Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

—Thomas Hardy, Preface to the first edition of Jude the Obscure (1895)

 

Thomas Hardy perhaps already sensed that there were elements in the first edition of Jude the
Obscure
—but not in the “abridged and modified” version of the novel serialized in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
—that would prompt what he calls “exception.” And indeed readers did take exception—exception, in particular, to what had been excised from the heavily bowdlerized serial version of the novel. The serial version omits the sexual component of the relationship between Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead; it casts them instead simply as friends and cousins, their children adopted rather than the product of an illegitimate union. The editor at
Harper’s
kept Hardy to his contract, despite Hardy’s attempt to extricate himself from it when the writing blossomed into something that would not suit the readership of the magazine. Instead, as Robert Purdy shows in
Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study
, in response to the editor’s (apologetic) protest about the content, Hardy consented to revise and bowdlerize the story. For the first edition of the narrative in volume form Hardy returned to the narrative what we might call his original intentions—those elements he had taken out, as he pens in the margins of his manuscript copy, “for serial publication only.” The resulting fiction is one that indeed captures both the “deadly war waged between flesh and spirit” and the tragedy of a person whose goals and aims result in failure: the tragedy, indeed, of the obscure.

The negative response to the appearance of
Jude the Obscure
on the literary scene of 1895 was strong but not unanimous. The Bishop of Wakefield famously reported that his disgust at the moral tenor of the book had prompted him to throw it in the fire—an act that Hardy refers to in his postscript (written in 1912) as a substitution practiced “in his despair at not being able to burn me” (p. 4). Moral outrage at the novel was promulgated by newspaper reviews in America and England alike, though the literary luminaries of the day issued more sober appraisals, acknowledging both the difficulty of the subject and yet, in some cases, continuing the castigation. Mrs. Margaret Ohphant, a prolific and popular novelist and reviewer of the day, writing in
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
in January 1896, declared that the novel was a “nauseous tragedy” and “an assault on the stronghold of marriage.” At stake in the novel, according to Oliphant, was the institution of marriage, for she read in Hardy’s plot line social prescriptions that veered from the shocking to the grotesque. In referring to the violence suffered by Jude’s children, she bitingly asks: “Mr. Hardy knows, no doubt as everybody does, that the children are a most serious part of the question of the abolition of marriage. Is this the way in which he considers it would be resolved best?”

William Dean Howells, the American novelist and editor, defended Hardy’s novel in the December 7, 1895, issue of
Harper’s Weekly
magazine by pointing out that the genre was tragedy: “It has not only the solemn and lofty effect of a great tragedy ... but it has unity very uncommon in the novel, and especially the English novel.” If there are displeasing elements of the book—and Howells states as much, and warns us that the novel “is not for all readers”—they are elements that Howells suggests “are deeply founded in the condition, if not the nature of humanity.” Edmund Gosse, an influential reviewer and novelist, would go further in the January 1896 issue of the journal
Cosmopolis
and warn that “censure is the duty of the moralist and not the critic.” Yet despite his admiration for the novel, even Gosse acknowledges that he felt disgust at certain of its elements. In defense of the novel he pleads for Hardy’s stature as reason to grant him leeway about his themes. At best, Gosse suggests, we should acknowledge the power, even if negative, of Hardy’s art: “We may dislike her, we may hold her intrusion into our consciousness a disagreeable one, but of her reality there can be no question: Arabella lives.” If Arabella lives on in the consciousness of innumerable readers of
Jude
the Obscure, it is an impression that has a history beginning with the novel’s first issue.

Hardy’s stature as a novelist when
Jude the Obscure
was published guaranteed him a certain degree of critical attention, but the attention he was to receive was so negative as to alter the course of his career. Jude the Obscure was Hardy’s final novel. In one of the strangest turns in literary history, Hardy at the age of fifty-five turned to poetry, which he continued to write until his death in 1928 at the age of eighty-eight. In letters to close friends he pretends a somewhat jaunty indifference to the negative response to
Jude,
but in an essay entitled “The Profitable Reading of Fiction,” which appeared in the journal Forum in 1888, Hardy’s defensiveness about readers suggests the effect the reception of his novel would have upon him:

If Hardy had become wary of a certain kind of reader, his bitterness toward what he calls “the mentally and morally warped ones” did not prevent him from continuing to believe that such “imbeciles” numbered in the dozens, not the thousands. He continued to tinker with the novel in subsequent editions. In the 1903 edition he tempered the scene in which Arabella throws the pig genitals at Jude, while in the 1912 edition he introduces some two hundred small but nevertheless effectively important changes. These changes, which the edition you read here reflects, are generally considered to have been softening gestures to the depiction of Sue. For instance, as the bibliographical critic Robert Slack has shown, in the 1903 edition Jude threatens to return to Arabella unless Sue consents to live with him (and, it is inferred, become his sexual partner), and Sue agrees to it because he has “conquered” her; in the 1912 edition, Sue’s acquiescence is the result of love. The key words “I do love you” are included seventeen years after the first publication of the novel. The revisions that Hardy makes go beyond an author’s usual attention to errors in early editions. Jude clearly stayed with Hardy in the years following his switch to poetry, though whether we should understand that switch in light of a renunciation inspired by the extremity of the negative reaction to Jude or as an excuse for returning to the genre (poetry) with which he began his writing career is less certain; it was, if nothing else, a decisive one.

So why was
Jude the Obscure
so upsetting to many of those who read it when first published? The representation of the marriage between Jude Fawley and his wife, Arabella, conformed neither to traditional representations of courtship in the English novel, nor to contemporary standards of morality. It was accused of being indecent and permeated with coarse sexuality; even by the end of Hardy’s life, when the novel had received its due recognition and had been translated into numerous languages, Jude was remembered with admiration in Hardy’s obituary as a great novel of human sexuality. If it is difficult to understand the level of anxiety Hardy’s critique of marriage engendered, it is perhaps indicative of how far removed we are from the social context of the time, especially from the issue of marriage and divorce, which was very much in the forefront of the public consciousness in 1890. What became known as the “Parnell case” inspired a public controversy around the subject of divorce as well as becoming the cause celebre of the day. The case began with a Captain William O’Shea, who filed for divorce from his wife on the grounds of her having committed adultery with Charles Parnell, the premier Irish politician and agitator of his day. Although the divorce was granted, the English Liberal Party urged Parnell’s resignation on the grounds that his leadership was no longer tolerable. The cause of Irish Home Rule suffered an almost fatal blow from what was widely considered Parnell’s moral turpitude. Parnell died in 1891, ruined in reputation and in health, but the discussion and polemics about the question of the sacredness of marriage did not die with him.