urines, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, rams-horns, and other historical kinds of music is completely hidden from official Casterbridge for when the magistrates roust out the trembling constables, nothing is found: Effigies, donkey, lanterns, band, all had disappeared like the crew of Comus. It is the last we hear of the workfolks mocking laughter for ironically the very success of this resurgence of carnival prepares the way for its suppression.Elizabeth-Janes marriage to Farfrae signifies the truimph of the serious, the organized, the moral, the rational, the final triumph of spirit over the disorganized, the passionate, the festive, the flesh. The essence of Elizabeth-Janes character is restraint and, like Farfraes, her actions are characterized by theirreasonableness and her perception of the world is consistently tragical. In the closing passages of the novel she reflects that joy is no longer an integral part of life but an interlude in a general drama of pain, a sentiment which signals the victory of Christian morality over passion, the final triumph of the morality of the pale Galilean. That certainly is Hardys intention, but in the very ambiguity of that victory the limitations of the ideaology of the thinking world are revealed precisely through the colonial status of the people over whom the new ideological forms now rule. Those ideological discourses which speak of unity and harmony and universality are put into contradiction by images of suppression, domination, conflict, not by virtue of the images per se but because they enable us to see the outside of a discourse which, claiming to be universal, has no bounds.In their periodic outbursts of pagan celebration the workfolk throw off the impositions of sobriety and respectability in a spontaneous rebellion against social order in which anyone who partakes becomes involved.THE APPEARANCE OF WOMEN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WOMANIn the structure of perceptions it ...
