This Rhoda Brook is a typical victim of Hardy’s short stories, isolated and an outcast of society from an early age after being used and left by Farmer Lodge. She doesn’t even get any respect from her son, which was probably due to a bad upbringing, due to her obsession with Farmer Lodge ever since he discarded her. When we join the story of “The Withered Arm” she is already an old outcast that’s well past her prime and when it says “…her dark eyes that had once been handsome”, it suggests that when she was with Lodge she was a ‘handsome’, attractive woman, but now she was all but “a thin fading woman of thirty”. This also shows at what time women where thought to have been old. When Lodge gets a new wife, she becomes extremely jealous of the woman and her “face as comely as a live dolls”. It’s because of this loathing towards her, she (accidentally) curses her arm, and it happens that the women she cursed turned out to be her only friend, Gertrude. Even though Rhoda was a victim from the start, Hardy still likes to bring the acidic nature of women out of her, so that the reader, even though Rhoda is hard done by, doesn’t feel so sympathetic towards her.
Gertrude is perhaps even more of the stereotypical victim because she didn’t actually do anything wrong except maybe vanity after her arm was cursed and started to wither, but who can blame her? Her own husband, Farmer Lodge “retracted every time he set eyes upon it”. This must have been depressing for her, since Lodge only slightly loved her due to her looks, and with that gone she had nothing. So she went into a state of mad desperation to find a cure for it, bringing out her bad side, which finally led her to her the placing of the arm on the neck of a recently hung person, which was said to be the only cure, “the turning of the blood”. When Lodge and Rhoda saw her doing so onto Rhoda’s recently hung son, Rhoda went into a state of mad anger which demonstrates another evil side to Rhoda as well, and thrust Gertrude against the wall, which combined with the ‘turning of her blood’, killed her. This shows the sticky ending of one of Hardy’s female characters, which was the most common way of Hardy’s to end the women in his stories except for one, Mrs. Chundle. Mrs Chundle still died, but she died peacefully of old age and happy after she had found God through her only friend, a curate at the local parish. She did not know however that the reason the curate didn’t come to say goodbye at her deathbed was because of her appalling onion breath. Apart from this, you can still clearly see the difference between the two deaths.
Hardy changed the moods of his stories in many different ways. The moods of “The Withered Arm” and “Tony Kytes the Arch Deceiver” are completely different, as “The Withered Arm” is a dark, depressing story of hate and “Tony Kytes, the Arch Deceiver” is a jolly, fast moving comical tale. Hardy achieves these moods by using devices such as ‘pathetic fallacy’, a technique that involves changing the setting to convey the mood of the scene. For example Rhoda and son live in a “lonely spot high above the water meads”. This portrays a lonely, slightly eerie scene that makes the reader fully aware of the mood of the story. Hardy also uses this technique in “Tony Kytes, the Arch Deceiver”, where the whole story happens on a bright, sunny day, conveying a happy, jolly mood. The tale is considered comical due to all the women Tony is fooling at one time and the mishaps Tony has at the women’s expense, further degrading the image of women in Hardy’s stories. To a Victorian audience this would all seem quite normal, even to a woman reading it because that’s just how things were. However, nowadays Hardy’s stories could be made out to be quite sexist due to modern women’s rights.
The women in “Tony Kytes, the Arch Deceiver”: Milly, Hannah and Unity are all stereotypical women of their time, not necessarily stupid, just naive. At that time, if a woman didn’t get a husband quite early on, they would be considered odd and out of place, a witch even, and all three didn’t want that so they were all trying to steal Tony from each other, even though he was already engaged to Milly. It was their only possible career move due to the fact that they were not allowed another one or to get into one, as they were most commonly not allowed an education. Even if they did, Hardy demonstrates his opinion on educated women through Harriet Palmley, who is a seriously snobby character, evil even, thinking herself above common men such as Jack Winter in another of Hardy’s short stories, “The Winters and The Palmleys”
Hardy’s language in his ‘Wessex Tales’ involves a lot of the dialect of where they are set, Wessex, which was quite widely known as a much different dialect to anywhere else. Hardy grew up in Wessex and that’s therefore how he knew so much of the local talk, but he didn’t write his stories totally in Wessex dialect, because if he did his audience back in London, which was where he wrote his stories for, wouldn’t understand a word of it. He accentuated the use of this dialect in most of the women, just to remind us that they weren’t educated in the use of proper English. Examples of these colloquialisms include “chimmer”, which means bedroom, “pile”, which means building, “cot”, which means cottage, and the list goes on.
So, are the women really victims or just women of their time? Well firstly Rhoda Brook from “The Withered Arm”. A victim from the word go, but also the cause of another woman becoming a victim. She still gains my pity however, as it was an accident. Gertrude, a victim of Rhoda’s (accidental) curse making her husband not find her attractive anymore, therefore she’s also got my sympathy. Old Mrs Chundle, the dear old lady with the smelly breath, and as nothing bad happens actually happens to her, I don’t think she is a victim. Hardy has done this because she is not a threat and not in any competition with any other women to make her be spiteful or be spited, and she also finds God in the end through the curate, so that could count towards Hardy not making her into a victim. Milly now, the “nice, light, small, tender little thing” that is so completely besotted about Tony that she will bypass the fact that he only chose her as a wife as a last resort, his proposal speech being “hey, Milly”, after he had already asked the other two, Unity and Hannah in front of her. She is definitely a victim but I’m not so sure she deserves my pity as she brought it on herself. The other two, Unity and Hannah are in the same boat in the way that they both want to steal Tony away from Milly but when it comes to Tony actually asking them to marry him they both refuse out of pride. They are not victims but women of their time, so they do not gain my pity, as that’s just the way it was. As for the male characters such as Lodge, who dies peacefully of old age, leaving most of his money to a reformatory for boys after being the main victimiser and Tony Kytes also, after humiliating Milly totally and having a happy ending is unfair considering what happened to all the women. I think Hardy does exaggerate the victimisation of the women and praise the men in his stories and I do feel sympathy for the majority of the women but as for the rights, characters and education of all the women, that’s them just being women of their time.
