Jude the Obscure

From the beginning, it were the occasional dissonant comments -- very brief -- that Hardy planted in his description of an ambitious schoolmaster leaving a tiny Wessex hamlet that gripped me and dragged me into the novel, promising a mildly cynical undercurrent to an everyman’s narrative.

The novel starts there, taking its time describing curbed ambition and stunted growth amidst rural status-quo, but pretty soon it becomes interested in matters of morality and social opprobrium. Is marriage a socially sanctioned contract that ought to be cancellable; or is it a promise made to God, and therefore eternally fixed? At what point does social disapproval and the continuation of a community's mores turn into concerted bullying?

Hardy is so show more very good at the plot archetype where bad things happen to good people: his main characters are unassuming people who mainly want to be left alone to pursue their own choices. Cue a crisis of faith, and a crisis of atheism, unsatisfactory work and life prospects; their resolve to pursue love and happiness is put to stringent tests unintentionally imposed by a society that simply does not get it.

And Hardy uses this outline to examine a range of class issues as well as moral / religious disagreements in his idealized setting of rural Victorian England. Hardy reserves his most direct criticism for class differences: his tale of a working class layman with scholarly ambitions is excellent at conveying frustration with the closed mindset of a self-contained academia, at expressing the resignation of reaching university only through his children and their offspring. But in Jude, Hardy never explicitly chooses sides when it comes to the moral issues. The antagonists, embodied customs and societal taboos though they are, are never portrayed in an unfair light; everyone's behaviour is at all times understandable and (from their own perspective) entirely reasonable. Lack of education, self-interested moral shortcuts and privilege-induced blindness may be deplored, but cannot be demonized, much less personified in easy allegories.

Hardy very skilfully makes readers care about his main characters -- Jude and Sue -- and then proceeds to relentlessly pummel his protagonists with all the disapproval that society and their notions of morality can muster. In this respect, Jude the Obscure reminds me of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss: a tragedy inflicted by moral considerations that are at least partially self-imposed and that the protagonists feel unable to abandon without betraying their sense of self.

As great as this book is in addressing moral and religious quandaries, the narrator’s voice is one of the best things about Jude. Most of the narrative is told fairly straightforwardly, without omniscient interference or explicit moralizing. But the narrator's voice sprinkles wry remarks on the text -- be they explicit comments or, more subtly, choice of words and connotations. It doesn’t often make an appearance, but when it engages in a little omniscient foreshadowing or offers a general comment about human nature, it is noticeably but not intrusively different from the surrounding narrative, and the effect is much amplified.

To sum up: Jude the Obscure was a very engaging read, and felt like a mature novel, written by an accomplished and highly skilled novelist-- it is so satisfying to feel you're in the hands of a master at their craft. It offered moral complexity, protagonists to root for, and a world with no easy, blameable antagonists. I loved every page of it, because there was so much to keep me intellectually interested as well as emotionally invested. show less

I said this before, in another review, that Thomas Hardy is such a literary talent that you can't give him less than three stars, no matter what you may think of the story itself. And I sure didn't think much of this one. I don't mean that it wasn't thought provoking, I just didn't care for the thoughts it provoked. I think it should have had an additional title: "Sue the Absurd", because this woman was too unbelievable to be believable. She's supposed to be a modern woman yet she acts more like an old fashioned martyr, sacrificing herself, for no really good reason. She makes a foolish marriage to Phillotson, who physically repulses her, makes the wise choice to ask him for her freedom, but once that's granted and Jude, (whom she show more loves....or cares for, since I don't think she was emotionally capable of love) gets his freedom from his conniving wife, Arabella, she won't marry him, and risks the disapproval of society by just living with him. Even when they're both legally free, she prefers not to revisit the altar, (or whatever). Makes perfect sense: marry a man you hate, but don't marry one you love. Her short fiasco with Phillotson couldn't have soured her on marriage that badly, and while it's true there was plenty of hypocrisy in it back then (not to mention mercenary gains, social pressure, and plenty that has nothing to do with love), back then, if you want children it should have been clear that they'd be much better off if their parents were legally wed.

So, they live together, but can't settle anywhere, too much disapproval, (so much stupidity....how many "respectably" married people had "bits on the side", as they said back then, and yet had the nerve to judge others) and are never really happy. When a terrible tragedy results, Sue's answer is to do penance by sacrificing herself and returning to Phillotson, despite her physical repulsion. He's all too eager to remarry her (talk about a desperate man, I'm guessing he couldn't find any other woman to sleep with him, including prostitutes), makes perfect (non)sense! Why not devote yourself to good works, charities, helping orphaned children, cleaning the street of horse manure, whatever....but this was just too ABSURD to be believed!

Almost as absurd as Jude believing that Arabella's kid was his. Considering that she had lied before about being pregnant (and he fell for that trap like a real nincompoop), left him for another man, and couldn't keep her legs together if she tried, not to mention there weren't even blood tests back then, let alone DNA ones, does it really seem likely he was the boy's father? I think NOT. But then again, considering the way the kid acted....insanity does run in families!

To sum it up, neither of these fools deserved a happy ending and I'm sure glad they didn't get one. show less

Na na na nananana, nannana, hey Jude.. - Paul McCartney, 1968

I had attempted to read Jude the Obscure several times in the past decades, but it never stuck with me. This was partly because I knew about the ending, and the thought of it upset me. I enjoy dark and bleak novels, but there was something about Jude that turned me off. Having just finished the book, I know now that it was also because I didn’t like the main character, Jude.

This time I ploughed through, but it was not an easy read. Jude really annoyed me. I couldn’t even envisage the physical man. I wasn’t keen either on the love of his life, Susan.

This is not a review so much as an account of my impressions and emotions while reading the book. There is enough written show more about the plot and writing style, but in order for my “review” to make sense, I need to mention the main characters and their roles.

Jude is presented as a poor boy with a sad family history, who aspires to a better life, hoping to be educated in the nearby city of Christminster - Hardy’s fictionalized version of Oxford. Jude has been given his love of books by a local village school teacher, Richard Phillotson.

Still barely a man, Jude meets a pig-keeper’s daughter Arabella Donn while walking down a country lane. She’s a woman of poor morals, a woman my grandmother would’ve called a “slattern”. Arabella get to know Jude by throwing a slaughtered pig’s genitals at him. She woos Jude and tricks him into marriage by pretending she’s pregnant.

After making his way to Christminsterm in order to educate himself, Jude meets the ethereal Susan, who is clearly beautiful, delicate and asexual. After Arabella leaves Jude, he and. Susan enter a platonic relationship and attempt to live together sexless and in love. The rest of the story involves the return of the school teacher and Arabella, and the Jude–Susan relationship.

I found all the main characters to be annoying. I was interested when reading the notes in my NLS version that the novel had been initially serialised, and had undergone many alterations in order to placate the sensibilities of the late 19th century publishers and readers.

It was interesting to read the working names that had been given to the novel. One was “The Simpletons” which I think was meant to describe the Wessex villagers in the first chapters, but actually fitted the Jude and the unworldly Susan, as well as Arabella, and to a lesser extent Richard Phillotson who crops up later in the book to woo the hapless Susan.

I realise that the book should be read in terms of the actual time it was set. However, Hardy asserts that things would be different for the lovers 50 years hence. That is putting the story around the 1840’s. Even in view of today’s incels, I do not think any heterosexual man would have the patience of Job to live in close proximity to the love of his life, obeying her desire for sexual abstinence for years.

I wondered about the different titles. As well as “The Simpletons”, “Hearts Insurgent” and “The Recalcitrants” were also working titles, and I prefer the latter two to the one that stuck. Was the name “Jude” a reference to Saint Jude the patron saint of lost causes as I had previously believed? On reading the novel I see that the book’s city of Christminster (Oxford) was known as the “city of lost causes”. Certainly the love-life of Jude and Susan could be seen that way.

A notable aspect of the book is that its chapters are followed by quotes from the Bible, Shakespeare, classical Latin (some untranslated), poets, and contemporary philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, to set the mood. Many of these were unknown to me, and perhaps would’ve had a better impact on educated late 19th century readers. To me they seemed as if the writer was showing off. Perhaps Hardy was elevating the writing to fit with “high” literature in order to appease Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of England and America where the book was originally published in England in serialised form?

I realise that Jude the Obscure is a classic, but it wasn’t an easy read for me. The philosophy of life dialogues between Jude and Susan were of some interest, but the emotions of the characters including those of the village people were unconvincing.

While reading the book, I kept thinking of the Beatles singing.
Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better. show less

Not all classics are created equal. After scoffing at the Wuthering Heights haters who dismissed the novel because of the 'horrible characters' and lack of romance, I picked up Hardy's miserable marathon after being intrigued by the 'Done because we are too menny' line - and the damn thing nearly killed my reading mojo! In January!

To be clear, I didn't hate the book because of the depressing content, as I was expecting that, but the whole thing - narrative, characters, dialogue - is just so overwrought, in true Victorian melodrama style, that I absolutely couldn't care less about Jude, Sue (and how are you supposed to pronounce the name, if not 'Soo'?) or the myriad supporting cast. In fact, I loathed Jude, who is a mash-up of his show more namesake in A Little Life and the eponymous Stoner, blaming his failings on everybody else and dragging others down with him.

Jude wants to be a scholar at Oxford (Christminster) but he's an uncultured peasant and Oxford has always been for those who are able to buy an education ('Such places be not for such as you — only for them with plenty o’ money.') But instead of admitting that, he blames his failure in the big city on a brief fling with an ambitious country girl called Arabella, which leads to a short lived marriage. (Arabella is dragged through the mud by Hardy, and the Wikipedia plot summary - 'rather coarse, morally lax and superficial' - but she's one of the most entertaining figures in the book!) Then after Arabella dumps him and moves to the other side of the world, Jude decides he will join the church instead and devote his life to helping others, but meets his cousin - his COUSIN, note - Sue Brideshead, and falls hopelessly in - well, lust. But a man of the cloth can't be legally married and chase after a close relative, so he bins off that ambition too and becomes a stonemason.

Then the ranting commences. I don't know how much of this is based on Hardy's life, but boy, has he got issues. After convincing Sue, who marries Jude's older childhood tutor but throws herself out of a window at the thought of consummating the union, to leave her husband and shack up with him, both decide they don't want to get married again (even after both are divorced from their first spouses, divorce being trendy in the late 1800s). Entire PAGES are dedicated, in dialogue, to the argument against bowing to tradition and societal pressure, and the guff the pair face for not tying the knot. I was like, 'Okay, so don't, but stop whinging!' And Sue, who I thought would be some kind of proto-asexual bluestocking - she's even described as a sort of honorary man, at one point, and dresses in Jude's best suit to hold a debate as equals - turns into the worst kind of delicate Victorian heroine, held up as a ideal woman by the author, I'm presuming, because she won't do let Jude do more than kiss her (until there's a bit of a skip in time and suddenly they have two kids and one more on the way because it's 'natural') but also refuses to 'trap' him in marriage ('Is it,' he said, 'that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?') And then when her weird stepson, 'Father Time', kills her two children and himself because he believes that their large family is driving them to poverty, she goes completely off the rails. Even before that point, she is far too shrill and contrary to be remotely likeable - the edition I read emphasised words with capitals instead of italics, which sort of fits her better: 'Oh don’t you UNDERSTAND my feeling! Why don’t you! Why are you so gross! I jumped out of the window!' Calm down, love.

Neither did I believe that the pair were star-cross'd lovers, or that 'they seem to be one person split in two!' More like blood relatives. Jude is pathetic, Sue is neurotic and in that way they deserve each other, but they are far from the perfect match, as Hardy tries to ram down our throats. Oh, he's so handsome, oh she's so pretty, how in love they are, blah blah. And the author can't even leave cheerfully wicked characters like Arabella alone - in a drawn out plot that Dickens must have applauded, Arabella returns to 'trick' Jude into marriage once again, after crazy Sue hooks up with her ex to atone for her 'sins' and the deaths of her children. I was so bored by that point. All completely unnecessary, unless you're being paid by the word.

Absolutely hateful, depressing text, but not because of the tragic plot, which is buried beneath the hysterical melodrama and tubthumping from the author. show less

Done because we are too menny.

Were there ever sadder words in a novel? They're not only sad, they're devastating at the same time, for they strike the reader like a body blow, one from which recovery can only be incomplete. I first read them in my early teens, and never forgot them, finding them just as powerful on the third reading as on the first and second.

[Jude the Obscure] is a difficult book, one full of unrelenting misery from which there is no escape. Hardy's aim in writing it was ...to tell without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims. Jude Fawley did aim - his target a classical education. He studied and dreamed, walking miles just to gaze at the show more spire of Christminster (Oxford), his ultimate goal. Jude was a working man though, and Christminster didn't aim for such as he.

Hardy focusses on that deadly war and those unfulfilled aims, speaking of "the hell of conscious failure" and "the grind of stern reality", territory later explored by [[Arthur Morrison]] in [A Child of the Jago] (1896) and [[Robert Tressell]] in [The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists] (1914).

Jude's downfall began with a wretched marriage to Arabella Donn, "a mere female animal", which ended in separation when Arabella left. Jude then fell in love with Sue Bridehead. While Arabella's early appearances fit a common enough story, it is the saga with Sue that allows Hardy to question whether marriage is a contract or a religious union. Marxist theory had said that there were basically three reasons for marriage: the inheritance of property, the inheritance of title, and religious belief. Property and title didn't apply to Jude; did religion?

Sue was Jude's cousin, someone his aunt had warned him against strongly. Jude was captivated by Sue though, even after she revealed she was married. Sue eventually left this unconsummated marriage for Jude. She tried to convince him through long discussions on religion that theirs should be a platonic union too. That only worked for so long. Children followed; the family slid further down into the morass with each child. Then came the devastating message quoted above, one that for many readers was unfathomable.

Sue moved on to another. Jude was left alone despite the reappearance of Arabella.

Hardy does not spare the feelings or the sensibilities of his readers. This is a brilliant picture of the conditions of the time. However, the book was received with such moral outrage that he never wrote another novel, saying ...the experience completely curing me of further interest in novel writing he could not write another. He wrote in a 1912 postscript to it ... that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties - being then essentially and morally no marriage. He also said that by then ...somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work, which "uncursed" the author.

This is how it should be read, as a moral work, as Terry Eagleton said, as a conflict between the ideal and reality, and an examination of the notions of duty and obligation.

_______________________

This book was my real life book club's book for April. We voted on a few titles for a classics selection and this one was chosen. Since I had suggested it, I was the one to lead the discussion. I was horrified to discover that many had stopped reading at that fateful quote at the top, with still about 100 pages to go. The idea that the impact had been so awful they could not continue reading filled me with guilt. Should you read it, and feel compelled to stop, don't. Continue on, for by losing that last section of the book, much of Hardy's message is lost.

For myself, once more I could see how rereads over time always offer new perspectives. Where once I had had some sympathy for the aptly named Sue Bridehead, as a sort of "new woman", trying to lead an independent life, she had never seemed the dominant character Hardy intended her to be. This reading, she did stand out as such, a foil to Jude. My attitude toward her changed completely. I now dislike her probably more than any other Victorian character. Even the loathsome Arabella's actions at least made some sense.

What hasn't changed, is my belief that this will always be on my top ten novels' list. show less

I might have liked this book. There's honestly no way to tell for sure, since my first encounter has been thoroughly overwhelmed by the audiobook's dreadful narration. Frederick Davidson (aka, David Case) reads his way through every bit of narrative with an inflectionless sing-song that lands on important words in a whisper as often as it lands on irrelevant ones with emphatic volume. He sobs his way through tearful dialogue instead of reading it with pathos; changes his rough-voiced characters to simpering whiners whenever they're having an emotional moment; and imbues every female character with the least attractive vocal qualities of their sex---limpid die-away airs or hard-voiced whorish manipulation, with no in between.

While there show more might have been something redeemable in these characters if I'd read their story, myself, I've been left with the indelible impression that, no, in fact, these characters are nothing more than mincing ninnies or greedy narcissists or self-deluding fools. And that while, yes, their story is framed by the devouring juggernaut of the English educational system and marriage laws, they would've determinedly ruined their lives even in the absence of these things.

My philosophy teacher in college told me I desperately needed to read this book, that if I did, I would see a British author's compassionate treatment of his characters (in contrast, according to her, to Jane Austen's contempt for them). But I didn't see Hardy's compassion for these people---and I've read Tolstoy, so I know what the compassionate expression of very flawed people looks like. What I saw, what I read, was a determined lambasting of a social system via sad, pathetic people who probably couldn't have made a go of life even under the best of circumstances. Hardy made it difficult for me to even care about these people, let alone have compassion for their circumstances.

I might laugh at Austen's characters, but she means me to. I don't think Hardy wants me laughing, let alone sneering, at his...but that's what I fought not to do through the entire book.

Poor Jude. Poor Sue. What unfortunate wretches you are. show less

There are some novels that it is always so difficult to sit down and write about - their stature as works of literature almost speaking for itself. Hardy’s final novel is quite simply utterly brilliant. Yes it is bleak, famously so, but in that very bleakness there is great beauty, Hardy tugs at the heartstrings as only he can. In this novel Hardy explores themes of educational inequality, marriage and religion, his cynicism at these social institutions seems particularly brutal in his story of Jude and Sue. Hardy was only in his mid-fifties when he completed this novel, and yet he lived until he was eighty eight; spending his remaining years dedicated to poetry. In this novel, it is possible to see echoes of Hardy’s own religious show more scepticism and the difficulties that had arisen in his marriage to his first wife Emma. It is not surprising that this novel was enormously controversial when it first appeared, and that apparently Emma Hardy didn’t like it at all.
“But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.”
As the novel opens Jude Fawley a young orphan, is living in the hamlet of Marygreen with his Great Aunt Drusilla. The school master Mr Phillotson is leaving and it is about him that young Jude has developed a kind of hero worshiping attitude. Mr Phillotson is off to Christminster (Oxford) and the idea of learning and the colleges of Christminster becomes a firmly fixed goal for Jude – and he determines to follow the school master’s example one day. Jude is not a school boy – living with his aunt helping out in her small bakery – and trying unsuccessfully to earn a small amount of money by scaring the rooks in a farmer’s field – he takes to teaching himself Latin and Greek in his spare moments. His ambitions become well known locally and are treated as a bit of an eccentricity.
When sex rears its ugly head – it is the beginning of the end for Jude’s continuing study, though not quite for his lofty ambitions – he continues to dream of attending the university at Christminster. Jude marries Arabella, a young woman determined to snare herself a husband – she is a totally unsuitable spouse, and Jude quickly realises his mistake, and the entrapment that was deployed by his conniving wife. Within a year or two Jude has been abandoned by his young wife, and is working as a stone mason, eventually set off for Christminster to ply his trade, still hoping to make it to the university one day. It is in Christminster that Jude first meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, of whom he has heard from his Great Aunt.
On the very day that Jude first meets Sue, he looks up Mr Phillotson, and introduces Sue to him. Phillotson has abandoned his studies, and is again working as a village schoolmaster. As Jude is not free to marry, Sue marries Mr Phillotson, planning to work alongside him in his school. Sue and Jude promise to be no more than good friends, the stories of their families’ history of tragic and unlucky unions introducing a terrible superstition to their minds. Sue quickly comes to regret her marriage, physically repulsed by her husband, even jumping out of a window to get away from him; and soon leaves him for Jude. Although initially the two live together platonically, eventually their relationship moves to the next stage – Jude’s son from his marriage with Arabella nicknamed Little Father Time – comes to live with them, and Jude and Sue have two more children. Life is hard for the couple, as they move from place to place, Jude’s health breaks down and he starts to find it difficult to get work, how far away his dreams of Christminster University seem now. Despite both Jude and Sue obtaining divorces Jude and Sue remain unmarried – although living as husband and wife, convinced that the tragedies of their ancestors can only bring them misfortune. However tragedy lurks closer to home, as the couple find themselves back at Christminster – the city of Jude’s original dreams. I won’t say any more about what happens – the bleakness of Jude’s story is probably well known – but I don’t want to be responsible for too many spoilers.
“I have been looking at the marriage service and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat or any other domestic animal.”
As a character Sue Bridehead is slightly confusing, certainly she is every bit as memorable as Tess or Bethsheba, although not quite as powerful a character as either of them, although I feel she should have been. Sue appears to be an intelligent, modern forward thinking young woman, at the beginning of the novel she is a religious sceptic. Yet although she rails against the necessities of women tying themselves to men by marriage – and the practise of being given away by a man during the marriage ceremony – she is superstitious and sexually repressed. Allowing herself to become brain-washed by religious conventions – Sue is the instigator of her own continuing misery. Jude whose ambitions are thwarted by poverty and indifference is a man who is fairly passive; he is dominated rather by the women in his life, although he is hugely likeable. show less