Relationships Between Men and Women in Thoms Hardy's Short Stories

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Relationships Between Men and Women in Thoms Hardy's Short Stories

Thomas Hardy was born on June the 2nd, 1848, at Higher Brockhampton in

Dorset, a little hamlet, a few miles from Dorchester. He soon moved to

London to study architecture, writing poems and short stories in his

spare time, eventually moving on to do full-time writing, abandoning

architecture.

Most of his stories are set in the imagined county of Wessex, which

encompasses the counties, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. His novels and

short stories all involved several issues; Victorian relationships and

the dynamics of actual relationships between people and Wessex itself.

In fact the details of relationships in his books help contemporary

historians understand Victorian England.

The five stories I have chosen to compare are: 'The Withered Arm',

'Old Mrs. Chundle', 'Squire Petrick's Lady', 'Superstitious Man', and

'Tony Kytes, The Arch Deceiver'.

The first relationship I will work on will be Tony Kytes and Milly,

Unity and Hanna from 'Tony Kytes, The Arch Deceiver'. The first

relationship described in the story is the relationship between Unity

and Tony. By the point at which we first meet Unity we have already

been told about Tony's fiancé Milly. So from this we can gather

already a few things about the characters because riding in a carriage

with another woman than your wife, in Victorian times, would be most

certainly frowned upon, so we can gather that Tony must be quite an

impulsive fellow and she must like him a lot. We know also that in

Victorian times women followed men not the other way so that is why I

say she must like him.

The conversation in the...

... middle of paper ...

...homas Hardy's short

stories are all very similar, all fulfilling a sort of pattern. Men in

all the stories become infatuated with the beauty of a woman and the

relationships fail because the woman cannot compete, or the beauty of

the woman is taken away. Women are not equal to men, in the stories

men are portrayed as the much more powerful sex, with the most

authority. The females in the stories try all they can to seduce and

manipulate men, but this is always to no avail. Even in 'Old Mrs

Chundle' the friendship between the old woman and the curator ends up

as a desperate battle between the two characters, with the man as the

figure of authority; but when she dies we realise he is not really the

strong character. In fact all the men are not very strong, they have

no depth and in finality are in fact extremely shallow.

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