Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

*contains spoilers*

There is a profound sense of irony running through Thomas Hardy’s most celebrated work, Jude the Obscure. As our protagonist, Jude Fawley, seeks a higher existence through a determined and self-productive study in Latin and Greek, having witnessed and been inspired by the angelic haze of the lights of Christminster in the distance, he naïvely believes that; “a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher” would be sufficient to provide him with the tools that would allow him to rapidly master these foreign tongues. He learns otherwise, however, as the acquisition of knowledge requires tireless study and “plodding” – though Jude, with his consistently impressive sense of dedication, pursues. This pursuit, as it happens, is constantly interrupted…by…well, the struggle – and the struggle is long.

To begin with, Jude is duped into marriage by the busty and frivolous Arabella, whose pretentious sucking in of the cheeks in order to feign natural and cherub-like clefts is prophetic of the scheming and deception in which she perseveres throughout the text. The married couple’s split – rather importantly a divorce is never sought – is instigated by Jude’s discovery of Arabella’s false pregnancy claims, and accompanied by a failed attempt at slow-bleeding a pig, though many years later Arabella ironically informs Jude that, after her escape to the Antipodes, she did indeed bear a child of Jude’s: the enigmatic Little Father Time. In one of Hardy’s typical uses of irony to express social constrictions, Jude falls deeply for his cousin, Sue Bridehead, though it is Jude’s confession of his hasty marriage to Arabella that triggers Sue’s eventual union with Jude’s old schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who it turns out was the reason Jude pursued an education at Christminster to begin with. Two unhappy marriages are thus formed, and in doing so Hardy begins his critique on the institution of marriage.

Jude and Sue, both in loveless marriages, cannot be parted for long. Hardy presents Sue as the completed half to an unfinished Jude, which immediately brings to mind Emily Bronte’s Cathy and Heathcliff from her sublime Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights: a love that cannot stand to be together but cannot bear to be apart. Jude is constantly eluded by Sue, and this is no more apparent as Sue educates Jude in scepticism in lieu of the educational opportunities never afforded to him by the likes of Christminster. As Jude’s medieval Christianity is shaken by Sue’s “Greek joyousness”, society’s watchful eye regards her unconventional union with Jude with scorn and discomfort, and Sue is moved to seek atonement in the rigid and archaic faith from which she originally frees Jude. ALL eludes Jude, essentially, and his frustration, confusion and anger over the loss of Sue to both Christianity and Phillotson, is his true downfall. This, of course, follows the tragic events involving Little Father Time, whose wretchedly fatalistic hypotheses on the nature existence precipitates the murder of all of Jude and Sue’s children, as well as his own suicide. Just as Christminster represents Jude’s gold standard of success, Little Father Time, the product of his union with Arabella, represents his eventual decline and failure: the potential for success versus morose and absolute negativity.

This novel, one of the most poignant and progressive of its time, was so poorly received upon publication that Hardy resolved never to write again. I can only speak truly for myself when I say: thank you, Thomas Hardy, even if it is a couple of hundred years late. You were right.