Mayor Of Casterbridge 3
One of the most striking aspects of the novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, is the role of festival and the characters' perceptions of, and reactions to, the festive. The novel opens with Henchard, his wife and baby daughter arriving at Weydon-Priors fair. It is a scene of festive holiday in which 'the frivolous contingent of visitors' snatch a respite from labour after the business of the fair has been concluded. Here Henchard gets drunk and vents his bitterness and frustration at being unemployed on his marriage. Henchard negates the festive and celebratory nature of the fair by his egotism. What the people perceive as a joke permissable under the rules of topsy-turvy, the ...
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of a conflict between various images of the isolated, individualistic, egotistical and private forms of 'economic man' (Bakhtin's term) and the collectivity of the workfolk. The many images of festivity - the washout of Henchards' official celebration of a national event, Farfrae's 'opposition randy', the fete carillonnee which Casterbridge mounts to receive the Royal Personage, the public dinner presided over by Henchard where the town worthies drank and ate 'searching for titbits, and sniffing and grunting over their plates like sows nuzzling for acorns', the scenes of revelry in the Three Mariners and Peter's Finger - culminate in ' the great jocular plot' of the skimmington. This 'uncanny revel', which like a 'Daemonic Sabbath' was accompanied by 'the din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, rams'-horns, and other historical kinds of music' is completely hidden from 'official' Casterbridge for when the magistrates roust out the trembling ...
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domination, conflict, not by virtue of the images per se but because they enable us to see the 'outside' of a discourse which, claiming to be universal, has no bounds.In their periodic outbursts of 'pagan' celebration the workfolk throw off the impositions of sobriety and respectability in a spontaneous rebellion against social order in which anyone who partakes becomes involved.
THE APPEARANCE OF WOMEN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WOMAN
In the structure of perceptions it is taken for granted that women's sight is determined in the main by the distracted gaze, their tendency to take the appearance for the essence expressed by Christopher Julian in relation to Ethelberta 'That's the ...
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"Mayor Of Casterbridge 3." Essayworld.com. December 22, 2007. Accessed April 16, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Mayor-Of-Casterbridge-3/76275.
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