Like other novels by Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure offers a bleak picture of the choices available to the working man. First published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895, the novel upset many. They found Hardy’s overt protest against poverty depressing. In his previous novels, characters had accepted their poverty and not struggled against it, as Jude does. Jude is an intelligent and creative individual who will never realize his gifts due to social stigma. Readers also found unacceptably vulgar the novel’s focus on the everyday and indecent in its characterization of sexual relations between unmarried men and women. Hardy found indecent the fact that sexual mores could be used to manipulate couples, forcing them into disastrous relationships with little concern for the destructive results.

He was accustomed to negative reactions; George Meredith had reviewed his first manuscript, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and pronounced it too revolutionary to publish. However, the public outcry by readers and critics alike to Jude the Obscure proved too much even for Hardy to tolerate. He found the reaction against his novel so distasteful that he ceased writing fiction altogether, turning to poetry and introducing a second change into his writing career. He would likely have been amazed by the intense popularity of his novel with later generations.

The novel’s protagonist, the stonemason Jude Fawley, emulates the journey of his beloved schoolmaster, Mr. Phillotson, from his small village of Maygreen to Christminster in an attempt to gain an education. He also escapes an unbearable marriage to a seductress, Arabella Donn, who lied to Jude about being pregnant just so he would marry her. When she leaves him to travel to Australia with her parents, Jude also decides to escape his miserable life. He searches for Phillotson and discovers him managing a small school, having failed to reach his goal of attending university. Jude intends to work as a stonemason until he can enter university, fantasizing in the meantime over a photograph of his beautiful distant cousin, Sue Bridehead. He eventually meets Sue and falls in love with her, helping her to get work with Phillotson as his assistant. His love for Sue intensifies the more he is exposed to her intellectual, creative nature, contrasting her refined personality with the crude opportunist, Arabella. Although the young people try to deny their love, they eventually admit what they feel for one another.

Sue enrolls in an all-female school, studying to become certified as a teacher. Despite her love for Jude, she becomes engaged to Phillotson, and they plan to marry following her completion of school. Sue vacillates in this arrangement, as at times she finds the thought of marriage to the much-older man repulsive. As she nears graduation, Sue visits Jude and is unjustly condemned for improper behavior by her imaginative schoolmistress, who moves to expel her. She turns to Jude for comfort, but discovers only then that he is a married man. Distraught, she marries Phillotson.

Heightening the conflict of an already dark plot, Arabella reappears, telling Jude that she married in Australia and begging him not to reveal her secret bigamy, to which he agrees. He continues to see the desperately unhappy Sue, begging her to leave Phillotson. Aware of the situation, Phillotson tells her to go to Jude, which she does.

Blocked from entering university by financial problems and his low social status, Jude accepts his position as a stonemason. Sue’s arrival buoys his spirits, but he is dismayed to learn that she does not want to have sex. He agrees to abide by her rule in order to keep her with him, and they live together. Arabella requests a divorce in order to legally marry her Australian husband, who has relocated to England. When he agrees, Phillotson learns of the divorce and decides to divorce Sue, legally freeing her. By this time, however, despite her new liberty, Sue will not marry Jude. Hardy condemns the institution of marriage, not only through his multiple examples of failed unions, but also through Sue’s belief that marriage will ruin her relationship with Jude.

Again, Arabella enters the scene to make misery for Jude. She brings him a young boy nicknamed Father Time, due to his incurable melancholy, that she claims is Jude’s. Jude and Sue take him in. Condemned by society due to their divorces and their early cohabitation, they remain miserable, driven from one village to another and not allowed to enjoy any happiness. Their only lasting friendship is with Mrs. Edlin, who does not judge them. They do consummate their union, eventually having two children of their own. In the most tragic of many tragic scenes in the novel, Father Time eventually murders the two younger children and then commits suicide, unable to face the family’s poverty any longer and mistakenly considering the children the source of their problems. Readers found coping with the grotesque scene almost impossible.

Sue’s reaction is to become fundamentally religious, constantly condemning herself for the children’s deaths, believing her suffering to be punishment by God. She urges Jude to return to his true wife, Arabella. Jude vigorously objects, protesting that he and Sue obviously belong together, as evidenced by their true love for one another. Sue will not listen. She returns to Phillotson, begging him to take her back. He agrees, but extracts her promise to always obey him. Weary of having to make what seem consistently disastrous decisions on her own, Sue agrees, and they wed, although they do not sleep together.

Sue’s action devastates Jude, at that point broken in spirit and ill. The widowed Arabella takes advantage of him, tricking Jude into marriage for the second time. Distraught and inconsolable, Jude makes a final journey to beg Sue to renew their relationship. She acts on her passion to kiss him and declare her love, and then pulls back, remembering her pledge to a higher moral purpose. After that incident, she joins Phillotson in bed as a type of punishment. Jude travels home in the rain, which signals a cleansing of the past and a time of change. He dies miserable and alone, while the reader observes Arabella laying a trap for her next victim. To add to the reader’s heavy burden of pity for the characters, Mrs. Edlin tells Arabella at Jude’s funeral that Sue has at last found peace. The irony of the statement undercuts any redemption such declarations of peace normally bring. The novel concludes with Jude’s needs having been ignored not only by Sue and Arabella but also by society in general. Critic Lionel Stevenson describes the novel as “repulsively black,” a comment with which many agree. However, the novel remains popular as a study subject in higher education and is readily available. Hardy’s own description of the novel as “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” indicates he might be surprised by its longevity.

Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s Novels

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adelman, Gary. Jude the Obscure: A Paradise of Despair. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Buckler, William E. Introduction to Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy. New York: Dell, 1959.
Page, Norman, ed. Jude the Obscure: An Authoritative Text: Backgrounds and Contexts and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1999.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.