Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (66 page)

1
(p. 274) “The little bird is caught at last!”
... “No
—only nested”: For Sue, who sees herself as a caught bird, marriage and sex are traps. Although Jude assures her that her capitulation to his desire to marry her (which he sees as a requirement for a sexual relationship) is not a trap but a nest, we should remember that Sue experienced her marriage to Phillotson as a trap that she escaped by making a nest in the closet away from his bed.

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(p. 278) Via Sacra ... Phryne: The Via Sacra was a road in ancient Rome. Octavia was the wife of the Roman emperor Mark Antony, and Livia was the wife of the emperor Augustus. Praxiteles was an ancient Greek sculptor of the fourth century B.C., and Phryne was his beautiful model.

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(p. 289) “It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus”: The basis of the classic Greek tragedy the Oresteia, by Aeschylus, is the story of the house of Atreus, a cursed family that suffers many calamities. The novel is permeated with such references. Even the tide, Jude the Obscure, sounds like Oedipus the King, the title of another classic tragedy.

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(p. 312) Pugin ... Wren: Augustus Pugin, a nineteenth-century architect, and Christopher Wren, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architect best known for St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, were proponents, respectively, of the Gothic Revival style of architecture and its opposite, the classical style.

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(p. 318) “We call them Christminster cakes”: To sustain themselves, Sue and Jude have taken to selling gingerbread in elaborate shapes evocative of the Christminster colleges. Jude had once served as a baker’s assistant to his aunt. That he has returned to making cakes, ones that recall the place that had blocked his scholarly ambition, is a measure of the distance Jude has traveled between his initial ideals and their tragic resolution.

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(p. 3 2 7) how it hates all men like me ... how it sneers at our false quantities and mispronunciations : Jude is expressing bitterness about the rejection he has experienced in Christminster. “False quantities”—the inability to distinguish between long and short vowels—refers to the mistakes that self-taught people make in pronouncing Latin or Greek verse; informally schooled, they have not had the benefit of hearing the proper pronunciations.

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(p. 331) “Why—it is Remembrance Day!―Jude―how sly of you—you came to-day on purpose!”: Jude has returned to Christminster, the site of his former dreams, on Remembrance Day, a holiday marking the last day of the academic year. While Jude denies that the arrival of the family on Remembrance Day was intentional, at the end of the previous chapter he has alluded to his desire to die in Christminster, and “to be there by a particular day” (see p. 327).

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(p. 345) “Done because we are too menny”: Little Father Time’s pathetic suicide note invokes several of the ideas that have been circulated in the novel. The boy’s rationale—the notion that population increases faster than its means of sustaining itself, as put forth by the economist Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)—seems to have been prompted by Sue’s too-honest discussion with him about the cruelty of nature (see pp. 341-342). For a discussion of Malthusianism and its influence on the novel, see the Introduction, page xxxi.

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(p. 348) “It comes in the chorus of the Agamemnon. It has been in my mind continually since this happened”: Jude is referring to lines in the ancient Greek tragedy Agamemnon, the opening play in the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus; the trilogy is based on the story of the house of Atreus, a cursed family that suffers many calamities. On page 289, Jude noted that “a tragic doom overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus.” He now seems to have capitulated to a force he feels is beyond his control. Moreover, his reference point now is no longer Christian but classical, while Sue, who experiences the children’s deaths as punishment for the sins she and Jude have committed, abandons her classical references and takes on a more Christian viewpoint.

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(p. 353) “We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!”: Sue is invoking biblical accounts in Genesis 3 of the fall of Adam and Eve and their exile from the Garden of Eden.

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(p. 368) and to let crude loving-kindness take care of itself: “Loving-kindness,” as Phillotson sees it, is a crude and unnecessary aspect of marriage. However, loving-kindness is the basis of Jude’s natural marriage to Sue (see p. 102).

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(p. 388) her shorn Samson was asleep: As he did on page 47, Hardy is again comparing Jude and Arabella’s relationship to that of Samson and Delilah in the Bible, Judges 16, where Delilah is responsible for Samson’s loss of power. At this point, Jude has clearly lost all his power, reflected in the statement that he is now Arabella’s “shorn Samson.”

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(p. 393) “‘What God hath joined together let no man put asunder”’: It is ironic—in that she has so little respected the religious meaning of marriage that she has committed bigamy—that Arabella quotes from the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer.

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(p. 398) “‘the letter killeth’!” ... “a right thing as you have done”: Jude invokes the novel’s epigraph—from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 3:6: “For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”—and uses Christian language and argument to persuade Sue that she is acting wrongly in holding to the “letter” of the law of Christian marriage. Sue, however, clearly believes in the orthodox position that marriage is indissoluble, and she tells Jude that he has done the “right thing” in remarrying Arabella.

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(p. 402) Addison ... Tractarian Shades: All the men mentioned are Oxford figures : Joseph Addison, eighteenth-century statesman but best known for founding, with Richard Steele, the periodical The Spectator in 1711; Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-1788); Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century writer and critic; Sir Thomas Browne, prominent seventeenth-century physician; Thomas Ken, seventeenth-century author of many famous hymns. The “Poet of Liberty” is Percy Bysshe Shelley and the “Dissector of Melancholy” is Robert Burton, author of the medical treatise Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The others are: John Wycliffe, fourteenth-century religious reformer who discovered the circulation of blood; Gabriel Harvey, sixteenth-century poet; Richard Hooker, sixteenth-century theologian; and Matthew Arnold, nineteenth-century poet and Oxford professor. Tractarian Shades is a reference to the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement, which was founded by nineteenthcentury theologian John Henry Newman and sought to revive Roman Catholic doctrines and ritual to the Anglican Church.

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(p. 413) “The Remembrance games,” he murmured. “And I here. And Sue defiled!”: Jude’s notice of the Remembrance games is bitter, since he, Sue, and the children returned to Christminster on Remembrance Day, just prior to the suicide of the children. Jude is thinking of the three failures of his life. “I here” refers to his failure to become a scholar and the perpetuation of his mistaken marriage to Arabella, and “Sue defiled” is a reference to Sue’s return to her legal, but not natural, husband.

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(pp. 413-414) his parched lips scarcely moving: ... “and life unto the bitter in soul?”: Jude is whispering lines from the Bible, Job 3. These lines mark Jude’s lowest point, for he is citing the lines of Job’s greatest despair prior to the divine response he will subsequently receive. The fact that Jude does not get a response is one of the final ironies of his tragedy.

In Jude, a 1996 film version of Thomas Hardy’s novel, director Michael Winterbottom vividly dramatizes every dark element in Jude the Obscure, of which there are many. The film’s tag line—“A time without pity. A society without mercy. A love without equal”—succinctly summarizes Hardy’s final novel.

While Jude, portrayed as reserved and sympathetic by Christopher Eccleston, and Sue, played by Kate Winslet, are not without charm and chemistry, the film never waivers from its faithful exploration of the profound darkness of the novel, surely one of the unhappiest stories in all of English literature. Graphic portrayals of bloody childbirth, intense deathbed scenes, and gruesome pig gutting all gesture toward the bleak and disturbing nature of Hardy’s themes. Winterbottom’s use of visual cues to illustrate Hardy’s psychological portrayals and social commentaries are not subtle. Jude and Arabella, the pig farmer’s daughter, played by Rachel Griffiths, make love in a filthy barn to the accompaniment of pig snorts and other barnyard folderol.

When the tutor Phillotson, played by Liam Cunningham, shows Jude the towers of Christminster and tells him, “If you want to do anything in your life, Jude, that’s where you have to go,” they loom as menacingly as those of Dracula’s castle. (After this visual teaser, no viewer will be surprised when Jude, self-educated and with a background in stonemasonry, is denied admission, setting the plot on its tragic course.) As if we need graphic proof of the mismatch of Jude and Arabella, we see Arabella dressing a pig carcass outside while Jude studies his Latin and Greek inside. The action of the film unfolds in a landscape that is fittingly brooding and rain-soaked.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

I do not know ... for what audience Mr. Hardy intends his last work, which has been introduced, as he tells us, for the last twelve months, into a number of decent houses in England and America, with the most shameful portions suppressed. How they could be suppressed in a book whose tendency throughout is so shameful I do not understand ; but it is to be hoped that the conductors and readers of ‘Harper’s Magazine’ were so protected by ignorance as not to understand what the writer meant then—though he now states it with a plainness beyond mistake.... Nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella has ever been put in English print—that is to say, from the hands of a Master. There may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not, we repeat, from any Master’s hand.

—from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (January 1896)

 

It is doubtful, considering not only the greatness of the work but also the greatness of the author’s reputation, whether for many years any book has received quite so foolish a reception as has been accorded the last and most splendid of all the books that Mr. Hardy has given the world.... So active, so malignant have these sanitary inspectors of fiction become, that a period of terror, analogous to that of the New England Witch Mania, is upon us. No novelist, however respectable, can deem himself altogether safe to-day from a charge of morbidity and unhealthiness. They spare neither age nor sex; the beginner of yesterday and the maker of a dozen respectable novels suffer alike. They outdo one another in their alertness for anything they can by any possible measure of language contrive to call
decadent
. One scarcely dares leave a man and woman together within the same corners for fear of their scandal; one dares scarcely whisper of reality. And at the very climax of this silliness, Mr. Hardy, with an admirable calm, has put forth a book in which a secondary, but very important, interest is a frank treatment of the destructive influence of a vein of sensuality upon an ambitious working-man. There probably never was a novel dealing with the closer relations of men and women that was quite so free from lasciviousness as this. But at one point a symbolical piece of offal is flung into Jude’s face. Incontinently a number of popular reviewers, almost tumbling over one another in the haste to be first, have rushed into print under such headings as “Jude the Obscene,” and denounced the book, with simply libellous violence, as a mass of filth from beginning to end.... There is no other novelist alive with the breadth of sympathy, the knowledge, or the power for creation of Jude. Had Mr. Hardy never written another book, this would still place him at the head of English novelists. To turn from him or from Mr. Meredith to our Wardour Street romancers and whimpering Scotch humourists is like walking from a library into a schoolroom.

―February 8, 1896

 

“Lowliness,” we are told, “is young Ambition’s ladder,” but in England adult Ambition, when no longer militant but triumphant, can afford not only to kick away the ladder of lowliness, but even to flout those who have raised her to the topmost rung. Thomas Hardy is at the summit of British novelists, and the British public will endure anything from him.... Hence it is but natural that the Press should be most unwilling to see in Jude the Obscure signs of degeneracy or deficiency But it does seem remarkable that such a book should be received, even by many excellent critics, with such unstinted and unqualified applause. The criticism of the Saturday Review may be taken as a sample of the heights of the eulogy to which his admirers are prepared to soar. The reviewer calls Jude “the most splendid of all the works that Mr. Hardy has given the world”; proclaims it as a master-piece “that will alone make 1895 a memorable year in the history of literature”; and declares that “had Mr. Hardy never written another book this would still place him at the head of English novelists.” Now, while reverently paying to Mr. Hardy the tribute of our willing acknowledgment of his splendid successes hitherto achieved, we cannot but hold Jude represents a deplorable falling off not only in conception, but in execution. We cannot think that the unquestionably high authority which has praised the book even with rapture is unprejudiced by a commendable gratitude for past pleasure, or by personal admiration of the author. Neither of these feelings, natural in themselves, ought to influence the verdict of criticism. Either Mr. Hardy’s powers have undergone a sad deterioration (which Heaven forbid), or he has determined to try the patience of his public and to see whether they will accept in lieu of a novel a treatise on sexual pathology, in which the data are drawn from imagination, and are, therefore, scientifically invalid, and in which his dramatic faculty has largely deserted him, and even his eminent descriptive powers are not conspicuously present. These are decided views, and we hasten to justify them.