Loyalty Theme Analysis

Phyllis, Humphrey, and Matthäus Tina each struggle with loyalty throughout the story, and their decisions about where they place their loyalty are ultimately what decide their fate. Phyllis is loyal to Humphrey for the first year of their engagement, but when she hears that Humphrey may not be honoring the engagement in the same way, her loyalty to him weakens, and she allows herself to think of Matthäus Tina as her lover. But when she overhears Humphrey talking with his friend about his plan to bring Phyllis a present and apologize for his behavior, her loyalty to him is immediately restored. Meanwhile, Humphrey has disregarded the engagement in order to secretly marry his love match—meaning that Phyllis’s loyalty to him is misplaced. Matthäus Tina’s relationship with loyalty is complicated, too. He feels no great loyalty to the army he serves, preferring to stay late at the garden wall with Phyllis rather than to ensure his promotion in rank. He makes the decision to desert England and his battalion, partly because of his homesickness—a kind of loyalty to his country—and partly due to an acute loyalty to his friend, Christoph, who will be sabotaged if Tina does not go through with the plan. Tina is simultaneously loyal and disloyal, and this duplicity, though it comes from a pure longing for home and the desire to do right by his friend, ends fatally for him.

Through these myriad complicated decisions and changes of mind, Hardy implies that loyalty is not a black and white issue. Loyalty given under duress, as it is by Phyllis, does not yield a happy result; disloyalty motivated by selfishness, as shown by Humphrey’s actions, can, unfairly, end in satisfaction for the disloyal party. Not even the purest loyalty to one’s family, country, or friends, as shown by Matthäus Tina, holds the guarantee of a reward.