A Tramp woman's Tragedy Flashcards
Summary
A Tramp woman’s Tragedy is similarly darkly tragic. It is a tale of love and jealousy, and leads to murder and execution, but at the centre is the terrible irony that the jealousy was founded on a joke, an act of teasing in which the speaker pretended to her lover (her ‘fancy-man’) that the child she was carrying belonged to ‘jeering Johnny’.
Themes
In “A Tramp woman’s Tragedy,” Hardy uses characters that embody negative gender stereotypes to emphasize the themes of destined justice and loss.
what tense is the poem written in?
past tense - Reflection. reflects the narrators sorrow and regret looking back on the tragedy and also how the memory haunts her.
What POV is it written in?
First Person
What is the form of the poem?
A ballad (narrating a story through short stanzas), ballads are traditionally passed on orally from one generation to the next.
Why did Hardy use a ballad?
- Memorable - could reflect how the memory is haunting and repetitive for the narrator, or perhaps Hardy is wanting to share an important message, which he wants to be remembered through generations. This message could be about class or negative female stereotypes.
How does it link the social class?
- A tramp is a long-term homeless person who travels from place to place as a vagrant.
- The character’s in this poem stay in ‘lone inns’, which sit on the edge of society and are isolated. This could reflect them also being excluded from society because of their class.
- Dorset provided Hardy with material for his fiction and poetry, since it was one of the poorest and most backward of the counties. His mother was a maid and his father was a stones man.
- Hardy’s awareness of the problems of rural life, classism, and morality is often reflected in his fiction; poverty, job instability, and a generally hard life are more responsible for lower morality.
- Hardy never felt at home in London, because he was acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority. he married an upper-class woman but was rejected by her family.
Repetition in the first two lines of each stanza
Mimics the daunting, repetitive wandering of the tramps, they are constantly ‘jaunt(ing)’ on.
‘The sun-blaze burning on our backs’
Retrospective Irony, the suffering will only get worse. This also could also imply how suffering is inevitable for these people from the very beginning because of their social class and poverty.
‘the sun drew down to west’
‘sink of sun’
Foreshadowing the tragedy that is about to occur - darkness falling
‘I teased’
‘I walked’
‘I laid’
The repeated use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ and verb phrases reflects how the narrator is taking responsibility for her actions. Reflecting on what has happened is filling her with shame and regret. This is tragic timing because the poem is written in past tense and the tragedy has already happened. The narrator realised her hamartia too late.
‘I would not bend my glances on my lover’s dark distress’
Myopia
Subtle alliteration of ‘dark distress’ reflects how obvious his distress was yet she was still blind to it and continued to ‘tease’.
‘within this royal realm’
Subtle alliteration
Emphasising her position in society. They are outcasts and do not fit into the ‘royal realm’
Juxtaposition to the ‘lone inn’
‘he took me on his knee’
‘mother Lee passed to my former one’
verb ‘took’ is controlling. ‘Passed’ is degrading like she is a gift and not a human being. The women are passive.
This links to being a women is society. In Victorian times Women were expected to be submissive, passive, and obedient; devoted wives and mothers who placed their husband’s needs before their own. However when this poem was written in 1902, views towards women were beginning shift. They receive the right to vote in 1928. Perhaps in this poem Hardy is suggesting that we cannot blame all tragedies on women. For centuries tragedies have been blamed on women (links to the hanging of Martha Brown, which Hardy was forced to witness at the age of 16) and the history of witchcraft trials where any sign of misfortune i.e. bad harvests could be blamed on women. Perhaps here hardy is blaming society and encouraging us to consider whether the narrator really is the antagonist or whether she is as much a tragic victim as the other characters.
