The settings in both the stories reflect the unhappiness of the two marriages. Hardy compares the village of Gaymead, from where Sophy and her husband came from, with the house they move to in London, after they are married. Gaymead is described as being “pretty, with tress and shrubs and glebe” the description of Gaymead is very different to the description of the house in London, “ a narrow, dusty home in a long, straight street” The contrast between the two places represents the change in Sophy’s life. She came from a village where she lived with people of her own class and where she was happy just being a maid. After she breaks her foot and she is not able to properly walk on it again, her master, asks her to marry him. The couple know they cannot be happy in Gaymead and her husband knows “he had committed social suicide” The couple know that they have gone against the social classes and married between them, this means they are not able to stay in their home town and they have to move away to London. The mining town in which Elizabeth lives with her husband and to children reflects how Elizabeth sees the marriage with her husband. The description of the town represents the unhappiness and resent she feels in her marriage. The town is described as being “dreary and forsaken” having “stagnant light” and there being “flames like red sores”. None of these description make the town seems like a nice, welcoming place to live. The people that live in the town do not seem happy either. The miners, coming home from the mines, are described as “shadows diverging home”. Being described as a shadow gives the impression of something incomplete and without feeling or emotion, it can move and mine coal but it is just a shadow, nothing else.
The women in both the stories do not fit in with the wider community due to their marriages between the classes. Elizabeth lives in a mining village where the people speak in a local dialect whereas she speaks in Standard English. When she goes to look for her husband and calls at the Rigley’s it shows clearly the difference in how they talk. Elizabeth talks to Mrs Rigley “I wondered if your master was at home, mine hasn’t come yet” Elizabeth’s speech is very different to that of Ms Rigley. She replies to Elizabeth, “Asn’t ‘e? Oh, Jack’s been ‘ome an’ ‘ad ‘is dinner an’ gone out. ‘E’s just gone for ‘alf an hour afore bedtime” Because of the way that Elizabeth talks and the tidiness of her house, Mrs. Rigley talks to her with a voice “tinged with respect”. The people of the town do not reject Elizabeth but she is not friends with any of the people because they have respect for her. In Sophy’s case the people of her husband’s class do not accept her because she speaks differently to them. The story tells us how Sophy, even though she had been married for more than fourteen years, she could still not use “was” and “were”. The story tells us how “this did not beget as respect for her among a few acquaintances she made. Sophy does that have any friends; she has “acquaintances” and these do not respect her because they see her dialect as being a sign of her ill education and inferiority. The children in the stories are made unhappy because of the marriages of their parents and the differences between them. Sophy’s son resents the fact that his mother is from a different class to that of his father, she corrects her on her grammar and is embarrassed about his. When they are outside and talking about her husband, the boy’s father, Sophy says, “He has been comfortable these last few hours, he cannot have missed us.” Her son replies; “has dear mother, not have” He says this with “an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. “surely you must know that by now”. Her son finds it difficult to accept that his mother is a lower class than him and his father and because of this he resents his mother and becomes impatient when she gets her grammar wrong. Elizabeth has two children and they have to listen to her moan about their father when he does not return home after mining. Elizabeth says to her son that her is just “as bad as your father if it’s a bit dusk” she says this to him when she puts pieces of coal on to the fire, the light is blocked for a while and the boy says “I canna see”
By the end of the stories it is clear that marrying out of you own class can never bring happiness. In Elizabeth story this is symbolised with the chrysanthemums. Her daughter sees that Elizabeth has some flowers in her pocket and pulls them out to smell them and put them to her lips. “Don’t they smell beautiful?” the girl said to her mother. Elizabeth replies and tells her daughter why she does not like chrysanthemums. “No, not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button hole”. The chrysanthemums in the story represent the stages of her marriage. At first she got them for her wedding. This seems rather strange because chrysanthemums are not known for their nice smells and here he is giving them to a woman he is going to marry. Although this is not when things start to turn bad. She says that her husband also gave her chrysanthemums when their first child was born. There is no mention of him bringing her any flowers when their second child was born, the next time he brings them home is when he is brought home to her, drunk. When the men bring her husbands dead body back to the house and carry it through to the parlour, they accidentally knock over a vase of chrysanthemums. Elizabeth does not look at her husband and just picks up the pieces of broken vase and the flowers, and then mops up the water with a duster. This is the end of the marriage and the end of the chrysanthemums. Sophy is left alone after he husbands death and is lonely, she is not accepted by her friends and not accepted by her son. She spends most of her days giving out of the window. One day she sees Sam, the man she was planning to marry when she lived in Gaymead and before her husband proposed to her. Its says the “she often though of him and wondered if life in a cottage would have been better than the life she had accepted” She asks her son if she can marry again and her son “thought the idea was a very reasonable one” and asked if she had chosen any one. He said he hoped that his stepfather would be a gentleman. Sophy replies, “ Not what you call a gentleman, he’ll be such as I was before I met your father” Her son does not like the idea at all, “the youths face remained fixed for a moment; then he flushed, leant on the table, and burst into passionate tears” he then becomes angered and says to his mother “ I am ashamed of you! It will ruin me! A miserable boor! A churl! A clown! It will degrade me in the eyes of all the gentlemen in England” Her son will not let her marry Sam because of his class status, he thinks more of his position among the gentlemen of England than of his mother’s happiness. Sophy dies at the end of the story and it is only Sam who wipes a tear from his eye, not even her son cries for his mothers.
Lucy Wade 11RW
