How does Hardy encourage us to sympathize with Gertrude and Rhoda? Do you sympathize with one more than the other?

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How does Hardy encourage us to sympathize with Gertrude and Rhoda? Do you sympathize with one more than the other?

 Thomas Hardy encourages you to sympathize with Rhoda, “A Lorn Milkmaid”, from his description of her and the situation that she is in. At the beginning of the story Hardy introduces her as “a thin, fading woman of thirty”. This makes you sympathize with her because her beauty and health are fading at an early age. Hardy describes how the radiance of the fire, “made her dark eyes, that had once been handsome, seem handsome anew.”

  The woman that “milked somewhat apart from the rest” seems to be left out from the others like an outcast, a situation that no one likes to be in. We also find out a little later in the story that she lived somewhat apart from the rest too, “Their course lay apart from that of the others, to a lonely spot high above the water mead”.  

  The other milkmaids talk about Rhoda and her circumstance in her presence as if the “thin worn milkmaid” wasn’t there. You get the sense that she is talked about badly behind her back, “She knew that she had been slily called a witch since her fall.” Here you feel sympathy for her because she is not accepted by the other milkmaids and villagers.

  Even the others admit that it is hard for her, “’Tis hard for she,” and the fact that she has a young son adds to the sympathy you feel for her, because she is poor and is a single mother having been abandoned by her partner, Farmer Lodge, who “ha’n’t spoke to Rhoda Brook for years.” Also, Farmer Lodge does not admit to have anything to do with the boy. Evidence of this is when his new wife questions him about the “poor lad”. He replies that he thinks the boy “lives with his mother a mile or two off”, when clearly he knows who the boy is.  

  Another thing that makes you sympathize with Rhoda is the poverty she is in. Her house “was built of mud walls, the surface of which had been washed by many rains into channels and depressions that left none of the original flat face visible; while here and there in the thatch above a rafter showed like a bone protruding through the skin.”

  Another way in which Hardy encourages you to sympathize with Rhoda is that we learn of her being driven away along with her son, “Her face grew sadder and thinner; and in the spring she and her boy disappeared from the neighbourhood of Holmstoke.” This encourages sympathy because she is driven out of her home by the circumstances.

  We also sympathize with Rhoda when we read of her son being wrongly executed - he was present when the crime was committed.

The executioner said that, “if ever a young fellow deserved to be let off, this one does: only just turned eighteen, and present by chance when the rick was fired.” But the authorities “are obliged to make an example of him,” to try and cut down the rise of the “destruction of property”. The boy was the only thing of value left in her life, and this only added to the problems she had.

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  Thomas Hardy encourages you to sympathize with Rhoda because of her independence. “Rhoda said she was well enough, and, indeed, though the paler of the two, there is more of the strength that endures.” This makes you sympathize with her, because you admire the way she persists until the end, and that she looks after the boy on her own, despite the poverty she is in. Further evidence of her independence is when she refuses “to have anything to do with the provision made for her.” (In Farmer Lodge’s will, he left a “payment of a small annuity to ...

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