STORIES OF OURSELVES

        Sophy’s wheel chair is a symbol of her lack of independence. At first she is dependent on her husband and then on her son. Sophy knows what she wants but yet she is not in control of her life. Also, she depends on the wheel chair to stay up so that she can move around. The window Sophy stairs at becomes her only contact with the outside world, and this is how she meets Sam again. “She often saw them creeping along at this silent and dusky hour—wagon after wagon, bearing green bastions of cabbages nodding to their fall, yet never falling, walls of baskets.”

 

        An omniscient position is placed throughout the story. Hardy the “voyeur” (a person who gains sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity) is rather normally known. Not only does the narrator tell his story in the third person, but also seems to know the inner thoughts of the main characters. In addition, he puts himself as a speaker who is having a conversation with the reader, like if he was explaining things in the story to the readers. For example at the opening of part two: “the next time we get a glimpse…”. In this quote there is a sense of knowledge that gives the reader the responsibility with regards to the morals being explored. Even when she is able to move while marrying Twycott, Hardy clearly reminds us about the necessity for women to marry and describes Sophy using images of domestic pets – “kitten like, flexuous, tender” –obviously attractive to a person, but surely also a feeling of superiority when associated with Twycott’s thought of his young wife.

 

Literary devices used with examples

 

        We come to know about Sophy’s early life through the use of flashbacks. “That question of grammar bore upon her history, and she fell into reverie, of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance. It might have been assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping her life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this”. When the story makes us remember this, we come to think that fourteen years of married have left a mark on Sophy and her son Randolph.