by Thomas Hardy
The final characteristic element of the naturalist narrative bespeaks the influence of perhaps the most towering intellectual influence of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin. Literary naturalism often represents its characters through evolutionary types; it brings the Darwinian concepts of natural selection, the struggle for existence, instinct, variability, and inheritance into play as potentially negative and positive features of human existence. Here we might think again of Arabella, with the preponderance of detail supplied about her physical traits as indices of sexual selection; she is not spoken of through human, psychologized traits, but through her animalistic qualities. In Jude, Sue Bridehead is also critiqued by evolutionary type, for she personifies the anxiety that existed in the wake of Darwin that it was possible to produce (through overevolution and social coddling) creatures unfit for the evolutionary struggle.
Hardy’s Darwinian view of nature is a departure from the Romantic “pathetic fallacy,” the concept of nature as a mirror of human emotions. For Hardy, nature is not a reflection of the human, but a site of contestation over resources (generally understood as sustenance and sexual outlets) that produces winners and losers. This is not to say that Hardy admiringly endorses evolutionary winners, for Arabella, certainly among the most distasteful of Hardy’s creations, is the consummate evolutionary winner. Jude’s tragedy is in part the result of a temperament that makes him too sensitive to compete. From Jude’s earliest childhood, when he loses his job as a human scarecrow because he feels sorry for the hungry birds, his sympathy makes him unfit to trample upon others. This quality is literal as well as metaphorical:Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them at each tread.
Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not himself bear to hurt anything.... He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the earthworms, without killing a single one (p. 17).
Hardy’s depiction of Jude here needs to be understood as more than just the fancies of a sensitive child or as a “weakness of character,” for it self-consciously portends the unhappiness that Jude will experience as a result of his inability to trample upon—or, put another way, compete for existence with—another creature.
The intellectual figure, however, whom Hardy most clearly cites in the text is Thomas Malthus, the economist whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) introduced a key idea for nineteenth-century narrative : the competition for resources. Malthus postulated that the geometric progression of population in relation to food would result in widespread famine and suffering. Human rationality, which Malthus believed was not all that powerful in the face of human reproduction, had no part in the most important social facts. The nineteenth-century novel became interested in describing and plotting the repercussions of Malthusian thought; Charles Dickens, with Oliver Twist’s famous request for a second bowl of gruel—“Please, sir, I want some more”—not only critiques the Poor Laws but distills Malthus’s ideas into a single, sentimental image. In Jude the Obscure Malthus is invoked in the act Little Father Time performs and the note he leaves behind. His line has sometimes become a shorthand for what the novel represents: “Done because we are too menny” indirectly cites Malthus’s anxiety about overpopulation (p. 345). Hardy’s novel is palpably that strangest of things within the tradition of the English novel, a novel of ideas—Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Malthus, and several others circulate in its pages, offering to the English tradition a Continental openness to fictional philosophizing.
One of the qualities of Jude the Obscure that is hard to fix, but which is nevertheless palpable in reading it, is the sense that it is written at a moment experienced as “late in time.” That Jude was, at the time it was written, an end-of-the-century production is evident from both its publication date of 1895 and the millennialism that haunts its pages. The sensation that everything is about to change because the century is about to turn over is a sensation with which we should be able to empathize. Our own issues about the change from the twentieth to the twenty-first century were routed through anxieties about a computer bug (Y2K) that was rumored would cause systemic chaos and anarchy throughout the modern world. Hardy’s novel likewise reflects an anxious millennialism: a culture in which order as they knew it was in eopardy. Sue’s disenchantment with marriage makes her see in a bride leaving the church the “heifers of sacrifice in old times” (p. 293), while Little Father Time looks at a bunch of flowers and does not see beauty, but rather their imminent death (p. 303). Jude’s appraisal that their ideas were fifty years premature reflects his awareness that the fin de siècle had not brought change quickly enough for his own happiness. In general, however, Jude is rarely so self-conscious, instead reflecting Hardy’s sense that a momentous change is upon them as the century turns; Jude says: “I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am” (p. 335). We might think profitably of Hardy’s Russian contemporary Anton Chekhov, whose character Vershinin, in act 2 of the play Three Sisters (1901), expresses a compatible sentiment:“Well, you know, how shall I put it? I think everything is bound to change gradually—in fact, it’s changing before our very eyes. In two or three hundred years, or maybe in a thousand years—it doesn’t matter how long exactly—life will be different. It will be happy. Of course, we shan’t be able to enjoy that future life, but all the same, what we’re living for now is to create it, we work and ... yes, we suffer in order to create it” (Plays, translated by Elisaveta Fen).
The modern moment in which Hardy is writing indirectly produces one of the text’s most difficult questions: What kind of person is created by modernity? The novel answers it in a number of different ways, though most powerfully in its creation of the characters of Little Father Time, Sue Bridehead, and Jude Fawley. When Jude decides to give up working as a restorer of churches because his un-sanctified union with Sue has led them to be ostracized, Sue advises him to find work as a stonemason on “railway stations, bridges, theatres, music-halls, hotels—everything that has no connection with conduct” (p. 312). Note the following about Sue’s seemingly random list: railways and hotels are places of transience, theatres and music halls are places of performance, while a bridge also implies a place of transition from one place to another. The novel invites us to think about the kind of person formed by these social facts. What kind of person is more comfortable with railway stations and hotels than with Gothic churches? Hardy’s novel implies, though typically never states, that this would be a modern person who is suffering, as Chekhov suggested, to create the modern world.
The most negative version of modernity in Jude the Obscure is the uncanny Little Father Time; more a cipher, symbol, or abstraction than a real person, the child who is the product of Jude’s and Arabella’s unhappy marriage tests the boundaries of realism. The end that Father Time comes to—almost an experiment in the grotesque extremes of the novel’s philosophies—suggests but never fully affirms a set of terrifying consequences of the modern. It is unclear, for instance, if the doctor’s appraisal of the boy’s profound pessimism—“it was in his nature to do it.... There are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life.... It is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live”—is validated by the text, or
if his diagnosis is but part of the oppressive social forms that Jude and Sue have tried to rebel against (p. 345).
Jude, whose philosophical affiliations at the start of his life consisted of traditional faith in education and religion, and Sue, who personified skepticism when Jude met her for the first time, are not consistent in their philosophies. Jude, who becomes increasingly un-tethered to traditional morality, at a certain point in the novel metaphorically switches places with Sue: “He was mentally approaching the position which Sue had occupied when he first met her” (p. 316). Because of the central horror that she experiences, Sue ultimately repudiates the modern position she has staked out for herself, even though she has fervently believed and convinced Jude that the trappings of modern social forms—social candor, the repudiation of hypocritical social forms, loss of family control, decay of religion, gender emancipation, as well as trains and hotels—would bring them happiness.
Before the act of penitence at the end of the novel, Sue Bridehead embodies the “New Woman,” a character type identified in popular culture as well as in the novel in the late nineteenth century. Sue’s modernity is tied to her unconventional approach to gender; as a new woman, she is educated and emancipated, and, the novel implies, as a result nervous and oddly free of sexual interest; her description of her friendship with a young man in London captures her curious unconsciousness about sex. We are meant to understand that one of the most obvious facts about Sue—her palpable horror about sex—makes her peculiarly modern in that it gestures to the modern category of the neurosis: As Freud would later suggest, one of the primary characteristics of a neurotic personality is its incapacity for understanding erotic demands. A neurosis might be described as the self that is split between the social self and the desiring self, often producing lacerating submissions—of the kind, for instance, that Sue endures and even courts eventually by returning to Phillotson—to what society says we should want.
Sue’s neurosis marks an innovation in the field of the novel, for the subtle psychologization of intimacy between two individuals and the bringing of neurosis into its depiction of sex makes Jude the Obscure a watershed novel. The novel, more than any other before it, depicts the minute-by-minute processes of married life, including sexual dysfunction, a neurotic relation to the sexual drive, and the depiction of unconscious desires. One need only think of Sue’s elaborate rigging of the closet that she sleeps in so that she can sense the approach of her husband, or her flinging herself from the bedroom window when Phillotson unadvisedly approaches her for sex, to realize the extent to which the novel opens up new frontiers for the twentieth-century novel. Up to this time the English novel had not only generally ended with marriage, but even when it continued past the fact of it having taken place it had never attempted to capture what it was like to be intimate with a spouse—let alone what it feels like to be intimate with someone for whom one feels physical repulsion. In this way Jude the Obscure leads to an enormous opening up of the field of novelistic representation, which would include what the novelist is allowed to describe, including the most intimate disclosures possible: what, for instance, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom reads as he defecates or Molly Bloom fantasizes about with her lover.
One way, finally, to begin the novel Jude the Obscure is to think hard about its title. We have considered how it echoes the sound of classical tragedies such as Oedipus the King, but its range of allusion is broader than this would imply. The Epistle of Jude, which Hardy had read and made notes on in his version of the Bible, is here invoked; whether Saint Jude, traditionally understood as the saint of hopeless causes, is in part behind the choice of Jude’s name is at least a defensible interpretation. But perhaps the most enigmatic aspect of the novel’s title is its title page, with its epigraph: “The letter killeth.” The phrase is a quotation from 2 Corinthians 3:6: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Saint Paul goes on to explain this as a distinction between the Spirit and the Letter of the Law, the meaning of which has been much debated, but which has generally been understood as Paul’s critique of a legalistic adherence to Christianity.
By citing part of the phrase, “the letter killeth,” Hardy invites the reader to consider what the letter of the law means and how it might kill. Since one of the primary ways that the novel engages law is through the marriage law, a reader would do well to start there, and ask: Does strict adherence to the law of marriage kill? The Divorce Act of 1857 had ensured the right of a civil divorce, so Hardy probably was not limiting his critique to the actual law itself, but perhaps was pursuing the more complicated question of how social conventions or religious belief could produce what he called “a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy” The question of how “the letter killeth,” and what the nature of Jude’s tragedy was, is perhaps the novel’s largest question—the pursuit of which will take the reader deep into the novel, and deep into the intellectual and emotional issues that ensure a place for Jude the Obscure among the greatest English novels.
Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City, and is the author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford University Press, 2003), as well as articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. King received her doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1998.
Map of Wessex, prepared by Hardy in 1895.
JUDE THE OBSCURE
“THE LETTER KILLETH.”1
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly as follows. The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onwards, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October 1892; the narrative was written in outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893, and at full length, as it now appears, from August 1893 onwards into the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a serial story in Harper’s Magazine at the end of November 1894, and was continued in monthly parts.
But, as in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the magazine version was for various reasons an abridged and modified one, the present edition being the first in which the whole appears as originally written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a provisional name, two such titles having, in fact, been successively adopted. The present and final title, deemed on the whole the best, was one of the earliest thought of
For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age; which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity; to tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.
Like former productions of this pen, Jude the Obscure is simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment.
August 1895.
Postscript
The issue of this book sixteen years ago, with the explanatory Preface given above, was followed by unexpected incidents, and one can now look back for a moment at what happened. Within a day or two of its publication the reviewers pronounced upon it in tones to which the reception of Tess of the d’Urbervilles bore no comparison, though there were two or three dissentients from the chorus. This salutation of the story in England was instantly cabled to America, and the music was reinforced on that side of the Atlantic in a shrill cr
escendo.
In my own eyes the sad feature of the attack was that the greater part of the story—that which presented the shattered ideals of the two chief characters, and had been more especially, and indeed almost exclusively, the part of interest to myself—was practically ignored by the adverse press of the two countries; the while that some twenty or thirty pages of sorry detail deemed necessary to complete the narrative, and show the antitheses in Jude’s life, were almost the sole portions read and regarded. And curiously enough, a reprint the next year of a fantastic tale that had been published in a family paper some time before, drew down upon my head a continuation of the same sort of invective from several quarters.
So much for the unhappy beginning of Jude’s career as a book. After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop—probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.
Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work—austere in its treatment of a difficult subject—as if the writer had not all the time said in the Preface that it was meant to be so. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only effect on it on human conduct that I could discover being its effect of myself—the experience completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.
