequent spectacles staged in Hardy's novel. The social
offense of being a bad wife is presented as the breaking of
the sanctified bonds of marriage, and it is in the
disintegration of the institutionalized ritual, vividly realized
in the inversion of cultural rules embodied in carnival, that
The Mayor of Casterbridge is interested. Indeed, where E. P.
Thompson suggests that "Rough Music" "brushes the
carnival at one extreme and the gallows at the other," I
suggest that in this novel it articulates a relationship
between those two extremes ("Rough Music Reconsidered"
13).
The social spectacle that opens the novel parodies the
marriage ceremony, perversely presented in the furmity tent
where Susan Henchard is offered for sale just as the horses
outside the tent are sold: "stand up" the future mayor of
Casterbridge commands, "and show yourself" (10; ch. 1).
12The woman here is forcefully pacified and humiliated,
subject to be displayed, bought, and sold, because she has
supposedly failed her husband, and caused "the extinction
of his energies" (9; ch. 1). This moment foregrounds and
symbolizes the subjection of women to public forms of
justice the novel interrogates, and the method of Susan's
sale in this public arena speaks to the obstinate and
enduring nature of folk tradition and custom while it
describes the breakdown of conventional morality due to the
same. Thompson's account of wife-sale suggests that
Hardy's representation in The Mayor of Casterbridge is in
some way responsible for the way the sale of wives has
been mistakenly read as "a melancholy expression of abject
feminine oppression" (Thompson, Customs in Common 406).
Thompson proposes that wife-sales constitute a
considerably wider discourse than this perception allows.
While I agree with this latter observation, I suggest that
Hardy's episode, which as Thompson avers "does not
conform to more 'typical' evidence," is in fact deliberately
bereft of "ritual features" such as a halter to symbolize the
transfer of ownership, which might identify it as typical
(406). In the three accounts of wife-sale recorded in Hardy's
notebook, a halter is described ( Thomas Hardy's "Facts"
Notebook 32g; 74b; 116b). Hardy's omission of this piece of
"'typical' evidence" speaks rather to his interest in the
symbolic subversive potential of the ritual in his fiction,
augmented by its resemblance to those other rituals I
comment on here. As Jennifer Gribble contends in her
discussion of The Return of the Native, "[S]uch apparent
mockery of traditional order is of course a recurring element
in popular festival, but it is Hardy's nineteenth century
narrative that effects the subversions here, and Eustacia's
'appropriation' of folk tradition which continues the narrative
interchange on which cultural tradition depends" (241).
Hardy's interest lies not in the accurate recounting of the
ritual itself, but in the narrative potential the collision of
traditional with modern society it promises. The public
approval of and assent to the spectacle of Henchard selling
his wife just as "gypsy fellows do with their old horses" (9;
ch. 1) articulates the way traditional and modern are
brought together through such spectacular dramas as wife-
selling, skimmity riding, and executions, suggesting that
these events are invested with similar cultural significance.
Anna Clark documents just such similarities when
describing the complexity of gender relations in plebeian
culture and communities characterized by antagonism,
violence, and intoxication, and played out in the public
sphere, observing that "the fault-lines of plebeian culture ran
between husbands and wives and fissured the larger
community as well" (87). The significance invested in these
events in Hardy's novel points to the interchangeability of
women's bodies and the implicit fabrication of traditional
rituals to define and control those bodies.
This series of public dramas suggestively exposes the way
the ritual observance of custom works to control women in
this novel. The wife-sale, the execution, and the skimmity-
ride are all subject to and sanctioned by groups of public
witnesses who for various reasons are invested in the
identification and subsequent social control of "bad wives"
(9; ch. 1). Additionally, the events are linked contiguously
through their association with specific spaces. The
substitution of one woman for another sees Susan Henchard
symbolically cast as the bad wife Mary Channing when she
reunites with her husband at the site of Channing's
execution 20 years after the initial undoing of her marriage.
Hardy's poem "The Mock Wife," based on Channing's crime
and her punishment, describes the dying husband, ignorant
of the knowledge of his wife's alleged misdeed, calling for
her to attend him ( Complete Poems 762). His friends,
unwilling to disabuse him of his love for her, find a woman
bearing her resemblance to take her place, and the man dies
contentedly after kissing the mock-wife goodbye. The mock-
wife stands as analogy not only to the false and arbitrary
justice that condemns and executes Mary Channing, but to
the staged representation of women in Hardy's novel. Using
the substitute mock-wife and the deception perpetrated by
the dying man's friends, the poem criticizes the way the
social body stands as witness and judge to such events. The
poem emphasizes the spectacle of Channing's public
execution, foregrounding the visual drama of the sacrificed
woman's body: "His wife stood six months after on the
scaffold before the crowd, / Ten thousand of them gathered
there; fixed, silent, and hard-browed, / To see her strangled
and burnt to dust" (29-31).
In The Mayor of Casterbridge Susan Henchard steps into the
venue of Mary Channing's execution to become, for the
second time, a mock-wife - when the sailor Newson returns
in later years he acknowledges that his "claim to her was a
mockery" (220; ch. 41). The cottage Henchard provides for
her suitably has a view of the "earth forts of the distant
uplands" and carries in its aspect the "touch of melancholy
that a past-marked prospect lends," suggesting that Susan
herself is "past-marked," a suggestion borne out when she is
referred to as "The Ghost" by the boys of Casterbridge (64-
65; ch. 13). At her death she neatly arranges for two coins to
be placed on each of her eyes and to be buried with them,
but even there she is subject to a form of public
consumption, described in the novel as a "cannibal deed,"
when one Christopher Coney later removes the currency (93;
ch. 18). But Susan's early demise means she is not the
woman who will be sacrificed in spectacular fashion a
second time. Henchard's decision to reconcile with Susan
serves to exclude the woman he was promised to, Lucetta
Templeman, after having mistakenly embraced his mock-
daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. Lucetta makes her first
appearance in the novel at Susan Henchard's graveside,
where she steps figuratively into the other woman's place,
leaving "two distinct footprints in the soil" (103; ch. 20).
13Lucetta's arrival in Casterbridge and her subsequent
marriage to Donald Farfrae, Henchard's great rival, and the
man who might be described as the mock-mayor once
Henchard no longer holds that office, is linked inextricably
and fatally to the Maumbury Ring. Lucetta takes up
residence in High-Place Hall, which overlooks the market-
place, "the regulation Open Place in spectacular dramas"
(126; ch. 24). High-Place Hall acts as the modern market-
town's version of the Maumbury Ring, complete with the
connection to blood-sports and human sacrifice afforded by
its surreptitious rear entry: "[B]y the alley it had been
possible to come unseen from all sorts of quarters in the
town - the old play-house, the old bull-stake, the old cock-
pit, the pool wherein nameless infants had been used to
disappear" (108; ch. 21).
While the venue of Mary Channing's execution affords the
narrative a connection between the three women, the public
consumption of spectacle shifts away from the amphitheater
to suggest the movement and exchange of bodies is fluid.
The relationship between the locales is crystallized through
the annual hiring fair that takes place on the day Farfrae and
Lucetta first meet (123-24; ch. 23). Occurring a few days
after the agricultural market in the same location, and
known as a "mop," this market sees the collapse of the
distinction between "commercial and the romantic"
concerns, realized most vividly when Farfrae compromises
his own business instincts to retain a young labourer and his
elderly father in order that the young man might remain in
proximity to his sweetheart (122-24; ch. 23). Recalling the
dual auction of wife and horse at Weydon-Priors Fair, this
market in bodies reads as a legitimized version of the wife-
sale that opens the novel. 14Samuel Menefee suggests that
a strong relationship existed between wife-sales, hiring
mops, cattle markets, and fairs, given the collision of
economic with social concerns, in addition to the inevitable
intermingling of disparate people. Mops in particular were
considered more social affairs, linked, Menefee argues,
"with courtship and sexual impropriety" (169). In his account
Menefee recognizes the hiring mop as an increasingly social
event, reporting that as well as food and drink they
"provided variety entertainment" such as "smock races. . .
singlestick matches, and 'girning' for the aspiring
participant," (38) and included "puppet shows, giants,
dwarfs, monsters, wild animals, trained animals, buffoons,
magicians and tightrope walkers" (271 n19). While Menefee
and indeed Thompson consider the wife-sale as part of an
informal albeit recognized ritual enabling the lower-classes
to undertake a mutual divorce, I suggest that the elements
of rough music that form an integral part of the hiring mops,
the approximation of the buying and selling of bodies,
combined with the formal location of the market place,
situate such an event as part of a public entertainment,
taking advantage of the carnival aspect of their context to
make a mockery of convention. 15This mockery extends
naturally to the body of the subject on display, be it a wife
for sale, or a skimmity-ride, performed "when a man's wife is
- well, not too particularly his own" (Mayor 197; ch. 36).
Hardy's deliberately ambiguous construction of a sentence
to describe the skimmity-ride plays on the separation of a
man and wife inherent in the ritual of wife-sale, while
gesturing to the rumour that Mary Channing found
entertainment outside of her marriage. The Smithfield
market in London, documented as a site of agricultural
sales, hiring mops, popular entertainments, wife-sales, and
executions, brings together the overt spectacle of the
carnival and the marketplace - of the visceral cycle of life
and death embodied in the buying, selling, and disposing of
bodies for profit (Clark 86). Hardy's wife-sale participates in
this cycle, occurring as it does against the backdrop of a
livestock auction, in a "congenial field among the peep-
shows, toy-stands, wax-works, inspired monsters. . . nick-
nack vendors, and readers of Fate" in attendance at
Weydon-Priors Fair (7; ch. 1).
The Casterbridge market-place acts, like the amphitheater
and the fair-ground, as a stage where the regular rules by
which society is bound are suspended, where spectacle
takes precedence over propriety, and where exchange is the
prevalent mode of operation. The wife-sale and the
skimmity-ride in this context are acts of violence
perpetrated under the auspices of entertainment. A central
referent here is the "Punch and Judy" show that frequented
such fairs and markets, a theatrical proxy to acts of
charivari such as the skimmity-ride (Judy often uses a spoon
to beat her husband). 16The effect of this mock-violence,
which sees this husband, Punch, beat to death both his wife
and child, is described by Frances Power Cobbe in an 1878
essay: "Thus it comes to pass, I suppose, that the abstract
idea of a strong man hitting or kicking a weak woman - per
se, so revolting - has somehow got softened into a jovial
kind of domestic lynching, the grosser features of the case
being swept out of sight" (58). Henchard, the mock-figure of
whom is described in the skimmity-ride as a "stuffed figure,
with a falseface," takes on the role of Punch in disposing of
his wife in the spectacle in the furmity tent at Weydon-Priors
fair (210; ch. 39). For Punch, ridding oneself of a bad wife is
the ultimate aspiration:
"Who'd be plagued with a wife
That could set himself free
With a rope or a knife,
Or a good stick, like me."
This short song appears at the end of Scene III after Judy's
death. In sympathy with Michael Henchard, who declares
when attempting to sell his wife, "if I were a free man again
I'd be worth a thousand pound afore I'd done o't" (9; ch. 1),
Punch considers that "to lose a wife is to get a fortune"
(Collier 199-200). Charivari then, informed throughout by the
presence of mockery, and enabling the achievement of one's
fantasy through proxy, provides the grounds for the easy
exchange of bodies that informs Hardy's novel, exposing
culture's "underlying unconscious" (Kristeva 78). In The
Mayor of Casterbridge both the market-place at High-Place
Hall and the amphitheater that is Maumbury Ring, stage a
succession of what Hardy calls "dark drama(s)" in his poem
"The Mock Wife," each concerning the collision of sexuality
and death, and resulting in the punishment of a supposedly
bad wife for the ruin of a supposedly good man.
When Lucetta arranges to meet with Henchard late in the
novel to plead for the return of her letters, which are
eventually used in evidence against her, it is no surprise
that again the assignation occurs at the site of Mary
Channing's execution: "Her figure in the midst of the huge
enclosure, the unusual plainness of her dress, her attitude of
hope and appeal, so strongly revived in his soul the memory
of another ill-used woman who had stood there and thus in
bygone days, and had now passed away into her rest" (189;
ch. 35). The recollection of a wronged woman in this venue
undoubtedly recalls Mary Channing as strongly as it does the
implied Susan Henchard, all three connected by the
spectacular public dramas they are subject to. The
description of Lucetta here casts her as Channing awaiting
execution, her nondescript dress and her appeal for justice
echoing the final moments of Channing's life spent in the
same arena, when she "justified her innocence to the very
last, and left the world with a courage seldom found in her
sex" ( Hardy's Public Voice 289). Hardy's account of the
execution in the novel, ending with the gruesome spectacle
of Channing as her "heart burst and leapt from her body" (56;
ch. 11), anticipates the symbolic state of Lucetta's own
heart, which "longed for some ark into which it could fly and
be at rest" (125; ch. 23). While Mary Channing is described
as being "allowed to have her former lovers or lover about
her by her indulgent and weak-minded husband" in Hardy's
account in the Times, Lucetta is referred to in the novel as a
woman who "must have had a heart that bore transplanting
very readily!" (187; ch. 35). Thus Farfrae responds when
Henchard reads Lucetta's letters out loud, while he himself
is ignorant as to their author. Finally, while Henchard
himself contemplates exposing Lucetta, he relinquishes the
opportunity, meaning that Farfrae will remain relatively
unscathed while Lucetta will bear her fate by public opinion
alone: "Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His
quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in
the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison
was beyond the nerve of his enmity" (187; ch. 35). 17This
scene resonates with the details of the Channing case, from
the wrecking of hearts to annihilation in the heat of
execution, and the manner of the alleged murder, the
poisoning by mouth of Thomas Channing. In relinquishing his
power of judgment on Lucetta here Henchard takes on the
role of Judge Price in Channing's case, likened by Hardy to
Pontius Pilate in bowing to the auspices of public opinion
when delivering his verdict. Henchard's decision merely
serves to consign Lucetta's case to the public court in the
lowbrow tavern "Peter's Finger," where she will be subject
to a trial in absentia that finds her guilty despite the fact
that the letters used in evidence against her are ambiguous
at best: they, "being allusive only, did not make it altogether
plain" (196; ch. 36).
Lucetta then is the third supposedly bad wife in Hardy's
novel. Unwittingly she completes the spectacular drama
begun when Henchard auctioned his wife at Weydon-Priors
Fair, the judgment of those witnesses in attendance
suspended until the passage of twenty-one years has
passed. Just as Henchard's sale of his wife is made possible
by the appearance of the stranger Newson at the auction
tent, so the re-appearance of the same man precipitates the
skimmity-ride that will mean Lucetta's death. This mock-
wife, now married to Farfrae, the mock-mayor once
Henchard no longer holds that office, is undone by the
arbitrary justice of local residents, and her punishment is
exacted through the custom of the skimmity-ride, the ritual
observed in the case of shamed wives and cuckolded
husbands.
The skimmity-ride itself is a remarkable social event
signaling a convergence of public and private spheres
through a powerful symbolic form of (mis)representation.
William Greenslade points to the "active retribution" the ride
embodies, the result of an "economic" "grudge" held by the
"impoverished and disaffected" victims of an increasingly
centralized economy, and performed as the act of a
"resistant culture" taking part in an ideological or class
conflict ( Hardy's "Facts" Notebook 61-64). Such analysis
necessarily links the skimmity-ride to the corresponding
royal visit to Casterbridge, and Greenslade suggests the two
episodes, "masque" and "anti-masque," are symbolic of the
encoding of the polarizations of the nineteenth-century city (
Hardy's "Facts" Notebook 63-64). This reading, however,
ignores the persistent engagement Hardy's text makes with
the central element of carnival this charivari deploys,
debasement through mockery. Where the proxy figure of
Henchard in the ride suggests to observers only a
resemblance to the former mayor, the female figure is
without question a proxy for Lucetta: "My - why - 'tis dressed
just as she was dressed when she sat in the front seat at
the time the play-actors came to the town Hall" (210; ch.
39). A delicious irony is realized here as Lucetta effectively
trades places with the "play-actors" she had once been
audience to, becoming the central figure in the
entertainment of others.
The decision to stage the ride is made specifically in order
to humiliate Lucetta, and not Henchard. It is Lucetta who is
found to be at fault, she is a bad wife, as the aptly named
Nance Mockridge expounds: "Mrs Farfrae wrote that!. . . 'Tis
a humbling thing for us, as respectable women, that one of
the same sex could do it" (196; ch. 36). As the witnesses
exult over the prospect of a spectacle that will be akin to an
execution, the staged nature of custom is emphasized: "I'd
like to shame her! Upon my life, 'twould be as good as a play
to read her letters, the proud piece of silk and wax-work!"
(195; ch. 36). The subsequent play of the skimmity-ride
manufactures a mock-Lucetta, duplicating both the burning
(wax) body of Mary Channing as she is sacrificed by fire, and
the mock-wife who takes her place at Thomas Channing's
death-bed in Hardy's poem of that name. To the people of
Casterbridge Lucetta is indistinguishable from a grand
entertainment, she becomes a wax-work, an effigy
symbolizing the novel's interest in substitution,
reverberation, and in mockery. Thompson's description of
rough music as "psychic terrorism" brings together the
punishments of both Mary Channing and Lucetta
Templeman, where the execution of the former is redacted
in the humiliation and subsequent death of the latter: "The
psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear upon them
was truly terrifying: the flaring and lifelike effigies, with their
ancient associations with heretic-burning and the maiming
of images - the magical or daemonic suggestiveness of
masking and of animal-guising - the flaunting of obscenities -
the driving out of evil spirits with noise" ( Customs in
Common 530). On identifying herself as the subject of the
skimmity-ride, Lucetta suffers a fit and subsequently dies.
The often overlooked aspect of Lucetta's death is her
miscarriage, and through this event the narrative plays out
the consequences of the dramatic sacrifice of his own
daughter when Henchard sold his wife at auction many
years previous. The Elizabeth-Jane who was the natural
daughter of Henchard is silently obscured from the
narrative, only to reappear through the loss of Lucetta's
child. 18Mary Channing herself was pregnant at the time of
her sentencing, and was granted a stay of execution while
she waited to give birth to her child. She did not miscarry,
but the subsequent fate of the child is obscured from public
record; Lucetta receives no such abeyance. 19The arbitrary
form of traditional justice the skimmity-ride embodies
recalls the injustice Hardy perceives in the decision to
execute Mary Channing, and the nature of the way the ride
stages the body in the public eye is emblematic of the
mockery of public drama. In his account of Channing's
execution Hardy describes her journey to the Maumbury
Ring, anticipating the skimmity-ride that is undertaken by
Lucetta's double: "She was conveyed from the gaol in a cart
by her father's and husband's house. . . the course of the
procession must have been up High-East-street as far as the
Bow, thence down South-street and up the straight old
Roman road to the ring beside it" ( Hardy's Public Voice 288-
89). This is also the journey Lucetta undertakes before her
meeting with Henchard at the site of Channing's execution.
Thus the events of the skimmity-ride overtly publicize and
spectacularly punish the actions of bad wives by enforcing
and adapting a traditional form of custom to control women.
The staged public execution of Channing in the Maumbury
Ring haunts this novel even beyond the space of the Ring
itself, announcing in Casterbridge's "every street, alley, and
precinct," the social forms of control over women's bodies in
this text (55; 11). The final lines of Hardy's poem "The Mock
Wife" comment on the arbitrary nature of public justice,
suggesting that such justice is inevitably subject to socially
constructed and enforced notions of gender:
. . . as was the verdict then
On women truly judged, or false, of doing to death their men.
Some of them said as they watched her burn: "I am glad he
never knew,
Since a few hold her as innocent - think such she could not
do!
Glad, too, that (as they tell) he thought she kissed him ere
he died."
And they seemed to make no question that the cheat was
justified. (31-36)
This novel's deliberate re-presentation of Channing's
execution and the mock-justice Hardy reveals at work here,
suggests the author's dissatisfaction with a kind of public
control over and disposal of private bodies through the
abuse of traditional rituals. As inevitable as the deaths of
Mary Channing, Susan Henchard, and Lucetta Templeman
seem to be in the novel, their connected stories also result
in an uneasy tension between the public voice and the
private body. The famous wife-sale that opens the novel
begins a pattern of subjecting women's bodies to customary
modes of display that make them vulnerable to public
consumption that is both economic and sexual. Spectacle,
and the public consumption of such, operates as a method
for obscuring the central act, which in these cases is the
violent abuse of the subject - even to death. However,
Hardy's novel, in the persistent re-presentation of Mary
Channing's story, of the persistence of her body as the
"heart burst and leapt" out of it, exposes that conceit,
drawing our attention back to the subject at the heart of
things (56; ch. 11). In a note closely contemporary to this
novel's publication Hardy describes his fiction as an
opportunity to "intensify the expression of things. . . so that
the heart and inner meaning is made visible" ( The Early Life
of Thomas Hardy 231-32). Here the heart acts as a metaphor
to expose a sham or mockery, evidence of the injustice
inherent in the power of publicly orchestrated spectacle.
The ambivalent representation of Channing's execution and
the mock-justice Hardy reveals at work throughout these
repeated spectacles, discloses a persistent trope
underpinning this novel, that of the association between
women and particular kinds of display that redact,
legitimize, or enforce local custom or ritual. Connected
throughout by the execution of Channing at the Maumbury
Ring, through these episodes the novel exposes the mockery
of public forms of justice when conditioned by local custom,
to suggest that in the present of the late nineteenth century
of the novel's conception, the integrity of society is
inevitably and perhaps untenably subject to a past which
bears considerably upon it to the extent that social ritual is
seen to impinge destructively on those that exist in the
margins of an emerging modern world.