Attitudes to women during the nineteenth century would be considered very chauvinist now, but at that time women were considered weaker both physically and mentally. When Gertrude Lodge fails to produce any children and loses her exquisiteness, Mr. Lodge ‘was usually gloomy and silent’ signifying that women were considered, nothing more than breeding machines who were expected to regenerate their husband’s family, this is also put forward when Hardy expresses Gertrude’s negative characteristics: ‘she had brought him no child’. Moreover, in the text, women are portrayed as objects of beauty. This is made apparent when Gertrude arrives in the village and Farmer Lodge tells her ‘you must expect to be stared at, just at first’. The villagers would gape at her gorgeousness without concern about how this made her feel. Society’s nature was that appearance was constantly recognised and the person was respected for how he or she looked. We see the importance of appearance again when Gertrude gets her withered arm, and when she soon feels that she would not have bothered about her arm so much had she got a notion that she was being loved less by her significant other. This can be further proven by the quote, ‘Men think so much of personal appearance’. Through this quote we can comprehend that she is dejected, as her spouse does not seem to be giving her the same attention as before. We also see that the idea of love, which is the key constituent of matrimony, was not the focal aspect in which two people got married because Farmer Lodge does not marry Gertrude for the sake of love but merely for her beauty. We observe that older men always married younger women. This was common and can be noted in ‘The Withered’ arm when Farmer Lodge marries Gertrude, who is exceedingly young ‘Years younger than he they say’ (a comment by one of the workers at the dairy make as they talk and gossip about Farmer Lodge’s newly wedded wife).
From ‘The Withered Arm’ we also ascertain that in the Victorian era, some women were accessories for men since men gave their wives all the economic stability that they needed; therefore they had to obey their husbands because they had legal and moral authority over them. The single women had to do all the work themselves. Women lacked economic independence because generally men had more education – even if little – and they possessed higher paying jobs. The underprivileged women probably wore dilapidated clothes, which were torn and filthy. We can presume this because on page three it says that Rhoda went up to the cottage made of mud parapet. The more fortunate women wore ‘A white bonnet and a silver-coloured gownd’, just how Rhoda’s son described Gertrude.
Throughout the story, Hardy gives us an idea of capital punishment in the nineteenth century. Rhoda’s son gets executed for setting fire to a haystack ‘only just eighteen, and only present by chance when the rick was fired’ and Rhoda herself disappeared from the village because people thought of her as a witch and she fear from being punished by death ‘in the spring she and her boy disappeared from the neighbourhood of Holmstoke’. This was all typical of the nineteenth century and people could be sentenced to death for what we would think of as minor offences. For example, capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, could be passed for picking pockets, stealing bread or cutting down a tree. These were the sorts of crimes likely to be committed by those in most desperate need such as Rhoda and her son (in other words the rural working class).
Thomas Hardy has mainly focused the narrative on the rural working class. It is evident that rural working class had hard lives, working for extended hours whether they were in the fields or milking the cows, until they were too old. Many of the employees worked for a landlord, who would belong to the upper classes and would live nearby in a prosperous house or would disburse them rent for their ‘milchers’ or the cottages ‘built of mud walls’, which indicates the country folk’s living conditions. It is not clear that there are any schools in the village where Rhoda lived or any nearby, which is a sufficient amount of data to presume that the majority of the rural workers received little or no education. Consequently, they have remained workers like the rest of their family and their generation, whereas the few upper class people who existed in the country had none of this inconvenience and lived rather contentedly earning their living through their employed workers. We can establish this in Hardy’s metaphor ‘creeping along at a snails pace, and continually looking behind him’ to describe the boys velocity. It is a metaphor of all the trouble and hardships in the boy’s life. Hardy forms an incredibly dismal ambience around the boy. I assume that Hardy is trying to epitomize the class difference, still present in Victorian England, between the farmer, an upper-class man with scarcely any worries, and the working-class boy with the weighty bundle upon his back. The light and dark also comes up again in the depiction of their lives, as a metaphor for the rich and the poor, the good and the evil. This is why farmer Lodge has lots of bright colours surrounding him and the boy has dark colours associated with him.
The southern English dialect spoken by the characters is difficult to remain disregarded. Since they lived in isolated areas of the country, amongst a small population, they received hardly any influence from the industrialised parts of the country. As a result dialects evolved in each rural society and words such as ‘chimmer’ or ‘milcher’ were common words of the country folk in Wessex. Also, there was a lack of communication between the country and the large towns since it travelled very slowly and since sources of transport were restricted as well as technology. The language and setting is also very imperative in “The Withered Arm” as many words in the story such as “lorn” and “wellnigh” are not commonly used in the writing today so help set a date to the story.
Thomas Hardy’s writing proficiency and use of language are effectual in many ways. He opens the story with a vivid description of the scene using rich and sophisticated language, introducing the atmosphere almost at once,
‘It was an eighty-cow diary, and the troop of milkers, regular and supernumerary, were all at work; for though the time of year was yet but nearly April’.
Most interestingly he manages to introduce the characters without directly describing them and achieves in reflecting their sex, class, wealth and even the description of their clothes. Hardy’s technique in ending the story is also effective and at the same time very different to his typical style of describing events in great detail. He has described the consequences of Gertrude’s obsession in attempting to heal her arm in a mere paragraph, and furthermore follows and describes the lives of the main characters in a period of perhaps half a decade to conclude the story. Thomas Hardy has reflected the moral values of that era by incorporating it with the consequences of the story. I believe that what Hardy is trying to say in The Withered Arm is in essence “move away from old traditions and let us live in a more open society where both rich and poor, men and women are one and the same and where pure love rules the aspects of matrimony”. This message is not only echoed throughout The Withered Arm but also in many other works of Hardy. Hardy analyses the flaws existing in a conformist society by showing how it destroys different people’s lives. The short story even has significance to this day, since the sexism towards women survives and so do the complications of marriage. It can be argued that Hardy is successful as a writer and reflecting the characters so descriptively since he may have encountered people who influenced his characters, and the fact that he lived in Wessex where many of the characters are from.
‘The Withered Arm’ portrays the lifestyle and society of the Victorian era in great detail. Thomas Hardy’s interpretation of the hardships such as discrimination faced by the working class and set by the upper classes allows one to get an insight of just some of the problems faced during this period. Hardy’s attention to detail and writing skills allow the reader to vividly picture the green countryside, and most importantly the moral values of that time and Hardy’s philosophical implications. Overall, the short story gives one the opportunity to get a clear understanding of Victorian society during the nineteenth century.
