Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Many people consider
Jude the Obscure
to be, among other things, part of that larger discussion of love and its relation to marriage and divorce that was so active in those years. It should be noted that Hardy specifically denied that Jude was a manifesto on what people at that time called “the marriage question.” Even so, his own description in the original preface to the novel in 1895 suggests that even if Hardy did not explicitly frame his novel around the sociological issues of the day, he nevertheless was quite aware that the novel spoke to the sometimes vexed relation between “flesh” and “spirit.” In describing his intention in writing Jude, Hardy wrote in the preface to the first edition: “To tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken” (p. 3).

Jude’s “unfulfilled aims” were indeed on display in the novel’s representation of how he and Arabella came to be married; two months into a relationship that had clearly turned sexual, Jude proposes going away by himself, as he wishes “some things had never begun!” (p. 58). Arabella’s insinuation, later proved false, that she is pregnant prompts Jude to marry her, even though as he acknowledges to her that he had “never dreamt six months ago, or even three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up of my plans” (p. 58). Hardy denied that any exception could be taken to the “handling”—what we might understand as the representational choices he made—of the tragic event. But the narrative voice describing the scene of marriage can hardly be said to be supportive of the marriage vows: “And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore” (p. 59).

The critique of marriage here is based on the problem Hardy sees with extending the momentary impulse of sexual feeling into an infinite futurity; in the 1912 edition he underscored his critique by adding language (“at every other time of their lives
till death took them
”) that echoed the marriage vow. Here, the marriage vow is represented as a tool of exaggeration, one that extends and codifies fleeting emotion. The critique of the permanency of marriage continues when Arabella reveals that she had been mistaken in thinking herself pregnant. Jude, already disgusted by the evidence of a fake hairpiece and feigned dimples, is not only stunned by the revelation but cognizant that the “transitory instinct,” or sexual desire, has passed—and yet, as the narrative points out, “But the marriage remained” (p. 63). Here, the persistence of marriage as an outward form is meant to echo the persistence of objects with which the novel opens:

The piano is the result of a momentary impulse; bought at auction, it fed an enthusiasm the schoolmaster used to feel for learning music that was never fulfilled. If the impulse to purchase and play the piano was brief, its persistence as a fact of the schoolmaster’s life beyond its usefulness is evident here at the description of moving day—much like the marriage that remained for Jude long after the impulse that fed that enthusiasm had waned. That Hardy opens his novel with the problem of the piano seems somewhat random unless one understands it in light of the critique of marriage to come. The opening passage’s fixation on the persistence of the piano is what we might call a first-level analysis of impulse—a critique here of a piano that is meant to shed light on or foreshadow the more complicated analysis of the persistence of marriage, beyond the life span of the impulse that inspired it, to come. Like the piano for Phillotson, the marriage that “remained” for Jude would become as the piano had for the schoolmaster: “a perpetual trouble to him ever since.”

That Hardy locates the origin of the novel’s tragedy at least in part in the persistence of the social form of marriage beyond its usefulness is evident in his postscript to the novel of 1912. That his intention was to write a tragedy is evident from his reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as his realization that the potential conflict between emotions and the social contract of marriage could produce a universal tragedy: “A marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties—being then essentially and morally no marriage—and it seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy, told for its own sake as a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was universal, and not without a hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein” (p. 5). The catharsis that Hardy envisions from the tragedy is evident in the postscript, but it is signaled even earlier, in the title of the novel, Jude the Obscure. The way in which Hardy fashions his title alludes quite obviously (and with the heavy irony that is Hardy’s trademark) to tragedy, particularly Greek tragedy: Jude the Obscure echoes Oedipus the King. Of course the question that immediately ensues is whether an obscure person can have a tragedy—Jude is no king, nor even a prince, as was Hamlet. Hardy signals here that he is attempting to write the tragedy of the contemporary, everyday man.

The particulars of Jude Fawley’s tragedy are the lifeblood of the novel’s plot, though the potentially universal aspects of what an obscure person’s tragedy might look like are worth exploring. We might understand the tragedy of the obscure man through three categories: the tragedy of consciousness, the tragedy of restlessness, and the tragedy of instinct. The tragedy of consciousness is particular to the person caught in obscure circumstances—the tragedy that Hardy claims ensues when one has too rich a consciousness for one’s surroundings, when one is more conscious, more aware, of what is happening to one than is necessary. Jude’s fine, even rich, sensibility creates the problems that lead to his difficult life. For instance, his finely wrought sympathy—for the birds he is hired as a child to keep away from the farmer’s corn, or the pig he cannot kill in such a way as to fetch the highest market price because that would cause the animal additional pain—is the product of a rich consciousness and sensibility that make it difficult to thrive in the social environment into which he was born. In Jude’s world we learn that coarser natures, such as Arabella’s, triumph over fine ones, and that to be one who notices everything may be counterproductive to survival. Jude’s decision to kill the pig swiftly, rather than let it bleed slowly to death to ensure a higher-quality meat, puts him at odds with Arabella, who unsentimentally declares, “Pigs must be killed” and later, “Poor folks must live” (pp. 66, 67). The tragedy of consciousness that plagues Jude is behind most of his failures, from his difficulty in walking so as not to kill earthworms to his inability as a working-class man to become a scholar at Christminster.

The tragedy of the contemporary everyday man, the novel seems to suggest, would also partake of a
tragedy of restlessness
. If one turns to the novel’s table of contents, one might notice that it is structured in an intriguing way, in six parts, each of which is named after a place (“At Marygreen,” “At Christminster,” “At Melchester,” “At Shaston,” “At Albrickham and Elsewhere,” “At Christminster Again”). The novel is, quite obviously, about mobility. However, the kind of mobility that Jude experiences is not the kind of heroic upward mobility one sees, for instance, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where the main character, Fanny Price, achieves a higher social class by virtue of her exceptional virtue, and where her ascension is signaled by a geographic transplantation, from the socially murky world of Portsmouth to the rural gentility of Mansfield. Jude the Obscure depicts instead a restless, modern mobility, a mobility where one moves back and forth to no apparent purpose. Notice as you read Jude the Obscure the amount of moving around that occurs, and the novel’s interest in forms of transportation (walking, carts, coaches, and especially trains) and what is possible psychologically and socially as a result of each of these forms of transportation. Jude’s lack of grounding in a specific place—the fact not only of his restlessness in relation to the situation into which he was born but also the ensuing psychic homelessness that he experiences—is a kind of dilemma particular to the new subject of Hardy’s modern tragedy.

Perhaps the deepest tragedy of all for Hardy is what we might call the
tragedy of instinct.
The tragedy of instinct is a way of describing all those events arising out of human forces that one cannot effectively control through consciousness. That is, those things that occur despite our intentions and move us to act even when we despise ourselves for acting: what Hardy, following the new modern consciousness about the ways of the natural world, actually calls “instinct” in the novel. Hardy brings to prominence this new understanding of instinct, coming from Charles Darwin, through his novel; the novel not only alludes to but can said to give a full sketch of instinct and unconscious motives, including the instinct for sex and self-preservation. For Jude, determined to educate himself and enter the university despite having been born into the working class, the sexual instinct that takes over when he encounters Arabella is the origin of his particular tragedy. The novel takes pain to show how Jude’s intention at every step is to resist this attraction. On several occasions he intends not to meet her, and on the night when they become lovers he intends to leave but is caught up in a playful game in which a chicken egg she has put down her bosom to warm it for hatching becomes seductive. Jude asks:

That Arabella strategically hides in an upstairs bedroom for him to find her and claim his parting kiss is meant to be understood as a trap in much the same way that her miming of maternal affection for the egg is indicative, at least symbolically, of the trap being laid for Jude by nature. And yet it would be a mistake to understand Jude’s tragedy purely in the light of another person’s falseness. A force far greater than Arabella’s agency is at work here. The engine that draws Jude, seemingly willingly and yet somehow unwilled, from the darkened, empty parlor to the bed upstairs is sexual instinct. The tragedy of instinct, though here worked out through Jude, is certainly one of the elements of his narrative that Hardy perceived as having universal force.

The title
Jude the Obscure
cuts to the heart of Aristotelian notions of tragedy, for Hardy—perhaps for the first time in the history of the novel, although he is picking up on a question the poet William Wordsworth implies in his poem “Michael” (1800)—asks whether ordinary people, under conditions of suffering, can have the nobility of tragedy. If we have explored in part what the tragedy of the obscure man would be about, we have not yet considered the operating problems for tragedy in Hardy’s time. First, it was in this time period that the plays of Henrik Ibsen first appeared on the English stage, and Hardy was among the first members of an association formed to sponsor the production of Ibsen’s plays. It is known that while Hardy was writing
Jude the Obscure
in 1893, he attended several performances of Ibsen’s plays, including
Hedda Gabler,
a play that established and continues, for many people, to personify social tragedy. Hardy can be said to follow in the aftermath of social tragedy, a genre in which society and an individual come together to create a tragic “problem.” The tragedy that ensues, we are meant to understand, is the result of the misalignment of society’s processes and the needs of the individual.

Second, Hardy might be said to have coped with the modern twin of the tragic: the “pathetic,” a journalistic form of tragedy in which startling events (kidnappings, plane crashes, motiveless murders) bubble up without much background information, and are immediately allegorized by the culture in large ways as “tragic.” The eruption of these horrifying events are enigmatic insofar as the real story is not known, and the result is that we invent a background of meaning for these events by giving them the generic stature of tragedy. In essence, the desire to call a horrifying event a tragedy is the desire to confer upon it the dignity of meaning, for “tragedy” is classically about meaningful suffering of a large enough magnitude to attain universal relevance. One can see how Hardy, a novelist who aspired to quotidian realism, might have an odd relation to the events of tragedy, which in general are too far outside the everyday to be the subject for a democratic practitioner of realism. For Hardy, the laws of nature replace the role of the gods in traditional tragedy.

The background of these contemporary approaches to tragedy—the Ibsenite tragedy, the journalistic tragedy—created for Hardy a set of questions for his own tragic plot. Since classical tragedy represents suffering that leads to a higher consciousness, meaningful suffering is an expectation that the reader of Jude brings to the novel only to have that expectation feel at times frustrated by the banality with which horrible events are rendered almost commonplace. This leads to a major question about the novel: Is the tragedy of
Jude the Obscure
one of social misalignment—the fault of society, as Ibsen’s social tragedies are—or is it a tragedy of nature? In the former, Jude’s tragedy might be understood as the tragedy of the “laws of nation”: those precedents or customs, enforced by society, that Ibsen, for instance, identifies as problems for the happiness of individuals. In this reading of Jude’s tragedy, marriage law and the class bias of Christminster in denying him admission are social problems that provide the engine for the ensuing tragedy. The novel also seems to propose, however, that Jude’s tragedy should be understood as the tragedy of the “laws of nature”: those natural facts such as reproduction, the sex drive, and the Darwinian description of the struggle for scarce resources. In this reading of Jude’s tragedy, the instinct that propelled him to become Arabella’s lover and a nature that made it impossible for him to be cruel made him “unfit” for survival, and prompted the ensuing tragic dénouement. We might understand Jude the Obscure as an experiment in deducing which of the two laws, that of society or that of nature, stands behind contemporary tragedies.