A Reading Of Thomas Hardy's "The Workbox"

Hidden Guilt?

A Reading of Thomas Hardy's "The Workbox"

"The Workbox," an offering of the poet Thomas Hardy, tells the story of a day in the lives of a young couple living in a small village in a rural area of the English countryside. The characters in the story include the husband, a carpenter by trade, his wife, the recently deceased John Wayward, and the narrator. The opening lines begin with the husband presenting his wife with a gift made of his own hand, a sewing box "[t]hat [he] made of polished oak" (2). The wife seems genuinely pleased with his offering, smiling and saying, "'Twill last all my sewing years!" (8). As the story continues, the husband tells his wife about the origin of the wood (the wood was a remnant of John Wayward's coffin) of which her workbox is made and how he was thinking, as he labored on the box, of the various ways in which timber reached its end. As the husband tells his story, he notices his wife's reaction and realizes she has become upset. At first the husband thinks that his wife may have known the deceased, a point which she denies, noting that John Wayward must have been older than she, leaving their village before she was grown. Finally the husband comes to the conclusion that his wife is upset due to the fact her sewing box came from the same piece of wood John Wayward's coffin was constructed of. Again the wife denies she is troubled, but her expression and body language seem to tell something different. At this point it becomes evident the wife probably knows much more about John Wayward than she is prepared to admit to her husband.

It appears to the reader the carpenter's wife knows more than she was willing to discuss with her husband. Hardy leaves several hints to spark the readers' imagination throughout the poem. In the final stanza Hardy writes,

Yet her lips were limp and wan,

Her face still held aside,

As if she had known not only John,

But known of what he died. (37-40)

The final stanza suggests that the wife knew John Wayward. The use of his given name only, in line thirty-nine, the description of the wife's features, and her reaction to the news of John Wayward's death suggest that she and Wayward were not only from the same home town, but had known one another, perhaps intimately. In the fourth stanza Hardy is showing a possible connection between the two that carries even to the grave:

"The shingled pattern that seems to cease

Against your box's rim

Continues right on the piece

That's underground with him. (13-16)

The reference to the pattern on the wood that is now both on the wife's sewing box and John Wayward's coffin seems to suggest this. The reader can easily take from the context of the two previously mentioned stanzas that the carpenter's wife not only had once known John Wayward, but they were lovers not destined to be together for some unknown reason and that Wayward had left their home town to avoid the pain of being near her. John Wayward's name even suggest that he had probably wandered aimlessly through life without her till an uncontrollable impulse to be near her again had brought him to the village where she and her husband were living. When the husband states that John Wayward "[d]ied of they knew not what" (12) and the narrator suggests that the wife did know from what Wayward died in the final line of the poem when he states, "But known of what he died" (40), the reader can conclude that John Wayward most likely died from a broken heart.

The setting and characters of "The Workbox" are of some significance to Hardy who was born and spent his adolescence in the village of Higher Bockhampton in England. The following statement by Irving Howe gives the reader some idea of the social level of Hardy's family: "His father was a master-mason, life-holder of a house and reasonably prosperous; but in the past Hardy's family had stood higher on the social scale and now it wobbled, not to uncomfortably, between the gentry above and the peasants below" (Howe 3). Hardy had lived around and been close enough to poverty to have a true feeling about the simple life that characters in the poem led. The fact the Hardy chose as a trade for the husband that of a carpenter could reflect the fact that he himself and his family had a background in the building trades beginning with "his father and grandfather; both men were stonemasons and builders. Hardy had not decided initially to become a writer. After his schooling he was apprenticed, at the age of sixteen, to the Dorchester architect John Hicks" (Stone 145). Once again Hardy's background proves he was no stranger to common, working class people. What most importantly impacted Hardy and what might best explain the main theme in "The Workbox" was his doomed love affair with his cousin, Tryphena Sparks. "While staying at his home in the summer of 1867 he met Tryphena Sparks, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a family related to his own," writes Trevor Johnson (16-17). Johnson goes on to say, "Theirs was a passionate, tempestuous, and one suspects a precarious relationship. At all events, Tryphena returned Hardy's engagement ring in 1872, after five years--an agonizing blow for him" (17). This goes to show that Hardy had much sorrow and heartache in his life, and it had a definite impact on his writing. Johnson states, "Her influence on his work is incalculable" (17). Terry Coleman further reinforces this statement by writing, "I believe she was one of the principle influences on his work" (15). It is easy to see the tremendous impression Tryphena Sparks made on Hardy's life and for the reader to understand how Hardy could arrive at a theme such as that in "The Workbox."

Hardy chooses a relatively simple structure for the lines of "The Workbox." This could be because the characters in the poem are simple country folk leading comparatively uncomplicated lives and Hardy feels compelled to use language more suited to the working class. The stanzas all consist of four, somewhat brief, lines with every other line rhyming in a moderately lyrical fashion without flowery or ostentatious language. This also could be attributed to the writer's desire to reflect the lifestyle of the characters. The first two stanzas reflect