Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in southwest England from about 1855-85; published in serial form in Harper’s Magazine in 1894-95, in book form in 1895.

SYNOPSIS

Jude Fawley, an orphan from a remote rural village in Dorsetshire, experiences professional and personal frustrations that lead to the extinction of his dreams.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840, in the village of Upper Bockhampton, in Dorset. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Hardy, a builder and master mason, and Jemima Hand. Both parents were from long-established Dorset families. The younger Thomas attended school from 1848-1856, entering the work world at age 16 as an apprentice to an architect and church restorer in Dorchester. In 1862 Hardy moved to London, where he worked for an architectural firm and became immersed in a program of self-education. He regularly attended church, both mainstream Anglican services and nonconformist evangelical services, and even considered entering the university, with an eye toward a career in the church. Religious doubts put an end to this scheme, and Hardy resumed his former employment in Dorchester in 1867. He meanwhile pursued his writing, both poetry and fiction, publishing his first novel, Desperate Remedies, in 1871. Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874, and the couple lived in London and Dorset before settling in 1885 at Max Gate—in a house that Hardy designed—on the outskirts of Dorchester. He was living here when Jude the Obscure, his fourteenth novel, appeared in book form in 1895. For the remaining 33 years of his life Hardy published only verse. He died on January 11, 1928. His ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey, and his heart was buried, as he had requested, in the church at Stinsford, near his birthplace. Hardy claimed that his turn from fiction to poetry was due at least partly to the negative reviews received by Jude the Obscure, a novel that powerfully criticized some aspects of society in the late Victorian era.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Class barriers to university admission

A central aspect of Jude the Obscure is Jude’s boyhood dream of attending the great university at Christ-minster in Hardy’s fictional world of Wessex. (Christminster is based on Oxford University, and Wessex on Hardy’s native county of Dorset.) In fact, a working-class boy like Jude would have no formal training to realize his dream. Free elementary education for all children in England was not mandated until the Education Act of 1870 or made compulsory until 1880. When Jude was a child, in the late 1850s, day schools of various sorts provided the only access to education for children of the lower classes. These day schools came in an assortment of types—charity schools, independent schools run by religious dissenters from outside the Church of England, and a few ancient grammar schools dating from the sixteenth century and supported by the Church of England. Locally administered, they were elementary schools and varied enormously in quality and curriculum. Attempts were made in the early nineteenth century to provide a national system of free elementary schools, but religious antagonisms between the Anglican church and the many nonconformist sects made organization impossible. In the novel, Jude does not attend the day school in Marygreen but works during the day and receives occasional instruction in the evenings from the local schoolmaster, an arrangement frequently found in the mid-nineteenth century among lower-class boys whose labor was of more immediate importance to the survival of their families than was their education. The upper classes, on the other hand, received the training necessary for attendance at Christminster (Oxford). For centuries Oxford functioned primarily as a preserve of the wealthy upper classes, whose children prepared for service in the Anglican clergy or for posts in the upper levels of government administration at home or in the colonies.

Aside from lack of training, Jude’s working-class status excludes him from attending an elite university like Oxford. Hardy’s novel accurately reflects the historical situation of higher education in mid-nineteenth-century England. Not only were Oxford and Cambridge universities too costly for middle-and lower-class students, they also remained virtually closed to dissenters and Roman Catholics until reform of the Test Acts in 1871, which had required taking communion according to the rites of the mainstream Church of England. Reform removed the religious obstacle, but class barriers remained to attendance at Oxford and Cambridge. Other universities, however, would have been realistic possibilities for Jude. By the time Hardy wrote the novel, London University (known today as University College London) was providing education for middle-and lower-class men, as were universities in Durham, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and other provincial centers. University education for women also developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

In pursuit of his dream, Jude begins a rigorous course of self-instruction, teaching himself Greek and Latin and reading deeply in classical and religious literature as well as popular works of science. While working-class men of Jude’s seriousness and industry might have been rare, they were not so uncommon as to render Jude’s character improbable, for this was the age of the literature of self-improvement. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in 1826, aiming to impart useful information to all classes of the community. The Society produced many works designed to show that factual knowledge about nature and history was of practical advantage, and their works sold widely among the middle and lower classes. While Jude’s studies are primarily theological, he represents the type of working-class individual for whom self-instruction was the only educational option available in the 1850s and 1860s. In the novel, Jude also belongs to the Artizans Mutual Improvement Society until the society learns of his unconventional relations with Sue Bridehead and ostracizes him. Innumerable working-class associations of this kind were common at the time, helping to spread popular scientific and technical knowledge as well as socialist ideology. Organizations such as the Salvation Army, association football leagues, and craft unions were also devoted to the entertainment and improvement of working-class life.

Religion and agnosticism

In Jude the Obscure, the central characters discuss many social and religious topics, all of which were of great relevance when the novel was written. Jude develops a thorough knowledge of the Bible and religious literature, and his awareness of current theological controversies is representative of contemporary attitudes toward religion.

Among the theological disputes of the day was the Oxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian Movement, which began in 1833 with sermons and tracts published by John Keble, Edward Pusey, John Henry Newman, and other eminent Anglican clergymen at Oxford. The Tractarians sought to renew the Church of England by reviving certain Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals abandoned since the reformation. They were reacting against liberalizing tendencies within the Church of England, tendencies that originated primarily in a faction known as the Broad Church, whose principles envisaged the church as a partner of the state, a relationship to which theological doctrine was strictly subordinate. Politically these liberalizing tendencies culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832, a measure that extended the franchise slightly to the newly populated industrial centers, disfranchising 56 boroughs, including ones with very small populations, and giving representation to 42 cities and towns that had previously lacked it. The measure transferred political power from the landowning aristocrats to the middle class, and the Tractarians saw it and other such measures as steps on the way to national apostasy. They wished to restore the Anglican Church to a position of spiritual preeminence in the nation and to resist the general trend toward secularization in British society. The Oxford Movement, at least at Oxford itself, effectively ended in 1845 when Newman and some of his followers converted to Roman Catholicism. With their conversion, the extremely conservative Tractarian Movement lost its most powerful supporters, and for the rest of the century a political and theological liberalism assumed the dominant position in the university. The successors of the Tractarians, however, continued to influence the contemporary religious mood outside Oxford. These second-generation Tractarians fostered personal piety and a respect for the church’s spiritual function in society, in opposition to the secular tendencies of liberalism, and their influence is evident in Jude the Obscure. When Jude gives up his study of religion and burns his library of theological and ethical works, into the incinerator go the writings of “Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, and Newman.” (Hardy, Jude the Obscure, p. 234). The latter three—William Paley, Edward Pusey, and John Henry Newman—were leaders of the Oxford Movement, while Joseph Butler and Philip Doddridge were eighteenth-century Anglican divines, and Taylor was a seventeenth-century bishop famous for his sermons. This group gives a fair cross-section of Jude’s beliefs: one nonconformist, Doddridge, and five High Churchmen, members of the traditional faction that favored hierarchy and ceremony.

COMTE, MILL, AND FREE THOUGHT

Auguste Comte was a nineteenth-century French philosopher who founded the school of philosophy known as Positivism, which taught that science, but it was a religion shorn of metaphysical trappings, with humanity itself as the object of worship. He also coined the term “sociology” and in fact is called the father of the field of sociology. In his efforts as a social reformer, Comte envisaged a society in which individuals and nations could live in harmony and comfort.

John Stuart Mill was the most influential British philosopher in the nineteenth century. He wrote important works on logic and economics, and in his ethical and political works he pointed out a sentiment of social solidarity and unity that was similar to Comte’s religion of humanity. Among Mill’s most influential essays were On Liberty(1859) and On the Subjection of Women (1869).

In other words, Jude is conventionally orthodox in his religious opinions.

Sue Bridehead, on the other hand, quotes liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and August Comte in the novel, which marks her as a religious skeptic and freethinker. Along with the ideas of Mill and Comte, Sue is also influenced by another movement of the day, the Higher Criticism, which began in Germany in the early nineteenth century and went on to gain many adherents in mid-century England. The Higher Criticism movement brought the study of history and philology to bear on the Bible in order to establish its textual accuracy and secure its legitimacy as the basis of Protestantism. But in many ways these efforts to apply scientific standards to Bible criticism had the opposite effect, casting doubt on the historical basis of many Old and New Testament events, on the veracity of miracles, and on the historical existence of Jesus. In Essays and Reviews (1860), a group of notable Oxford scholars—nicknamed the “Seven Against Scripture”—articulated many of these doubts. (Members of the group include Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and Baden Powell.) Other scientific endeavors contributed to the spread of religious agnosticism among intellectuals in England as well, in such fields as geology, archaeology, astronomy, and physics. Integral to scientific progress of the day was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859; also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), itself an important element in the decline of church authority and the growth of secularism. Lastly, the fields of anthropology and comparative religion, which developed with the arrival of information from the furthest reaches of England’s colonial empire, helped construct a larger picture of human beliefs, and this picture encouraged the increasingly secular climate in the “mother country.”

Woman’s emancipation

When Jude the Obscure was written, women in England could neither vote nor attend any of the older universities, nor sit on a borough or county council, nor enter any of the leading professions except medicine or teaching. Feminism in England is traceable in a variety of forms back to the eighteenth century and earlier (see A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). In the 1880s and 1890s, feminism advanced onto new fronts as women began to demand equality of education, jobs, and personal habits in terms particular to the era. Feminist leaders were espousing new ideas about women—their nature, sexuality, and interests—and Hardy was well aware of these new ideas. The mid-to-late-nineteenth-century women’s movement, for example, demanded greater employment opportunities for working-class women and an end to legislation that specifically excluded women from certain kinds of high-skilled jobs. At the same time, related questions of industrial legislation and trade union membership drew many women into socialist organizations and the labor movement toward the end of the century.

In Jude the Obscure, the character of Sue Bride-head is often identified with a feminist position. The critic Robert Gittings has argued, though, that Sue is representative of the emancipated women of the 1860s rather than the 1890s. For Gittings, Sue’s interest in the works of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte was common among certain women of the 1860s—known as the “Girl of the Period”; it was more typical of her than of the so-called “New Woman” of the 1890s, who sought greater sexual freedom, drank and smoked in public, and supported the woman’s suffrage movement (Gittings, p. 93). “The gen uine New Woman of the 1890s was likely to have political affiliations with socialism, to play some part in opening the professions to women, and probably to have received some sort of university training,” and Sue has none of these characteristics (Gittings, p. 94). For Gittings, Hardy was clearly modeling Sue, when she was anti-religious, rationalist, and positivist, on a woman of the 1860s.

Sexual liberation was another important element of Victorian feminism, along with the political and economic elements. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1882 and 1893 gave a wife the same right to her property as an unmarried woman, which was considered a triumph, since prior to these acts a woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage. However, many feminists continued to decry the economic and sexual oppression of prostitutes and the exposure of married women to venereal diseases because of the infidelities of their husbands. One strain of discourse about women rejected marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, and this strain also emerges in the opinions of Sue Bridehead.

The “marriage problem”

Jude the Obscure focuses on marriage as a social and religious institution, particularly the unhappy marriage. Divorce law in England was reformed by the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which made more generally attainable for the first time what had long been nearly impossible to all but the wealthiest British subjects. The act established a Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, but the provisions for unhappy wives differed from those for unhappy husbands. The husband had the right to a divorce simply on the grounds of his wife’s adultery, but a wife had to have proof that her husband committed not only adultery but also desertion, cruelty, rape, incest, or sodomy. Another act in 1878 allowed magistrates’ courts to recognize separation between spouses in the case of violence or desertion. Still, divorce remained relatively rare; as late as 1913 there would be only 577 in England and Wales combined (Cannon, p. 298).

The question of marriage and divorce came to the forefront of public attention in 1890 with the case of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. In December 1889, Captain William O’Shea filed a petition for divorce from his wife, Katherine, on the grounds of her adultery with Parnell. The case caused a storm of controversy and immense public discussion on the whole issue of love, marriage, and divorce. It was in this climate of opinion that serial publication of Jude the Obscure began in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in December 1894. Other specifically literary events also contributed to the topicality of the marriage question. Among these were current interest in the plays of Norwegian dramatist Heinrik Ibsen, first staged in England in the early 1890s, and interest in the novels of Grant Allen and the essays of Edward Carpenter. Ibsen’s powerful indictments of the evasions and lies of middle-class marriage occur in such works as The Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and Hedda Gabler (1890), all of which Hardy had read and some of which he saw performed in 1893. Allen’s novel The Woman Who Did (1895) follows the fortunes of an unconventional woman who rejects marriage as oppressive, lives and bears a child with her lover, and endures social condemnation and suffering after his death. Published the same month as Jude the Obscure, Allen’s novel is sensational and, in the opinion of feminists of the 1890s, even reactionary, yet less discerning reviewers classed both novels as attacks on the conventional pieties surrounding the sacrament of marriage. Finally, in essays such as “Love’s Coming of Age” (1896), Edward Carpenter discussed forthrightly the relationship between the sexes.

Modernization and industrialization

By the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization in England had turned the nation into the first predominantly urban society in human history. Rapid and unregulated growth of manufacturing towns disrupted the settled patterns of rural folkways, many of which had persisted largely unchanged for centuries. The countryside and the character of its people changed as it adapted to the new conditions. Among the changes was loss of population, as a number of forces coalesced to drive thousands off the land and into the new factory towns. Railroad expansion as well as new technologies and capitalistic methods meanwhile drastically altered farming, with ongoing shifts in rural society growing sharper between the years of Hardy’s birth and the end of the century. English agriculture during the third quarter of the nineteenth century had been prosperous, but after 1875 a series of disastrous harvests coincided with an influx of cheap grain from the United States to cause heavy losses for English farmers. Two “great depressions,” in 1875-84 and 1891-99, made it appear that the independent grain industry could not survive as it was then organized. On top of their other problems, in the light of the depopulation, the farmers had to cope with an acute labor shortage, which forced them to raise the wages of those workers who stayed on the land. In fact, by the end of the century the exodus from country to town had depleted the rural population enough for some critics to warn that English rural society was on the verge of collapse.

Commentators differed markedly in their proposals for reform: liberal economists advocated free trade and scientific farming as the solution, radicals called for a Socialist revolution, and others suggested land-reform measures that would make small-scale ownership the basis of England’s agriculture. Beginning in the 1860s, union organizing among rural laborers led to higher wages and improved conditions. Joseph Arch’s National Union spread quickly in the early 1870s among the southern counties of England, including Hardy’s Dorsetshire, relieving extreme cases of oppression, hunger, and misery among the rural laborers. Meanwhile, many reformers called for more education for the rural poor, while others demanded the complete abolition of education for the lower classes, claiming it was making the rural laborers discontented with their place in the social hierarchy. Hardy came to maturity during this period of ferment in rural England, and his novels chronicle the upheaval that changing social forces caused in individual lives. The critic Raymond Williams describes Hardy’s original contribution to the literature of the rural working class:

It is not only that Hardy sees the realities of laboring work…. It is also that he sees the harshness of economic processes, in inheritance, capital, rent and trade, within the community of the natural processes and persistently cutting across them. The social process created in this interaction is one of class and separation, as well as of chronic insecurity, as this capitalist farming and trading takes its course. The profound disturbances that Hardy records cannot then be seen in the sentimental terms of a pastoral: the contrast between country and town. The exposed and separated individuals, whom Hardy puts at the center of his fiction, are only the most developed cases of a general exposure and separation.

(Williams, p. 115)

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Jude the Obscure is set in Hardy’s fictional region of Wessex. The hero, Jude Faw-ley, was orphaned in early childhood and raised by his widowed aunt Drusilla Fawley in the remote rural village of Marygreen in Dorsetshire. After receiving encouragement from his schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson—whose parting words to Jude direct him to “be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can”—Jude aspires to attend the university at Christminster and become a clergyman (Jude, p. 34). Industrious, he shows remarkable scholarly aptitude, but lacks

BEHIND THE ARCHITECTURAL TIMES

With the growth in the economy and population of England came an increase in the demand for buildings which helps explain why the figure of the architect first emerges at this times as a discrete and recognizable professional. Hardy distinguished himself as an architect, winning two awards in 1863—a silver medal from The Institute of British Architects and first prize from the Architectural Association for design of a country mansion. Hardy’s attitudes toward architectural styles was formed during the height of England’s Gothic Revival, a movement traceable to the 1830s but at the peak of its popularity in the 1850s and waning by the late 1860s. This shift in taste is reflected in Jude the Obscure; the provincial Jude, whose own training as a stonemason was in the Gothic style, arrives in Christminster when Gothic has fallen out of favor and the Classical styte is dominant, another example of societal circumstances which Jude vainly labors.

formal education. Jude is a self-taught man; he reads theology and classical literature as possible during the day, when he drives his aunt’s bakery cart, and studies late into the night. At age 20, before he attains his goal of applying for admission to the university, Jude enters a disastrous marriage with the vital but vulgar Arabella Donn, who feigns pregnancy in order to trap Jude. In despair over his miserable situation, Jude walks to the middle of a frozen lake, hoping to fall through the ice and die. When this fails, he gets drunk. After cohabiting with her husband for three years, Arabella abandons Jude and immigrates to Australia. Jude then revives his interest in the university, moves to Christminster, and finds work as a stonemason while continuing his studies, still hoping for admission.

In Christminster, the 23-year-old Jude meets his cousin, Sue Bridehead, a 27-year-old woman with unconventional attitudes and religious opinions who works in a shop making ecclesiastical ornaments. Though strongly attracted to each other, Sue and Jude both believe members of their family are constitutionally unsuited to marriage. They nevertheless fall in love. Jude introduces Sue to his former schoolmaster, Phillotson, who now teaches in a village school near Christminster. Phillotson offers Sue a job as an instructor at his school, suggests she enroll in a teacher-training school, and eventually proposes marriage. In spite of the age difference—Phillotson is about 40—Sue agrees to marry him after she finishes teacher training, though Jude is the one whom she loves. Sick at heart at seeing Phillotson woo Sue, and having failed to gain admission to the university, Jude returns to his ailing old aunt at Marygreen and decides to spend the next few years preparing to enter the ministry.

When Sue later learns of Jude’s first marriage (to Arabella), she quits her training and abruptly marries Phillotson in what seems to be a fit of impulsive masochism. Jude agrees to give her away at the wedding. Sexual relations with Phillotson disgust and repulse Sue, whereupon she flees to Jude. Their own love remains un-consummated until Arabella returns and Sue grows desperate to retain Jude for herself.

Jude and Sue have two children together and also raise his child with Arabella, Little Father Time. The fact that Jude and Sue never married mortifies their respectable neighbors, so the two begin moving from place to place to find work and avoid scandal, which grows progressively more difficult. In the novel’s most horrific scene, Little Father Time, who seems to embody a Schopenhauer type of pessimism, hangs his two younger siblings and himself, leaving a note that reads, “Done because we are too menny” (Jude, p. 405). The shock and grief of this slaughter convince Sue that she has offended the Christian God by deserting Phillotson, taking up with Jude, and espousing free thought. Jude tries to reason with Sue:

“You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler, and you deserve more admiration than I gave. I was too full of narrow dogmas at that time to see it.”

“Don’t say that, Judel I wish my every fearless word and thought could be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation—that’s everything! I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!”

(Jude, pp. 353-54)

Sue insists on seeing the death of the children as a just retribution for her sins, and she gradually slips into an irrational process of self-punishment that finally leads her to return to Phillotson and submit to the repugnant sexual relations with him. Jude tries to reason with Sue but is unable to penetrate her by-now-extreme Christian dogmatism. In his sorrow, he imbibes alcohol, and his health gradually deteriorates. Through an unusual series of events Jude is reunited with the ever-calculating Arabella, who nurses him through his final illness with callous contempt, leaving him to die alone in his room with the bitter words from the biblical book of Job on his lips: “Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?” (Jude, p. 408).

Sue Bridehead and the vicissitudes of Victorian sex

Critics have continued to scrutinize the problematic nature of Sue’s sexuality since Jude the Obscure was published, and for this reason she often seems the novel’s most interesting character. After a few weeks of marriage to Phillotson, Sue tells Jude of the sexual “repugnance” she feels toward her husband, with whom conjugal relations raise “a physical objection—a fastidiousness or whatever it may be called” (Jude, pp. 227, 230). She cryptically explains that what tortures her so “is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way, in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness” (Jude, p. 230). Sue informs Phillotson of her feelings, saying she wishes to leave him and live with Jude, a scandalous proposal in Victorian England. To support her argument for such an unconventional arrangement, Sue quotes John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. Any man or woman, says Mill, “who lets the world, or his portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than ape-like imitation” (Jude, p. 239). Phillotson agrees to the separation, though he pays a high price: he experiences a loss of respectability in the eyes of the community that costs him his career. Once Sue and Jude begin cohabiting, their relations also remain sexless for many months, and they make love only seldom after first being physically intimate. “My nature is not so passionate as yours!” Sue tells Jude, to which he replies, “1 think you are incapable of real love” (Jude, p. 255).

The source of Sue’s sexual inhibitions remains obscure, although the speculation of critics has ranged from frigidity to homosexuality. Hardy’s friend and reviewer Edmund Gosse, for instance, supposes that Sue’s shrinking from sex and marriage was motivated by lesbianism. But Hardy responded

PESSIMISM AND SCHOPENHAUER

Hardy once wrote to a friend; “My pages show harm&ny of view with Darwin, Huxtey, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill, and others.” Among these others was Arthyr Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the German idealist philosopher who is sometimes called the father of pessimism, Schopenhauer maintained that an honest assessment of human existence in its totality reveals that suffering far outweighs pleasure and that, objectively considered, never to have been born at alt Is vastly preferable to existence under any conditions. The central postulate of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system was his conception of the Will, a blind and irrational striving that pervades nature and is ceaseless and insatiable. Compassion was the cardinal virtue in Schopenhauer’s ethics, since an awareness of the universality of human suffering leads the individual to sympathize and commiserate with alt fellow sufferers. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is akin to Buddhist thought, a relation he himself was aware of, as both deem it possible to escape from enslavement to the will by transcending the ego, which is the way, the two philosophies teach, to ultimate salvation. For Hardy, Scbopenhauer’s thought fit welt with current notions of a universal struggle for survival as the basis of organic life and of human iife as occurring within a context of vast, impersonal cosmic forces, where the desires and aspirations of individual human beings are meaningless or very nearly so. When Jude explains Little Father Time’s actions, he echoes Schopenhauer; “The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says It Is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

(Jude, p. 346)

that Sue’s “abnormalism consists in disproportion: not in inversion, her sexual instinct being healthy so far as it goes, but unusually weak and fastidious” (Hardy in Kramer, p. 173). Repeatedly in the novel, she evinces a tepid desire. Jude often refers to Sue as if she had no body: she is “the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfill the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with any man” (Jude, p. 235). By relating Sue’s psychological situation to the social institution of marriage, the novel renders her attitude even more complex. Sue repeatedly expresses a sense of “dread lest an iron contract” of marriage should extinguish the tenderness she and Jude share (Jude, p. 273):

Jude, do you think that when you must have me with you by law, we shall be so happy as we are now? The men and women of our family are very generous when everything depends upon their good-will, but they always kick against compulsion. Don’t you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don’t you think it is destructive to a passion whose essence is its gratuitousness?

(Jude, p. 286)

Whatever causes her sexual inhibitions, Sue’s staunch efforts to intellectualize, rationalize, and politicize an issue that she dare not confront in all its sensuousness and intimacy provides the novel with an excellent platform upon which to air related questions about the social and psychological conditioning of women and their sexual exploitation in marriage. Sue articulates many of the standard feminist views current in the 1890s. Furthermore, her attitude echoes an image propagated in Victorian society by Dr. William Acton, a venereal-disease specialist. According to Dr. Acton, the Victorian female was passionless: “I should say that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind” (Acton in Hellerstein, p. 177). Particularly when a woman is with child, said Acton, she loathes familiarity. “In some exceptional cases, indeed, feeling has been sacrificed to duty, and the wife has endured, with all the self-martyrdom of womanhood, what was almost worse than death” (Acton in Hellerstein, Hume, and Offen, p. 178). In view of such teachings, Sue Bridehead hardly seems like an anomaly for her time.

Sources and literary context

Like Jude, Hardy himself was largely self-taught, and his reading and its influences on his craft were very broad. He had a profound knowledge of the Bible and the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer and was thoroughly familiar with the works of Shakespeare. The English romantic poets were another important influence on Hardy, particularly Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. As indicated above, Hardy read widely in science and philosophy, Darwin and Thomas Huxley especially influencing his attitude toward life. Among English novelists, George Eliot is probably Hardy’s most direct forebear. Jude’s speech to the Christminster townspeople in part 6, for example, is modeled on a speech to workingmen given by one of Eliot’s characters in “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” (1867). Though Hardy claimed that Jude contained less autobiographical material than any of his other novels, critics have found abundant evidence that Hardy in fact put a great deal of his own circumstances and experiences into Jude.

Reception

Hardy’s novel was greeted with righteous indignation by the defenders of moral propriety in literature. Reviews with headlines such as “Jude the Obscene” and “Hardy the Degenerate” were among the more vituperative reactions, an experience Hardy later said had the effect of “completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing” (Hardy in Page, p. 6). As indicated above, Jude the Obscure was seen by some reviewers as an attack on the sanctity of marriage as a religious sacrament. Margaret Oliphant, a prolific author of popular romances and novels, reviewed Jude in Blackwood’s Magazine in January 1896 and found some parts of the novel “of the most unutterable foulness” and the whole “an assault on the stronghold of marriage, which is now beleaguered on every side” (Oliphant, pp. 139, 141). Oliphant was especially indignant that a writer of Hardy’s stature, whose works sold very widely, would descend to such depths of corruption. “There may,” she said, “be books more disgusting, more impious … more foul in detail, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not, we repeat, from any Master’s hand” (Oliphant, p. 138). Other guardians of public morality reacted similarly. The Bishop of Wakefield burned his copy of Jude the Obscure, prompting Hardy to remark in the “Postscript” to the 1912 edition that the bishop must have done so “in his despair at not being able to bum me” (Hardy in Page, p. 6).

Not all reviewers, however, were blind to the novel’s merits; before Hardy’s death it was recognized as a masterpiece, a status it continues to hold today. In fact, William Dean Howells lauded the novel in an early review in Harper’s Weekly (December 7, 1895), saying that Jude the Obscure “has not only the solemn and lofty effect of a tragedy … but it has unity very uncommon in the novel, and especially the English novel…. This tragedy of fate suggests the classic singleness of means as well as the classic singleness of motive” (Howells in Page, pp. 378-79).

—James Caufield

HAHOY’S FICTIONAL WESSEX

The setting for many of Hardy’s most successful novels is the region he called Wessex, and the localities in Hardy’s Wessex often correspond to real places in England, Some of these correspondences are listed below.

Hardy also renamed many of Oxford’s most famous colleges, though scholars differ over some of the designations, as the question marks here indicate,

For More Information

Cannon, John, ed. The Oxford Companion to British History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Draper, Jo. Thomas Hardy’s England. London: Cape, 1984.

Gittings, Robert. Young Thomas Hardy. London: Heinemann, 1975.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Reprint, London: Macmillan, 1974.

Hellerstein, Erna Olafson, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen. Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France and the United States. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1981.

Jedrzejewski, Jan. Thomas Hardy and the Church. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Kramer, Dale, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Oliphant, Margaret. “The Anti-Marriage League.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 159 (January 1896):135-49

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