영어로 읽는 고전 _ 토마스 하디의 캐스터브리지의 시장
토마스 하디의 『캐스터브리지의 시장』은 1886년에 출판된 소설이다. 젊은 건초 묶음꾼 마이클 헨처드는 시골 장터에서 술에 취한 순간, 자신의 아내와 어린 딸을 낯선 사람에게 경매로 팔아버린다. 수년 후, 깊은 후회 속에서 성공한 시장이 된 헨처드는 새로운 삶을 재건하려 하지만, 그의 과거가 예기치 않게 돌아온다. 이 이야기는 영국 농촌을 배경으로 야망과 경쟁, 그리고 그의 운명적인 결정이 가져온 결과들과 씨름하는 한 남자의 투쟁을 따라간다.
Classics Read in English _ The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with one of the most audacious first acts in Victorian fiction — a scene so raw and so shocking that it lodges itself permanently in the memory from the very first reading. At a country fair, young Michael Henchard, drunk and reckless and consumed by a bitterness he cannot quite name, auctions off his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor. The bid is accepted. The transaction is complete. And in that single, catastrophic moment, Hardy sets in motion a tragedy whose consequences will take a lifetime to fully arrive.
Years pass. Henchard sobers up, swears off drink, and through sheer force of will and intelligence transforms himself into one of the most respected men in Casterbridge — successful grain merchant, civic leader, mayor. He has built everything a man could want from nothing, on the ruins of the worst thing he ever did. But Hardy understands, with the precision of a writer who has studied human nature at its most unforgiving, that the past does not stay buried simply because we have moved on from it. It waits.
When his wife and the daughter he sold return to Casterbridge — just as a charming, capable young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae arrives to complicate Henchard's professional life — the walls he has spent two decades building begin, quietly and then catastrophically, to come down. What follows is a portrait of a man at war with himself — proud, generous, self-destructive, and incapable of the small surrenders that might have saved him — rendered with a tragic inevitability that places The Mayor of Casterbridge among the great novels of the nineteenth century.
Among the contents
One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.
The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along.
