Beware, Big Brother Society is Watching You: The Mayor of Casterbridge

The rural working class of Victorian England underwent tremendous changes during Hardy‘s time. Although the government tried its best, it was impossible to keep control on all these changes, because their effect was profound and covered various social, political, industrial, moral, intellectual domains. Hardy was keenly aware of the economic problems of the villagers of his time, and as a realist novelist he dwells on the tensions brought about by industrialization and urbanisation. In his Wessex novels Hardy demonstrates the densely coded scripts relate specifically to women and marriage in the Victorian Era. In his novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge he shows the inevitability of marriage script as a pressure point on women‘s lives and imaginations. They had no opportunities for changing the cultural and social institutions in their patriarchal society. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy continues to focus on women‘s problems in the Victorian Era as well as the effect of industrialization on the working class families. In this novel Hardy‘s central concern is the problem of modernity and how society that was getting rapidly industrialized. He tries to fashion a portrait of what he saw as an endangered way of life and to create a snapshot or pictorial evidence for future generations.

Keywords:

Patriarchal Society , Social Codes , Social Institutions , Moral Codes