by Thomas Hardy
The title Jude the Obscure cuts to the heart of Aristotelian notions of tragedy, for Hardy—perhaps for the first time in the history of the novel, although he is picking up on a question the poet William Wordsworth implies in his poem “Michael” (1800)—asks whether ordinary people, under conditions of suffering, can have the nobility of tragedy. If we have explored in part what the tragedy of the obscure man would be about, we have not yet considered the operating problems for tragedy in Hardy’s time. First, it was in this time period that the plays of Henrik Ibsen first appeared on the English stage, and Hardy was among the first members of an association formed to sponsor the production of Ibsen’s plays. It is known that while Hardy was writing Jude the Obscure in 1893, he attended several performances of Ibsen’s plays, including Hedda Gabler, a play that established and continues, for many people, to personify social tragedy. Hardy can be said to follow in the aftermath of social tragedy, a genre in which society and an individual come together to create a tragic “problem.” The tragedy that ensues, we are meant to understand, is the result of the misalignment of society’s processes and the needs of the individual.
Second, Hardy might be said to have coped with the modern twin of the tragic: the “pathetic,” a journalistic form of tragedy in which startling events (kidnappings, plane crashes, motiveless murders) bubble up without much background information, and are immediately allegorized by the culture in large ways as “tragic.” The eruption of these horrifying events are enigmatic insofar as the real story is not known, and the result is that we invent a background of meaning for these events by giving them the generic stature of tragedy. In essence, the desire to call a horrifying event a tragedy is the desire to confer upon it the dignity of meaning, for “tragedy” is classically about meaningful suffering of a large enough magnitude to attain universal relevance. One can see how Hardy, a novelist who aspired to quotidian realism, might have an odd relation to the events of tragedy, which in general are too far outside the everyday to be the subject for a democratic practitioner of realism. For Hardy, the laws of nature replace the role of the gods in traditional tragedy.
The background of these contemporary approaches to tragedy—the Ibsenite tragedy, the journalistic tragedy—created for Hardy a set of questions for his own tragic plot. Since classical tragedy represents suffering that leads to a higher consciousness, meaningful suffering is an expectation that the reader of Jude brings to the novel only to have that expectation feel at times frustrated by the banality with which horrible events are rendered almost commonplace. This leads to a major question about the novel: Is the tragedy of Jude the Obscure one of social misalignment—the fault of society, as Ibsen’s social tragedies are—or is it a tragedy of nature? In the former, Jude’s tragedy might be understood as the tragedy of the “laws of nation”: those precedents or customs, enforced by society, that Ibsen, for instance, identifies as problems for the happiness of individuals. In this reading of Jude’s tragedy, marriage law and the class bias of Christminster in denying him admission are social problems that provide the engine for the ensuing tragedy. The novel also seems to propose, however, that Jude’s tragedy should be understood as the tragedy of the “laws of nature”: those natural facts such as reproduction, the sex drive, and the Darwinian description of the struggle for scarce resources. In this reading of Jude’s tragedy, the instinct that propelled him to become Arabella’s lover and a nature that made it impossible for him to be cruel made him “unfit” for survival, and prompted the ensuing tragic dénouement. We might understand Jude the Obscure as an experiment in deducing which of the two laws, that of society or that of nature, stands behind contemporary tragedies.
Certainly the novel considers both possibilities. Sue Bridehead, for instance, is frequently the voice of criticism about how society and individual happiness are often fatally misaligned: “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” (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 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 traditi
on 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 as the object (the pig pizzle) and the act (her throwing it at Jude) that begins to stand in for her.
Jude is also associated with certain objects: the old Latin books, the birds whose “thwarted desires” he empathizes with in allowing them to eat the farmer’s corn, and the bread he delivers in his first job. Jude’s job as a delivery boy associates him with the staleness of the bread he delivers; Jude, we are meant to understand, is like the dead language he is teaching himself to read while delivering the stale bread. Like the Gothic carving he restores as a stonemason, Jude is repeatedly associated with decrepit and somewhat useless objects.
Hardy’s narrative procedure is on the cusp of the modern, so it is perhaps not surprising to learn that he lived on the cusp of the twentieth century. Born in 1840 in the county of Dorset, England, Hardy did not die until 1928, well after the end of World War I and the high-water mark of literary modernism. His biography is illustrative if unencumbered by fantastic events; having left school at sixteen, he was apprenticed to an architect and trained in the profession, which he practiced until 1873, when he became a full-time novelist. He lived in his native city of Dorchester his entire life, except for annual spells in London. He was married twice, first in 1874 to Emma Gifford and, after her death, for a second time in 1914 to Florence Dugdale, whom he had met and fallen in love with in 1893. Some biographers speculate that Florence was the model for Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure.
Perhaps what is more illuminating of the novel than the spare facts of Hardy’s biography is the intellectual context in which he swam. He is often understood as a naturalist writer in the tradition of the French novelist Émile Zola and the American novelist Theodore Dreiser. Literary naturalism describes a kind of literature written in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, a period roughly bounded from 18 8 0 to the start of World War I, and which as a movement navigated the transition from Victorianism to modernism. The word “naturalism” might encourage one to think of nature, and given Hardy’s quite rural settings in the fictional geography of Wessex, one could not be faulted for making that connection. But naturalist writing is often, as in Émile Zola’s Paris or Theodore Dreiser’s New York and Chicago, about the city. Naturalism does not refer to nature in general, but “nature” as it was understood by late-nineteenth-century science, especially the nature of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and others. This is nature defined by struggle, competition, extinction, and possibly even degeneration : the hostile and even forbidding side of nature.
Literary naturalism, in a nutshell, is characterized by grim plots, and the pessimistic depiction of the inevitable process of rises and failures, although it is often lauded for its rich accounts of a new urban world. Hardy, like the master Zola, placed the complex fact of work and wages at the center of his representation of life. The subjects of the naturalist novel, which include survival, grim poverty, near starvation, insecurity, and the many changes of place and position that an individual can experience, remind us that naturalism describes the world as dynamic and unstable. Literary naturalism often sees the city, with its harsh laws, as a new kind of nature. The focus on work, the replacement of love or marriage by sex and the sexual drive, and the centrality of the biological sphere (birth, aging, death) are all key features of literary naturalism.
Characteristic of naturalism in general, and Jude the Obscure in particular, is the replacement of “decisions” by characters with “drives.” Decisions, which suggest careful analysis and a moral consciousness (even if they are deluded), are replaced in the naturalist novel by drives: by instincts, or passive moments of consciousness or even unconsciousness. These states, which might include the instinctual reactions of sexual desire, fear, hunger, warmth, or cold, come from the realm of the unwilled. For example, the narrative, in describing the way in which Jude singles out Arabella from her two companions, notes that he does so “for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters, unconsciously received” (p. 40). The description of the force that pushes Jude to keep his appointment with Arabella, despite his decision to spend the day in study, is equally suggestive of a drive rather than a decision: “In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him—something which had nothing in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to care little for his reason and his will” (p. 45).
A second characteristic of literary naturalism is the depiction of the world in constant dynamism: The naturalist novel charts a series of vertical movements, risings and falls, that seem inevitable as well as extreme. One might think here of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, with its concomitant rise of Carrie from shopgirl to Broadway star and the fall of Hurstwood from club owner to the depths of the Bowery’s poverty. A third characteristic of literar
y naturalism is its interest in what we might call the “essential processes” of life: work, sex, and death. Instead of an interest in social interaction and the complexity of social arrangements, the naturalist novel focuses its attention on the essential or even biological facts of life. The topics of pregnancy, sexual drives, labor, and dying are depicted with a vividness not previously seen in the English novel.
A prominent characteristic of literary naturalism is perhaps the one that pertains most crucially to Jude the Obscure. Sexual reproduction in literary naturalism, and especially in Jude the Obscure, has a firmly Schopenhauerian slant. Arthur Schopenhauer’s best-known and most influential work, The World as Will and Idea ( 18 18, 1844) exerted a tremendous pull over late-nineteenth-century European literary culture, although it exerted very little influence over professional philosophy. According to Schopenhauer, the universe is a cruel, hostile, and even wicked place, and any attempt through our own will—be that the will to exist or the will to know—to improve the world will inevitably increase our suffering; to Schopenhauer, suffering is the intrinsic fact about human life.
As a result of this condition, what a person can do is try to reduce his or her will to almost nothing; he advocates doing this through fasting, voluntary poverty, and chastity. He defines the good person as someone who has recognized the universal quality of suffering and who, in withdrawing his or her will, refuses to participate in the perpetuation of that suffering. The crucial consequence of this thesis is that chastity is the ideal, for sexual procreation introduces into the world another suffering creature. Schopenhauer goes on, however, to acknowledge the difficulty of chastity because of what he sees as nature’s trap: Nature, which he sees as cleverer than any individual person, devised a trap so that life will be perpetuated, and that trap is sexual desire. In Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, sexual intimacy is nature’s way of tricking or trapping the individual into reproducing, perhaps even against his will. One can see the relevance of Schopenhauer’s ideas to Hardy’s novel, where sexual desire entraps various characters into actions or circumstance that will turn out badly for everyone. If Hardy’s novel is deeply sensuous, it is a sensuality riddled with a Schopenhauerian pessimism.
