In the last “Reading Lamp,” I reviewed The Wedding People by Alison Espagh, a 2024 novel that details a million dollar wedding, a Bridezilla on steroids and the youth culture’s dreary search for fulfillment. The book focuses our attention on self-aggrandizement and sleek body parts.
I pointed out some redeeming features of the book. It escapes the trap of being just another unrealistic peepshow romcom for bored housewives. And it is actually very realistic in a way that Espagh may not have intended. Like so much fiction today, it reflects our culture’s obsession with the physical, with me-me-me, and with the F-word.
I also noted that authors automatically reflect the current cultures in their work because it’s what they know— they know modern culture and what modern readers will tolerate in a novel. So most novels mirror the culture of their readers.
To get the taste of The Wedding People and its focus on the Me Generation out of my mouth, I then reread a favorite classic by British author Thomas Hardy. His novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1886, also deals with the themes of romantic love, weddings and emotion.
The reader is plunged into this plot in Chapter 1 when Michael Henchard, an itinerant farm laborer, gets drunk and irritated with his wife and sells her and their baby daughter to a passing sailor. The rest of the plot turns on this impulsive act.
Hardy was a major figure in the literary realism movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Realism resulted from Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of the Species, which suggests that man is not controlled by a deity but by natural forces and his own nature. Man is fated, then, to a destiny that is out of his control.
Michael Henchard’s nature is hot-headed, easily irritated, impulsive, defensive and proud— a dangerous combination of traits for producing an orderly, successful life. Like some of the characters in The Wedding People, he lacks introspection and self-control.
With his powerful personality, however, he succeeds for a time in the town of Casterbridge, where he establishes an agricultural business and becomes its mayor.
But his fate comes for him in his middle years with the return of the wife and child he sold, his hiring of a stranger who will become his rival, and the reappearance of a young woman with whom Henchard had an affair 20 years before.
In other words, the 140-year-old classic has all the elements of a modern romance without the gutter elements. The characters are real, and the romance is not the point of the plot. The affair, a common law marriage, and the three weddings that take place in this novel are not the point of the plot or the glorious destination in the life of all men and women, as these events are in modern romances. The events are mentioned only in passing with few details, no outlandish Bridezilla terrorizing the wedding party, and no peeps into the love nests, though we know all this happens.
In the 1800s, a wedding was simply a religious, moral and legal necessity. It was not the climactic event of life. Unless you were Queen Victoria planning the Wedding of the Century to show off the grandeur of your empire for political purposes, the 1800s bride came home, put on her apron and got supper on the table.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is more of a page-turner than The Wedding People. With the unrealistic romantic focus removed, the novel’s plot and character development pop on every page without our having to read through drawn-out bedroom scenes and shallow relationship struggles in which the characters scramble to “find themselves.” We already know about this stuff without having to plod through it. And Mayor is written without a single slang word for a body part and without the “F-word.”
Despite the more elegant language, Hardy got into trouble with his readers with his next novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, for “infidelity and obscenity” in those plots, especially Tess. I’ve read both novels, and believe me, there’s nothing in them that would even be noticed as infidelity and obscenity in today’s fiction.
That just shows you the difference in the times and the things we’ve learned to tolerate and authors expect us to put up with. As I said, a novel is a reflection of where our culture has wound up.
If you put this one under your Reading Lamp, You may have one problem with the language in the Mayor. It’s not gutter language but the loftiness of it that may slow you down. Novels at the time this one was written were worded in “genteel” English, a refined style that served the purpose of lifting them above the ordinary speech of the day. You’ll encounter words you don’t know and a loftier expression of ideas than we’re accustomed to in most modern fiction.
And that, too, is a sad change reflected in our culture by today’s literature.
