Who we (Hardy’s Victorian audience) would expect to marry this wealthy Farmer Lodge however quickly comes onto the scene. To the milkmaids of Egdon Heath, Farmer Lodge’s new wife arriving in the afternoon was the perfect opportunity for gossip. However none of these milkmaids had seen nor heard of Lodges new wife so gossiped about how they assumed she would be. In their thick southern accents the milkmaids predicted the new Mrs. Lodge to be “a rosy cheeked, titsy totsy, little body enough”, “Years younger than he they say” and “His young wife”. Once the new Mrs Lodge did arrive, it turned out that these women had predicted correctly, Gertrude Lodge was indeed a young, beautiful woman, well educated and, supposedly, a virgin; the direct opposite of Rhoda. However, after spending a while as Mrs Gertrude Lodge, Gertrude discovers that her arm is withered (supposedly inflicted by Rhoda after a supernatural dream), distorting her physical beauty. However, has it really? Or is it just that their perception of beauty is distorted by the bindings of a proper Victorian marriage. Gertrude then is no longer Lodge’s perfect wife and their marriage is lost for love, if there ever was any to begin with, and has, as poor Gertrude puts it, “sank into prosiness”.
A similar situation occurs in ‘ On the Western Circuit’ where a young lawyer, Charles, described as being “not a great man”, falls in love with a young maidservant called Anna. Howevr the course of true love never runs smooth and Anna’s illiteracy is figuratively a large pot hole along the path of their relationship. The narrative voice hints that the relationship between the two progresses too rapidly as Anna is soon pregnant. In order for both characters to avoid social embarrassment and rejection they must marry. However Charles’ love for Anna was to do with the beauty of her letter writing which in fact was not hers, it was Edith’s. Edith: the woman already bound unhappily in marriage that with Charles is experiencing love for the first time.
So from this we gather that both marriages occurred due to the influence of the Victorian society. Like Lodge, Charles is attracted by a young, pretty woman, both woman are of an inferior social class so see an opportunity to “marry up”. In the end happily married couples? No. However if both couples had married because they loved each other, instead of what society insisted, would the outcomes have been different?
Hardy’s tales of these unfortunate couples indicate to the Victorian audience that all is not perfect when considering marriage. Hardy is telling us that behind these storylines, there is a larger picture. It is in fact quite a sad as this larger picture represents a large majority of Victorian couples, all who believed they were making the right choice by marrying for money and status instead of following their heart and marrying for love. It was due to this decision that most couples ended up unhappily married, and deeply regretting their decision to carry out marriage in the first place. It is this that spurred Hardy to write from the perception of four women, as opposed to the men.
Up until now I have not mentioned the other side to the story, or in other words, the larger picture. Even with Anna’s pregnancy and Gertrude’s withered arm veering marriage off its fairytale track, Hardy presents to his readers yet another complication in their marriages. The other two women in the stories, Edith and Rhoda, first appear to have nothing to do with the men, Charles or Mr. Lodge. However, we have known from the start that this is no fairytale, instead a tragedy. And more importantly, a tragedy to affect not one, but all of these unfortunate Victorian citizens.
The secret behind these two names remains untold to some characters, and in the case of The Withered Arm, Rhoda’s secret is not revealed to the reader until we are in depth of the plot. In both situations a love triangle occurs; as Edith’s letter writing progresses, so does her love for Charles, and at the same time, Charles love for Anna as he receives her ‘charming’ letters. In ‘The Withered Arm’ it turns out that Rhoda had had a previous relationship with Farmer Lodge that had resulted in a child. This may sound like the beginning of a happy family, but Lodge would not marry Rhoda, simply because of who she was to society; so she was left pregnant and very much alone on the outskirts of a community, abandoned by a man who loved her. I f had had swallowed his pride then e would have ended up happily married with a son.
The main and most important point here is that love between two people ignites (farmer Lodge-Rhoda and Edith-Charles), but due to the current situation the characters are in, their love cannot proceed:
EDITH- She is in love with Charles but is already bound to her husband (a rich wine merchant) in marriage; however, she despises him and their marriage, like many others, is loveless. They cannot divorce because of law and reputation and he would lose his status.
ANNA- All this innocent “child of nature” wishes is for Charles to love her, but he cannot because she is illiterate. But if she dosen’t she will be rejected in society as a befallen woman.
RHODA- their relationship could not continue because she was a fallen woman, no longer his perfect wife. Rhoda is now alone and forced to raise her child outside of the community.
GERTRUDE- like Anna, all Gertrude wants is for her husband to love her; she believes it is her withered arm that is causing him to despise her so goes to desperate measures to cure it, only killing herself in the process. She basically dies for love, sacrificing herself for a marriage without love.
The on of Rhoda and Lodge is perhaps the greatest victim of all the characters. As a young boy he was lonely and craving love and attention: ‘his mother not observing that he was cutting a notch into the beech backed chair’. Had he not grown up on the fringe of society then maybe his life would not have come to such a tragic end.
When looking at which of the pair had control over their marriage, it became obvious from the start that it was the husband. In the modern day marriage is another word for joined where responsibility’s and respect is shared between the husband and wife. When Anna falls pregnant it is Mr Harnham who sends her away so she does not bring embarrassment to him, and when Charles finds out it is he who decides that they shall marry. Also when Rhoda falls pregnant, it seems obvious that it is Lodge who abandons her so she does not ruin his status.
In many of Hardy’s novels he writes as the narrator, using pathetic fallacy to put the characters emotions across; sometimes these translate as their secrets. When Rhoda is escorting her new friend, Gertrude, across Egdon Heath to find a conjuror whom Gertrude believes will cure her arm and therefore her marriage, Hardy describes the scene as “the dark atmosphere”, “the wind howled dismally over the Heath” and “this solemn country”. All of these illustrate the scene as dismal, an emotion similar to what Rhoda was feeling as she awaits what the conjuror will unearth about the cause of Gertrude’s withered arm. Also at the opening of part two in ‘The Withered Arm’ the ‘darkened room’ reflects Edith’s solemn mood.
It seems absurd that such a religious era should ignore the wishes of the bible when considering marriage. God was an icon to whom people obeyed, but when marrying a companion they did not obey the bible by finding a partner to love. The passage below is taken from ‘On the Western Circuit’ in the narrators voice:
‘Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better that free womanhood with its interests, dignity and leisure, she had consented to marry the elderly wine merchant as a last resort, at the age of seven and twenty- some three years before this date – to find afterwards that she had made a mistake. That contract had left her still a woman who’s deeper nature had never been stirred.’ In other words she has never experienced romantic love.
From this, I can conclude that Hardy did not only know, but believed that women were exploited by men to use as items in marriage; these women, represented by Edith Harnham, were bound by “contract” not love to their marriages which left them regretfully as women with a “deeper nature that had never been stirred”. But there was nothing they could do as in the Victorian Society their lives would follow one of two paths: one in marriage or one alone on the edge of society, but neither with love.
