Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy

                      Introduction

Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. It is Hardy's last completed novel. Its protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man, a stonemason, who dreams of becoming a scholar.

        

who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardy's fictional county of Wessex), who yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modelled on Oxford. As a youth, Jude teaches himself Classical Greek and Latin in his spare time, while working first in his great-aunt's bakery, with the hope of entering university. But before he can try to do this the naïve Jude is seduced by Arabella Donn, a rather coarse, morally lax and superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. The marriage is a failure, and Arabella leaves Jude and later emigrates to Australia, where she enters into a bigamous marriage. By this time, Jude has abandoned his classical studies. Here you can see some videos of Jude the Obscure.

                      

After Arabella leaves him, Jude moves to Christminster and supports himself as a mason while studying alone, hoping to be able to enter the university later. There, he meets and falls in love with his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. But, shortly after this, Jude introduces Sue to his former schoolteacher, Mr. Phillotson, whom she eventually is persuaded to marry, despite the fact that he is some twenty years her senior. However, she soon regrets this, because in addition to being in love with Jude, she is horrified by the notion of sex with her husband. Sue soon asks Phillotson for permission to leave him for Jude, which he grants, once he realizes how unwilling she is to fulfill what he believes are her marital duties to him. Because of this scandal—the fact Phillotson willingly allows his wife to leave for another man—Phillotson has to give up his career as a schoolmaster.

Sue and Jude spend some time living together without any sexual relationship. This is because of Sue's dislike both of sex and the institution of marriage. Soon after, Arabella reappears having fled her Australian husband, who managed a hotel in Sydney, and this complicates matters. Arabella and Jude divorce and she legally marries her bigamous husband, and Sue also is divorced. However, following this, Arabella reveals that she had a child of Jude's, eight months after they separated, and subsequently sends this child to his father. He is named Jude and nicknamed "Little Father Time" because of his intense seriousness and lack of humour.

Jude eventually convinces Sue to sleep with him and, over the years, they have two children together and expect a third. But Jude and Sue are socially ostracised for living together unmarried, especially after the children are born. Jude's employers dismiss him because of the illicit relationship, and the family is forced into a nomadic lifestyle, moving from town to town across Wessex seeking employment and housing before eventually returning to Christminster. Their socially troubled boy, "Little Father Time", comes to believe that he and his half-siblings are the source of the family's woes. The morning after their arrival in Christminster, he murders Sue's two children and kills himself by hanging. He leaves behind a note that simply reads, "Done because we are too menny." Shortly thereafter, Sue has a miscarriage.

Beside herself with grief and blaming herself for "Little Father Time"'s actions, Sue turns to the church that she has rebelled against and comes to believe that the children's deaths were divine retribution for her relationship with Jude. Although horrified at the thought of resuming her marriage with Phillotson, she becomes convinced that, for religious reasons, she should never have left him. Arabella discovers Sue's feelings and informs Phillotson, who soon proposes they remarry. This results in Sue leaving Jude once again for Phillotson, and she punishes herself by allowing her husband sex. Jude is devastated and remarries Arabella after she plies him with alcohol to once again trick him into marriage.

After one final, desperate visit to Sue in freezing weather, Jude becomes seriously ill and dies within the year in Christminster, thwarted in his ambitions both in love in achieving fame in scholarship. It is revealed that Sue has grown "staid and worn" with Phillotson. Arabella fails to mourn Jude's passing, instead setting the stage to ensnare her next suitor.

1) Character study of Jude and Sue Bridehead

         

Jude👦

Jude is the hero and the central character of the book, and his life is interconnected with that of all the other major and minor characters in the story. Hardy presents the protagonist as an ordinary, working-class man of humble origins struggling hard to realize his dreams but thwarted by a cruel fate and a pitiless, snobbish social system. Despite the resemblance to the hero of Greek tragedy (in his nobility of character), Jude, of all Hardy's characters can be said to come closest to a kind of Marxist literary hero. He is the outsider who is denied access to improvement and social advancement by a rigid, conservative class-system.

The reader first sees Jude as a child of eleven, hardworking, persevering, affectionate, gentle and extremely sensitive. Hardy develops certain traits in Jude's personality as he grows older: he displays a lifelong inability to hurt any living creature or to see it suffer, whether it be an earthworm, a pig, a horse, a rabbit or even his wife, Arabella. His vulnerability and essential gentleness lead him to be careless regarding his own survival.

Part of Jude's tragedy arises from his incurable idealism. As a child he is fascinated with Christminster. It is the focus of all his dreams, a shining ideal of intellectual life. But even though he realizes his ambitions may be futile, the university remains an obsession with him. Similarly, he idealizes Sue as the perfect intellectual woman, but here too he is disillusioned and frustrated. His obsession with Sue continues nevertheless. Both Christminster, the intellectual ideal, and Sue, the ideal of womanhood, promise fulfillment, and both frustrate him. All his hard work and earnest effort at mastering Greek and Latin come to nothing, and despite his great patience with Sue and devotion to her, he loses his job, his children and finally even his title as husband. His utter loneliness and desolation create a strong emotional impact on the reader. It is here that Jude, despite his humble working-class origins, rises to heroic stature. Very often in the book he is compared to heroic figures such as Job; he has, like Job, the ability to bear great suffering. He reconciles himself to the endless tragedies and disappointments of life. At the end of the novel, he matures as a man. With all the setbacks life deals him, he never loses his dignity. At two places in the novel, he is compared to Samson (Part I, Chapter 7 and Part VI, Chapter 7), defeated by his own innocence and a woman's cunning. Sue herself compares him to Joseph, to a "tragic Don Quixote" (Part IV, Chapter 1) and to St. Stephen "who while they were stoning him could see Heaven opened."

Jude's death at the young age of thirty (the approximate age of Jesus Christ at his death) indicates that he has been "crucified" by society. But even the flaws that contributed to his downfall are not really faults. If his sensitivity, kindness, sense of honor, naïveté and idealism are considered weaknesses, they are also his strengths. His only real weakness is a tendency to drink when in despair, although he is not a drunkard.His death in Christminster on Remembrance Day and his loneliness and desolation has a strange poignancy. The reader is left with a feeling of bitterness and waste at the ruin of a promising life.

•  Sue Bridehead👩

She is vivacious, friendly and yet refined. Hardy contrasts Sue with Arabella to represent the difference between the spirit and the flesh. Sue is often spoken of as "ethereal" and "aerial." Jude himself calls her, "you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom, hardly flesh at all..." (Part IV, Chapter 5). Even Phillotson remarks on the rather spiritual affinity between Sue and Jude as something "Shelleyan." Though in some ways Sue represents a free spirit struggling against an oppressive, conventional social order, in other ways Sue can be very conventionally Victorian, for instance, in her shrinking from the physical and in her aversion to sex. She refuses to live with Jude as his lover even after leaving Phillotson. She regards physical relations as repugnant. Furthermore, she sees marriage as a "sordid contract" and a "hopelessly vulgar" institution. It often seems that she is merely seeking excuses to postpone marriage. Her dislike of Arabella is revealed in her comment to Jude about her being a "fleshy and coarse" and a "low-passioned woman."

Yet with all her sensitivity and apparent fragility, there is in Sue a selfishness and a corresponding insensitivity to the feelings of others.Ther is Christminster undergraduate whose heart she broke, kind and decent Phillotson whose career she wrecks, and Jude, to whom she does great injury by undermining the beliefs which are essential to his well being. She utterly fails to realize the pain she inflicts on Jude with her wavering attitude. Jude is provoked to remark, "Sue, sometimes when I am vexed with you, I think you incapable of real love" (Part IV, Chapter 5). Despite all the sacrifices Jude has made for her, despite being free to marry him after her divorce, she will not make a commitment. Hardy captures Sue's quality of unpredictability and elusiveness. She buys nude statues of Greek divinities, then repents and conceals them from her landlady. She snaps irritably at Phillotson, then regrets it later. Sue is sometimes reckless and then diffident, stern and then kind, warm and then standoffish, candid and then evasive. In portraying these glimpses of Sue--her unceasing reversals, her changes of heart and mind, her conflicting behavior-- Hardy creates a complex, fascinating character. The reader sees her telling Jude, "You mustn't love me" (Part III, Chapter 5) and then writing to him, "you may." After her marriage she forbids Jude to come to see her (Part III, Chapter 9), and then she revokes the ban and invites him the next week. Later, she cancels the invitation (Part IV, Chapter 2). Hardy indicates that along with her changing moods, she has a tendency to shift ground under pressure.

Finally, when tragedy strikes in the violent deaths of the three children, Sue is seen breaking down under the strain and becoming a sick woman. She plunges into a state of tormenting guilt and remorse. The reader sees a personality distorted by the effort to bear terrible burdens and now blindly seeking a self-inflicted punishment.

                      Conclusion👈

The Jude the Obscure is one of the play by Thomas Hardy. The Moral of the play is that the main character could not achieve his goal because he want to become a scholar like his teacher Phillotson was in that position of  Scholar man.

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