The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy and Odour of Chrysanthemums by DH Lawrence

A Comparison between the Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy and Odour of

Chrysanthemums by DH Lawrence

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Higher Bockhampton in Rural Wessex;

he died in 1928. David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood

near Industrial Nottingham, he died in 1930. Both Hardy and Lawrence

wrote Novels, Short Stories and Poems frequently about lonely

individuals, especially women. Lawrence’s work illustrates what he

was like as a person, deep-minded and genuine with extraordinary views

to life. Hardy’s work is often about troubled relationships between

men and women which is also what a lot of Lawrence’s work is based

around.

Both writers fell in love during their lives, Hardy married Emma

Lovinia Gifford who unfortunately died suddenly in 1912, although

Hardy married again in 1914 to Florence Dugdale, Gifford was the love

of his life and he had his heart buried in her grave when he died.

Lawrence fell in love with a woman named Jessie Chambers, he did not

marry her though probably because of the dominating influence that his

mother had over him. He eventually did marry, his wife was a German

lady named Frieda von Richthofen.

Another similarity is that both Hardy and Lawrence’s work was heavily

criticised. Critics said that Hardy’s work was “pessimistic” with an

“earthy realism” and “abstract philophizing”. This resulted in Hardy

to concentrate on writing poems instead of novels. In Lawrence’s

case, he was criticised for including a lot of graphic sex in his work

and 1000 copies of one piece called “The Rainbow” was burnt in front

of the magistrate. Soon after this he left England and became a

wanderer for the rest of his life. Hardy came from a more stable

background than Lawrence wi...

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...ader does not know whether Gertrude

knows the truth or not because of Hardy’s narrative technique which

forces the reader into Rhoda Brook’s shoes and limits the reader to

only the same information that Rhoda has. Hardy focuses the reader’s

attention in order to control the responses which I found remarkable.

Hardy’s main weakness was that it was hard for the reader to relate to

his characters as they did not seem real obviously because of the

super natural element to his story. But I found this to be one of

Lawrence’s strengths as his characters a lot more realistic as he used

such descriptive language which makes the reader able to picture the

setting and the characters distinctively. I thought that Lawrence’s

weakness was that the plot was not very gripping, especially when

compared to Hardy, and the story started to drag out because of the

slow pace.