The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy
Quick answer: The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy, summary and analysis: Rhoda's dream, Gertrude's curse, the hanging at Casterbridge and the cruel ending explained for study.
A milkmaid abandoned by a rich farmer dreams one night that his pretty new bride sits on her chest, flaunting her wedding ring, and in the dream she seizes the spectre's left arm and hurls it away. The next day the real bride begins to sicken, finger marks rising on her real left arm, and neither woman can name what has passed between them.
Hardy published the story in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1888 and made it the dark centrepiece of Wessex Tales. It is his most complete ghost story, though the ghost may only be jealousy given a body, and its final scene at Casterbridge jail delivers one of the cruellest coincidences he ever engineered, which for Hardy is saying a great deal.
The story in brief
Rhoda Brook, a milkmaid on Farmer Lodge's dairy, was seduced and abandoned by him years ago and raises their son alone. When Lodge brings home a young wife, Gertrude, Rhoda sends the boy to spy on her, feeding a jealousy that culminates in the incubus dream: the bride's spectre astride her in the night, mocking her with the ring, until Rhoda grips its left arm and flings it off. Gertrude, kind in waking life, befriends Rhoda, but soon shows her a strange affliction: her left arm is withering, marked as if by a grip of four fingers, dating from the very night of the dream. Rhoda, appalled, wonders if she has powers she never wished for.
As the arm worsens, Lodge's love cools. Gertrude, desperate after six years, consults Conjuror Trendle, who shows her the face of her enemy in a glass of water; she and Rhoda part, and the Brooks leave the district. Trendle's final remedy is folk magic at its grimmest: the withered limb must touch the neck of a freshly hanged man before the body cools, to turn the blood. Gertrude rides secretly to Casterbridge for an execution, praying, horribly, that some guilty man may be hanged. The hangman admits her; she lays her arm on the dead man's neck, and the blood turns indeed. Then Rhoda and Lodge appear, come to claim the body: the hanged eighteen-year-old, convicted of being present at a rick-burning, is their son. Rhoda's scream identifies Gertrude as the spectre of the dream at last. Gertrude's overtaxed constitution gives way, and she dies in Casterbridge within three days. Lodge, broken, leaves his property to a reformatory for boys with a small annuity for Rhoda, who refuses ease and returns to the milking barton, an old woman working in the meads.
The characters
Hardy binds four people in a knot where every kindness tightens the harm.
Themes and meaning
Set-text themes: jealousy made physical, superstition and folk belief, the powerlessness of women whose whole standing rests on beauty or marriage, and fate arranging its coincidences with maximum cruelty. Gertrude's decay from gentle bride to a woman who prays for a guilty man to hang measures what desperation does to goodness, and the arm itself works as a symbol of how one man's careless past marks both his women.
The sharper reading: Hardy keeps the supernatural deniable. Psychosomatic explanations are left open, an obsessive dream, a nervous wasting, folk-cure shock, yet every character behaves as if magic is real, and their belief does all the damage a curse could. The story's true engine is not witchcraft but the community of guilt between two women who ought to be allies, and the man who never once considers himself the cause.
The craft: the converging ending
Study how Hardy runs two lines toward one point. Gertrude's cure requires a hanged body; Rhoda's story requires her son's fate; the gallows is where the plots meet, and the meeting re-explains everything, even the dream, as one long approach to this scene. Convergence endings feel fated rather than plotted when both lines have independent momentum, and Hardy gives each woman six years of separate suffering so the collision arrives with full weight.
The other transferable device is the deniable ghost. By granting the supernatural exactly one appearance, in a dream, and confirming it only through ambiguous evidence, Hardy gets the dread of a ghost story and the dignity of a tragedy at once. Writers attempting the uncanny should note how much power lives in never ruling either explanation out.
What poets can take from this
- Keep the timeline straight for exams: the dream, the marks, Trendle's glass, six years of decline, then Casterbridge.
- Name the double explanation, psychological and supernatural, and show how Hardy sustains both.
- Use Gertrude's prayer for a hanging as the measure of her corruption by suffering.
- As a writer, build endings by converging two independently moving plots on one place.
- Give the uncanny a single deniable appearance and let belief do the rest.
- Punish your true culprit least; injustice is sometimes the strongest closing note.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a wronged character dreams of harming their replacement, and the next day the harm is real. Never confirm whether the dream caused it. Let the two characters become friends before either learns what connects them.
Questions
What causes Gertrude's withered arm?
Hardy never settles it. The marks appear on the night Rhoda dreams of gripping the spectre's arm, and the folk world of the story treats it as an unwitting curse, but a medical or psychosomatic reading is deliberately left open. The ambiguity is the point: belief in the curse does the damage either way.
What happens at the end of The Withered Arm?
Following Conjuror Trendle's remedy, Gertrude touches her arm to the neck of a newly hanged man at Casterbridge, who turns out to be Rhoda and Farmer Lodge's son, hanged for presence at a rick-burning. Confronted by both parents, Gertrude collapses and dies within three days; Rhoda returns to milking and refuses Lodge's money.
Is The Withered Arm a true ghost story?
It is best described as Wessex gothic with a deniable ghost. The only supernatural event is a dream, and every later horror comes from folk remedies and coincidence. Hardy said the incidents were suggested by local traditions, and he keeps rational and magical explanations in balance to the last page.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.