‘The persistence of the unforeseen’: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Keith Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Keith Wilson (London: Penguin, 1997; xxi-xli), xxxi.Google Scholar

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8.Google Scholar

Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 156–7.Google Scholar

See, for example, John R. Cooley, ‘The Importance of Things Past: An Archetypal Reading of The Mayor of Casterbridge’, Massachusetts Studies in English, 1 (1967), 17–21Google Scholar

W. Eugene Davis, ‘Comparatively Modern Skeletons in the Garden: A Reconsideration of The Mayor of Casterbridge’, English Literature in Transition (1880–1920), 3 (1985), 108–20Google Scholar

Rod Edmond, ‘“The Past-Marked Prospect”: Reading The Mayor of Casterbridge’, Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form, ed. Ian Gregor (London: Routledge, 1993), 111–27.Google Scholar

J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar

Bruce Johnson, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders’, in True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy’s Novels (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1983), 76–83Google Scholar

Tess O’Toole, ‘Fictitious Families’, in Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1997), 17–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Suzanne Keen, Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127, 132, 134, 140.Google Scholar

Raymond O’Dea, ‘The “Haunting Shade” That Accompanies the Virtuous Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge’, The Victorian Newsletter, 31 (1967), 33–6.Google Scholar

Robert Langbaum, Thomas Hardy in Our Time (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1995), 128.Google Scholar

Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, rev. edn, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 64. Hereafter MPdM.Google Scholar

Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993), 65.Google Scholar

J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 6.Google Scholar

Florence Emily Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Milgate (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1985), 183.Google Scholar

Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 61. Hereafter AfD.Google Scholar

Scott Durham, Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.Google Scholar

Marjorie Garson, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Bounds of Propriety’ in Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 94–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See also Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 17–44. Hereafter AU.Google Scholar

J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 20–1.Google Scholar

J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 110. On the effects of the will, see also Ingersoll (‘Writing and Memory’, 307–8). Also on the will, seeGoogle Scholar

Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1992), 134–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On questions of destination and receipt, and the transformation of addressees, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘Thomas Hardy, Jacques Derrida, and the “Dislocation of Souls”’ in Tropes, Parables, Performatives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 171–80.Google Scholar

Jacques Derrida, ‘Desistance’, trans. Christopher Fynsk, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–42; 27. Hereafter D. On this passage, and Derrida’s reading of rhythm as the haunting of the space of tradition, see Wigley (AD 162).Google Scholar

Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On • Border Lines’, trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176; 76. Hereafter LO.Google Scholar

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 150. Wigley draws on Heidegger’s discussions of dwelling and of the uncanny in relation to Being throughout his study.Google Scholar

Arguably, this is the project of that area of Hardy criticism, prominent in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which sought to read Hardy as a social historian or ‘sociologist of Wessex’. At the risk of being reductive, such criticism tends towards reading Hardy’s novels as documents of rural life, and the losses to a way of life attendant on changing technologies of farming. See, for example, Douglas Brown, Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Edward Arnold, 1962)Google Scholar

Noorul Hasan, Thomas Hardy: The Sociological Imagination (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar

Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 9. Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the signifying functions of language is highly suggestive for readings of the various spectral effects in The Mayor of Casterbridge which would intersect with a number of the readings put forward here. At a number of points, and in particular in suggesting that ‘I become the one to whom I am listening’ (118), Merleau-Ponty anticipates the discussions of Hillis Miller and Derrida on the effects of communication on the addressee in the former’s essay on Hardy, already mentioned, and Derrida’s essay ‘Telepathy’, on which Miller draws: ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review, 10 (1988), 3–41.Google Scholar