Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Unlike with many novels, I have a strong suspicion that the characters in Jude the Obscure have a life outside of their author's conception and intention. Although Jude is a novel of ideas, the major characters rarely nor consistently illustrate an idea. Both Sue and Jude are egotistical creatures beholden to ideas. Both wish to rewrite the givens of their circumstances.

In the introduction, Hardy describes the novel as "an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment (Penguin Jude, Taylor, p.3-4). Within the novel,shortly after Jude and Sue break off an engagement to be married yet remain living together, the narrator comments,"The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given"(288). Both of these comments suggest that Hardy's intent in writing Jude is not polemical. What Hardy means by impressions is unclear, but Jude is an exploration of the extent to which men and women can step outside the social and define their lives for themselves, according to their own readings of their bents and tastes. Hardy's fiction is set in motion to provide answers, not illustrate them. The characters are not parts of an allegory but instead sources surprise and consistency amidst inconsistency.

There is a disingenuous quality to Hardy's narrator defensively reminding the reader that he is not required to comment on the issues illustrated by the novel. Hardy, or at least the narrative voice, clearly has problems with marriage as both concept and practice. Yet, with a grudging respect for civilization and tradition, he seems unable to own his position.

Although born without connections or resources of any kind, in a rural area, Jude initially believes he can be an Oxford-educated ecclesiastic. Midcourse in his life and the novel, he believes he can become a saintly, altruistic curate. In both cases, he believes he can become learned and holy.

Sue is more complicated and, as with other Hardy women, there seems a great deal more distance between her and the narrator. The narrator insight into Sue is not nearly as clear as his insight into Jude. With Jude, the writing of his character seems to come from experience, from the writer having felt as Jude. Sue seems much more a journalistic creation, a product of a scientific observation born of an intense curiosity. She's exquisitely rendered; yet we never feel inside her head. As with other Hardy novels and their heroines, I wonder how a woman novelist past or present might write the story-over, with a narrator whose vision of the story is more clearly in line with Sue's perspective and experience.

The obliquities in Sue's character certainly lend her mystery. She acts according to impulses that are hard to characterize and define. She remains a mystery not only to Jude and the reader but to herself. She presents a mix of consistency and inconsistency in her character that make her life-like. All of her actions are the product of both noble and base impulses and desires. She is both flawed and too good for this world.

She is even a bit dishonest on the matter she feels about most strongly, the institution of marriage. She presents herself as opposed to it, seeing it as a form of legal, societal coercion that necessarily sullies a true love. Yet, Sue opposition is something more than simply born of ideals. She draws men to her, only to push them away when they become attached to her. Ultimately, she would seem to oppose not only marriage, but monogamous commitment of any kind. In part, her resistance here derives from noble impulses. Commitment limits her ability to love as broadly as she wishes. She derives a psychological satisfaction in being loved by many and a type of power in loving many.

However, her long-time resistance to permanent, committed, sexual relation with both Jude and Phillotson gives her a much more basic power. It allows her to keep two men focused on her and derive the benefits both confer. Phillotson provides stability and economic/social wherewithal. Jude provides romance. Her relation with him allows her to pursue a rich imaginative life as a revolutionary, a tragic lover, a rebel.Sue is a tragic figure: by virtue of her gender and time, she is denied the range of opportunities and powers available to men. With few resources, she avails herself of the one source of power that remains, her sexuality.

Seeking to keep two men within her orbit on a long-term basis, Sue resorts to varied strategems. Early on, when Jude suspects that she and Phillotson have a relationship going, she turns evasive and admits "I know you'll be angry if I tell you everything, and that's why I don't want to!"(134). Yet, when Jude accedes to her wish to remain silent, and in effect announces (however dishonestly) his willingness to relinquish her, Sue shifts tactics and tells of her engagement. Jude still withholds any expression of jealousy or concern. Finally, she threatens him with what they honestly both most fear; a cessation of relation outside of a formal business one. She tells him that they can no longer see each other. This does the trick. Jude emphatically replies, "O yes, we will....your being engaged can make no difference to me whatever"(134).

Avoiding commitment, limiting relation, confers a power on Sue. Yet, tragic as she comes across, she also appears manipulative and almost vengefully cruel. Shortly after her first engagement to Phillotson, she goes off to Melchester and the Teacher's School. Once there, she actively recruits Jude, getting him to move to Melchester, despite the fact that, although she later protests otherwise, she clearly knows Jude has feeling for her. The scenes just previous to her marriage ceremony with Phillotson are particularly sadistic.

An alternative, and possibly complementary, reading of these scenes can be made with Sue as romantic revolutionary, or at least as a sensation-starved want-to-be. Throughout the book, she taunts Jude with Phillotson,as if she is trying to get Jude to express his love in a full, dramatic and death-defying manner that is in keeping with her romantic, Shelleyean notions of love. At points, she fashions herself and is depicted as a tutor, finding a man who she is able to shape into a nobler version of man. On the night they spend debating, she promises Jude that she "won't disturb your convictions.....But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I-shall I confess it?-thought that man might be you." She here pitches her search as a contest; and, her project seems to partake of a second creation.

If the end of their pedagogical relation is radical, the roles in it are conventional, conforming with traditional Victorian gender norms. Sue is presented and seen as an airy, disembodied, rational creature, and as such virtuous. With a good measure of exasperation, Jude tells Sue that she is such a phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who-if you'll allow me to say it-has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can't'"(260). Jude is earthly, but in her presence and under her tutelage, he is bound to shed his earthiness and attain to her more spiritual condition.

Jude is a disciple of Sue. In their master/disciple relation, when he fails her attempts at elevation, he feels shame. Shortly after his one night stand with Arabella, as a fallen disciple in the presence of his master, Jude sees Sue as the "sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs," and correspondingly "felt heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in Arabella's company"(187). Jude decides not to tell Sue, rationalizing "there was something rude and immoral in thrusting these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average man"(187).

Shortly after eloping to Aldbrickham, Jude accepts that the two will live on a platonic footing. In disciple fashion, Jude tells Sue he is happy just to be near her, confessing that "this is more than this earthly wretch called me deserves-you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet tantalizing phantom...forgive me for being gross, as you call it!(243).

Sue is seen and represented in the novel as spiritual, or more precisely, disembodied, and as such, a creature of a higher plane. Indeed, according to the governing assumptions of their relationship, proximity to her aerial being lifts his earthly being,but her ethereal being potentially is corrupted by a too close contact with the earthly Jude, or with the earthliness, the body, of any potential love. On their way to Aldbrickham, resisting Jude's entreaties for more physical contact and a more concise definition in their relationship, Sue lectures Jude, "My liking for you is not as some women's perhaps. But it is a delight in being with you, of a supremely delicate kind, and I don't want to go further and risk it by-an attempt to intensify it"(240). A proper and necessary distance to her elevated beauty is suggested later on in the novel, after the distance has been broached, when Sue, Jude and Little Time visit the fair. At the fair, acting in Jude's fashion to her, Sue sniffs an assortment of flowers, and says, "I should like to push my face quite into them-the dears!...But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them'"(297). Of course, it isn't a matter of rules; touching flowers, handling them too much, will kill them.

Suggestion is repeatedly if quietly made that Sue might simply be frigid, or homosexual. Sue herself most often suggest this. Speaking of her marriage to Jude, Sue asks, "Wouldn't the woman for example be very bad natured if she didn't like to live with her husband....merely because she had a personal feeling against it-a physical objection-a fastidiousness, or whatever it might be called..."(210). There is the sad almost comic scene where Sue runs to the second-story window of her bedroom and hops out when Phillotson accidentally enters her bed.

Sue ultimately does establish a sexual relationship with Jude suggesting that her deep aversion may not be to sex itself but to sex with Phillotson. Yet, this is never made entirely clear. The reader is offered little to no insight as to how or why Sue ultimately allows her relation with Jude to proceed to the sexual. In 'sleeping' with Jude, Sue would seem to have surrendered a position that defined her to us and to herself, and yet Hardy presents this surrender as an accomplished fact.

It occurs rather quietly, between the lines, shortly after Arabella pays a visit to their home in Aldbrickham. To prevent Jude from going to see the distraught Arabella who has come seeking his aid, Sue agrees to marry Jude, announcing "If I must, I must!" She then runs across the room, embraces him, and declares "'I am not a cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you at a distance? I am sure you don't think so! Wait and see! I do belong to you, don't I? I give in!'" The scene ends emblematically: "[Jude] kissed her on one side, and on the other, and in the middle, and rebolted the front door"(267).

Sexual imagery opens the next passage: "In the moring it was wet"(267). The two are still physical,flirtatious (268). Arabella apparently notices a difference in Sue that a night has brought. She claims Jude wasn't Sue's the day before but now agrees with Sue's assessment to the contrary, mockingly praising Sue: "'You've been quick about it'"(269). Finally, Sue all but declares the consummation of their relationship, telling Jude she is "easier in my mind now than I was" since the supposed cause of her divorce with Richard, sexual infidelity, has now occurred.

Sue insists on drama, even at the risk in the end of punishing herself. She fashions herself a heroine, as larger than life, as the lead in a story. Initially, she is the freedom fighter and seeker. After the loss of her children, she reverses her former opinions, and fashions herself as a Promethean figure, a contender with Gods who has lost and is being punished. At all points in the novel, she refuses to see her life as less than a dramatic story invested with meaning.

Sue can be seen as self-aggrandizing. Seeking meaning and romance, Sue aligns her life with the persons and drama of stories. On their way to Aldbrickham, Sue informs Jude that their relation is not to be conventional; free of their marriages, she is not necessarily interested in setting out on an ordinary relation with Jude. After a spat and Jude's agreeing to a relation on Sue's terms, she makes a request: "'Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley's "Epipsychidion' as if they meant me!'" Jude at first demures, telling her that he know "'hardly any poetry." This doesn't stop Sue, who recites herself the lines she wanted Jude to offer her, and then claims "'O it is too flattering, so I won't go on! But, say it's me!-say it's me!'" Again acquiescing, Jude perfunctorily reassures her "It is[text's italics] you, dear; exactly like you!'"(245). At which point, she forgives Jude his critical comments made in frustration at her continued refusal to truly elope with him.

Her text changes with her reverse in fortune. In histrionic fashion, she tells Jude "'whoever or whatever our foe may be, I am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprize. I am beaten, beaten!'" Seeing it as apropos of her own situation, she quotes Paul: "'"We are made a spectacle unto the world and to angels, and to men!"'"(342). Sue still sees herself on a large stage, engaged in a singular combat. Her opponent intends her as a lesson to the world!

Yet, it is easy to be critical and to only see the egotism. Jude shares a great deal of Sue's penchant for drama and self-aggrandizement. His Churchminster dream is a fantasy and it originates with some less than idealistic impulses. He seeks status, class, and titles. He too is capable of self-aggrandizement, as when after calculating his path to a salary of 5,000 pounds a year and a D.D., he aligns himself with Christ and declares, "'Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased'"(38).

Yet, in his portrayal of Jude, Hardy clearly traces out noble lines. In Jude's affecting summary speech to the crowd on Remembrance day at Christminster, he worries that he may have been "a paltry victim to the spirit of mental and social restlessness, that makes so many unhappy in these days'"(327). Yet, Jude reveals the noble and ultimate impulse of his Churchminster dream in outlining his failure to achieve it. It hasn't simply been about money or status. He tells the crowd, "And what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worse of me. I am in a chaos of principles-groping in the dark-acting by instinct and not after example'"(327).
Ultimately, Jude's original impulse to Churchminster never changes, though he fails it and himself. Clearly, he needed a mentor, a true teacher, somebody who would have been able to see him through his adolescence.

I have a deep affinity for Jude and what moves him despite his failure. Hardy describes the boy Jude: "It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to-for some place which he could call admirable...a spot in which...he could set himself to some mighty undertaking"(25).