JUDE THE OBSCURE

 * CHARACTER STUDY OF JUDE AND SUE BRIDEHEAD...........

                      Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy,  which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. It is Hardy's last completed novel.

                          Its protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man, a stonemason, who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.

                             Thomas Hardy  (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot,  he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.

                           While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as, 

# Far from the Madding Crowd (1874),

# The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), 

# Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), 

# Jude the Obscure (1895). 

                         During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W.H.Auden and Philip Larkin.

                                  JUDE  

                             Jude is obscure in that he comes from uncertain origins, struggles largely unnoticed to realize his aspirations, and dies without having made any mark on the world. He is also obscure in the sense of being ambiguous: he is divided internally, and the conflicts range all the way from that between sexual desire and knowledge to that between two different views of the world. Jude is, therefore, struggling both with the world and with himself.

                                 He is not well equipped to win. Though he is intelligent enough and determined, he tries to force his way to the knowledge he wants. Though well-intentioned and goodhearted, he often acts impulsively on the basis of too little objective evidence. 

                                    Though he is unable to hurt an animal or another human being, he shows very little concern for himself and his own survival, often needlessly sacrificing his own good. 

                                      He never learns, as Phillotson finally does perhaps too late, to calculate how to get what he wants. In short, he is more human than divine, as Hardy points out.

                                  He is obsessed with ideals. Very early he While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure(1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W.H.Auden and Philip Larkin.

                         Christminster into an ideal of the intellectual life, and his admitted failure there does not dim the luster with which it shines in his imagination to the very end of his life. He searches for the ideal woman who will be both lover and companion, and though he finds passion without intellectual interests in Arabella and wide interests but frigidity in Sue he maintains the latter as his ideal to his deathbed. Recognizing the Christminster holiday just before he dies, Jude says, "And I here. And Sue defiled!"

                             Jude is reconciled to his fate before he dies only in the sense that he recognizes what it is. In a conversation with Mrs. Edlin he says that perhaps he and Sue were ahead of their time in the way they wanted to live. 

 

                                  He does not regret the struggle he has made-, at the least, as he lies ill he tries to puzzle out the meaning of his life. At the very end, however, like Job he wonders why he was born. But then so perhaps does every man, Hardy seems to imply.

                              A young man with a passion for learning who aspires to be a professor despite his position in the working class. He works as a stone-mason and academic life is always outside of his reach. The novel follows his career woes and his tumultuous love life, centered on his tragic relationship with cousin Sue Bridehead.

                                An orphaned child, Jude Fawley comes to live with his great-aunt at Marygreen and is inspired by his schoolmaster to move eventually to Christminster, a university town, obtain his education there, and enter the Anglican priesthood. 

                                    Jude is kind, noble, appealing, and capable, but very much a loner, unnoticed and insignificant in grand scheme of things. He is easily swayed by others' strong opinions and loves more than he is loved. Jude's dreams and ambitions are thwarted from the beginning—first by a disastrous marriage and then by class barriers that make it impossible to enter the university. 

                                 Later his desire to live with his soulmate is thwarted by social conventions. Eventually everything Jude cares for is taken from him, even the idea of turning toward God.

                     SUE BRIDEHEAD

                              It is easy for the modern reader to dislike Sue, even, as D. H. Lawrence did, to make her into the villain of the book. (Lawrence thought Sue represented everything that was wrong with modern women.) Jude, as well as Hardy, obviously sees her as charming, lively, intelligent, interesting, and attractive in the way that an adolescent girl is.

                         But it is impossible not to see other sides to her personality: she is self-centered, wanting more than she is willing to give; she is intelligent but her knowledge is fashionable and her use of it is shallow; she is outspoken but afraid to suit her actions to her words; she wants to love and be loved but is morbidly afraid of her emotions and desires.

                             In short, she is something less than the ideal Jude sees in her; like him she is human. She is also a nineteenth-century woman who has given herself more freedom than she knows how to handle. 

                                She wants to believe that she is free to establish a new sort of relationship to men, even as she demands freedom to examine new ideas. But at the end she finds herself in the role of sinner performing penance for her misconduct. As Jude says, they were perhaps ahead of their time.

                                 If she is not an ideal, she is the means by which J tide encounters a different view of life, one which he comes to adopt even as she flees from it. She is also one of the means by which Jude's hopes are frustrated and he is made to undergo suffering and defeat. 

                             But it is a frustration which he invites or which is given him by a power neither he nor Sue understands or seems to control.

                                    Sue Bridehead is a nonconformist, an independent individual, even from childhood. In Christminster she earns a living as an ecclesiastical designer and lives as a free woman. She becomes involved with Jude and as a result makes a bad marriage with an older schoolteacher whom she then leaves to live with Jude without the benefit of marriage. 

                                  Her actions often show her as masochistic or, at best, carelessly self destructive, at war with herself, and uninterested in physical intimacy. Sue is an agnostic, but after losing her children she comes to think God is punishing her for defying convention and spends considerable time in church and living according to Christian doctrine.

                                      Jude's intelligent, independent cousin. She works first as an artist-designer and later as a teacher. Sue is a modern woman and a free-thinker. She rebels in her marriage and carries out a scandalous affair with Jude. She has a nervous disposition and has trouble making decisions about relationships.

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