A Wife and Another

And as for the essay competition - well I simply had to enter! They were asking for an essay on any aspect of the work or legacy of Thomas Hardy, so I decided to write about one of his poems - 'A Wife and Another' - analysing from a feminist angle. I think it's a brilliant poem - there's so much drama in it, and Hardy has moulded the words with his customary excellence. I very much enjoyed writing about it, and it later came as a very pleasant surprise to discover that my entry had been awarded third place!

Here is Hardy's poem 'A Wife and Another'.

‘War ends, and he’s returning

Early; yea,

The evening next to-morrow’s!’ –

– This I say

To her, whom I suspiciously survey,

Holding my husband’s letter

To her view. –

She glanced at it but lightly,

And I knew

That one from him that day had reached her too.

There was no time for scruple;

Secretly

I filched her missive, conned it,

Learnt that he

Would lodge with her ere he came home to me.

To reach the port before her,

And, unscanned,

There wait to intercept them

Soon I planned:

That, in her stead, I might before him stand.

So purposed, so effected;

At the inn

Assigned, I found her hidden: –

O that sin

Should bear what she bore when I entered in!

Her heavy lids grew laden

With despairs,

Her lips made soundless movements

Unawares,

While I peered at the chamber hired as theirs.

And as beside its doorway,

Deadly hued,

One inside, one withoutside

We two stood,

He came – my husband – as she knew he would.

No pleasurable triumph

Was that sight!

The ghastly disappointment

Broke them quite.

What love was theirs, to move them with such might!

‘Madam, forgive me!’ said she,

Sorrow bent,

‘A child – I soon shall bear him. . . .

Yes – I meant

To tell you – that he won me ere he went.’

Then, as it were, within me

Something snapped,

As if my soul had largened:

Conscience-capped,

I saw myself the snarer – them the trapped.

‘My hate dies, and I promise,

Grace-beguiled,’

I said, ‘to care for you, be

Reconciled;

And cherish, and take interest in the child.’

Without more words I pressed him

Through the door

Within which she stood, powerless

To say more,

And closed it on them, and downstairward bore.

‘He joins his wife – my sister,’

I, below,

Remarked in going – lightly –

Even as though

All had come right, and we had arranged it so. . . .

As I, my road retracing,

Left them free,

The night alone embracing

Childless me,

I held I had not stirred God wrothfully.

And here is my essay, third place in The Thomas Hardy Society Writing Competition.

To what extent is Thomas Hardy’s ‘A Wife and Another’ A Feminist Poem?

Feminist writing positions readers to sympathise with women’s suffering. Certainly this poem positions us to sympathise with the narrator, who suffers the utmost betrayal from her husband and her friend. The affair is revealed to the reader as the narrator discovers it herself, effectively positioning us to experience the shock through the wife’s eyes. Even Hardy’s use of structure, putting both revelations (‘one from him that day had reached her too’ and ‘would lodge with her ere he came home to me’) at the end of stanzas, enhances the shock: it has a similar effect to concluding a chapter on a cliffhanger, creating a twist. The sense of betrayal is furthered through a pattern of language relating to entitlement. The italicisation of ‘I’ (‘I might before him stand’), indicates the wife’s feeling of personal right to the man, which is especially effective when juxtaposed with ‘in her stead.’ Contrasting ‘her’ and ‘I’ demonstrates the unfairness of the other woman’s encroachment on the marriage. ‘The chamber hired as theirs’ is an image that strikes at the heart of marriage, Hardy’s use of ‘theirs’ instead of ‘ours’ feeling tragically out of place and heightening the sense of injustice. Later, Hardy has the narrator use the possessive ‘my husband,’ increasing the impact by having this phrase separated out using dashes for emphasis. It serves to make the situation even sadder, because narrator and reader both know that the husband has been unfaithful and is no longer exclusively hers.

Around halfway through, the narrator undergoes a change of heart, illustrated through Hardy’s use of a volta. (This occurs at ‘Then, as it were, within me something snapped.’) Here, the reader almost expects the wife’s anger to surface. In Hardy’s ‘The Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, which also follows a narrative that involves a suspected affair, there is an impassioned stabbing when the infidelity is discovered (which ends up being tragically ironic because there was no affair after all). Contrastingly, in A Wife and Another, there is no anger, nor violence. Instead, the narrator sees herself ‘the snarer’: she views herself not as the victim but the perpetrator, obstructing the pair’s ability to be romantically involved. Therefore, she leaves them to be together, walking away. The reader already feels desperately sorry for her, but this is now exacerbated by the fact that her ending is so sad. ‘“He joins his wife – my sister,”’ she remarks ‘ – lightly – ’ upon leaving. Insertion of ‘lightly’ between dashes emphasises how out of place it is; she is only pretending that everything is OK. It is tragic as she leaves the inn, laughing ‘as though all had come right, and we had arranged it so,’ almost putting on this show to persuade herself that she has set things right. Yet her upset is evident in the last stanza, which Hardy imbues with much pathos. ‘The night’ is personified as ‘embracing childless me.’ Only the night comforts her now, not her husband; moreover ‘night’ has connotations of coldness, darkness and fear, the setting thus reflecting the wife’s bereft state. Hardy’s use of ‘embracing’ is particularly poignant because it is an intimate relationship that the wife is walking away from, a person that would have embraced her, and is now embracing someone else. ‘Childless me’ is also a notable lexical choice. Emphasising ‘childless’ points to the fact that the other woman is pregnant by the husband, highlighting again how unfair this is. Yet it also works on a deeper level. Being married and having children went hand in hand in Victorian society, being a wife and being a mother almost one and the same. Unmarried mothers were scorned, and it was assumed that if you were married, you would want to have children. Being a wife and a mother was the narrator’s right as a woman. ‘Childless’ shows that she has been robbed of this chance. The title of the poem, then, is a perfect epithet for the tragedy of the wife’s situation, because it can be read as a play on words of ‘a wife and a mother.’ The narrator wanted to be – should have been able to be – a wife and a mother, but instead her story has been cruelly twisted, becoming all about a wife and another woman.

Yet it is interesting to look at the perspective of the other woman.

It could be argued that we sympathise with her suffering too. This is something that Hardy subtly encourages the reader to do, because of the point halfway through the poem when the narrator sees the situation through the other woman’s eyes (‘I saw myself the snarer, them the trapped.’) As the wife realises that the other woman could be viewed as a victim, the reader simultaneously makes the same realisation. In fact, the suffering of the other woman appears before the volta. When the wife enters the inn, she sees the other woman, and ‘her heavy lids grew laden with despairs, her lips made soundless movements unawares.’ This imagery is almost suggestive of prayer, implying that the woman is so deeply upset by the appearance of the wife that she has turned to God in desperation. Hardy’s use of ‘despair’ also denotes directly her suffering, with its connotations of anguish and hopelessness. This idea returns in the woman’s dialogue. Hardy creates a stanza of truncated speech: he uses caesura to interrupt the lines of poetry through dashes and an ellipsis (‘“A child – I soon shall bear him…”’), and also uses enjambment, having the phrase ‘I meant to tell you’ split up across a line break. This creates a disjointedness because all the pauses fall in unnatural places. This, when read aloud, sounds as though the speaker may be crying; it also symbolically mirrors the woman’s distressed emotional state, altogether creating a sense of genuine sorrow, guilt and remorse. It’s this integrity that facilitates the narrator’s change of heart. Therefore, we arguably are positioned to see the suffering of this other woman, who has, after all, simply fallen in love with a man who is already tied to someone else.

However, while feminist writing is about sympathising with women’s suffering, it is usually focussed on their suffering at the hands of the patriarchy. It cannot be denied that Victorian Britain was patriarchal, and that the treatment of women was often unjust, but in this particular poem, which features two women and one man, the man is not presented as the perpetrator of their suffering. In fact, he is surprisingly absent from the poem. He has no dialogue, and only appears halfway through, and even the title ‘A Wife and Another’ makes it clear that this poem is about two women.

While the poem presents both women as having suffered, there are undeniable undertones of competition, resentment and vengeance between the women (most obvious at the beginning of the poem), implying perhaps that they are the perpetrators of each other’s suffering. The poem opens in medias res, and with the introduction straightaway of a husband returning home early from war, the reader expects this to be a happy conversation between friends. Yet before the first stanza is even finished, the word ‘suspiciously’ has appeared. Contrary to our expectations, the relationship between these women is being set up as dubious and un-trusting. Hardy continues to use a semantic field of clandestine actions and suspicion: ‘secretly,’ ‘filched,’ ‘unscanned, ‘planned.’ Rather than talking to the woman, the wife steals her letter and hatches a cunning plan to go to the meeting-point herself and intercept them. It’s almost like espionage. So although the narrator’s affront could encourage the reader to sympathise, because it is understandable that she is aggrieved, her reaction to discovering the affair could alternatively be read as a desire for vengeance. The phrase ‘in her stead, I might before him stand’ could be interpreted not only as shining a light on the injustice, but as showing spiteful competition between the women. When one considers why the narrator plans to intercept the pair, it seems that she wants to catch them in the act, expose their guilt, which is really quite a nasty way of showing them she knows about their relationship. On the other side of the coin, the other woman has been equally dishonest: it is revealed quite late into the poem that ‘he won me ere he went’ – meaning that this liaison has been going on secretly since before the war. This is perhaps why the honesty of the woman’s cathartic outpouring (beginning ‘Madam, forgive me!’) comes as such a shock to the wife and causes her to sympathise – it is such a change from all the dishonesty. The fact that these women are presented so antagonistically, fighting with each other in a lying, scheming, vengeful and resentful way, raises the idea that this might not be such a pro-feminist poem after all. One of the key values of feminism is the idea of sisterhood, of women sticking together against adversity and standing up for one another. What Hardy shows us here is almost the opposite, and it could even be argued that that this juvenile, catty behaviour of the women forms a very negative stereotype. Thus, if this poem is really a very small, domestic story of an intimate situation in the private world of these female characters, it is perhaps not so clear whether it is for women, or against them.

However, there is another interpretation exploring the wider message that this poem could be spreading: if one takes this small world to be a microcosm for Victorian society, it could be read as a protest against the institution of marriage. Hardy was known to have thought that marriage was a repressive social obligation, and that vowing to love someone forever was impossible. This sense of entrapment appears in the poem through Hardy’s lexical choices: he uses ‘snarer’ and ‘trapped’ in reference to the position of the husband and the mistress, and later ‘left them free.’ It is reasonable also to note the contrast Hardy draws between the relationship of the wife with the husband, and the relationship of the other woman with the husband. As previously explored, there is a certain sense of entitlement between wife and husband – they are married; it is their legal right to be together. However, the portrayal of the relationship the husband has with the other woman is disparate. The exclamation ‘what love was theirs, to move them with such might!’ illustrates the genuine passion they share, which highlights the fact that, in Hardy’s eyes and in Victorian society, marriage did not always imply love. The wife was tied to the man through law, and through the marriage contract, but the other woman was the one whose relationship with the man was founded on mutual love. This suggests that the constraint of marriage was arguably the cause of all the suffering in their situation – the marriage bond was the obstruction, not the wife herself. The final line ‘I held I had not stirred God wrathfully’ raises the issue of religion – marriage is a Christian sacrament. It causes the reader to question whether the way this situation is resolved is right. It does seem as though it would be better to let the lovers be in love and raise their child together, but in the eyes of the Church the marriage bond has been adulterated. The question therefore is whether God would endorse the upholding of the marriage vows, or the pursuit of love and a stable family. This is where the protest stems from, and this is why it makes sense that Hardy is showing us two women suffering, trapped, and arguably forced into acting vengefully, at the behest of the social and religious system.

Therefore, ‘A Wife and Another’ is to a greater extent a feminist poem, because it positions us to sympathise with the oppression of women due to the institution of marriage in Victorian society.