Jude the Obscure

(1) Character study of Jude and Sue Bridehead:

Jude Fawley:

A young man with a passion for learning who aspires to be a professor despite his position in the working class. He works as a stone-mason and academic life is always outside of his reach. The novel follows his career woes and his tumultuous love life, centered on his tragic relationship with cousin Sue Bridehead.

Sue Bridehead:

Jude's intelligent independent cousin. She works first as an artist-designer and later as a teacher. Sue is a modern woman and a free-thinker. She rebels in her marriage and carries out a scandalous affair with Jude. She has a nervous disposition and has trouble making decisions about relationships.

(2)Epigraph"The Letter Killeth":

The epigraph to the novel is “the letter killeth,” which comes from a quote from Jesus in the Bible:

 “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth light.” 

Hardy intended this quote to refer to marriage where the contract of the institution kills joy and true love but Hardy purposefully leaves off the optimism of “the spirit” Jude and Sue’s joy is fleeting even when they are only following “Nature’s law,” and in the end they find no good answer for how to properly love and live together. By the novel’s tragic end Hardy still leaves the question of marriage unanswered, emphasizing only his dissatisfaction with the institution as it stands.Much of Jude the Obscure consists of a critique of the institution of marriage, which Hardy saw as flawed and unjust. The novel’s plot is designed to wring all the possible tragedy out of an unhappy marriage, as Jude is first guilted into marrying Arabella by her feigned pregnancy, and Sue marries Phillotsonmostly to make Jude jealous. Both protagonists immediately regret their decisions, and realize how a single impulsive decision can affect their entire lives. When they meet each other and fall in love, Sue and Jude’s pure connection is constantly obstructed by their earlier marriages, and Hardy even presents the tragedy of Little Father Time’s murder-suicide as a natural result of broken marriages and unhappy relationships.

The novel is not a simple diatribe against marriage, but instead illustrates a complex, contradictory situation. Sue and Jude want their love to be true and spontaneous, but also totally monogamous and everlasting.

(3)Jude the Obscure as Hardy's indictment on Christanity:

Jude the Obscure has often been interpreted as an indictment of the society that made it impossible for a working man to obtain higher education. In fact, Hardy openly blames the English educational system, which provided no opportunity for an ambitious but impoverished young man who wanted to study at a university. Besides, Hardy violently attacks the Victorian concepts of class division and marriage as a holy institution. Unlike the earlier novels, Jude is mostly set in modern, urban environment; in small drab industrial towns, railway trains, workshops and streets.

Jude the Obscure is a poignant novel with disquieting moral and social concerns. Its message aims to put into question the very foundations of traditional marriage and class-based elitist education. In his narrative strategy, Hardy makes use of the form of a realistic Bildungsroman and introduces a New Woman character, but he goes far beyond this framework presenting psychological portraits of a modern man and a modern woman in a futile search for their selfhood. As in his previous major fiction, Hardy shows in a series of symbolic images the tragic clash between tradition and modernity in late Victorian society. He also denies the relevance of Christianity to a dehumanised society.