Comparison of Hardy's "Withered Arm Collection of Short Stories"

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English Hardy Coursework

Thomas Hardy was a British novelist and a poet who was born in 1840 during Queen Victoria’s reign and died at the age of 88 in 1928. Most of Hardy’s works are set in the countryside of Wessex. The three stories I will be looking, ‘The Withered Arm’, ‘The Son’s Veto’ and ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’; are all taken from the collection of stories called ‘The Withered Arm and other Wessex Tales’. Hardy’s characters were often portrayed as victims of a predestined fate and his stories usually end in awful tragedy.

 “The Withered Arm” is a tragedy of fate and is a story of two women linked to one man. The Man being Farmer Lodge in this story and the two women being Rhoda Brook, the lower in social class working as a milkmaid and Gertrude the higher in social class who is the clear choice for Farmer Lodge to marry. It is clear from the story that Farmer Lodge has had previous relations with Rhoda Brook and they have even had a child together but society has denied them to have public relationships because of there social status. Therefore only one is liable to be able to marry the Farmer in the eyes of society and that is Gertrude. This causes a subconscious jealousy from Rhoda towards Gertrude that is presented as a form of witchcraft that Rhoda unknowingly possesses. This witchcraft causes Gertrude to visit Rhoda in a dream and Rhoda to grasp Gertrude, ‘Rhoda, in a last desperate effort, swung out her right hand, seized the confronting spectre by its obtrusive left arm, and whirled it backward to the floor,’. This meeting in the dream caused an affliction on Gertrude’s arm making her less appealing to the Farmer.

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The narrative focus of the story switches from Rhoda to Gertrude at this point in the story giving us an insight into what Gertrude is thinking. This ailment leads Gertrude to seek concoction after concoction to treat the injury finally leading her to use a method that involves a corpse that has been hung. This is where Hardy introduces his cruel because just as Gertrude thinks she is going to rid herself of this ailment Farmer Lodge and Rhoda burst in and the corpse being the illegitimate son of Rhoda and the Farmer this shock kills Gertrude. This is similar ...

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