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

nineteenth-century novelists, wrote strongly out of a religious tradition of conscience, self-examination, and the weighing of good and evil within actions. To that extent, this kind of novel is a heritage of the English Puritan conscience; it is not coincidental that the early English novel is to a significant extent born out of spiritual autobiography, such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress . In Austen’s world, motives are knowable and rational, for she believes that people are responsible for themselves and for their lives. This tradition of the novel has been understood as optimistic—Austen’s novels suggest that human beings, once educated by experience, are not driven by irrational or monstrous motives.
    To understand Hardy is to make this perhaps somewhat shocking claim: Hardy believes none of this. To describe the persons in his world, Hardy often has them act in ways that they themselves cannot explain. This impacts what we call the “procedure” of the novelist as well, for Hardy in general does not step in to explain for his inarticulate characters the reason behind their actions. Unlike in Austen, where pages upon pages are devoted to rational analysis, in Jude the Obscure the characters often seem lost and inarticulate, powerless to understand or explain the events that are occurring. Hardy replaces rational analysis with a different kind of novelistic procedure, which I will discuss momentarily. The important thing to understand is that in Hardy’s novels the conscious thoughts and spoken words of a character are often less important than the unconscious or unknowable drives or wishes that lead someone to act in a particular way.
    Hardy’s narrative procedure is distinctive in its use of juxtaposition : the arbitrary act of putting two unrelated facts in collision with one another, in order to make a critique that would otherwise have to be stated analytically. Hardy owes something to the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert for this technique, as does James Joyce, who will later employ it in Ulysses when he has a horse defecate at the same moment drunken pub-goers yell anti-Semitic slurs. Jude’s recitation of the Creed in Latin, while drunk in a pub, as well as his admission to Sue about his marriage to Arabella while surrounded by market refuse, are examples of juxtaposition: “It was told while they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse. He began and finished his brief narrative” (p. 171). Here, the intervention of an analytical critique of Jude’s unhappy position is not necessary because the juxtaposition of his story and the rotten refuse produce an obvious, if implied, critique.
    Another way in which Hardy’s novelistic procedure is distinctive is the way he employs objects in his narrative. Objects in the novel project a certain reality about the characters with which they are associated ; more than symbols, these objects tell a story about the person they are associated with that the inarticulate character cannot say, and which the narrator refuses to spell out for us. An example: Arabella comes from a family of pig farmers, and in order to capture Jude’s attention for the first time she throws a piece of a pig at him as he passes by: “On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet. A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig” (p. 39). The pig penis that Arabella throws at Jude tells us about Arabella: She works with pigs and, in throwing the sex organ of the pig, is meant to be understood as piggish herself The closest the novel will ever come to directly analyzing Arabella’s character—“She was a complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less” (p. 40)—does not tell us nearly as much