The Abjections of Thomas Hardy in “The Withered Arm”

        

                                    The abjections of Thomas Hardy's "The Withered Arm"

The gothic images of Thomas Hardy’s short story “The Withered Arm” correspond to tropes as defined by Anne Williams in her gothic investigations in the study Art of Darkness. Supernatural events, or the threat of them, form the typical elements which make this story fall in the gothic genre, but Hardy’s story is enhanced by looking through the lens of Williams’ use of feminine innocence in the face of monstrous cruelty (Chapter II. The House of Bluebeard). The reader aligns such “monstrous cruelty” with Julia Kristeva’s notion of “abjection,” or that which causes uneasiness, comes to the forefront, and defines the symbols of decadence and the unknown in the story (4). Williams’ innocent female(s) take charge of their situation through confrontation with the abject. In Hardy’s story this emergence of the female in the face of monstrosity is doubly shown using two female protagonists who sometimes see the other one as the threat, and sometimes as the companion in the face of ironic determinism. In either instance, the two female protagonists act as gothic innocents battling to save themselves from their precarious predicaments.

            The struggle to overcome fate and declare oneself as an individual of free will is a common theme in Hardy. Such a theme plays out from his early creation of Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native to Jude Fawley in his final novel Jude the Obscure. Eustacia is a self-assured woman at one with the nature of the heath who still wants to break out of the rural society by marrying the man who has returned from worldly travels, only to find that only wishes to stay in the rural lands. Jude Fawley as a young man sees the natural pleasures of the heath together with its ugliness and determines that he wants to break free by pursuing a life of the mind, something society and circumstance constantly deny him once he gets to the urban areas he once longed for.

            The reader notices this theme of abjection, determinism, and free will  in “The Withered Arm.” Not reading the story as a structured narrative arc, but as a series of immediate affective events lets the reader envelope themselves in the world of each of the protagonists, understanding their struggles at each moment as they face the changing horrific situations around them. . As noted, the theme plays out in the two females, the peasant girl Rhoda, and the newly arrived landlord’s wife Gertrude. Viewing the story as a succession of images and situations informs the reader as to the individual gothic elements of the story, per Williams’ feminist definition. 

At the beginning of the story, the chorus of peasant women comment on the arrival of the landlord with his new bride. Word reaches Rhoda, and she is devastated. She has been waiting for years for the landlord to acknowledge her child as his son, hoping that the result would be his taking her for his wife. The arrival of the new wife positions Rhoda as an innocent fighting against the “abjection” of the new wife. This abjection becomes enhanced when Rhoda dreams of the new wife as a spirit out to do her harm. In the dream Rhoda reaches out to stop Gertrude from harming her, touching the spirit’s arm. Immediately the spirit is in agony and withdraws. The innocent heroine of Rhoda has overcome the abject, at least in the dream.

            In addition to Rhoda as innocent, the story now turns to Gertrude who awakens with a pain in her arm. Unbeknownst to her, it is in the same spot on her arm that Rhoda had grabbed in her dream. The withered arm is distasteful to her new husband, and he shuns her. Sophia must find out what has happened and try to stop it. The confronts her own abject feature by searching out the supernatural in the form on the Wessex County wizard, who happens to be a friend of Rhoda. The two women meet through the symbology of dream imagery and its possible physical effects and the supernatural tropes of the rural wizard and his attempt to seek out the truth of what has happened.

            Not knowing of Rhoda’s son’s parentage, Gertrude aligns with her, and Rhoda returns the empathy when she recognizes the place on the withered arm where she had, in her dream, touched her supposed enemy. The alliance of the two protagonists, brief as it is, creates an emphasis of what Anne Williams calls “the female gothic,” the attempt of the innocent female to take matters into her own hands for purposes of escaping a monstrous situation (3). Usually, this situation is determined by an ogre-like male who has imprisoned the innocent in some way. But in Hardy’s story, the abject situation is the determined fate of the two women. This fate has as its cause the blind rejection by the landlord of Rhoda and her son and his further rejection of his new bride after she becomes afflicted. But his part is secondary to that of the overwhelming umbrella of inevitable loss which hovers over the two women as they struggle with each other’s position in the story. When Gertrude asks the wizard the cause of her injury, he shows her in a scene unshown to the reader. But Gertrude knows that Rhoda is the cause and breaks ties with her.

After years of agony, Gertrude visits the wizard again to see if he knows of any cure to the withered arm. He says he knows of only one. She must touch the afflicted place to the neck of a newly hanged man. This advice furthers the Williams type of Gothicism. The female must take matters in her own hands. She must face an abject horror. Only then can she be free, albeit through supernatural means.

The irony of fate looms in the air once again, though. For when Gertrude receives news of a hanging, she makes a scene by rushing to the dead body and touching her arm to its neck. She is, indeed, healed. The withered arm glows with health. But at that moment the parents of the dead man rush up to here. It is her husband and Rhoda. He has finally recognized Rhoda’s son as his. The shock of seeing the parents together sends Gertrude into a swoon. She collapses and dies. The ending is melodramatic, supernatural, and, at the same time, fatalistic. Rhoda loses her son due to the societal conditioning of the poverty-stricken bastard; he has become a murderer, and action for which he is hanged. Gertrude regains her beauty, only to lose her life.

That the two females end their stories in tragedy is not typical of the Williams female gothic trope. Such a fatalistic ending is very typical of a story by Hardy. Hardy uses the trope of the female surviving using her own wits to show the strong sense of individualism that is typical of his characters. They have a persistent need to fight to escape the fate that twists around them sending them to an inevitable place of loss. In “The Withered Arm,” the means of the fight against determinism involves supernatural tropes that give the story its weird and spooky atmosphere typical of any gothic tale. But the fate of a deterministic universe wins, as it does in so many Hardy works, and the innocents must inevitably give up themselves to it.

The reader catalogs the abjections of the story as they happen. Rhoda faces the abject horror of the specter in her dream, and she survives, even conquers it. Gertrude then faces the abjection of her withered arm. Together they briefly form an empathy, as Rhoda feels she has supernaturally caused Gertrude’s abjection. But then Gertrude faces the abjection of Rhoda as the cause of her injury. The story has a twist at this point, as the storyteller never shows the exact revelation to Gertrude; the wizard simply takes her to the side and something supernatural (probably) happens to let Gertrude know of Rhoda’s involvement. Gertrude leaves Rhoda, returning to the wizard only years later. The reader presumes this hesitation is due to a fear of the outcome, and that proves justified. Gertrude’s next abjection is when she faces the dead body of the hanged man and touches it. The abjection is temporarily subdued as her arm heals. Then we discover her and Rhoda’s final abjection, the death of Rhoda’s son and his acceptance at last by Gertrude’s husband. The horror of the final scene shows Rhoda’s final abjection, the death of her son due to his having turned criminal, and Gertrude’s final realization of the accumulated effects of all the horrors, a realization that kills her.

The reader feels a moment-by-moment realization of each of these abject horrors as they happen. In this way, Hardy’s interplay between two female protagonists comes alive in a back-and-forth dance of emotions that creates an awareness far beyond the story as an arch of narrative or character. The arcs are present, true. But in tackling the story moment-by-moment we see the two women tackle each abjection in its turn. In doing so, they sometimes find a brief empathy with the other. But in the end, they are fated to contribute to each other’s downfall. Reading the events as a series of enveloping moments makes clearer the connection to Anne Williams’ sense of feminine gothic as she outlines in Art of Darkness. The innocent female progresses through the narrative never knowing what is to happen at the next turn, trying desperately to overcome the sense of fatalism that bombards her. Whatever supernatural elements inform this story, they lead to one of Thomas Hardy’s inevitable ironies.

 

 

The image was generated by AI on Bing using the phrase “Foggy background with nineteenth-century peasant woman limping” on March 4, 2024.

 

Hardy, Thomas. “The Withered Arm.” Wessex Tales, Project Gutenberg, Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3056] Most recently updated: February 4, 2021 (original publication date 1888).  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3056/pg3056-images.html

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. tr., Leon S. Roudiez. New

            York: Columbia University Press. 1982.

Williams, Ann. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. University of Chicago, 1995.