assignment 4

Jude the Obscure

Name: Emisha Ravani

paper: 104 Literature of The Victorians

Roll no: 07

Enrollment no : 4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Jude the Obscure Background

Thomas Hardy's last finished novel, Jude the Obscure, is widely considered to be his best. Hardy explores all the big issues: class, faith, hope, love, sex. In the process, this seemingly simple story of a doomed love affair transcends the Victorian era in which it is set, making it a timeless classic, a universal tale of longing and despair.

Jude the Obscure Summary

Jude the Obscure is the story of a working-class young man from southern England, Jude Fawley, who dreams of someday becoming a scholar at the prestigious university at Christminster, modeled on the world-famous Oxford University.

Before this can happen, however, Jude is tricked into marriage by the seductive, but opportunistic, Arabella Donn, who falsely claims she is pregnant. The marriage soon falls apart and Jude travels to Christminster, only to be denied entry to the university. The classical studies he has pursued all his life, almost entirely on his own, have been for nothing. He has neither the education, nor the money, to become a scholar.

While at Christminster, he meets and quickly falls in love with his cousin, the vivacious and rebellious, Sue Bridehead. She, however, marries Jude's former schoolmaster and mentor, Richard Phillotson, who is cruel to her. Their marriage also fails; Sue and Jude divorce their spouses, but Sue refuses to marry Jude.

Then Jude discovers that he has a long-lost son with his estranged wife, Arabella. Jude's son comes to live with him and Sue. Still unmarried, Sue and Jude bear two more children, but are shunned by their community. Jude loses his job as a stonemason, the family is denied lodgings, and so the five of them embark on a seemingly endless search for work and housing.

Ultimately, Jude's namesake, his son with Arabella, known as Little Father Time because of his grave manner, hangs the younger children and himself, leaving behind a note which says only, 'Done because we are too meeny (many).'

Devastated, Sue returns to Phillotson and a life of religious devotion. They remarry, as do Jude and Arabella. After one more attempt to reconcile with Sue, Jude falls ill and ultimately dies at the age of 30. Arabella immediately moves on in search of her next husband, while Sue lives out the rest of her dreary life with Phillotson.

Jude the Obscure Themes & Analysis

Let's now take a closer look at the different themes and overall analysis of Jude the Obscure one step at a time.

The Struggle of the Victorian Working Class

Jude, though born into the working class, has big hopes of social and class mobility. He dreams of the kind of education and the kind of social and financial success from which those of his class are too often barred. But Jude's impoverished background is not so easily shaken.

An orphan raised by his aunt, Jude learns that his classical academic pursuits have all been for nothing: he's studied the wrong things. His head is stuffed with useless and probably incorrect information, and, what's worse for the scholars of Christminster, he has neither the resources nor the 'breeding' to become a scholar. He's, quite simply, not the right class and, all too often in Victorian England, the class in which you're born is the class in which you remain.

Love, Marriage, and Sex

Troubled relationships fill Hardy's novel. Jude and Arabella's disastrous marriage highlights an issue that Hardy himself frequently condemned: the Victorians' always judgmental and frequently cruel attitude toward sex.

Jude succumbs before marriage to Arabella's seductions and feels compelled, both by honor and by religious and social conviction, to marry her, tying himself eternally to a shallow woman whom he doesn't really love.

Conversely, the truly loving relationship between Sue and Jude is destroyed because it exists outside of marriage. The social condemnation and ostracism they incur ravage what might otherwise have been a very happy family. Sue, Jude, and their children are brutalized, and made hungry and homeless, through the scorn leveled against them.

Religious Hypocrisy

Religious hypocrisy is an important theme in the novel, in which men become priests simply because it is a comfortable career choice, not a vocation. There is a distinct absence of genuine religious feeling or experience in the novel; people use religion simply as a way to enforce society's rules and norms. Religion makes hypocrites of people because it forces them to despise and reject their natural urges (such as the desire for sex) and to violate natural morality: to leave partners who no longer suit them or make them miserable and to refrain from marrying unsuitable partners to establish paternity.

Religion is also a tool to subjugate women, who must get permission from husbands and fathers to do anything of consequence. For example, Sue points out that while a man gives himself freely in marriage, a woman is "given away" by a patriarchal figure, usually her father, to the husband who will become her keeper.

In Hardy's view religion is a crutch as well—to help the self-conscious creature that is a human being face the terrible existential angst (anxiety about existence) that is his or her fate. People comfort themselves with the idea of an afterlife, as when the organist plays the 73rd psalm at the children's funeral, and Sue hears, "Truly God is loving unto Israel." But where is God in their deaths? Without a belief in God, people must create their own reason to live, and if they are not able to come up with one, life becomes unbearable, as it did for Jude's mother and does for Jude's unearthly son, and eventually for Jude.

Related thematically are the words of the entire novel's epigraph: "The letter killeth." The sentence is a shortened version of St. Paul's words in the Book of Corinthians in the New Testament: "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." In this quotation St. Paul is contrasting the "old covenant" of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) with the "new covenant" created by the teachings of Jesus. However, Hardy means the letter of the law in religious matters may violate the tenets of Christianity if people do not interpret them with mercy and compassion. The words echo thematically throughout the novel as they apply to marriage and religion. In a wider context Hardy saw orthodox religion as a soul-killing philosophy, and the novel's characters reflect those who mercilessly follow the letter—inflicting heartlessness, cruelty, abuse—and those who do not.

Brutality of the Class System

The brutality of an impenetrable class system haunts Jude, who has the misfortune to be born into the working class. Despite being hard working, ambitious, and highly intelligent, he cannot escape from the restrictions of his class. He is doomed to remain basically in place, and the best he can do is become a craftsman in a skilled trade.

Jude cannot gain entry into the university because he has not had access to schools that teach Greek and Latin, and his efforts at self-study are not enough for him to catch up. Thus, he doesn't have enough knowledge to take an examination to qualify him for a scholarship. Neither does he have the money to pay—another route to a university education, and the one generally taken by the upper classes. Although Christminster was made for people like him—a genuine scholar with a thirst for knowledge, as Sue points out—Jude is doomed to remain outside its gates of learning and denied the opportunities to which learning can lead.

Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is an important theme in the novel, and Sue Bridehead represents, to an extent, the "new woman" who would prefer to remain independent. Given a choice Sue probably would not marry but feels constrained to do so. Sue has a trade as an ecclesiastical or church designer, and she has more than enough intelligence and talent to become a certified teacher, although she closes that opportunity by violating the rules of the teaching academy. Moreover, she rebels against her unjust punishment rather than meekly submitting to it, and as a result she is expelled. Readers may wonder whether male students would have similarly harsh restrictions and similarly harsh punishments for violating them.

Sue does not wish to get married because she understands the obligations of matrimony, the bondage of it, are worse for a woman than for a man. A wife is subject to her husband, and if he decides to treat her with physical or psychological cruelty, she has little recourse but to endure her pain. Sue resents the notion of women as property to be given and used in marriage. And she resents the accepted fact that women are reduced to using marriage as a way to ensure financial stability rather than choosing marriage freely to express their love and desire to live with a soulmate. Sue rebels against the hypocritical standards of society, which deem her immoral because she is not legally married to her children's father. Her failure to hide this information leads to tragedy that completely breaks Sue's spirit. As penance she surrenders to social norms, returning to her unlovable husband to atone for what she sees as the sin of having and then losing her children and living on her own terms.

References:

https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Jude-the-Obscure/themes/

https://study.com/academy/lesson/jude-the-obscure-by-thomas-hardy-summary-themes-characters.html