Likewise, when Annie and John Thomas go on a ride at the fair, they ‘spin and heave… [he was] flinging one leg across her mount, perilously tipping up and down, across the space, half lying back, laughing at her. He was perfectly happy… she was excited.’ This language, like the description of the train, is hinting at eroticism by describing ‘innocent’ actions as if they were people moving and feeling sensations during sexual intercourse. More obviously, ‘John Thomas’, the name of the main male character in ‘Tickets, Please’, is also a slang term for the penis. Through these insinuations the new sexuality that women flaunted, the intense sexual feelings that Annie has for John Thomas - that cause her to weep with ‘fury, indignation, desolation, and misery’ - and the bestial, primitive action that the women take at the end is emphasized.
In ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ there is little language that hints at underlying tension. The cosy country setting makes the reader feel rather wrapped up in it, as if it were the only place on earth. This is highlighted by the use of affectionate West Country dialect: for example, ‘’ee’ or ‘ye’ is used for ‘you’, ‘’twas’ for ‘it was’, and ‘O’ for ‘Oh’. The description that is used is highly simplistic and conforms to the romance genre, in that the readers infer that this is a serene place in which there are no ominous threats or shady nuances to disturb the lovers, who are the focal point of the story. Tony and Milly ‘talk on very pleasantly, and look at the trees, and beasts, and birds, and insects, and at the ploughmen at work in the fields’. The reader subliminally correlates this with a lazy summer’s afternoon in a peaceful, contented setting.
Both Tony Kytes and John Thomas are described as popular with women; John Thomas ‘flirts with the girl conductors in the morning, and walks out with them in the dark night’ while Tony is ‘quite the women’s favourite’. Both men are also flawed. The carrier, who tells Tony’s story, says ‘There was no more sign of a whisker or beard on Tony Kytes’s face than on the palm of my hand.’ - as facial hair is a sign of manhood, this implies that Tony is child-like, weak and simple.
Before John Thomas is introduced, the (omniscient) narrator informs us that ‘Since we are in wartime, the drivers are men unfit for active service… So they have the spirit of the devil in them’. Although John Thomas is an inspector, not a driver, he must also be unfit to fight, and therefore ailing in some way. This is ironic; he is a comparatively vulnerable, weak man and yet he is emotionally superior to the tram girls, who ‘have all the sang-froid of an old non-commissioned officer’. Also, the perturbed position he is in symbolizes the threat to men, and masculinity, the First World War brought. He has to fight to prove his manhood, which Tony Kytes takes for granted.
John Thomas’s hatred of women taking an ‘intelligent interest’ in him and his consequent nonchalant manner of leaving them and ‘walking out with the newcomer’ is probably due to insecurity. His manhood is seriously threatened by the fact that he is surrounded by women and cannot fight in the war like a ‘real man’, so he compensates for this by coldly abandoning the women as soon as they begin to try and get close to him, thus giving him power over the relationship. In this way he only allows himself to see women as entities; when they display their personalities by showing an ‘intelligent interest’ he is in danger of caring about them as individuals, and of them seeing his insecurity (and the reason he is unable to fight in the war).
In both stories there are continuous references to women as objects; they are constantly referred to as ‘girls’ which puts them on a lower level to men and on a par with children. In ‘Tickets, Please’, ‘the miners travel, for a change of cinema, of girl, of pub’ – implying that women, like cinemas and pubs, are mundane things that men occasionally get tired of and want to trade for another one which is much the same. John Thomas, also, is unable to let himself see women as individuals. Similarly, Tony Kytes ‘loves ‘em [women] in shoals’. This completely de-humanizes women, suggesting that they are equal to supplies that are carried ‘in shoals’.
The main female character in ‘Tickets, Please’ – Annie – is ‘something of a Tartar’, while the women who conduct the trams in the Midlands are described as ‘fearless young hussies’ – ‘hussy’ is an insult, usually meaning a promiscuous woman; male insecurity led them to condemn aggressive women - whereas in ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’, the descriptions are ‘a nice, light, small, tender little thing’, ‘a handsome girl’, ‘a dashing girl’; Hannah, Milly and Unity’s characters are not initially described, and never in detail, so the reader infers that they are considered insignificant. In both stories the women are often described through the eyes of the men who interact with them (Annie at the fair is ‘a plump, quick, alive little creature’ – John Thomas’s perspective) – perhaps because they were both written by men. Also, they are mostly described vaguely or in a large group i.e. ‘tram girls’ in general.
Unlike John Thomas, Tony Kytes does not seem insecure at all. When he talks to his father about his predicament (he cannot decide which of the three women –all of whom are hiding in the back of his cart – to marry) he is offhand about it: ‘Yes, the truth is, father, I’ve got rather into a nunny-watch [regional dialect meaning tangled mess], I’m afraid!’. Both characters view women as objects, but there is a believable reason for why John Thomas does – his insecurity – while Tony does not seem to be any sort of a character. He is not even portrayed as a nasty person; he is simply excessively laid-back. He does not seem to be concerned with anything; after being rejected by two women, he turns to the third and says, ‘what must be must be, I suppose.’ This conveys the message that marriage is to be taken lightly; it does not matter whom you marry, and this can be determined by one coach ride.
The endings to both ‘Tickets, Please’ and ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ emphasize the power that, ultimately, the men have over the women, no matter how forceful or domineering the women are or how unstable or unintelligent the men are. Hannah in ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ manipulatively says, ‘I wouldn’t say no if you asked me – you know what’, but it is Tony who wields the power and is in the position to choose between the women. In turn, the hold that general attitudes in society – frequently brought about by the people in power – have over individuals is also emphasized.
In ‘Tickets, Please’ six of John Thomas’s ex-girlfriends attack him as a form of revenge. The undertones of this – the women cannot have him in a loving way, so they get him in a violent, bestial way – are accentuated by the seedy setting (a ‘rough’ waiting-room at a train station at night) and dialogue, such as ‘Shut the door, boy’, ‘Especially if you’re not afraid to go home in the dark’, ‘Don’t leave us all lonely, John Thomas’. The women are desperately trying to gain some power over John Thomas – Muriel uses the word ‘boy’ to try and demean him, just as women are referred to as ‘girls’ - to conceal the fact that he has made them all intensely vulnerable. There is also irony, in that he has left and does leave them all lonely, and in light of that Muriel’s dark sarcasm could be viewed as a plea.
Their attacking him is power, but a futile, superficial form of it. He only needs to say ‘I choose Annie’, after they have wildly, passionately pulled him to pieces, to regain his authority over them. Annie knows that he does not really love or even prefer her, but is calculatingly devastating her and the others. He knows that if he chooses Annie she will never be able to accept him, partly because she knows that he is ‘full of malice’, and partly because she is the ringleader and cannot injure her pride so much as to consent to be with the man they have been humiliating. Furthermore, ‘each of them waited for him to look at her, hoped he would look at her’, because all the women are still in love with John Thomas. They are also shocked by the swift snatching of their new-found power from their hands, and so are ‘mute, stupefied’.
There are some similarities between the two endings. The women in both put on a façade of resilience – ‘Take her leavings? Not I! I’d scorn it!’ says Unity in ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ – to disguise their hurt, misery and love for Tony Kytes and John Thomas. The ending of ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ is somewhat bizarre. Milly accepts Tony’s offer of marriage, having witnessed him ask two others before her, without questioning or reprimanding him. She says, ‘If you like, Tony. You didn’t really mean what you said to them?’ This is enormously frustrating for the reader; somehow it has been expected that the hollow characters and unrealistic storyline will become symbolic of a deeper meaning, because the story, and its attitude towards love and marriage, is disturbingly easy. ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ seems extremely far removed from humanity, for no clear reason.
Ultimately, 'Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver' is far subtler than 'Tickets, Please'. The latter is far from transparent, but the fact that the ending is so ambiguous, much of the story is set in darkness, and language is woven suggestively and extensively means that there are undertones, symbols and messages of some sort - the reader has only to determine what these are. 'Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver' could be viewed as a story meant purely for entertainment and amusement - the reader laughs at the simpleton-like action Milly takes at the end, feels affection for Tony Kytes, a 'lovable rogue' and appreciates the snugness of the setting - there may also be humour in the irony of the title (an 'arch-deceiver' is usually meant to refer to a highly successful criminal or business person, and Tony Kytes simply fumbles a frivolous situation). However, we feel uncomfortable with this idea, as, especially at the end, it is troublingly laid-back to the point of exasperation.
It is possible that ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ is a satire on the rigid attitudes of the 1890s, traditional romantic clichés and male views and expectations of women. Women were often advised to be passive, tender and submissive, as Milly is in the story; and Milly is pathetic. Perhaps the uncomfortable dissatisfaction the readers feel at the end is reminiscent of society at that time, with moral codes and standards wrung around its members so tightly as to cause frustration. ‘Tickets, Please’ parallels this in that it also subverts our expectations in having the women assault John Thomas in an attempt to rebel against not only their feelings, but also society’s constrictions, allowing John Thomas, a man, to wield so much power over them; but they fail.
In conclusion, the two stories differ as they are being read, with ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’ appearing as an exasperatingly light-hearted farce and ‘Tickets, Please’ emerging as a complex tale of wartime hostility and changing gender roles. Certainly, they differ greatly in their style, setting and characters. But in the end they deal with the same issue; the emotional power that men automatically had over women due to conventions in the past. ‘Tickets, Please’ could be seen as a historical continuation of ‘Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver’, with the masculinity taken for granted in Hardy’s era just beginning to come under threat. The two stories both force the reader to contemplate their message, but the ways in which they manipulate are very different.
