John Thomas Raynor in ‘Tickets Please’ is very different from Tony Kytes. Tony Kytes is very much innocent and just looking for love while John Thomas just uses the women. There is sex and lust in ‘Tickets Please’ but in Tony Kytes there is just talk of marriage. John Thomas flirts with the girl conductors in the morning and leaves with them at night. The girls would often quit so John Thomas would flirt with the new girls and takes them home. He is afraid of commitment to one girls so as soon as they show sign of commitment he will go on to the next girl. This is very different to Tony Kytes as he is looking for a woman to marry and he asks three of them. They are both the opposite to each other as one wants to get married and the other just runs a mile when there is any sign of marriage.
Tony Kytes ‘The Arch Deceiver’ is set in the countryside of South Wessex, nowadays called Dorset. It is set on a road travelling to the village of Longpuddle. The setting gives the impression of the road being surrounded by big fields and forests all around the field with men out working in the fields. Ploughmen ploughing the fields and cottages with thatched roofs. Nature all around and horses on the road witch don’t have any kind of tarmac on just dirt and dust. The characters in Tony Kytes are not three-dimensional people the women are all ‘cardboard cut-outs’. The women in Tony Kytes are all looking for the same thing they all want to get married. They don’t just want a quick relationship they want to have some commitment out of Tony. Tony is happy to go along with this but the problem for him is that his doesn’t know witch one to marry. The impression of the girls in the story of Tony Kytes is that they all a pretty with rosy red cheeky and blonde that goes with their blue eyes and they all have long dresses on with matching bonnets. The women in the story give the notion that they could be off of a postcard.
Tony Kytes is been presented, as bit of ladies man in the story an example of this is when all of the women are waiting for him to come back from market. The third women that Tony picks up is Hannah and this is what is said about her “who should they see looking out of the upper window of a house that stood beside the road they were following, but Hannah Jolliver”. She is waiting Tony who at this time is riding alone with Milly, his fiancé, when they see her in the window. Tony is really a big favourite with the ladies. Another good example of his relationship with the ladies is the fact that they will hide underneath sacks for him this proves that he has a certain gift when talking to ladies. Tony also has a weak spot when he is talking to women he can’t refuse to say that he will commit to them when he is talking to them and also tell the ladies that he only belongs to them and example of this is when Tony denies that he is definitely getting married when him and Hannah say:
“You’ve settled it with Milly by this time, I suppose?” she says
“N-no, not exactly.” Tony says.
Tony says this because he is just starting to realise how much more attractive Hannah is than the other two girls are. This the character that Tony is he tell the girls that they are the one that he wants when the others can’t hear as he sees the things that he likes out of them when he is with a certain girl. Tony doesn’t take any notice of what his father told him to do “Then stick to Milly” and did the total opposite. This show that Tony is rebellious to what his father says and that he doesn’t take any notice of what his said. He ended up marrying Milly because the others rejected him.
Thomas Hardy doesn’t use “Modern English” he uses dialect from the area of Wessex he uses such phrases as “Loved ‘em in shoals” which means that he flirts outrageously. Hardy uses other words and phrases that are not used in the “Modern English” Language such “Nunny-watch” witch was an old way of saying mix-up or knicker-twist. The difference between the language that Hardy uses and the language that is used in writing today is that his language is that they sometimes speak sentences in different orders to the way that we would or they use words that can have the same meaning but are just not spoken today fro example “my coming wife” we would not say that today we would use the words ‘my wife to be’ or ‘my future wife’.
Thomas Hardy also uses humour very well to soften the story up and not make it a boring story with just a man deciding over three women. He makes it funny by putting all of the women in the same area so that Tony cannot say anything that might offend one of them. This makes you wonder how he is going to get them out of the cart or what will happen when they do find each other. You have to feel sorry for Tony Kytes as he is in a very sticky situation and the humour adds up to sympathy for Tony Kytes. It is not outrageously funny but it does bring and slight smile to the eye as you can really feel for how Tony would be feeling.
I am now going on to look at the second short story that we looked called ‘Tickets Please’ written by DH Lawrence. The story is about a tramway in the Midlands and is set around a girl named Annie and a man named John Raynor. It is about there relationship with each other and then when he breaks up with Annie it turns to her getting her own back on him for he did to her. She gets all of the other girls that he mistreated together and they sort him out by ‘beating him up’.
The first sentence of the story is very long and has over one hundred words in it. This is used to give the effect of going on the tram as it swerves around the town. This makes you read fast and makes it seem as if you are going fast. This first sentence really sets the scene of the story as it rushes though the town past all of the factory and the rows and rows of houses that house the workers in the Industrial town. This is totally different to the setting of Tony Kytes as it is in a town and Tony Kytes was set in the countryside. The nature of the women in ‘Tickets Please’ is that they are much stronger willed than the women in Tony Kytes. The women in Tony Kytes were very quiet. These women say what they think and don’t care that he is there boss.
There is distinct time difference between the two stories. ‘Tickets please’ was set in wartime England therefore all the women were working and there was very few men for them. They felt that they were equal to the men and not like in Tony Kytes their piers. They felt they could treat men the same as men treated them as they were doing the same jobs as the men would have been doing.
Annie had the idea to get revenge on John Thomas this was because of the way that he treated her as well as the other women at the tram station. This section that shows the girls planning their revenge. Annie goes around a few of the girls to ask them if they wanted to get their own back John Thomas. She asks one girl “Who’s John Thomas on with now?” to break the ice and then brings back old memories to get her to remember how much it hurt when they split up with each other. She does this to all of the girls and gets most of them in on her plan to get there own back on him. Another section in which she is trying to get revenge is when she asks him to walk her home this is how she will get into the girls clutches. She then lures him in to the girls ‘staff room’. My third section that I think shows the girls revenge is when they are all jumping onto him and beating him. DH Lawrence uses very vivid images to give the picture of what is happening to John Thomas he writes “she fetched him a sharp blow to the head with the buckle end.” This is just at the start of the girls demolition of John Thomas and DH Lawrence uses his good use of language to give even more images of the pain that John Thomas is going through.
The women in ‘Tickets Please’ behave like this because they know that they can do the jobs of men and that they don’t want to be treated like the men slaves. They are strong willed women because they are doing jobs that require some guts to do. The women in Tony Kytes would never do anything like this as they lived in the age when they are not considered to be equal to men. They would not be doing the same jobs as men and they are very much just looking for someone that they can marry and settle down with and have child to do the jobs that the men would do and so the girls can get married off. They live in a different age to the women in ‘Tickets Please’ and therefore will not have the same experience as they do.
There is also a difference in the language used in the two stories. The first story, Tony Kytes, uses the dialect of Wessex. The second story, ‘Tickets Please’, uses a language that is closer to modern English so there fore is easier for us to relate to. For example this is a passage taken from Tony Kytes “kick up a bit of a miff” this would not be recognised as modern English and would not have been in war time England when ‘Tickets Please’ is set. A lot of the story in Tony Kytes is talking and so a lot of the phrases are wrote down. In ‘Tickets Please’ there is not that much difference from the language that we speak today. They do use words like “tha” which mean you is the only real changes in the language from Modern English.
The story that I preferred was Tony Kytes, as I liked the humour that Hardy added. I think that the language that they use was very difficult in places but the section at the bottom of the page cleared that up for me. I like the way that the story built up to a climax all the way and in the building up ore people became involved. I think that ‘Tickets Please’ was a good story but was very much related around two characters and so not that much to pad out into a fuller story.
Thomas Henesey 11.O