Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth.He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as,
☞Far from the Madding Crowd (1874),
☞The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886),
☞Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1891), and
☞Jude the Obscure (1895).
During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.
Central message of the novel:
Jude Fawley a studious eleven year old schoolboy who lives in the village of Marygreen with his Aunt Drusilla, a baker. Jude is the only student who is upset when the village schoolmaster, Mr. Richard Phillotson, leaves to pursue a college degree in the nearby university town of Christminster. However, Mr. Phillotson’s leaving inspires Jude to romanticize the city of Christminster, and he gets into the habit of climbing a hill outside the village to get a view of the city. He hears from some laborers that Christminster isn’t a good place for working-class people like him, but he ignores these warnings. Jude decides that he will become an academic. After a failed attempt to procure some Greek and Latin textbooks from Physician Vilbert, the local quack-doctor, he writes to Mr. Phillotson who gamely sends him some texts. For the next three or four years Jude diligently studies the classical languages. He also takes an apprenticeship in stonemasonry so that he will be able to save money for his studies.
At age nineteen Jude wants to leave for Christminster but is distracted by a romance with Arabella Donn, the flirtatious daughter of a pig-butcher. Arabella wants to marry Jude but worries that he will move to Christminster without her. Her friends, Anny and Sarah, advise her to get pregnant so Jude will have to marry her. Arabella goes along with this plan and seduces Jude. Just as he is about to break up with her and leave for Christminster, she reveals to him that she is pregnant, and they marry the following week.
Back in Shaston, Mr. Phillotson loses his job when it gets out that he let his wife elope with another man. The stress of this makes him ill, and Sue goes back to visit him briefly. On her visit, Mr. Phillotson agrees to grant her an official divorce. Jude has also divorced Arabella, so that Arabella might legally marry her Australian husband.
By the following February, Jude and Sue have both completed the divorce process, but Sue is reluctant to marry Jude. Arabella comes to Aldbrickham, and although Sue prevents Jude from seeing her, she writes later with major news: she and Jude had a child before she went to Australia, and now she needs Jude to take care of the boy because he will get underfoot at the bar she has with her husband, Cartlett. Jude and Sue agree to adopt the boy, who is known as Little Father Timedue to his grim, prematurely aged demeanor. They try to marry several times for the sake of the boy, but they can never go through with it due to their worries that getting married will poison their relationship.
Rumors spread that Jude and Sue are living together unmarried, and they are shunned by the people of Aldbrickham. Jude cannot get employment, so he, Sue, and Time are forced to move frequently from city to city, so that Jude can get freelance work before people get to know him. They do this for two and a half years.
One day, Arabella encounters Sue selling baked goods at a fair. She has had two children with Jude and is pregnant with a third. Jude is suffering from health problems, so he bakes and Sue sells his products gingerbreads shaped like the university buildings at Christminster. Arabella realizes that she still loves Jude. After this encounter, Jude and Sue decide to move back to Christminster, since Jude still loves the city and they hope that Time will one day attend the university.
Meanwhile, Cartlett has died and Arabella is crafting a scheme to get Jude to remarry her. She shows up at Jude’s apartment and asks to spend the night, explaining her father has kicked her out. Jude reluctantly agrees, and gets so upset when Arabella tells him that Sue has married Phillotson that he goes to the bar. Arabella joins him and gets him very drunk, then takes him to her father’s house. For the next few days, Arabella keeps Jude intoxicated, and throws a little party at which she manages to extract a promise that Jude will remarry her. The morning after the party, she insists that Jude keep his promise in order to maintain his honor and her own.
Jude marries Arabella, but their marriage is no happier the second time. He goes to Marygreen to try to convince Sue to elope again. Although she admits she loves him and not Phillotson, she feels duty-bound to stay with her first husband. Jude returns to Christminster, and his health only worsens. He dies alone while an uncaring Arabella attends a boat race with Physician Vilbert, her new love interest.
Marriage as a social custom:
It could be argued that the rejection of marriage is the central didactic point of this novel. Hardy repeatedly emphasizes that marriage involves making a commitment that many people are emotionally unequipped to fulfill - this sentiment comes from the narrator, but it is also expressed by Sue, Jude, Phillotson, and Widow Edlin at various points in the novel. Whether the institution of marriage can be saved is open to interpretation. Jude and Sue are clearly a good match for each other, so Jude wants to get married. Sue, however, feels that marriage will poison the relationship. The narrator does not seem to favor either side; it is left up to readers to decide how the problems with marriage might be solved.
Education play a leading role:
Hardy highlights many kinds of education in this present novel.Most obviously, we have Jude's desire to get a university degree and become an academic. However, Hardy also emphasizes the importance of experiential education. Because Jude is inexperienced with women and with social situations more generally, he is especially susceptible to Arabella's seduction. In the novel, the level of traditional education one reaches is closely tied to the class system, and if someone from Jude's class wants to learn, they must teach themselves. Although the narrator seems to admire Jude's willingness to teach himself, he also points out the limits of autodidacticism, noting that despite Jude's near-constant studies, he cannot hope to compete on the university entrance exam against richer men who have hired tutors.
Social class as an enemy:
In addition to his points about education, Hardy also criticizes the rigidity of social class more generally. Jude is limited in his career options because as a working-class man, he cannot hope to be promoted beyond a certain level, even in fields like the clergy that are supposed to be open to all. However, Jude and Sue also benefit from their low social class in that their respective divorces are processed quickly and without inquiry and they can get away with living together unmarried for quite some time. Even this is a mixed blessing - they are caught eventually, and the reason they weren't caught sooner is that they are unimportant to the people around them.
Religion as rule:
As Jude the obscure can be interpreted as critical of the institution of marriage, Hardy is equally as possessed with the church. Throughout their relationship, Jude and Sue have many conversations concerning religion, the former being initially more devout than his intellectually curious cousin. At a diorama depicting Jerusalem, the major characters' feelings on religion crystalize. Sue wonders why Jerusalem rather than Rome or Athens is deemed important, Phillotson counters that the city is important to the English as a Christian people, and Jude is utterly absorbed by the work - though he also strains to agree with Sue. Later, Sue mentions a friend who was the most irreligious but also the most moral. Hardy points out that these concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Jude's faith is tested by Sue. He realizes his sexual attraction to her makes him a hypocrite. Rather than suppress his natural physical desire, he burns his books, marking his break with Christianity. This makes Sue's reversal later in the novel all the more shocking. Jude likens her conversion in the wake of her children's death to his partaking in alcohol during difficult times. Here Hardy calls into question the motivations behind faith. Through Sue's self-punishing adherence to her Christian duties despite her true nature, Hardy suggests those motivations are not always pure.
Women's rights as professional leaders:
Sue Bridehead is a strikingly modern heroine in many ways - she lives with men without marrying them.she has a rich intellectual life. she works alongside Jude. Hardy criticizes the social conventions that prevent her from fulfilling her potential as an intellectual and as a worker. However, he also reinforces some of those social conventions unintentionally by portraying Sue as anxious and hysterical, Hardy perpetuates a common Victorian stereotype about women being especially emotional. Also, we are expected to accept Sue having lived with the Christminster undergraduate because they were not having sex, despite his professed liberalism, Hardy upholds traditional values by offering this piece of information and expecting it to color our judgment of the character.
Old versus new
The narrator of this novel often laments the ways that old things are replaced by the new, especially when it comes to urban architecture. Likewise, the Widow Edlin suggests that older, more laid-back attitudes toward marriage are better than prudish Victorian norms. Nineteenth century British society was, in many ways, more conservative than the historical periods that preceded it, so Hardy's admiration for the older aspects of English culture ties in to his social liberalism and his reverence for intellectual inquiry.
Disappointment and Frustration:
Disappointment crops up over and over again in this novel: Jude is disappointed by his career; he is disappointed in his marriage to Arabella and then his cohabitation with Sue; he is disappointed by Mr. Phillotson, who never achieved his dream of getting a university degree. Even Time's assertions that he never asked to be born suggest a certain disappointment with life. Since most of the novel's tragedies come as lost opportunities, the ways that the characters deal with disappointment contribute to their characterization. For example, Phillotson takes a relatively mature perspective when he is disappointed in his marriage to Sue, and allows her to be with Jude. Arabella, in contrast, deals with her disappointment in Cartlett by spying on Jude and scheming to get back together with him.
Itinerancy:
Jude the obscure features many kinds of nomads. Some of these are minor characters like the traveling laborers in Shaston. However, Jude himself is a kind of nomad and the novel's structure reflects this. It is not divided into arbitrary chapters or thematic groupings but rather is divided into sections based on the characters' location. This geographical mobility speaks to the new freedom but also rootlessness that came with the advent of rail travel which revolutionized the lives of working people like Jude who could now travel long distances affordably.
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