At first Rhoda is presented as the protagonist. She is frail, keenly protected by the milkmen in the first chapter, and a single mother. Yet as she is presented as increasingly jealous, and as Gertrude appears increasingly perfect, our sympathies veer towards the latter. In fact, Gertrude is less well drawn than Rhoda. All we know of her is her gentleness and beauty; she is almost doll-like. Sympathy, like the farmer’s love, may never quite be committed to her.
Both women experience trauma and injustice in remarkably similar ways. Rhoda has been wronged by the farmer before the story begins; Gertrude is wronged in a similar way at the end. Rhoda’s dream attack is an act of self-defence, rather than of malice, Gertrude’s trip to the hanging is also an act of self-protection. The self-defence dream damages Rhoda, whose guilt at the damage her magic had caused eventually forces her to move away, and Gertrude’s ‘hanging spell’ does her no lasting good at all, as she dies soon after.
Fate operates in ‘The Withered Arm’ through the ‘blasting’ of Gertrude’s arm by the reluctant sorceress. Rhoda. The use of the supernatural is risky for a novelist because it diminishes interest in character and places emphasis on the plot. Therefore to counter the ‘unbelievable’ element in his story Hardy places great importance on the social context. Interestingly, when Gertrude departs for the executioner’s, she looks at her arm and blames it, not Rhoda, “'Ah!' she said to it, 'if it had not been for you this terrible ordeal would have been saved me!'” It is the first time Hardy explicitly points to the withered arm as the central cause of all the problems, and the first time that we begin to suspect him of social satire rather than of occultist storytelling. Well-bred Gertrude does not believe in the supernatural until she was becomes half-mad with her illness. Her early attitude: -
“ 'O, how could my people be so superstitious as to recommend a man of that sort! I thought they meant some medical man. I shall think no more of him '” - eventually gives way to “apothecary messes and witch mixtures” as her desperation takes over.
Rhoda never believes the rumours about herself being a witch until, completely overcome by guilt she believes what she did to Gertrude in her nightmare: ‘Oh can it be…that I exercise a malignant power over people against my own will?' She knew that she had been slily called a witch since her fall.”
While it is by no means explicit, it does seem possible that Hardy is parodying supernatural stories and beliefs to comment on the hidden horrors of rural life. Gertrude doesn’t blame Rhoda for the injury, even after visiting the “clever man”. She is frozen with shock, but not enraged at Rhoda or, apparently, terrified of her.
The blasting of Gertrude’s arm is given a credible motive. Rhoda is jealous and resents Gertrude for taking the role of wife which should, by right, be hers. The brilliance of Hardy is to make the motive of jealousy subconscious. Rhoda is not fully aware of her powers of witchcraft. The visit to Conjuror Trendle is a revelation for Rhoda as much as it is for Gertrude:
“But she had promised to go. Moreover, there was a horrid fascination at times in becoming instrumental in throwing such possible light in her own character as would reveal to her to be something greater in the occult world than she had ever herself suspected.”
The shocking dream in which Rhoda and Gertrude encounter each other shows figuratively that now Gertrude is the wife of Farmer Lodge and possesses his love she automatically gains an enemy, Rhoda, who she has removed from Lodge’s affections. Hardy exemplifies the “unfairness” of life when Gertrude becomes Rhoda’s friend. At first Gertrude is not convinced by the occult however despair lures her more intensely into the occult.
All the characters are linked in a network of relationships. Rhoda’s son is brought up to believe that Lodge is his father. It is a belief confirmed by Lodge’s presence at his execution. The only person who is ignorant of the network of relationships is Gertrude. She is an innocent who has been drawn into an effective trap. She therefore has the majority of our sympathy when she falls victim to Rhoda’s ‘malignant power’. Rhoda becomes the more repellent as she remains silent in Gertrude’s suffering and takes a cruel satisfaction in her triumph after the visit to Conjuror Trendle:
“For the first time a sense of triumph possessed her and she did not altogether deplore that the young thing at her side should learn that their lives had been antagonised by other influences than their own.”
Gertrude is a pathetic victim of ‘other influences’ but Rhoda, in spite of being confirmed as a sorceress, takes on an almost tragic quality. She attracts the sympathy that any jilted woman left with a child might attract. Her jealousy is understandable, her ‘malignity’ is subconscious rather than conscious and she suffers from a sense of guilt as she witnesses Gertrude’s decline. Finally, her agony and anger over her son’s corpse are, if not exactly justified, excusable. And the body over which she wails is the victim not only of law’s harshness but also of his parents’ negligence. Nothing could better illustrate the unfairness of existence.
