“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.” The preceding excerpt from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge follows Elizabeth Jane, a waitress in the town’s local tavern, and her discovery and initial shock of learning that her estranged father is Michael Henchard, the now wealthy mayor of a small town. This story illustrates examples of formal diction with levels of abstraction, imagery, and harsh and uneasy tone throughout that conveys the current relationship between Elizabeth and her father.
The way that a story is written can be the determining factor of the structure overall. For The Mayor of Casterbridge, the diction that is being conveyed through text can be best described as being formal for the time period that it was written during. An example of formal diction being used in the excerpt occurs on lines 36-40, which states “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
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Imagery can present itself through text and provide a sense of solace into the author’s mind. An example of imagery that occurs in the excerpt is the descriptions of the “small protruding needle-rocks” in line 89 and the way