Approaches to Text: Hardy's Jude the Obscure, enhanced by appreciation of its context.

As a child, my Grandparents were fond of giving me a book every birthday. I became absorbed with the texts, devouring them enthusiastically. Jude the Obscure was selected for my 14th birthday and quickly established itself as a favourite, the rural setting and Jude’s enthusiasm for education contributing to my enjoyment. Reading in the sleeve notes of Hardy’s ashes being buried in Poet’s corner whilst his heart resides with his first wife struck me as so impossibly romantic that he became an authority on matters of the heart long before I had any understanding of them myself. Moved by my love of the novel to learn more of the author, I came to appreciate the simplicity and superficiality of my initial interpretation. Through reading of Hardy’s life and the period in which he lived, my appreciation of its context and understanding of the text deepened; the story and characters coming to life. Whilst Jude may not be a hero in the familiar tradition, his determination to endure and refusal to succumb to convention, regardless of the cost, are truly heroic. This growth of understanding served to cement Hardy as the pre-eminent literary influence on my formative years. 

Hardy was insistent that Jude the Obscure was the least autobiographical of all his novels, yet the content points entirely to the contrary. His wife, Emma, disapproved of the novel, fearing the Victorian public would see their marriage reflected in the relationship of Jude and Sue. That disapproval extended to the more general controversy arising from its attack on the values and institutions that Victorian England held dearest, those of marriage, higher education and social class. A controversy compounded by the timing of its publication in 1895, all too soon after the trials and conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1894. Further confirmation, were any needed, of the Victorian sense that the moral fabric of society was disintegrating. Tomalin (2006) argues that Hardy had set out to shock, “In Jude it was the class system’s denial of education and opportunity to the intelligent poor, and the resulting wastage, as well as the problems and pain if dealing with failed marriages”. Hardy poured so much of himself in to the novel, many commentators conclude that the vitriolic criticism he was in receipt of resulted in his never writing another. Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, famously burned a copy; Hardy seemed to take that news in good humour ‘After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop – probably in his despair at not being able to burn me’. Though the critical reception of Jude the Obscure was also a source of consternation for Hardy in darker times. The work was rewritten several times from its initial bowdlerized serialisation, the Osgood first edition, through to the definitive 1912 Macmillan version. It was sold in brown paper, as well as being banned for a time, yet still quickly amassed sales of 20,000. The success of the novel is another persuasive explanation offered for Hardy never writing another, the controversy having boosted sales to a public yearning to be scandalised.  Having secured an income, Hardy was free to pursue his passion for poetry.

To understand the context of the novel, we must appreciate the numerous parallels between the prevailing themes of Jude the Obscure and Hardy's life. Themes common to many of his novels such as marriage, established religion and social class are rooted in his personal struggles with marital relationships, his inability to accept religious doctrine and relentless need for philosophical questioning, and his observations of the plight of a working class doomed to the obscurity that awaits the title character. The limitations Victorian class boundaries force upon the working class man are a clear link between the novel and Hardy's life, especially concerning opportunities for and access to higher education.

The narrative tracks the life of Jude Fawley, a simple country boy from a family of modest means. Orphaned and living with an aunt none too pleased with his presence, the scene is set in the first chapter with the departure of his school master, Mr Phillotson, for Christminster. Jude becomes fixated on his education, on bettering himself and eventually following in his teacher’s footsteps toward a university degree. That ambition is ultimately thwarted by Jude’s lack of formal grounding in the classics and inability to fund his scholastic aspirations, both of which are rooted in his social class. A simple enough premise enriched by consideration of Hardy’s own social status, aspirations to higher education and life course more generally. These taken in combination with the Victorian belief in the betterment of the individual being entirely in his own hands; the belief that application and perspiration were the ingredients of success, providing a powerfully autobiographical context that makes the novel all the more tragic.

Hardy had an advantage over his protagonist in his mother being well-read, teaching him until he was old enough to attend school where he showed promise. Lacking the financial means to attend Oxford or Cambridge, and frustrated by the lack of means available to him to develop his apparent academic talents, Hardy became an apprentice architect. The aspiration to further education and frustration at its inaccessibility never left Hardy. Although he did not make a serious attempt to attend university, understanding it to be inaccessible to all but the privileged few, he never ceased in his attempts at self improvement. Despite his protestations against accusations of autobiography in the novel, he often alluded to it. Zeitler (2007) explains that “like Jude Fawley, Hardy worked diligently in his spare time to prepare himself through self-study. Years later, writing about the origins of Jude the Obscure – ‘a short story of a young man who could not go to Oxford’ – Hardy declared that he is the one to tell that story.” Doubtless because he knew the story so very well.

Ultimately Jude comes to understand that he does not belong in Christminster, in spite of his aptitude exceeding that of his social superiors. He is rooted by his heritage, circumstance and the opportunities available to a man of his social status. Surveying the university buildings around him in part II, chapter VI “He saw that his destiny lay not with these, but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live.” As a stone mason, Jude confronts the bitter irony that he is permitted by his social standing to help build the monument to education, intellect and betterment that is Christminster, though not to enter its lofty halls. Just as Jude leaves Christminster, Hardy leaves London, having never felt he belonged there on account of his inferiority in terms of class and formal education. Hardy’s aspirations toward a university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest suffer the same fate as Jude’s.

Through characters such as Jude, Hardy conveys his disdain for the class divides still prevalent in Victorian times, his lack of confidence in social mobility as a concept and the inevitable futility of any attempt to advance beyond one’s social status. In response to his requests as a working man seeking advice on advancement as a scholar, Jude receives a succinct reply from the Master of Christminster’s Biblioll College stating that ‘I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do.’ Though change would not be long to come, and further education would soon become achievable, if challenging, for the working man. Hardy experienced the same class restrictions as Jude, compounded by the isolation one experiences in attempting to advance beyond the bounds of the working class. Separated from the working class by his aspirations, yet not fully accepted by the professional middle class he sought to join; ultimately belonging to neither. Hardy was influenced greatly by his friend and mentor Horace Moule, alumni of both Oxford and Cambridge universities. Norman (2011) explains that ‘It was he who introduced Hardy to the Saturday Review – a radical London weekly publication which attributed the majority of social evils to social inequality’, though whether the publication shaped Hardy’s philosophy or resonated with what already existed is less clear.

As difficult as it may be to accept Hardy’s assertions against the autobiographical in Jude the Obscure given its treatment of social issues and education, it can only become more so as we reflect on the views of religion and the institution of marriage expressed in the novel. More still when we consider the novel in the context of Hardy’s life experience and the prevailing attitudes of the time. In order to understand Hardy, his views on established religion and its institutions, we must appreciate the influence of religious faith in Victorian England. Hardy’s formative years were spent in a world where the established church rallied defensively in the aftermath of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, resisting modernisation to consolidate its position as the pre-eminent social force of the time. A Victorian society underpinned by a patriarchal church held rigid views on the role of women, and marriage was regarded as a life event rather than a genuine choice. As inevitable a life event as child-bearing. A woman’s purpose in the 19th Century, as far as the church and hence society was concerned, was to secure a husband and reproduce, nothing more.

Hardy demonstrates the dominant power of the church over the life of the individual via the transformation of Sue Bridehead from an independent free-spirited woman to a God-fearing, sexually repressed shell of her former self. A woman so convinced of her sin and need to be punished that she considers the deaths of her children a punishment for her transgressions. She reacts to this by submitting to a marriage with a man in whom she has no interest or inclination; because society demands it. Her hostility toward religion is replaced by a pious, submissive, obsession with it. Jude, meanwhile, is walking the same path in the opposite direction. Having harboured ambition to take his study toward a calling to the priesthood, Jude loses interest and ultimately faith in established religion, becoming consumed by a need for Sue. It is tempting to write-off this seemingly unlikely set of circumstances as nothing more than an overly contrived literary artifice, yet once again parallels with Hardy’s life abound. His first wife Emma, much like Sue, was largely indifferent to religion in her youth but became more religious as the years passed. Hardy, in the same manner as Jude, considers answering God’s calling. Having studied his early writing, Daziel (2006) argues "of Hardy's already being sympathetic to Evangelicalism by October 1858, his taking sufficiently seriously his so-called 'dream' of ordination to practice writing a sermon, and, most significantly, his having a personal faith that was both ardent and orthodox". Yet this strength of faith was not to last. Contemporaries of Hardy considered him non-religious, living a life of non-believing commensurate with a self-declaring agnostic. Despite his apparent loss of faith, Hardy retained an essentially Christian outlook in terms of values and outcomes, if not the mechanism that enforces adherence with them. Jude the Obscure, like many of Hardy’s works, conveys the beliefs of the author in fate, preordination, and destiny in what he considers to be a Godless world. Daziel goes on to explain that "Hardy repeatedly articulated both his conviction that the Cause of Things must be unconscious, 'neither moral or immoral, but unmoral,' and his hope that this Unconscious Will was evolving into consciousness would ultimately become sympathetic".

Hardy’s increasing criticism of organised religion was in conflict with Emma’s ever stronger embrace of the church, an inevitable source of tension. His views on marriage and relationships between the sexes were progressive for their time, and are well represented in his works generally, Jude the Obscure being no exception. He was married twice, not particularly happily on either occasion. Though his first wife noting Hardy’s lack of interest in women other than those he created, and his second that he was generally disposed to shut himself in his room alone, suggests he was not entirely blameless. His views of the gender inequality ingrained in marriage and divorce legislation, as well as the institution of marriage itself, were ahead of their time. Laws pertaining to marriage displayed significant bias in favour of men, with women effectively ceasing to be from a legal point of view when they married, becoming barely more than their husband’s property. Sue best describes the conflict between a woman and her social context once married: “I have been thinking... that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies…”

Divorce was unacceptable to the Victorian sensibility, leading to many married couples living apart rather than formally dissolving their union. The grounds for divorce were further biased; a man could divorce citing adultery without meaningful substantiation, where a woman had to demonstrate further injury in addition to the offence. Divorce was also prohibitively expensive, making it difficult for women to initiate if they conformed to the social norm of home-making and raising children, whilst putting it beyond the means of most regardless. Hardy railed against an institution that bound people by contract, as well as against a society that required they stay together regardless of their feelings toward each other. Divorce, to him, seemed eminently sensible in cases where hearts had changed. Still, Sue returns to Phillotson, as society obliges.

Representations of women in Jude the Obscure are well rooted in the dominant female influences in Hardy’s life. Widow Edlin warns that marriage is not for the Fawley family, just as Hardy’s mother ‘advised all her children against it and told them to look after each other instead – advice only disobeyed by Thomas’. Emma Gifford exaggerates her attachment to a local farmer to provoke a marriage proposal from Hardy, where Arabella Donn employs various feminine wiles to attach herself to Jude. Sue Bridehead in her free spirited nature reined in by religious fervour could be seen as analogous to Emma again. Although her cold detachment, desire to be loved whilst remaining sexually unavailable, as well as her middle name being Florence perhaps point more strongly to Florence Henniker; a woman Hardy greatly admired, and pursued for many years. The character of Sue would have been completed by Hardy’s cousin Tryphena Sparks, with whom he had a relationship until meeting Emma and whose death in 1890 precipitated the writing of the novel. The only female character in the book notable for deviation from her real-life counterpart is Drusilla Fawley, who as a great-aunt taking in an orphaned Jude never achieved a relationship with him beyond indifference, was far removed from Hardy’s accounts of his relationship with his mother.

My understanding of Jude the Obscure has been enriched immeasurably by an appreciation of its context; Hardy’s life and the era in which he lived. The premise of the novel is simple enough, but the number of tragedies befalling its hero could scarcely be believed were it not for our understanding of their autobiographical connections. Many of the events depicted were features of Hardy’s life. Many of the characters strongly reminiscent of those close to him, many of Jude’s relationships similar to those of the author. The plight of Jude as an intelligent but socially impoverished man struggling in a world to which he does not belong, deeply relevant to him personally. Hardy was, of course, a product of his environment; though insightful enough to see beyond it. The central conflict of the novel is that of societal expectations versus the desires and aspirations of the individual, a conflict as apparent in Victorian society as in the narrative. Hardy, via Jude, explains that “To indulge one’s instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in an old civilization like ours. It was necessary to act under an acquired and cultivated sense of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour.” Hardy, like Jude, was an ill-fit with his social class and Victorian sensibilities. An appreciation of context elevates Jude the Obscure from a great English literary work, to one of the greatest.

Bibliography

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