Characterization &amp Essay Example

would have been happy with Sam but Randolph does allow her the freedom to make her decision and follow it. Too long Sophy has allowed others to control her life. Her immobility becomes a symbol for her dependence in life on her son’s will. Randolph Twycott: Randolph is a poor specimen of humanity. Even as a young boy he displayed a rather bad attitude towards his mother that bordered on impatience.

As he grows up, he becomes acutely conscious of the difference in their status. He is the son of a gentleman but his mother is of poor stock. She lacks education and “culture” and is not worthy of being considered his equal. She dotes on him but he considers her with ill concealed impatience. Her love for him is of no importance to him and he seeks the company of others of equal station in life. When he enters Church, she hopes that he would take a more humane view of her and the less fortunate world but the more he studies the more humanity he seems to lose it.

Her desire to marry Sam is met with consternation and Randolph’s concern is not his mother’s happiness but his position in society which he feels will be undermined by that action. Sophy’ s isolation from the company of Sam who cared for her and her remoteness from Randolph who no longer had any love for his mother led her to her premature death. Sam Hobson: He is a gardener and a shopkeeper whom Sophy loves despite the fact that he belongs from the lower status and wants to marry him looking at

his interest he has towards her and also at his manners and his attitude.

But he happens to be the man whom Randolph hates and does not want this mother to get married to him because he feels his status in the society would go down if his mother marries Sam despite him having interest, good attitude and well manners towards her mother . Summary: Sophy is working as a servant to rural vicar Reverend Twycott when she receives a proposal of marriage from gardener Sam Hobson, but she rejects his proposal. When she injures her foot in a fall down stairs, she thinks she will have to leave the vicarage, but Reverend Twycott suddenly realises her worth and proposes to her and is accepted by Sophy.

Feeling that he has committed ‘social suicide’ by marrying a servant, Twycott moves to a new ‘living’ in south London. They have a son, Randolph, who is sent to public school in preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, prior to taking up the ministry. When Twycott dies, Sophy lives in a small house he had the foresight to provide for her. She is bored by the eventlessness of her existence, and estranged from her son, who has adopted a superior and critical attitude to his uneducated mother. Eventually she meets Sam again when he is transporting vegetables to Covent Garden market.

She tells him she is unhappy and wishes she were living back in the countryside. Their relationship comes to life again, and Sam proposes marriage to her for a second time. She accepts in principle, even though by doing so she would lose the home

and the living Twycott has provided for her. But she needs time to break the news to her son. When she does so, he forbids her to marry Sam because the shame of it would downgrade him in the eyes of his friends. Sophy asks Sam to wait, and he does so for five years, after which he repeats his offer.

Sophy renews her appeal to Randolph, who is now an undergraduate at Oxford. He forces her kneel down and swear that she will never marry Sam, claiming that he does this to honour the memory of his father. Five years later Sam has become a prosperous greengrocer. He stands in his shop doorway as Sophy’s funeral procession passes by on its way to her home village. Randolph who has now become a priest scowls at Sam from the mourner’s coach.

Themes: Marriage: There are any number of injudicious, difficult, and failed marriages in Hardy’s work. It was a subject dear to his heart, since he felt that his own marriage to Emma Gifford had run onto the rocks of boredom and indifference once it had passed beyond its early days of romance. Sophy at nineteen has a proposal of marriage from Sam the gardener which she refuses, but thinks is reasonable. She explains to Twycott ‘It would be a home for me’, which illustrates her social vulnerability. However, Twycott then proposes to her. She does not love him, but respects him and is flattered by an offer from someone she considers of higher social status.

But Twycott is twice her age; he dies first; and although he leaves provision for Sophy in

his will, none of his financial affairs are made accessible to her. On his decease, his son Randolph becomes his principal legatee. When Sophy receives a second proposal of marriage from Sam, she will have to forfeit her house if she accepts, and by implication her income as well. In other words, despite having moved upwards in the social class system on her marriage to Twycott, she becomes vulnerable to possible downward social mobility on his death.

The fact that Sam makes a success of his fruit and vegetable business merely reinforces the sad irony in the story. Sophy would have been socially secure in accepting his offer of marriage, if she had not been emotionally bullied by her own son. Education: To become a vicar in the Church of England is to join the upper echelons of the Establishment, even at a modest level. A home and an income are provided for a minister of the church, and in addition it is common for the fees of a private education to be paid for any children.

Reverend Twycott has no children with his first wife, but when he marries Sophy they have a son Randolph, who is privately educated, first at a public school, then at Oxford University. Thomas Hardy knew the value of education. Particularly as one of the few mechanisms to upward social mobility. And he knew how difficult it was to gain access to higher education for people of lower class origin no matter how talented. Jude the Obscure is a novel devoted to this subject, But Hardy also realised that absorbing the cultural values of an upper class

institution such as a university might create social tensions.

Randolph Twycott is upper middle class by birth, because his father is a vicar; but his mother remains an uneducated woman of humble origins. The son chooses to adopt a snobbish sense of superiority over his mother – illustrated in the story by her trivial lapses in English grammar, which he corrects. But more seriously he maintains a completely groundless sense of emotional superiority over her by his tyrannical refusal to accept her proposed marriage to Sam. His formal education has done nothing to develop his sense of humanity or common decency.

He might be clever enough to graduate from Oxford, but he has no common respect for his own mother. Class: On what is Randolph’s claim to superiority based? For this we need to step back once again to the basis of his parent’s marriage in class terms. Twycott marries his servant Sophy, and in doing so he knows he is ‘committing social suicide’. That’s because as a minister and a member of the upper middle class, he would be expected to choose a wife at a comparable level in class terms.

He marries Sophy more or less in secret, then gets round the problem of social stigma by moving away from the rural community in which his ministry is located to a new living in an obscure part of south London. This illustrates another feature of social life of which Hardy was acutely aware of the differences between rural and urban life. Twycott knows that in a village or town everybody’s social status will be known to other inhabitants, whereas he

enjoys London for its ‘freedom and domestic privacy’ where the parishioners will not know his wife’s origins.

They were, however, away from every one who had known her former position; and also under less observation from without than they would have to put up with in any country parish. Randolph is privately educated and develops into a snob and prig. But he is Twycott’s inheritor, and Sophy knows that she will lose all claims to her house and her income if she marries Sam. She does not like her isolated life in London, and Randolph is therefore condemning her to a sort of living death by forbidding her to escape it by marrying Sam.