The Withered Arm and Other Stories

The Withered Arm and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. It consists of works produced between 1874 and 1888, each of which takes place in a fictional region of Britain called “Wessex.” The stories involve local folklore, superstition, and myth to build brief, yet complex character sketches of the unique people who live in Wessex. In making these characterizations, Hardy invokes a variety of genres, from ghost story to suspense.

The collection’s titular work, “The Withered Arm,” is often considered Hardy’s best short story. It follows Rhoda Brook, a middle-aged woman living in Farmer Lodge, and the mother to an illegitimate child conceived with the lodge’s landlord. The landlord finds a new wife, enraging Rhoda. She builds up a vivid, imaginary portrait of his new wife, Gertrude, in her head, using only a few pieces of information relayed by her son. One night, she has a dream in which Gertrude sits on her chest while wearing a ghostly silk dress. She refers to the apparition of Gertrude as “the incubus,” and recalls how it tried to suffocate her in the dream. She vanquished the incubus by grabbing its left arm and throwing it aside, where it vanished.



The following day, Rhoda meets the real Gertrude, who turns out to be very kind and likable. However, Gertrude happens to relate that she began to feel a pain in her left arm in the middle of the previous night. She shows Rhoda her arm, where several bruises shaped like fingerprints have appeared. Over the coming weeks, Gertrude’s arm atrophies, and Lodge begins to find her disgusting. Gertrude asks Rhoda to take her to a shaman named Conjuror Trendle; she complies, fearing that Trendle will realize that she caused the disease and bring an end to their new friendship. Trendle creates an image of the source of the disease and shows it to Gertrude. The narrator does not describe the image; only that Gertrude immediately dislikes Rhoda. Rhoda soon moves out of the area with her son.

The story returns to Gertrude two years later, relating that she is now a hostile and superstitious woman obsessed with curing her disease and winning back Lodge. She desperately returns to Trendke, who tells her that it can be cured by touching the neck of a man after his hanging. Lodge leaves town for business, and Gertrude goes to Casterbridge to see a hanging. She makes her way to the corpse and touches it, feeling life rush back into her arm, just as his parents arrive to claim him. She is horrified to see that they are Lodge and Rhoda. Gertrude faints and later dies from shock. Rhoda returns to the same area to live as a hermit, declining a large sum of money that Lodge leaves to her upon his death.

Another story in the collection, “The Son’s Veto,” comments on the repressive gender norms of Victorian society through the eyes of a disabled protagonist, Sophy. “Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver” is told by the driver of a horse carriage, who relates the story of Tony Kytes who strategically asks many women to marry him individually, then marries Milly, the only one who wants to marry him. “The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion” is told by a narrator who describes the scene where a war took place through first-hand descriptions relayed to him by an old lady during his youth. Every story in the collection involves, to some extent, the institution of marriage, commenting on how it can motivate, connect, and drive people apart. Hardy’s stories are compelling experiments in nineteenth-century-British subjectivity, riding the line between believability and absurdity.