The Withered Arm recap

Dairywoman Rhoda Brook has an unacknowledged son by the prosperous Farmer Lodge, who returns to the district with his gentle young wife, Gertrude. Consumed by curiosity and resentment, Rhoda dreams that Gertrude attacks her and seizes the apparition's arm. Gertrude soon develops unexplained marks and wasting in that same arm, yet befriends Rhoda without understanding the connection. A local conjuror indicates that Rhoda's influence caused the affliction. As the arm worsens and Lodge's affection fades, Gertrude becomes desperate. Years later she follows a folk remedy requiring contact with the body of a hanged man. The executed youth proves to be Rhoda and Lodge's son. Gertrude collapses after touching his corpse and dies soon afterward, leaving Lodge isolated and Rhoda bereaved. The cure she sought completes the ruin linking wife, former lover, husband, and abandoned child.

Rhoda Brook is a poor, isolated milkmaid on Farmer Lodge's property and the mother of his unacknowledged twelve-year-old son. The other dairy workers discuss Lodge's return with a young wife, sharpening Rhoda's curiosity about the woman who has received the secure place denied to her. Rhoda sends her son to observe the couple as they arrive and asks him for a detailed report of the bride. He describes the new Mrs Lodge, Gertrude, as young, fair, and small. Although Rhoda has not met her, she forms a vivid mental image of Gertrude and broods over the marriage. Lodge's prosperous new household throws the poverty and exclusion of Rhoda and their son into sharper relief.

Rhoda has a vivid nighttime vision in which a distorted Gertrude sits upon her chest and thrusts her wedding ring toward her. Rhoda seizes the figure by the arm and throws it away, waking with the sensation that the struggle was real. Soon afterward Gertrude reveals that her arm has developed painful finger-shaped marks and is beginning to waste, with no ordinary explanation. The location of the marks corresponds to Rhoda's grip in the dream. Gertrude continues to visit and trust Rhoda, unaware of both Rhoda's former relationship with Lodge and the vision. Rhoda is frightened that her hostile feelings may somehow have injured a woman who has shown her only kindness, while Gertrude becomes increasingly anxious about an affliction that medicine does not cure.

Rhoda reluctantly directs Gertrude to Trendle, a man locally credited with knowledge of uncanny illnesses. In a private ritual he shows Gertrude the face of the person whose influence lies behind the damaged arm; her reaction confirms to Rhoda that she has been identified. Rhoda leaves the district rather than remain near the Lodges. Time passes, the arm grows more useless, and Gertrude's appearance and marriage deteriorate with it. Farmer Lodge, disappointed that they have no child and repelled by the affliction, becomes emotionally distant. Gertrude returns to Trendle in desperation. He says the influence may be broken if the circulation is shocked into change by touching the neck of a man immediately after he has been hanged. Though disturbed by the remedy, Gertrude begins considering how it could be carried out.

Learning that an execution is due at Casterbridge, Gertrude travels there alone and secretly arranges to approach the condemned man's body. After the hanging she is admitted and presses her withered arm against the dead man's neck in the hope of restoring it. The contact produces a violent shock. Rhoda and Farmer Lodge then enter to claim the body, revealing that the executed youth is their son, now grown from the boy who befriended Gertrude. The parents confront Lodge's wife beside the child their earlier relationship produced and Lodge neglected. Gertrude collapses under the physical and emotional shock and dies soon afterward. Lodge retreats from his former life, and Rhoda is left to return to labor after the loss of her son. The attempted folk cure binds the arm's mysterious origin to the family's oldest injury without healing either one.

Gertrude travels to Casterbridge to use Trendle's last suggested cure: touching her withered arm to the neck of a newly hanged man. She arranges access to the body after an execution and presses her arm against it. At that moment Rhoda Brook and Farmer Lodge enter to claim the dead youth, who is their son. Gertrude learns too late that the condemned man is the boy who once befriended her and whose parents' lives her marriage displaced. The shock of the encounter overwhelms her, and she dies soon afterward. Lodge withdraws from the life he had built, while Rhoda has lost her son as well as any remaining connection to him. The attempted cure thus brings all three adults together around the consequence of their old neglect and resentment, but restores none of them.