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The Mayor of Casterbridge, written in 1886, is one of Hardy’s most important works, which mainly describes Henchard, the hero’s life and death, plus his thriving and falling, and also involves the discussion of love and marriage. Researches on this novel can be pided into several categories. For the first classification, scholars pay their great attention to the female and male images in it. Apart from these aspects, there are still a great tribe of academics targeting on environment research. In addition, the researchers significantly study the masterpiece from the perspective of Hardy’s fatalism. They dig into the relationship between characters’ temperament and their fates.
In this work, Hardy implicitly criticized the traditional morality that woman must be chaste before getting married through the production of a minor character—Lucetta. She is a young, beautiful and unmarried woman. She knows Henchard who comes to her hometown for business by chance. For many unknown reasons, she falls in love with him and has some intimate relation with him. But they are not ready for marriage because Henchard fears about his wife’s appearance, which does become a truth later.
Susan, Henchard’s wife, once sold by him for 5 shilings, comes to him with a daughter, Elizabeth. After deep consideration, Henchard decides that he has to make up for his first wife and gives up Lucetta. Unfortunately, Susan dies shortly after their second marriage. At the same time, Lucetta gets a large amount of money from her aunt and knows that Henchard is single again. Thus, she follows Henchard to Casterbridge. She settles down at Casterbridge and plans to marry herself to Henchard.
However, after a while, she finds out that he proposes to her only because he is responsible morally for her lost of chaste and good fame rather than love. Thus her emotion towards Henchard gradually becomes aloof, but for her reputation’s sake, she still agrees to Henchard’s proposal of marriage. For Henchard shows indifference to her coming, she feels disappointed and resignedly. At this time, she comes across another man—Farfrae, a handsome and smart business rival of Henchard. Lucetta falls in love with him immediately. But she is still threatened by Henchard to marry him, and at first, she could do nothing but agrees to his proposal.
But after she knows what Henchard has done to his wife and daughter, she inflexibly decides to pursue her happiness and to secure Farfrae by marrying him without telling anyone including Elizabeth. After knowing their marriage, Henchard threatens her with her past. Though having lived a happy life with Farfrae, Lucetta fears about her past revealed to her beloved husband, and because of this kind of restless anxiety, she dies miserably after a parade organized by people in Casterbridge to condemn her relation with Henchard and infidelity to her husband. This is the introduction of Lucetta’s whole life, which is entirely a tragedy.
This thesis involves three parts. The first part briefly introduces the author of the novel, and the experience of Lucetta’s whole life. The second part consists of three chapters. First, it analyses Lucetta’s characteristics from three points of view. It proves with exact examples that she is a woman with fantastic beauty but of terrible superficiality and a woman of simple and hypocritical characteristic at the same time; she is “ambitious” but with no complete self-awareness; she dares to resist but still ends up with a misery life. Then, it discusses the relation between Lucetta’s character and her misery life. Finally, it probes into Hardy’s aesthetic standard towards women and concludes that Hardy himself does not like Lucetta, though he describes her as such a beauty.