Analyzing Complex Relationships in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge

Of all the enigmas which ever confronted a girl there can have been seldom one like that which followed Henchard’s announcement of himself to Elizabeth as her father. He had done it in an ardour and an agitation which had half carried the point of affection with her; yet, behold, from the next morning onwards his manner was constrained as she had never seen it before.

The coldness soon broke out into open chiding. One grievous failing of Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

It was dinner-time—they never met except at meals—and she happened to say when he was rising from table, wishing to show him something, “If you’ll bide where you be a minute, Father, I’ll get it.” “‘Bide where you be,’” he echoed sharply. “Good God, are you only fit to carry wash to a pig-trough, that ye use such words as those?”

She reddened with shame and sadness. “I meant ‘Stay where you are,’ Father,” she said, in a low, humble voice. “I ought to have been more careful.”

These improvements, however, are somewhat in advance of the story. Henchard, being uncultivated himself, was the bitterest critic the fair girl could possibly have had of her own lapses—really slight now, for she read omnivorously.

Elizabeth-Jane produced a line of chain-shot and sandbags, he reddened in angry shame for her, and, peremptorily saying, “Never mind—I’ll finish it,” dismissed her there and then.

These domestic exhibitions were the small protruding needle-rocks which suggested rather than revealed what was underneath. But his passion had less terror for her than his coldness. The increasing frequency of the latter mood told her the sad news that he disliked her with a growing dislike.