Revisiting Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
I have a distinct image of myself newly graduated from college, lying in the top bunk in a friend’s house in Sweden and finishing Jude the Obscure in the long, otherworldly June daylight. Thirty-six years have passed since then; my husband and I have raised three children to adulthood. And this month, I revisited Jude the Obscure to divine the shadow it cast on my reading of Brideshead Revisited (more on that here). But like any great novel revisited after so many years, the story opened for me in a whole new way. Now, I read Jude the Obscure as a book about mental illness—specifically depression, though the book also deals with scrupulosity.
There are a few striking similarities between Brideshead and Jude: both stories involve moral scruples surrounding divorce, and both take place in part in great university towns (Oxford in Brideshead, the fictional Christminster in Jude). But while Waugh’s Charles Ryder can afford to attend university, Jude, who is of the peasant class, tutors himself in the hope of gaining admittance one day. When a coarse young woman named Arabella entraps Jude into marriage, he takes a surprisingly progressive view of sexual mores:
There seemed to him…something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancellation of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labour… because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness.
This is the second time Jude is inclined to discard social norms—the first is when he resolves to be educated beyond his own class–and Jude’s many reversals exacerbate his depressive tendencies, particularly toward alcohol. The fickle Arabella soon leaves, and Jude, who is trained as a stonemason, moves to Christminster, where his more educated cousin Sue Bridehead also lives. Jude’s great-aunt warns him strictly not to contact Sue; there is some sort of curse on his family, she says, and the Fawleys oughtn’t to marry. Jude cannot offer himself to his cousin in any case, because he is not free.
When Jude arrives in Christminster after dark, he feels completely detached: “[k]nowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.” Soon, Jude is aware of unseen presences: “There were poets abroad;” ‘Speculative philosophers drew along;” “The scientists and philologists followed.” But, in the morning, “the colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances.”
It isn’t long before Jude encounters his cousin and becomes enamored of her, though it takes him a while to unveil his identity. When Sue finally writes to him, he offers to meet her “at the cross in the pavement which marked the spot of the Martyrdom.” It is Sue who recognizes just how inauspicious this meeting place is. They start out as friends; Jude introduces his cousin to his old schoolmaster Mr. Phillotson, whose example has drawn Jude to Christminster in the first place. Phillotson has not made a success of himself, and when Sue comes to teach at his school, he falls in love with her. Sue has always been flighty and delicate; she has a fine mind, but she lacks the courage of her convictions. When she learns that Jude is already married, she impulsively accepts Phillotson’s offer—though she develops such an aversion to him once they are married that he is at last moved to release her. Sue and Jude drift from place to place in what appears on the surface to be a free-spirited and illicit union, though they live chastely together for years.
Jude the Obscure is full of remarkably modern speeches. Sue says that she “’may hold the opinion that, in a proper state of society, the father of a woman’s child will be as much a private matter of hers as the cut of her underlinen, on whom nobody will have any right to question her.’” Such anti-family ideas are socially ruinous; and yet Jude tries to placate her. “’That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.’” (Later, as Jude is losing his faith, he will accuse Sue of wanting to save her own soul at the expense of his.)
And while Phillotson suffers for his renunciation of Sue, Jude’s Arabella inconveniently reappears. She wants Jude to divorce her so she can properly marry the man she has been living with in Australia. And she announces that Jude has a son whom he must immediately take off her hands.
“Little Father Time,” as the boy is known, is a morose child who seems like an old man. His silent advent on the train is absolutely terrifying; in his melancholy nature, he takes after Jude:
[h]e was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.
The child’s arrival brings out Sue’s latent scrupulosity concerning her flight from her unhappy marriage. Her “supersentiveness [is] disturbed” when the boy comes; Jude “[finds] her in the dark, bending over an armchair.” And yet Sue promises to be a mother to him, though his resemblance to Arabella incites a horror in her. The child asks,
“is it you who’s my real mother, at last?” … Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. She thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.
Meanwhile, Jude writes to the heads of the various colleges in Christminster to ask if there are any funds set aside for the education of one such as him. The only one who deigns to reply advises Jude to remain content in his own class. But it becomes harder and harder for Jude to find work as people gossip about his unconventional family, which has now grown to include two younger siblings and a child on the way. Little Father Time absorbs these concerns, as Sue makes no attempt to hide anything from him.
“I couldn’t bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely. – Why was I half-wiser than my fellow-women? … It was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!”
Jude and Sue are well-attuned to one another’s moods and can adjust for them, but the child has no such coping skills. The family makes its way back to Christminster in time for Remembrance Day so that Jude, who is quite ill by now, can indulge in self-reproach at his failure to enter the college. But when the family is unable to secure adequate lodgings together, Little Father Time brings about an unthinkable tragedy. As Jude will say later,
“[t] he 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.”
How prescient this seems in light of the dangerous influences young children are exposed to today!
Unlike Charles Ryder, who turns toward Christianity at the end of Brideshead Revisited, Jude loses his faith when Sue drifts away from him.
“You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may be called, if it’s that which has caused this deterioration in you. That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of, if they could have known you—should degrade herself like this! I am glad I had nothing to do with Divinity—damn glad—if it’s going to ruin you in this way!”
Of course, it is not Christianity per se that has caused this “deterioration” in Sue; she suffers terribly from scrupulosity over past sins. Some might say that the times simply haven’t caught up to her yet. But today’s moral laxity doesn’t support human flourishing, either.
The tragic ending of Jude is so much darker than the ending of Brideshead, and yet it does not disturb my expectations at all. I had no wish to see things turn out happily in the end, perhaps because Hardy’s sensibility feels more like the naturalism of Zola: the self-interested Arabella, having exploited Jude’s grief, lures the lascivious Dr. Vilbert with his own “love-philtre” before Jude is cold on his deathbed, while the terrible grief to which Sue is subjected deranges her thoughts. Sue and Jude have been gradually changing places, as he loses his faith while she finds a scrupulous one. There is more straightforward tragedy here, while perhaps Brideshead aims to have it both ways.
And yet you might say that Julia’s choice at the end of Brideshead Revisited–a choice that honors the Catholic understanding of marriage–revisits (and thereby corrects) Sue Bridehead’s tragic, disordered choices in Jude the Obscure. Waugh looks clear-eyed at the world with a true faith, while Hardy quotes Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Gallilean; the world has gone grey from thy breath.”
And that’s a pagan poem I can hardly bear to read.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 