Skip to content

On The Western Circuit

Discussion questions

  1. What are the central conflicts of the story? Consider tensions between country and city, education and ignorance, appearance and reality, love and social convention. Which conflict seems most important, and why?

  2. Eagleton argues that a story's opening teaches us how to read everything that follows. Read the first paragraphs of "On the Western Circuit" carefully. What does Hardy establish in his opening — about narrative perspective, about the world of the story, about tone? How does the opening prepare us for what is to come?

  3. The carousel is the story's central image. Read the scene where we first see Anna riding it closely. What does Hardy compare the carousel to? Identify the figures of speech involved and explain what they contribute to the scene's meaning. How does this image establish the story's central themes and anticipate its ending?

  4. The letters at the heart of the story create a crisis of diction. Edith, an educated woman, writes in Anna's name to Charles. Find two or three moments in the story where Hardy draws attention to the register or language of the letters. What does the collision between Edith's literary voice and Anna's rustic simplicity reveal about the characters and about language itself?

  5. Hardy's narrator moves between omniscient commentary and free indirect discourse — moments where we seem to be inside a character's consciousness without the narrator explicitly telling us so. Find two examples of free indirect discourse in the story and identify whose perspective Hardy adopts in each case. What does this technique reveal that straightforward omniscient narration could not? How does it complicate our sense of whose story this is?