Do You Consider 'the Mayor of Casterdridge' by Thomas Hardy as Classical Novell. Why

'The mayor of casterbridge'.

"For my part I don't see why men who have got wives, and don't want 'em, shouldn't get rid of 'em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses." --The Mayor of Casterbridge.

And with those words (and the act they inspire), Michael Henchard brings a lifetime of misery down on himself. The Mayor of Casterbridge is widely considered to be Thomas Hardy's greatest novel. It is a classic tale of the spiral and eventual demise of an essentially bad man. The story is rich with personal intrigue... sins, lies, cover-ups, love triangles, secret identities and so on... making it a continual pleasure to read. The regional dialect (spelled phonetically throughout) can be a bit cumbersome to wade through at times, though it certainly lends atmosphere to the novel.

The characters are interesting and easy to relate to and Hardy did an admirable job of making most of them distinctly human: Michael Henchard is "bad" (as evidenced by the sale of his wife and child in the opening scene) but is also carefully drawn as essentially flawed and insecure, rather than a flat parody of evil. Donald Farfrae, who is as good as Henchard is bad, is also flawed in his own ways which adds depth to his character too. Hardy was obviously better at creating men than women because the women are a little more "Victorian stereotypical": the good ones are pictures of chaste virtue who can actually take ill and die over a nasty shock (puh-lease) and the bad ones are fat hags in bawdy houses. The women are certainly less interesting than the men in this book.

Morality - a classic novel should say something of value, drawing attention to human problems, condemn or applaud certain points of view. it should make a statement that is more significant than the "Chocolate cake is the world's best dessert" kind of comment. But we don't have to agree with the authors statement, it just has to be there.

Effective language - the language used should be forceful, fresh and not hackneyed, and suitable to the purposes of the statement/message.

Truthfulness - Is the work credible? Does the author make us believe what is being said? Such a standard cannot, of course, be applied literally. We do not believe in the literal truth of Gulliver's Travels or Candide, but we understand that the authors are using fantasy and exaggeration to communicate basic truths about humanity. Moreover, a good novel, story, or drama should give us the feeling that what happened to the characters was inevitable; that, given their temperaments and the situation in which they were placed, the outcome could not have been otherwise. Everything we know about Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, for instance, makes his suicide inevitable. A different ending would have been disappointing and