To Please His Wife — Thomas Hardy and the Price of Keeping Up

Thomas Hardy’s To Please His Wife first appeared in 1891. Its characters make choices that are still recognisable even where the circumstances that hold them together have changed.

Korean television once had a particular appetite for melodramas known as makjang, of which Temptation of Wife is a well-known example.

Hardy’s late nineteenth-century story has some of the same materials: the wish to rise, money as a measure of how well a life has gone, and the intimacy of envy when someone you know has more.

The Tragedy That Begins with Comparison

Jealousy is one of the forces that moves the story. The person who feels it can give reasons for each choice she makes. Put the choices together and the outcome takes on a different shape.

Shadrach Jolliffe comes home from sea and goes to church to give thanks. He encounters Emily Hanning and Joanna Phippard. His feelings for Emily complicate a promise he has made to Joanna. Joanna thinks of releasing him, then sees him with Emily and chooses to hold him to their engagement.

Emily marries a prosperous man named Lester. Her circumstances improve while Joanna’s family struggles. Shadrach, who has little confidence as a shopkeeper, goes to sea again to earn more. He brings home a sum that might have been enough if it had only been compared with what they needed.

A second trip brings a harder condition. Shadrach says their two sons would have to go with him. Joanna hesitates, then consents, and all three leave.

When they do not come home, Joanna has fewer ways to support herself. Emily gives her a place to live. The story leaves Joanna waiting long after an ordinary absence would have ended.

Hardy the Critic

Hardy resisted the idea that a writer who looked closely at suffering had to be a pessimist. His fiction leaves room to ask what might have been different, even when the story offers its characters little chance to find out.

The Victorian world in which he wrote was materially prosperous in some respects and unforgiving in others. The story sees social ambition from inside a household, where the cost is counted very differently from the way it appears outside.

Character and Environment

Hardy called one group of his novels “Novels of Character and Environment.” The terms also offer a way into this story, where temperament and circumstance keep pressing on one another.

A naturalist reading asks how far a person’s choices are shaped by traits and circumstances they did not choose.

That question gives many works associated with naturalism a dark direction. The reader can see the room for action getting narrower even while a character believes a choice is still open.

Hardy’s fiction often gives the impression of forces that keep working without particular concern for the people in their path. The sea in this story requires no malice to change a family’s life.

What Wanting More Can Do

Joanna is not the only person who can recognise the pull of a comparison that never stops. Hardy shows what can happen when that comparison sets the terms of a decision.

The particular pressure belongs to Joanna. The wish to take another person’s life as a measure of your own is easy to bring closer to home.

People still ask what happens when visible success becomes a standard everyone else feels expected to match. The story gives that pressure a household, a few decisions and a very long wait.

That is part of why the ending can reach a reader who has never known a family that lived from the sea.

To Please His Wife

• Author — Thomas Hardy
• First published — 1891