She is now becoming obsessed with the affliction on her arm as Farmer Lodge is becoming colder and distant towards her, and she wishes to be “again as she was when he first saw her”. She would do anything to make him happy, and is desperate to do so. This is another sign of the oppression of women at the time. Gertrude feels she has failed as Lodge’s wife, as she also cannot produce a child, and because of this they have shared “six years of marriage and only a few months of love”. She has become an “irritable, superstitious woman” who “craves for renewed love, through the medium of renewed beauty”. She is obsessed with her ailment and goes to see Conjuror Trendle once more for a remedy. He gives her the drastic solution of having to place her arm on the neck of a freshly hanged man, which would have been hard for her to accomplish even though people were often executed for only minor crimes at that time. She mentions none of this to Farmer Lodge due to “fear of her husband’s anger”. It is at this point in the story where I lose my sympathy for Gertrude, as she has become self-centred and absorbed with her affliction, praying “O Lord, hang some guilty or innocent person soon!” She is heartless and cold, not caring whether the person providing her with a cure by being executed deserves to be killed or not, but “longing for the death of a fellow-creature”. She spares no thought for others, only herself. This is the complete opposite of Gertrude’s original character; however she still shows determination, by going through with the cure.
Gertrude’s death was brought about by not only the shock of the cure, but by the shock of seeing her own husband with Rhoda Brook, the woman who brought this plight upon her. She feels betrayed seeing her husband, whom she was desperate to win back, with Rhoda, the lower class mother of his illegitimate child.
Similarly, Rhoda Brook can also be seen as a victim in The Withered Arm, as she has been ostracized from society because of her illegitimate child, which was a disgrace at the time. Even within her class she is an outcast, and the father of her child refuses to acknowledge either of them, as Victorian fathers ahd no responsibilty for their illegitimate offspring. From the beginning of the story, Hardy causes the reader to pity Rhoda, the “lorn milkmaid” who is a victim of gossip in her village, bearing the shame of her illegitimate son. She lives in isolation, which fuels malicious rumours of witchcraft, as women living alone were often accused of being witches. All this causes the reader to pity Rhoda, as it is undeserved when all she did was fall in love with Farmer Lodge. Rhoda is physically very different to Gertrude, Lodge’s wife, being older, with dark hair and “dark eyes, that had once been handsome”. She is tired and worn, with milker’s hand, a result of hard work and years of poverty, showing the different upbringings of the two women. The reader is told that Rhoda “had once been handsome”, so there is a similarity in the way that Gertrude loses her looks, as Rhoda has.
By contrast to Gertrude, everything Rhoda owns has been worked for and she lives in extreme poverty, in a dilapidated cottage on a “lonely spot”. The cottage’s mud walls have been worn away by the rain, rather like Rhoda has been worn away by years of hard work and suffering. Hardy describes a jutting rafter as “a bone protruding through the skin”, the powerful image creating atmosphere and building tension. These negative illustrations contrast well to the lovely images used to describe Gertrude. There is also a contrast in the beliefs of the two women. When Rhoda is shown the affliction on Gertrude's arm, she immediately jumps to the conclusion that she "exercises a malignant power over people" and that she really was a witch, but in the beginning, Gertrude dismisses such thoughts and beliefs in witches and superstition. Whereas Gertrude is compassionate and opened up to Rhoda, Rhoda is a lot more withdrawn and tough. Similarly to Gertrude, Rhoda develops an obsession in the story. Before she meets Gertrude, she is tormented with thoughts of comparison of the two, needing to know if "she's dark or fair, and if she's tall - as tall as I." She develops a jealousy towards Lodge's new wife, and this shows that Rhoda still has feelings towards Farmer Lodge, even though "he ha'n't spoke to Rhoda Brook for years." The two women can be seen as adversaries, Lodge's old lover and father of his child, and his new wife. However, once Rhoda met Gertrude, her "heart reproached her bitterly" and as she got to know Gertrude, she realised "this innocent young thing deserved her blessing and not her curse." This tells the reader that Rhoda is not as cold and hard as her tough exterior suggests. The two women form a strong friendship and confide in eachother because they are both lonely. Rhoda puts Gertrude's feelings before hers, by going with Gertrude to visit Conjorur Trendle, even though she knows she may be ousted and this is another sign of Rhoda's deep loyalty to her only friend. This act of selflessness makes the reader warm to Rhoda.
By causing the reader warm to Rhoda, when she loses Gertrude's friendship, Hardy creates sympathy for Rhoda, as she did not inflict such pain on Gertrude purposely. Neither woman deserves this suffering, and because of it, they have lost eachother as companions. Rhoda is portrayed as very brave and genuine, when she tells Gertrude that she is "not sorry that we have come, all things considered" after the trip to Conjuror Trendle. At this point in the story, Rhoda's personality has also changed. Rhoda has changed from being a tough outcast, to a selfless, loyal friend to Gertrude Lodge; whereas Gertrude has become obsessive and selfish rather than her original, sensitive, giving character. At the end of Chapter V, when Rhoda and her son disappear from the village, the reader pities her for having finally been driven out, after years of being ostracized from her community, it was her closest friend who was the reason for her leaving. When Rhoda and Gertrude next meet there is a large contrast between the two women. "The fragile young Gertrude" is using the execution of Rhoda's son to cure her shallow affliction. Rhoda is filled with fury at the sight of Gertrude, the woman who ended all possibilities of Lodge loving her again, now standing in between her and her only child. At this point in the tale, I had no sympathy for Gertrude Lodge, who had become selfish enough to hope for a fellow human being's death, even though her affliction was not her own doing, she became obsessed and let it take over her life and lose her closest friend, and husband. However I empathise with Rhoda Brook, who had lost her only son and been cast out of her society further through no fault of her own. She now has no-one to support her, having lost her lover, her only friend and finally her child.
Rhoda is a victim throughout The Withered Arm, as her love with Farmer Lodge was doomed and led to the shame of an illegitimate child, which meant suffering the rejection of the people in her village and the malicious rumours of her witchcraft. She is also tormented with guilt because of the ailment affecting Gertrude's arm, but staying silent about it for fear of losing her only friend. Not long after she does lose Gertrude's companionship, her only son is executed. Although he is innocent, he is hung to make an example, which was extremely common at the time. After all this suffering, she has nothing left to live for, and must go back to working as a lonely milk maid.
Like Rhoda Brook, Phyllis Grove also lived a solitary life, living alone with her father, who had a "taste for lonely meditation", so therefore Phyllis rarely had company. This is another example of the dependence women had on men in the Victorian era. When we first meet Phyllis in The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion, she is "so shy that if she met a stranger anywhere...she felt ashamed at his glance". She is introverted and has a very lonely lifestyle, similar to Rhoda Brook, although they were alone for different reasons. Despite this shyness, Phyllis becomes engaged to an appropriate man, rather like Gertrude and Farmer Lodge's relationship. Humphrey Gould, like Lodge, would have been a typical match for a young girl at that time, being of the same class and from a respectable family. Humphrey leaves Phyllis money to provide for her while he is away and the engagement was kept in tact with letters that were "regular though formal" and the relationship has no passion or real love. Although Humphrey is absent for long periods of time and their relationship is incredibly formal, Phyllis still agrees to marry him, as she believes that she is lucky to be engaged and will not have another chance to leave her father's home. She is innocent and naive, similar to Gertrude at the beginning of The Withered Arm. Hardy portrays a childlike image of her sitting atop a fence that it had been "Phyllis's pleasure to clamber up" since her childhood.
In Humphrey's absences, Phyllis befriends Matthaus Tina, partly because she feels sorry for him as he is homesick, rather like Gertrude befriends Rhoda and her son. Phyllis however, did not let Matthaus "overstep the line of friendship", showing her loyalty to her betrothed fiancee. She waits for Humphrey, trusting that he will return to her shortly to be married. However, as in Rhoda Brook's village gossip starts to spread around , and she hears that Humphrey has cancelled the engagement as he wishes to look elsewhere for a wife. Similarly to Rhoda, Phyllis has been let down by a lover and is now left with no-one. Phyllis's father refuses to believe this, and so bans Phyllis from meeting with Matthaus, in case Humphrey does come back. This is another example of the control that males had over women in the Victorian era. Now that the thought of Humphrey is not restraining her, Phyllis "no longer checked her fancy" for the German hussar, but she was not yet regarding him as her lover. When Matthaus proposes that Phyllis run away with him, for he hates the army but loves her, her immediate reaction is to say no. She is extremely loyal to her father, and determined to not bring shame onto her family. If she were to elop eith a german soldier, it would bring the same shame on her and her family as Rhoda Brook suffered for bearing an illegitimate child. However, as soon as her father threatens to send her away as a punishment for meeting with a "foreign barbarian", Phyllis changes her mind and decides to run away to Germany with her lover.
"The one feature in her proposal that overcame her hesitation was the obvious purity and straightforwardness of his intentions."
This not only tells the reader how honest and genuine Matthaus is compared to Humphrey, but again shows how trusting and naive Phyllis is, the childlike innocence that is similar to Gertrude's personality at the beginning of the tale. This is portrayed again when Phyllis changes her mind once more when she hears Humphrey's return, thinking that he has come back to marry her, and once again she is let down when she discovers that Humphrey is in fact already married. She is filled with relief for not having to marry a man she did not truly love, but also regret at not leaving with a man she did truly love. At the end of the story, once again, like Rhoda Brook, the heroin of the tale watches a loved one's execution. Hardy describes the hussar's execution factually, writing no emotional description, which makes it cold and more emotive for the reader. Phyllis's love for Matthaus is tragic - he was a true gentleman, who honestly loved her, and her one chance at true love was snatched away.
I think these three protagonists of Hardy's short stories are all similar in the way that they each experience short-lived happiness. Gertrude spent a few months of love with Farmer Lodge, as did Rhoda before her. They both shared an intimate friendship in which they each had someone to confide in. Phyllis had a true love with Matthaus for a short while, instead of a formal marriage with an appropriate man. I sympathise with each woman at different times in the tales, especially as their suffering was through no fault of their own, and partly because of the cultural standards of the era. Although each woman is very different, they are all united in their failure to find love and friendship.