Jude The Obscure – Thomas Hardy, 1895 ★★

The Cruelest Art

As is so with butchers and lawyers, being a good novelist requires more than a little healthy sadism. Needs of drama and conflict require putting characters through the wringer, even (especially?) those you like.

Perhaps Thomas Hardy minded that as, after Jude The Obscure, he left novels behind and switched to poetry.

If so, he made sure he got every last dreg of cruelty out of his system by spilling it on the page of his final manuscript.

The title character is Jude Fawley, introduced as an 11-year-old orphan in Marygreen, a farming community set in Hardy’s fictional English county of Wessex. Jude dreams of going to a university while earning what little he can throwing rocks at crows on a farm. A lapse of kindness to the birds gets him thrashed and fired.

“It would have been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy!” sighs his spinster aunt Drusilla. “But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny he can.”

Eventually Jude grows up to have his dreams shattered, his life ruined, and the love of his life lost, each event repeated multiple times. While despair doesn’t start out so overwhelming a theme, it takes over by the sixth and final section, never to relent.

Hardy's original manuscript for Jude The Obscure, which he edited carefully by hand for serial publication in European editions of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, beginning in December 1894. The full novel shocked many. He would later note a copy of the book being burnt by a bishop, "probably in his despair at not being able to burn me." Image from https://beta.fitz.ms/news/original-manuscript-of-thomas-hardy%27s-jude-the-obscure.

Trouble of a more manageable sort is a constant of Jude The Obscure, taking the form of everything from social class to organized religion to marriage but ultimately marked by the heavy toll of social expectations.

“I have been thinking,” she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, “that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.”

The “she” in this passage is Sue Bridehead, Jude’s cousin and undying object of his romantic devotion. Whether or not Sue feels the same is a question Jude The Obscure spends a lot of pages not resolving.

Thomas Hardy is a difficult novelist for me. Torture tests are not my favorite form of fiction, and I find myself going through them with him much too often. His first major novel, Far From The Madding Crowd, offers some lighter moments amid its pain, but in the main people you meet in Hardy’s fiction are a sad lot, forced along pre-determined paths to miserable ends like lambs to a slaughter.

Tess Of The D’Urbanvilles would have seemed the apex for this approach, but before reading it I was made aware Jude presented even crueler fare. This proved so, though not as quickly as I expected.

In 1906, Walter Tyndale, a watercolorist who often used Hardy novels as subjects of his art, painted this scene of Jude in the fields of Blackmore Vale. Image from https://www.antiquemapsandprints.com/shaftesbury-blackmore-vale-jude-obscure-1906-old-antique-print-picture-43763-p.asp.

At its outset, Jude The Obscure sets out in a Dickensian direction. Yes, his childhood is hard, but hardly unendurable. Aunt Drusilla is a pill, but she does feed the boy and provide some semblance of domesticity. The people of his town are a colorful and varied lot. Hardy bores in on Jude’s youthful dislocation in a way that connects through the centuries:

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

At one point in this first section, set entirely in Marygreen, Jude is given responsibility for delivering Drusilla’s baked goods by wagon. Hardy explains how Jude is given to reading his classics while steering his wagon, and that the local authorities are on alert to catch him for his lack of attentiveness. Knowing Hardy, I knew this would result in some terrible calamity, fatal both to his horse and his aunt’s business.

And then…nothing happened. My expected calamity not only never materialized, it never got brought up. Jude completes his errands without incident before moving on to become a teenaged mason and a qualified success. Fatal, sudden accidents abound in Hardy’s fiction, so I was surprised to discover he gave them a rest here.

Jude encounters Arabella washing pig's innards with her friends while walking home to Marygreen, a chance encounter which winds up doing Jude no good. Illustration by William Hatherell from https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/hatherell/1.html.

In fact, Jude’s failures throughout are more self-determined, or the products of human agency rather than an uncaring cosmos. He sets out to be a university scholar, but is sidetracked by marrying to the wrong woman, brusque Arabella, who introduces herself by throwing a pig’s penis at him and then seduces him so to force a marriage by getting pregnant.

“Lots of girls do it; or do you think they’d get married at all?” one of Arabella’s friends explains.

One problem I have reading Hardy is the sense of insects being under a microscope. He employed a scientific sensibility to his writing that lent him modernity in his own time but can come off trite and dated now. Jude is a remarkably learned man, capable of looking at his life objectively and seeing flaws and snares. Yet he is helpless all the same, because fate is character, or something Victorian like that.

Sue and Jude exchange downcast glances in a scene from late in the novel, as she is led away by another. Illustration by William Hatherell from https://www.alamy.com/.

Much worse in this regard is Sue, Hardy’s stab at a modern woman. Sue Bridehead is very modern, disdainful of Christianity (“The cathedral has had its day,” she declares) and of a woman’s traditional wifely role. Yet she won’t give Jude a simple answer when he asks if she loves him, and time and again proves her own ruination, either by marrying the wrong man and then repenting, or marrying the right man and still repenting. The chick just can’t make up her mind.

Jude exclaims on this late in the novel:

“I never knew such a woman for doing impulsive penances, as you, Sue! No sooner does one expect you to go straight on, as the one rational proceeding, than you double round the corner!”

By this point in Jude The Obscure, Sue has lost much of her reason, dealt some terrible blows which even for Hardy come off rather extreme. The book never did pull me in, but for most of its length it does give you consistency of character. Jude and Sue make their stand, take some lumps by disapproving society, and advance the philosophy of non-conformity as a reasonable mode of life.

Then Sue undergoes a final personality reversal that crushes Jude.

You can see why the book got Hardy some trouble in his day, and admiration in ours. His view is a brave one, bravely expressed. But the characters never breathe, and their story never feels real.

Sue (Kate Winslet) and Jude (Christopher Eccleston) on the run from social scorn in a scene from a 1996 film adaptation. The fact the couple are cousins is brought up in the book, as well as the fact their family has had bad luck with marriage in general. Image from https://kentfilmoffice.co.uk/filmed-in-kent/1996/10/jude-1996/.

We are told Jude and Sue’s love is some precious thing, but all they ever do is talk. For a long time, Sue won’t consummate their union sexually, apparently because she abhors anything that smacks of wifely duties, though it may be the sex itself that bothers her. Jude finds her so admirable that he gladly gives up his religion for her, which might seem a sacrifice had Hardy suggested Jude ever found anything worthwhile in Christian faith.

What Jude ultimately worships is learning, though this too is superficial. His mecca is Christminster, a great university city just visible from the pastures of Marygreen. Jude longs to study there, but can only find work in town as a mason. Eventually he comes to realize there is more to life than poring over ancient Greek texts:

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life. These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ nor Minster.

Oxford, city of learning and of the university of the same name, was Hardy's model for Christminster. As one Marygreen resident puts it: “‘Tis all learning there – nothing but learning, except religion. And that’s learning too, for I never could understand it.” Image from https://www.linkedin.com/school/oxford-continuing-education/.

Alas, Jude is not to find happiness even after accepting such a fate. Social norms are such that Jude and Sue continually find themselves running afoul of narrow-minded community leaders when they inevitably discover the couple is not in fact married.

I found this tangent strained the more Hardy pulled it, as if the pair were the only unmarried couple in all of England: “I can’t bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way!” Sue exclaims.

If the answer seems a simple one, to just marry and settle down, it is beyond Jude and especially Sue’s capacity, however much they need acceptance. When she does agree to marry, it is not to Jude, but to a middle-aged schoolteacher who fancies her. Why she does this may be tied to her dislike for sex, or for marriage, or a need to punish Jude for marrying Arabella before he even met Sue, but it came off to me as a contortion of her character to boil up some drama.

Thomas Hardy, as painted by William Strang in 1893, two years before Jude's publication. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy.

Hardy’s writing ability is a saving grace, here as in his other novels. He had a jeweler’s ability to cut and fit his words just so to craft a perfect sentence. Walking through Christminster, Jude takes in the dilapidated condition of its many historic buildings:

The condition of several moved him as he would have been moved by ancient sentient beings. They were wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against years, weather, and man.

In a 1961 afterword in my old Signet paperback, A. Alvarez declares Jude The Obscure to be “Hardy’s last and finest novel,” but calls out its deficiencies, too. “The dialogue, for example, is, with very little exception, forced and hollow,” Alvarez writes.

I didn’t quite find that so, but I do agree that Sue is a “bodiless idea” more than a character. Alvarez calls Hardy’s move to poetry a logical forward step in his development as an artist. I see it more as weariness with the toil of novel-writing, a weariness I found myself sharing more and more as Jude ground to its predetermined end.