‘The Withered Arm’ and History

‘The Withered Arm’ (1888) has often been acknowledged as one of Hardy’s finest short stories, and as Kristin Brady points out, its form is close to the folk-tale: ‘There is an oral quality to its prose style, but it has no actual narrator with a personal motive for telling his story.’ This is so even though the tale also refers to nineteenth-century developments such as photography and galvanism. Brady deals ably with the curious admixture here, noting Hardy’s reluctance to comply with Leslie Stephen’s request that the phenomenon of the withered arm itself be more fully explained to the reader. The story’s supernatural aspects are held firmly in place by the social realism of the presentation, as instanced in the opening description of the ‘eighty-cow dairy’, the size and capitalist structure of which Brady comments upon, adding that the simultaneous continuance of old-style practices makes the dairy ‘an emblem of its transitional time’. The story may possess a fairy-tale element, but as Gilmartin and Mengham remark, ‘it is in fact impossible to extricate it from its Victorian ideological setting’.