Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (67 page)

If we consider broadly and without prejudice the tone and scope of the book, we cannot but class it with the fiction of Sex and New Woman, so rife of late.... The book is steeped in sex. The aspirations of the stone-cutter Jude towards a University career form quite a subordinate underplot. The main theme is an elaborate indictment of marriage as being necessarily the death of pure passion and even of healthy sexual desire.... The book is addressed by the writer expressly “to men and women of full age,” and he adds—in a tone which seems to show that he thinks the matter one of very little moment—“ I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.” These are indeed regia verba, and justify our complaint that Mr. Hardy conceives himself to be in a position in which he may flout his readers. It seems that if his readers are of full age they are bound to accept without question his manner of handling his subject, whatever it may be. If it should seem prurient or coarse, being of full age they are bound to suppress all protest against it. This is a new and terrible penalty imposed on the elderly, a harmless though not very interesting class. Tennyson has made a person of full age cry—

But we should hope that Tennyson’s

is not a fair sample of Mr. Hardy’s readers of full age. We claim for them the right to hold and even express, on questions of what is decent in literature, opinions not less refined than the opinions of those who are still young. Nay, more, we should expect that the reader of full age would belong to just that class who would feel that the world presents other and to them more tractable difficulties than sex-problems, or marriage-problems (which, however, they would gladly see treated carefully by the Leckys and Herbert Spencers of the day), and that life is serious enough to dispose them to turn away with some impatience from a work in which there is not a practical suggestion for reform, and (what is worse) in which there is not material for a smile from the first page to the last—a dismal treatise as “chap-fallen” as Yorick’s skull in the hands of Hamlet.

—from Fortnightly Review (June 1, 1896)

 

Although English men and women are never so happy as when absorbing unorthodox sermons under the guise of art, the permanent vitality of sermons is considerably less than that of art. Thus I was not without suspicion in approaching “Jude the Obscure.” Had Mr. Hardy discovered the pernicious truth that whereas children can only take their powders in jam, the strenuous British public cannot be induced to devour their jam unless convinced that it contains some strange and nauseous powder? Was “Jude the Obscure” a sermon on marriage from the text on the title-page: “The letter killeth”? Putting aside the small failures always liable to occur in Mr. Hardy’s work, I found little to justify the suspicion. The sermon may, possibly, be there, but the spirit of art has, at all events, not been killed. In all the great qualities of literature “Jude the Obscure” seems to me the greatest novel written in England for many years.... I understand that the charge brought against “Jude the Obscure” is not so much that it is bad art as that it is a book with a purpose, a moral or an immoral purpose, according to the standpoint of the critic. It would not be pleasant to admit that a book you thought bad morality is good art, but the bad morality is the main point, and this book, it is said, is immoral, and indecent as well.

So are most of our great novels. “Jane Eyre,” we know on the authority of a “Quarterly” reviewer, could not have been written by a respectable woman, while another “Quarterly” (or maybe “Edinburgh”) review declared that certain scenes in “Adam Bede” are indecently suggestive. “Tom Jones” is even yet regarded as unfit to read in an unabridged form. The echo of the horror which “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” produced more than a century ago in the cheerfully immoral society of the ancien régime has scarcely even to-day died down sufficiently to permit an impartial judgment of that powerful and saturnine book. “Madame Bovary,” which Taine regarded in later days as fit for use in Sunday schools, was thought so shocking in the austere court of Napoleon III that there was no alternative to prosecution. Zola’s chief novels, which to-day are good enough to please Mr. Stead, the champion of British Puritanism, were yesterday bad enough to send his English publisher to prison. It seems, indeed, on a review of all the facts, that the surer a novel is of a certain immorality, the surer it is also to be regarded first as indecent, as subversive of public morality. So that when, as in the present case, such charges are recklessly flung about in all the most influential quarters, we are simply called upon to accept them placidly as necessary incidents in the career of a great novel.... Why should the Young Person not read “Jude the Obscure”? To me at least such a question admits of no answer when the book is the work of a genuine artist. One can understand that a work of art as art may not be altogether intelligible to the youthful mind, but if we are to regard it as an en-sample or a warning, surely it is only for youth that it can have any sort of saving grace. “Jude” is an artistic picture of a dilemma such as the Young Person, in some form or another, may one day have to face. Surely, on moral grounds, she should understand and realize this beforehand. A book which pictures such things with fine perception and sympathy should be singularly fit reading.

—from Savoy (October 1896)

1. Is it possible that some of what was considered indecent in Jude the Obscure lies in Hardy’s characterizations of women? A critic could argue that Sue is frigid and Arabella a calculating temptress.

2. Do you agree that a novel can serve as a warning, and therefore that one of literature’s purposes is to prepare readers for difficult situations ? Who is the real audience of Jude the Obscure, young readers or older ones? Is the question of audience a relevant one?

3. Does Jude the Obscure have a moral—or, at least, a message? If so, what is it?

4. Are the characterizations of the main characters realistic or at least plausible—or has Hardy skewed them to make a point?

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