In a 1908 review article for the Times of London, Thomas Hardy commented on the previous months of excavation of the Neolithic earthwork amphitheater in Dorchester, known as the Maumbury Ring(s). Hardy had returned to Dorchester from London in 1883, and the town is most famously fictionalized in the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy's description identifies the defining moment in the Ring's history as the execution there in 1706 of the nineteen year-old Mary Channing for allegedly having poisoned her husband. Quoting extensively from a contemporary report of Channing's trial and execution, Hardy asserts that he could find little in the statements of the case to support Channing's execution. His opinion is rather that this was a high spirited young woman forced by her parents to marry a man she did not love, whose weak indulgence of his new wife merely served to contribute to the sense of her being a woman of “careless character” that would see her wrongly condemned.

Hardy's interest in Channing's story extends into The Mayor of Casterbridge itself, significantly when the Maumbury Ring becomes the site of reconciliation after a period of twenty years between the protagonist Michael Henchard and his wife Susan, whom Henchard sold at auction in the novel's dramatic opening scenes against the backdrop of a conversation regarding “[T]he ruin of good men by bad wives” (9; ch. 1). The site is significant in bringing together the instances of wife execution and wife auction, and in consequently drawing attention to the ways that public spectacle serves to marginalize women in the novel. The historical spectacles of both wife execution and wife auction push against the dominant struggles of masculinity the novel is normally seen to frame, revealing a somewhat sympathetic portrait of women, in distinction I will suggest, to the way the novel is traditionally seen to represent them. The relationship between these spectacles is further crystallized in Hardy's late poem “The Mock Wife.”Footnote ¹ Based on Channing's story, the title provokes an image of deception or sham, an implied falsehood at the heart of the spectacle that marginalizes these women. Hardy's interest in mockery, substitution, and evidence (or the lack thereof), is given focus through his use of the spectacle of Channing's execution in The Mayor of Casterbridge, to cast doubt over public forms of the regulation of women's bodies.

Recognized as Hardy's most developed and sustained imaginative engagement with history and archaeology in his novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge sees the recurring evidence of histories and past deeds announce the destructive possibilities inherent in the vicissitudes of time. Casterbridge itself “announced old Rome in every street, alley and precinct. . . . It was impossible,” the narrator suggests, “to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire” (55; ch. 11).Footnote ² The broad reach of history described here is matched by the narrative's narrower insistence on what J. Hillis Miller has called “the persistence of the past” (21), and more recently, Julian Wolfreys identifies as “haunting” (153). These critics both read a novel characterized by a recurring presence or presences, a series of uncanny traces, images, and memories of the past that reappear throughout the text, creating untimely irruptions in the narrative present. This persistence is understandably read largely through its effect on Michael Henchard, a man subject to “certain archetypal patterns of tragic experience which have echoed through the centuries incarnating themselves now in this person” (Miller 24).Footnote ³ Wolfreys points to the uncanny doubling in the text as instances of resemblance that signal a spectral return (153–69). These accounts both elide the haunting of this text by Channing's execution, focusing rather on the function of women as echoes of the Henchard narrative, punctuated by ghosts of the past, and fulfilling some long awaited tragic destiny that is inherently patriarchal. Miller's criticism has been influential in shaping subsequent scholarship on this aspect of the novel, focusing on the “material persistence of the past in the present as the trace of history” (Wolfreys 9).

Readers of Hardy's work and of this novel will no doubt be familiar with the prodigious method of unearthing the past that characterizes his writing, if Casterbridge “announced old Rome in every street,” then the novel itself announces local history at every turn, from wife-sales to re-marriages, from mayoral banquets to bankruptcy hearings, complete with visits from royal personages.Footnote ⁴ Hardy knowingly and skillfully plunders the annals of, in particular, the Dorset County Chronicle for historical precedent and local custom which he suggestively fleshes out in his fiction.Footnote ⁵ As Bharat Tandon observes, “[T]he Wessex novels have an abiding concern with bits of the past which are supposedly dead, but will not lie down” (473). In Casterbridge a conventional notion of history is colored by the lens of local folklore and custom, and it is a history that is always present – ready to excavate the town's past and bring it to the surface at any given moment. Allison Kroll contends that Hardy's “engagement with emerging archaeological and anthropological accounts of the cultural past crucially informs his conception of English identity, which he envisions as in-progress, accumulative, and, in a world of ineluctable change, grounded in the materiality of the artifactual” (335). Where Miller, Kroll, and Tandon consider the material nature of the historic relic in his novels as evidence of the way Hardy links the distant past to the present, I want to suggest here that cultural memory located in and expressed through the presence of bodies past is what resonates through this novel, the particular revenant in Casterbridge being that of Mary Channing. This is what Hardy describes as “real flesh and blood,” in his account of Maumbury's history, as opposed to “uncertain visions of possible Romans” (Hardy's Public Voice 287). This article reads the ways Hardy imaginatively reconfigures the “flesh and blood” drama of Channing's execution to stage a marginalized history of Casterbridge through three interlinked public spectacles. My interest here is twofold: the first lies in the redaction of Channing's story in the narratives of both Susan Henchard, the supposedly “bad” wife famously sold at auction at the beginning of the novel; and Lucetta Templeman, another supposedly “bad” wife whose death is prompted by a traditional “skimmity-ride” intended to shame her.

It is late in the novel when Casterbridge's lower-class residents contrive to shame Lucetta Templeman for her past indiscretions, and stage the skimmity-ride, a form of charivari or rough music.Footnote ⁶ This spectacular punishment sees a mocked up figure of the wrongdoer riding perhaps by donkey or cart, and paraded through the streets serenaded with raucous music, and takes its name from the skimming spoon with which the mock-wife would traditionally beat the mock-husband during the ride. An 1834 publication on the history of Lyme Regis provides the following account:

The description makes evident the purpose of the ride – to shame couples whose indiscretions are not to be tolerated. However, in Hardy's novel the ride specifically targets Lucetta rather than Michael Henchard, the man with whom she has committed those indiscretions, or even her husband, whom the charivari might identify as cuckold, Donald Farfrae.Footnote ⁸ The Casterbridge version of the ride, planned during what amounts to a public hearing, is described to a stranger in the novel as, rather, “a' old foolish thing they do in these parts when a man's wife is – well, not too particularly his own” (197; ch. 36). As with the dramatic wife auction that opens the novel, the skimmity-ride represents the survival of a rural tradition that underpins an interest in socially constructed codes of control, particularly where the persistence of traditional spectacle appears to mock or imitate the conventional society the novel describes.

Secondly, I want to consider the shared elements of each of the public spectacles to which these women are subject as part of the author's critique of this kind of arbitrary form of justice. In each case a public spectacle is produced, it is taken as evidentiary by representatives of the community, and subsequently it justifies public control over private bodies. This reading is underpinned by E. P. Thompson's contention that “[R]ough music is a vocabulary which brushes the carnival at one extreme and the gallows at the other” (“Rough Music Reconsidered” 13). Carnival, informed throughout by the presence of mockery, and enabling the achievement of one's fantasy through proxy, provides the accoutrement for the spectacularly staged dramas that are played out in the novel. As Julia Kristeva observes, carnival makes visible the staged nature of representation, and exposes a culture's “underlying unconscious: sexuality and death” (78). In this novel Mary Channing's body provides evidence of that underlying unconscious, exposed in the public sphere through the staged spectacle of her execution at the Maumbury Ring, and subsequently rehearsed through the spectacles involving Susan Henchard and Lucetta Templeman.

As the most visible relic of antiquity in Dorchester/Casterbridge, the Maumbury Ring presents an unmistakable measure of difference from the rest of the town itself, the geography of which is described as “clean-cut and distinct like a chess-board on a green tablecloth” (71; ch. 14). The earthwork ring described in the novel as “still smooth and circular” (71) then, abutting a chessboard of squares, signals an irregularity that distinguishes it from the chartered streets of the town itself. Critics have commented on the alterity the Ring represents. Suzanne Keene notably identifies the site as a “narrative annex” symbolizing otherness, a site of difference mapping a marginal social space (130). In Casterbridge there are several such sites, and this paper will concentrate on the Maumbury Ring and its urban counterpart the Casterbridge market-place, also a “centre and arena” (127; ch. 24), as loci for a particular kind of staging that shapes the concerns of this novel. These spaces, often perceived of as liminal, or as annexes to the central narrative of the novel, are, rather, fundamental to the novel's preoccupation with bringing the margin to the center through acts of recurring spectacle. As Kroll suggests of Hardy's fiction, “once a place becomes storied, it not only recalls and reproduces the narratives attached to it, it draws further narratives to it. Hardy's narrative layering of humanly significant sites, exemplified first in his vision of Egdon Heath, recurs in all of his subsequent work” (347). In The Mayor of Casterbridge it is the story of Mary Channing's death at Maumbury that “reproduces the narratives” of display and violence that I discuss here. If these spaces are “narrative annexes,” then the ritual survivals that take place in and around them are social annexes, signaling an inversion of conventional modes of behavior. However, where the term annex suggests these events are marginalized from the central action of the novel, this account relocates them as central to a reading of Hardy's interest in the way the past impinges uneasily on the present. Liminality in this instance describes a cultural threshold, an ambiguous time and space where the past and present commingle at critical junctures in Hardy's narrative.

When, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the Maumbury Ring first appears as the site of reconciliation between Henchard and his wife Susan, the previously sacrificed woman re-emerges at the scene of Channing's execution, prompting a recounting in the text of Channing's death and suggesting a symbolic symmetry between the events of wife-sale and execution:

Significantly in this version of the story, Hardy retains the detail of Channing's heart as it “burst and leapt” from her body, given a certain veracity in his review for the Times due to the claim that the details had been handed down by an ancestor who witnessed the event.Footnote ⁹ The voracious onlookers, the ten thousand who gather, are somewhat thwarted in their eagerness to devour this spectacle, another gesture to the unpalatable nature of Channing's sentence in Hardy's opinion. Channing's heart, literally exposed to the spectator, stands as symbolic evidence of her innocence; it is laid bare, exposing the deceitful nature of her prosecution in full public view.Footnote ¹⁰

As Andrew Radford observes, the reference in this passage to the delicate digestion of the onlookers suggestively links this episode to the furmity woman who appears at the beginning of the novel, and who later declares that her wares have been sampled by “the richest stomachs in the land” (Radford, Mapping 37; Mayor 20; ch. 3). Even the strongest stomach, though, cannot suppress the ghastly spectacle of Mary Channing's body, as the heart “burst and leapt” out of it, the image a reminder of the extremely public nature of social punishment, as Channing's heart is very literally exposed to public view. The oddly distinctive image of Channing's heart being exposed or laid bare is evocative of affairs of the heart, of broken-hearts, and of the broken promises that recur in the novel and are played out under the unremitting gaze of the public gallery. The reminder of the witch-like furmity woman, whose rum-laced concoction undoubtedly played a role in Henchard's misguided decision to auction his wife, is suitably placed, coming as it does when Henchard's reunion with the wife he sold is set to take place at the Maumbury Ring. Their meeting is thus haunted by the ghost of Channing's public execution a century before, crucially, at a moment when this couple seeks to keep private their very public display of twenty years prior. Always this novel stages returns – priors – Radford calls them, and the reader is invited at this juncture to recall the fair at Weydon-Priors that opens the novel, where Henchard dismantled his family for profit in a haze of drunkenness and disillusionment.Footnote ¹¹

When Susan Henchard utters the familiar performative “I do” (12; ch. 1) in the novel's dramatic opening, she effectively undoes her marriage to Henchard, setting in motion a chain of events that are later described as “certain peculiarities of reverberation” (209; ch. 38). The reverberations between the furmity woman at Weydon-Priors Fair, the tented auction, the assembled witnesses to the event, and the marriage that is undone in their presence; and the reunion at Maumbury Ring, is informed by Mary Channing's execution, a similarly spectacular public sacrifice of a supposedly bad wife who had ruined a good man. Hardy's representation of the events surrounding Channing's execution suggest that he sees a woman punished for being a bad wife in the eyes of the community, as opposed to the crime of murdering her husband: “she was found guilty,” he writes, “after a trial in which the testimony chiefly went to show her careless character before and after her marriage.” Further, he suggests, the decision to condemn her was “influenced by the desire of the townsfolk to wreak vengeance on somebody, right or wrong” (Thomas Hardy's Public Voice 288), suggesting the diminished power of judicial authority in favour of the public voice, emphasizing the role the public plays in constructing the visceral entertainment provided by the spectacle of Channing's death. This account suggests that Mary Channing's crime has more to do with her behavior in social terms than the fact that she may have poisoned her husband, and her execution provides a grisly template for the kind of regulated social justice offered through the subsequent spectacles staged in Hardy's novel. The social offense of being a bad wife is presented as the breaking of the sanctified bonds of marriage, and it is in the disintegration of the institutionalized ritual, vividly realized in the inversion of cultural rules embodied in carnival, that The Mayor of Casterbridge is interested. Indeed, where E. P. Thompson suggests that “Rough Music” “brushes the carnival at one extreme and the gallows at the other,” I suggest that in this novel it articulates a relationship between those two extremes (“Rough Music Reconsidered” 13).

The social spectacle that opens the novel parodies the marriage ceremony, perversely presented in the furmity tent where Susan Henchard is offered for sale just as the horses outside the tent are sold: “stand up” the future mayor of Casterbridge commands, “and show yourself” (10; ch. 1).Footnote ¹² The woman here is forcefully pacified and humiliated, subject to be displayed, bought, and sold, because she has supposedly failed her husband, and caused “the extinction of his energies” (9; ch. 1). This moment foregrounds and symbolizes the subjection of women to public forms of justice the novel interrogates, and the method of Susan's sale in this public arena speaks to the obstinate and enduring nature of folk tradition and custom while it describes the breakdown of conventional morality due to the same. Thompson's account of wife-sale suggests that Hardy's representation in The Mayor of Casterbridge is in some way responsible for the way the sale of wives has been mistakenly read as “a melancholy expression of abject feminine oppression” (Thompson, Customs in Common 406). Thompson proposes that wife-sales constitute a considerably wider discourse than this perception allows. While I agree with this latter observation, I suggest that Hardy's episode, which as Thompson avers “does not conform to more ‘typical’ evidence,” is in fact deliberately bereft of “ritual features” such as a halter to symbolize the transfer of ownership, which might identify it as typical (406). In the three accounts of wife-sale recorded in Hardy's notebook, a halter is described (Thomas Hardy's “Facts” Notebook 32g; 74b; 116b). Hardy's omission of this piece of “‘typical’ evidence” speaks rather to his interest in the symbolic subversive potential of the ritual in his fiction, augmented by its resemblance to those other rituals I comment on here. As Jennifer Gribble contends in her discussion of The Return of the Native, “[S]uch apparent mockery of traditional order is of course a recurring element in popular festival, but it is Hardy's nineteenth century narrative that effects the subversions here, and Eustacia's ‘appropriation’ of folk tradition which continues the narrative interchange on which cultural tradition depends” (241). Hardy's interest lies not in the accurate recounting of the ritual itself, but in the narrative potential the collision of traditional with modern society it promises. The public approval of and assent to the spectacle of Henchard selling his wife just as “gypsy fellows do with their old horses” (9; ch. 1) articulates the way traditional and modern are brought together through such spectacular dramas as wife-selling, skimmity riding, and executions, suggesting that these events are invested with similar cultural significance. Anna Clark documents just such similarities when describing the complexity of gender relations in plebeian culture and communities characterized by antagonism, violence, and intoxication, and played out in the public sphere, observing that “the fault-lines of plebeian culture ran between husbands and wives and fissured the larger community as well” (87). The significance invested in these events in Hardy's novel points to the interchangeability of women's bodies and the implicit fabrication of traditional rituals to define and control those bodies.

This series of public dramas suggestively exposes the way the ritual observance of custom works to control women in this novel. The wife-sale, the execution, and the skimmity-ride are all subject to and sanctioned by groups of public witnesses who for various reasons are invested in the identification and subsequent social control of “bad wives” (9; ch. 1). Additionally, the events are linked contiguously through their association with specific spaces. The substitution of one woman for another sees Susan Henchard symbolically cast as the bad wife Mary Channing when she reunites with her husband at the site of Channing's execution 20 years after the initial undoing of her marriage. Hardy's poem “The Mock Wife,” based on Channing's crime and her punishment, describes the dying husband, ignorant of the knowledge of his wife's alleged misdeed, calling for her to attend him (Complete Poems 762). His friends, unwilling to disabuse him of his love for her, find a woman bearing her resemblance to take her place, and the man dies contentedly after kissing the mock-wife goodbye. The mock-wife stands as analogy not only to the false and arbitrary justice that condemns and executes Mary Channing, but to the staged representation of women in Hardy's novel. Using the substitute mock-wife and the deception perpetrated by the dying man's friends, the poem criticizes the way the social body stands as witness and judge to such events. The poem emphasizes the spectacle of Channing's public execution, foregrounding the visual drama of the sacrificed woman's body: “His wife stood six months after on the scaffold before the crowd, / Ten thousand of them gathered there; fixed, silent, and hard-browed, / To see her strangled and burnt to dust” (29–31).

In The Mayor of Casterbridge Susan Henchard steps into the venue of Mary Channing's execution to become, for the second time, a mock-wife – when the sailor Newson returns in later years he acknowledges that his “claim to her was a mockery” (220; ch. 41). The cottage Henchard provides for her suitably has a view of the “earth forts of the distant uplands” and carries in its aspect the “touch of melancholy that a past-marked prospect lends,” suggesting that Susan herself is “past-marked,” a suggestion borne out when she is referred to as “The Ghost” by the boys of Casterbridge (64–65; ch. 13). At her death she neatly arranges for two coins to be placed on each of her eyes and to be buried with them, but even there she is subject to a form of public consumption, described in the novel as a “cannibal deed,” when one Christopher Coney later removes the currency (93; ch. 18). But Susan's early demise means she is not the woman who will be sacrificed in spectacular fashion a second time. Henchard's decision to reconcile with Susan serves to exclude the woman he was promised to, Lucetta Templeman, after having mistakenly embraced his mock-daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. Lucetta makes her first appearance in the novel at Susan Henchard's graveside, where she steps figuratively into the other woman's place, leaving “two distinct footprints in the soil” (103; ch. 20).Footnote ¹³ Lucetta's arrival in Casterbridge and her subsequent marriage to Donald Farfrae, Henchard's great rival, and the man who might be described as the mock-mayor once Henchard no longer holds that office, is linked inextricably and fatally to the Maumbury Ring. Lucetta takes up residence in High-Place Hall, which overlooks the market-place, “the regulation Open Place in spectacular dramas” (126; ch. 24). High-Place Hall acts as the modern market-town's version of the Maumbury Ring, complete with the connection to blood-sports and human sacrifice afforded by its surreptitious rear entry: “[B]y the alley it had been possible to come unseen from all sorts of quarters in the town – the old play-house, the old bull-stake, the old cock-pit, the pool wherein nameless infants had been used to disappear” (108; ch. 21).

While the venue of Mary Channing's execution affords the narrative a connection between the three women, the public consumption of spectacle shifts away from the amphitheater to suggest the movement and exchange of bodies is fluid. The relationship between the locales is crystallized through the annual hiring fair that takes place on the day Farfrae and Lucetta first meet (123–24; ch. 23). Occurring a few days after the agricultural market in the same location, and known as a “mop,” this market sees the collapse of the distinction between “commercial and the romantic” concerns, realized most vividly when Farfrae compromises his own business instincts to retain a young labourer and his elderly father in order that the young man might remain in proximity to his sweetheart (122–24; ch. 23). Recalling the dual auction of wife and horse at Weydon-Priors Fair, this market in bodies reads as a legitimized version of the wife-sale that opens the novel.Footnote ¹⁴ Samuel Menefee suggests that a strong relationship existed between wife-sales, hiring mops, cattle markets, and fairs, given the collision of economic with social concerns, in addition to the inevitable intermingling of disparate people. Mops in particular were considered more social affairs, linked, Menefee argues, “with courtship and sexual impropriety” (169). In his account Menefee recognizes the hiring mop as an increasingly social event, reporting that as well as food and drink they “provided variety entertainment” such as “smock races. . . singlestick matches, and ‘girning’ for the aspiring participant,” (38) and included “puppet shows, giants, dwarfs, monsters, wild animals, trained animals, buffoons, magicians and tightrope walkers” (271 n19). While Menefee and indeed Thompson consider the wife-sale as part of an informal albeit recognized ritual enabling the lower-classes to undertake a mutual divorce, I suggest that the elements of rough music that form an integral part of the hiring mops, the approximation of the buying and selling of bodies, combined with the formal location of the market place, situate such an event as part of a public entertainment, taking advantage of the carnival aspect of their context to make a mockery of convention.Footnote ¹⁵ This mockery extends naturally to the body of the subject on display, be it a wife for sale, or a skimmity-ride, performed “when a man's wife is – well, not too particularly his own” (Mayor 197; ch. 36). Hardy's deliberately ambiguous construction of a sentence to describe the skimmity-ride plays on the separation of a man and wife inherent in the ritual of wife-sale, while gesturing to the rumour that Mary Channing found entertainment outside of her marriage. The Smithfield market in London, documented as a site of agricultural sales, hiring mops, popular entertainments, wife-sales, and executions, brings together the overt spectacle of the carnival and the marketplace – of the visceral cycle of life and death embodied in the buying, selling, and disposing of bodies for profit (Clark 86). Hardy's wife-sale participates in this cycle, occurring as it does against the backdrop of a livestock auction, in a “congenial field among the peep-shows, toy-stands, wax-works, inspired monsters. . . nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate” in attendance at Weydon-Priors Fair (7; ch. 1).

The Casterbridge market-place acts, like the amphitheater and the fair-ground, as a stage where the regular rules by which society is bound are suspended, where spectacle takes precedence over propriety, and where exchange is the prevalent mode of operation. The wife-sale and the skimmity-ride in this context are acts of violence perpetrated under the auspices of entertainment. A central referent here is the “Punch and Judy” show that frequented such fairs and markets, a theatrical proxy to acts of charivari such as the skimmity-ride (Judy often uses a spoon to beat her husband).Footnote ¹⁶ The effect of this mock-violence, which sees this husband, Punch, beat to death both his wife and child, is described by Frances Power Cobbe in an 1878 essay: “Thus it comes to pass, I suppose, that the abstract idea of a strong man hitting or kicking a weak woman – per se, so revolting – has somehow got softened into a jovial kind of domestic lynching, the grosser features of the case being swept out of sight” (58). Henchard, the mock-figure of whom is described in the skimmity-ride as a “stuffed figure, with a falseface,” takes on the role of Punch in disposing of his wife in the spectacle in the furmity tent at Weydon-Priors fair (210; ch. 39). For Punch, ridding oneself of a bad wife is the ultimate aspiration:

This short song appears at the end of Scene III after Judy's death. In sympathy with Michael Henchard, who declares when attempting to sell his wife, “if I were a free man again I'd be worth a thousand pound afore I'd done o't” (9; ch. 1), Punch considers that “to lose a wife is to get a fortune” (Collier 199–200). Charivari then, informed throughout by the presence of mockery, and enabling the achievement of one's fantasy through proxy, provides the grounds for the easy exchange of bodies that informs Hardy's novel, exposing culture's “underlying unconscious” (Kristeva 78). In The Mayor of Casterbridge both the market-place at High-Place Hall and the amphitheater that is Maumbury Ring, stage a succession of what Hardy calls “dark drama(s)” in his poem “The Mock Wife,” each concerning the collision of sexuality and death, and resulting in the punishment of a supposedly bad wife for the ruin of a supposedly good man.

When Lucetta arranges to meet with Henchard late in the novel to plead for the return of her letters, which are eventually used in evidence against her, it is no surprise that again the assignation occurs at the site of Mary Channing's execution: “Her figure in the midst of the huge enclosure, the unusual plainness of her dress, her attitude of hope and appeal, so strongly revived in his soul the memory of another ill-used woman who had stood there and thus in bygone days, and had now passed away into her rest” (189; ch. 35). The recollection of a wronged woman in this venue undoubtedly recalls Mary Channing as strongly as it does the implied Susan Henchard, all three connected by the spectacular public dramas they are subject to. The description of Lucetta here casts her as Channing awaiting execution, her nondescript dress and her appeal for justice echoing the final moments of Channing's life spent in the same arena, when she “justified her innocence to the very last, and left the world with a courage seldom found in her sex” (Hardy's Public Voice 289). Hardy's account of the execution in the novel, ending with the gruesome spectacle of Channing as her “heart burst and leapt from her body” (56; ch. 11), anticipates the symbolic state of Lucetta's own heart, which “longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest” (125; ch. 23). While Mary Channing is described as being “allowed to have her former lovers or lover about her by her indulgent and weak-minded husband” in Hardy's account in the Times, Lucetta is referred to in the novel as a woman who “must have had a heart that bore transplanting very readily!” (187; ch. 35). Thus Farfrae responds when Henchard reads Lucetta's letters out loud, while he himself is ignorant as to their author. Finally, while Henchard himself contemplates exposing Lucetta, he relinquishes the opportunity, meaning that Farfrae will remain relatively unscathed while Lucetta will bear her fate by public opinion alone: “Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond the nerve of his enmity” (187; ch. 35).Footnote ¹⁷ This scene resonates with the details of the Channing case, from the wrecking of hearts to annihilation in the heat of execution, and the manner of the alleged murder, the poisoning by mouth of Thomas Channing. In relinquishing his power of judgment on Lucetta here Henchard takes on the role of Judge Price in Channing's case, likened by Hardy to Pontius Pilate in bowing to the auspices of public opinion when delivering his verdict. Henchard's decision merely serves to consign Lucetta's case to the public court in the lowbrow tavern “Peter's Finger,” where she will be subject to a trial in absentia that finds her guilty despite the fact that the letters used in evidence against her are ambiguous at best: they, “being allusive only, did not make it altogether plain” (196; ch. 36).

Lucetta then is the third supposedly bad wife in Hardy's novel. Unwittingly she completes the spectacular drama begun when Henchard auctioned his wife at Weydon-Priors Fair, the judgment of those witnesses in attendance suspended until the passage of twenty-one years has passed. Just as Henchard's sale of his wife is made possible by the appearance of the stranger Newson at the auction tent, so the re-appearance of the same man precipitates the skimmity-ride that will mean Lucetta's death. This mock-wife, now married to Farfrae, the mock-mayor once Henchard no longer holds that office, is undone by the arbitrary justice of local residents, and her punishment is exacted through the custom of the skimmity-ride, the ritual observed in the case of shamed wives and cuckolded husbands.

The skimmity-ride itself is a remarkable social event signaling a convergence of public and private spheres through a powerful symbolic form of (mis)representation. William Greenslade points to the “active retribution” the ride embodies, the result of an “economic” “grudge” held by the “impoverished and disaffected” victims of an increasingly centralized economy, and performed as the act of a “resistant culture” taking part in an ideological or class conflict (Hardy's “Facts” Notebook 61–64). Such analysis necessarily links the skimmity-ride to the corresponding royal visit to Casterbridge, and Greenslade suggests the two episodes, “masque” and “anti-masque,” are symbolic of the encoding of the polarizations of the nineteenth-century city (Hardy's “Facts” Notebook 63–64). This reading, however, ignores the persistent engagement Hardy's text makes with the central element of carnival this charivari deploys, debasement through mockery. Where the proxy figure of Henchard in the ride suggests to observers only a resemblance to the former mayor, the female figure is without question a proxy for Lucetta: “My – why – ‘tis dressed just as she was dressed when she sat in the front seat at the time the play-actors came to the town Hall” (210; ch. 39). A delicious irony is realized here as Lucetta effectively trades places with the “play-actors” she had once been audience to, becoming the central figure in the entertainment of others.

The decision to stage the ride is made specifically in order to humiliate Lucetta, and not Henchard. It is Lucetta who is found to be at fault, she is a bad wife, as the aptly named Nance Mockridge expounds: “Mrs Farfrae wrote that!. . . 'Tis a humbling thing for us, as respectable women, that one of the same sex could do it” (196; ch. 36). As the witnesses exult over the prospect of a spectacle that will be akin to an execution, the staged nature of custom is emphasized: “I'd like to shame her! Upon my life, 'twould be as good as a play to read her letters, the proud piece of silk and wax-work!” (195; ch. 36). The subsequent play of the skimmity-ride manufactures a mock-Lucetta, duplicating both the burning (wax) body of Mary Channing as she is sacrificed by fire, and the mock-wife who takes her place at Thomas Channing's death-bed in Hardy's poem of that name. To the people of Casterbridge Lucetta is indistinguishable from a grand entertainment, she becomes a wax-work, an effigy symbolizing the novel's interest in substitution, reverberation, and in mockery. Thompson's description of rough music as “psychic terrorism” brings together the punishments of both Mary Channing and Lucetta Templeman, where the execution of the former is redacted in the humiliation and subsequent death of the latter: “The psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear upon them was truly terrifying: the flaring and lifelike effigies, with their ancient associations with heretic-burning and the maiming of images – the magical or daemonic suggestiveness of masking and of animal-guising – the flaunting of obscenities – the driving out of evil spirits with noise” (Customs in Common 530). On identifying herself as the subject of the skimmity-ride, Lucetta suffers a fit and subsequently dies.

The often overlooked aspect of Lucetta's death is her miscarriage, and through this event the narrative plays out the consequences of the dramatic sacrifice of his own daughter when Henchard sold his wife at auction many years previous. The Elizabeth-Jane who was the natural daughter of Henchard is silently obscured from the narrative, only to reappear through the loss of Lucetta's child.Footnote ¹⁸ Mary Channing herself was pregnant at the time of her sentencing, and was granted a stay of execution while she waited to give birth to her child. She did not miscarry, but the subsequent fate of the child is obscured from public record; Lucetta receives no such abeyance.Footnote ¹⁹ The arbitrary form of traditional justice the skimmity-ride embodies recalls the injustice Hardy perceives in the decision to execute Mary Channing, and the nature of the way the ride stages the body in the public eye is emblematic of the mockery of public drama. In his account of Channing's execution Hardy describes her journey to the Maumbury Ring, anticipating the skimmity-ride that is undertaken by Lucetta's double: “She was conveyed from the gaol in a cart by her father's and husband's house. . . the course of the procession must have been up High-East-street as far as the Bow, thence down South-street and up the straight old Roman road to the ring beside it” (Hardy's Public Voice 288–89). This is also the journey Lucetta undertakes before her meeting with Henchard at the site of Channing's execution.

Thus the events of the skimmity-ride overtly publicize and spectacularly punish the actions of bad wives by enforcing and adapting a traditional form of custom to control women. The staged public execution of Channing in the Maumbury Ring haunts this novel even beyond the space of the Ring itself, announcing in Casterbridge's “every street, alley, and precinct,” the social forms of control over women's bodies in this text (55; 11). The final lines of Hardy's poem “The Mock Wife” comment on the arbitrary nature of public justice, suggesting that such justice is inevitably subject to socially constructed and enforced notions of gender:

This novel's deliberate re-presentation of Channing's execution and the mock-justice Hardy reveals at work here, suggests the author's dissatisfaction with a kind of public control over and disposal of private bodies through the abuse of traditional rituals. As inevitable as the deaths of Mary Channing, Susan Henchard, and Lucetta Templeman seem to be in the novel, their connected stories also result in an uneasy tension between the public voice and the private body. The famous wife-sale that opens the novel begins a pattern of subjecting women's bodies to customary modes of display that make them vulnerable to public consumption that is both economic and sexual. Spectacle, and the public consumption of such, operates as a method for obscuring the central act, which in these cases is the violent abuse of the subject – even to death. However, Hardy's novel, in the persistent re-presentation of Mary Channing's story, of the persistence of her body as the “heart burst and leapt” out of it, exposes that conceit, drawing our attention back to the subject at the heart of things (56; ch. 11). In a note closely contemporary to this novel's publication Hardy describes his fiction as an opportunity to “intensify the expression of things. . . so that the heart and inner meaning is made visible” (The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 231–32). Here the heart acts as a metaphor to expose a sham or mockery, evidence of the injustice inherent in the power of publicly orchestrated spectacle. The ambivalent representation of Channing's execution and the mock-justice Hardy reveals at work throughout these repeated spectacles, discloses a persistent trope underpinning this novel, that of the association between women and particular kinds of display that redact, legitimize, or enforce local custom or ritual. Connected throughout by the execution of Channing at the Maumbury Ring, through these episodes the novel exposes the mockery of public forms of justice when conditioned by local custom, to suggest that in the present of the late nineteenth century of the novel's conception, the integrity of society is inevitably and perhaps untenably subject to a past which bears considerably upon it to the extent that social ritual is seen to impinge destructively on those that exist in the margins of an emerging modern world.