Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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” (p. 211). Jude, who at first attempts to conform to society’s rules, becomes passionate in his rejection of both religion and social law: “It is none of the natural tragedies of love that’s love’s usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in parting!” (p. 222).
    Sue, who at one point calls legal marriage “vulgar,” is a figure in the novel like Jude, who wants to “progress” beyond the normal social moulds but who is unable to find the courage either to remarry or live happily unmarried. Ultimately, as the result of the particular horror she experiences, Sue retreats to a conventional morality as a way of doing penance. Jude understands this as the fatal misalignment of social law and their individual happiness: “As for Sue and me when we were at our own best, long ago—when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless—the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us. And so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her, and recklessness and ruin on me!” (pp. 409—410). In this formulation of the tragedy, the “laws of nations” are given the blame. And yet the novel nevertheless traffics deeply in the possibility that there was nothing that Jude could have done, and nothing that society could have done, to have prevented the tragedy that was his life. The laws of nature, after all, propelled him into a mistaken and even unwanted sexual liaison and marriage with Arabella. The child who results from that union testifies to Jude’s continuing sexual instinct long after his love for Arabella has died, and it is this child—Little Father Time—whose actions initiate and propel those aspects of Jude’s tragedy that most readers find hardest to stomach.
    In the wake of those horrific events, Sue’s anguished cry is in many ways the classic question implied and answered by social tragedy: “I am driven out of my mind by things! What ought to be done?” (p. 348). Jude’s response captures the pessimism of tragedy based on natural law: “Nothing can be done.... Things are as they are, and will be brought to their destined issue” (p. 348). Here Jude is quoting from the chorus of the ancient Greek tragedy Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, borrowing directly from a Hellenic pessimism that is one of the novel’s most prevalent resources. The educated fatalism of the sentence stems as well from Jude’s realization that his grief is the progeny of the sexual instinct that led him to Arabella. In this light, Sue’s anguished hope that society could reform itself so nothing like this could happen again falls on deaf ears, and Jude’s response (“nothing can be done”) is an argument that their tragedy was the result of the “law of nature.”

    Hardy’s exploration of his characters’ difficulty in understanding what forces are at work in their lives would seem to put him in a long tradition of the English novel, one that had charted the moral growth of its characters and that had employed a rational, analytical, and intellectual vocabulary for that process. Jane Austen, for instance, belongs to this tradition, for her novels suggest that she wants us to understand her characters and perhaps even model our own moral growth upon them. Austen seeks to make us aware of the consequences of acts in the lives of others, and sees her role as that of one who captures a kind of moral and intellectual analysis of character and actions. This approach points to the fact that Austen, as well as many other