Assignment 104: Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of ‘Jude the Obscure’

This Blog is an Assignment of Paper no.104 Literature of the Victorians. In this assignment I am dealing with the topic Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of ‘Jude the Obscure’.

Information:

• Name : Rajeshvariba H. Rana 
• Roll No. : 18
• Enrollment No. : 4069206420220023
• Semester : 1st
• Paper No. :  104
• Paper Code : 22395
• Paper Name : Literature of the Victorians
• Topic : Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of  ‘Jude the Obscure’
• Submitted to : Smt.S.B.Gardi,Department of       English,MKBU                        
• E-mail : rhrana148@gmail.com 

Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of ‘Jude the Obscure’

Thomas Hardy: 

Thomas Hardy is best known for his novels, all of which were published in the mid- to late-19th century.

Hardy strongly believed in the incoherence of the empirical world. In his major fiction Hardy illustrated his personal philosophy of chance, a belief that chance, a blind force of Nature, can change man's destiny. Chance is for Hardy everything for which man has no control.

Hardy was not a philosopher, but certainly a philosophical novelist. His novels are in essence ethical reflections on both the universe and the social world.

The Universe is always present in his fiction. Hardy developed his ethical view of the universe in general, and of Victorian society in particular, in his early novels, Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and in the major novels, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, as well as in his epic drama The Dynasts. Hardy's characters serve as metaphors for his tragic vision of the human condition.

To try to find answers from the man himself is an exercise in frustration. Hardy had a private and a public self, and one can only suspect which self is revealed at a particular moment. "Whatever was within him that gave him the dark cast. To his mind, he kept it well hidden, expressing it only as a philosophical pessimism. He was always polite and ironic. mask before the world, and never, as some writers have done, let it drop so that the real man might be seen and understood. " Even his " official biography" is elusive, for it was written by Hardy and typed under his supervision by his second wife, whose name appears as author. As Richard Carpenter has noted, "It is more interesting for what it conceals than for what it says." Descriptions of Hardy's personality contribute least of all to an elucidation of his intention.(Schwartz)

The scheme of Jude the Obscure was outlined in 1890 from notes made in 1887, some of the circumstances having been suggested by the death of a woman in the former year. The narrative was begun in 1892, written in full length from August 1893 onward into the next year , and was in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. Harper's Magazine began serialisation in November 1894, under the title "The Simple tons, "and continued with monthly instalments from January to November 1895, under the title " Heart Insurgent ."(Schwartz)

Specifically in the novel, Hardy depicts characters who raise questions about such things as religious beliefs, social classes, the conventions of marriage, and elite educational institutions and who feel in the absence of the old certainties that the universe may be governed by a mysterious, possibly malign power.

Hardy's Representation of Courage to Face the Harsh Reality in Light of Darwinism :

"Darwinism thinks that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evolved from the lower forms of life and humans are special not because God created them but because they have successfully adapted to the changing environment. Conditions and have passed on their survival - making characteristics genetically".(Lu and Zhang)

In the novel Jude the Obscure, Darwin's theory of revolution is indeed widely applied in the description of the conflict between character and environment. And the theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest has a profound effect on the characters. The evolutionary storm that Darwin blew up in the Victorian age in Britain swept like a fresh wind through natural science and literature, bringing in its wake a new climate of intellectual and academic freedom that has grown with the passing years.

The themes of the novel are the struggle of the Victorian working class, religion and nonconformity, marriage and sexuality, and education.

Religion:

As a Christian allegory , Jude is a terrible indictment of Christianity and , particularly , Christianity as manifested in Victorian society . The Christian sacrifice is re - enacted in the society which some of its people thought the finest fruit of that sacrifice , and which now ignores or abets the death of Christ . Hardy is also trying to show how that sacrifice achieved nothing . The animal and unaspiring persist eternally , and it is to these that Christianity has geared itself. (Holland)

The references to the Bible , and more specifically to the book of Jude , are thus used negatively : Hardy brings out the idea of religious and ethical struggle in his here in order to refute society's pietistic stance. (Gray)

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.

Marriage :

To see how the structure works, and specifically to see how marriage functions, let us return to the basic opposition between "civil law" and "law of nature."

But Hardy is interested not only in showing such casual floutings of the marriage laws, which in themselves may seem isolated and accidental occurrences dependent upon individual willful acts. Instead of simply showing how the act of marriage can be infelicitous, his real goal is to show that even when it is apparently felicitous - that is, when the recognized conventions governing the act of marriage have been properly invoked and performed - marriage is doomed to failure, because it promises to deliver something it can not. This he demonstrates through the two main marriages in the novel.(Goetz)

The marriage between Sue and Phillotson is more complicated. Phillotson represents an enlightened view when he lets Sue go to live with her soulmate, an action for which he is punished by a hypocritical society. Society cares much more about the letter than the spirit of the law ("the letter killeth") and upholds a superficial morality that negates people's deepest feelings. But the problem of marriage in Hardy's novel is intractable; even though Phillotson is willing to take Sue back as his wife, his complicity in her martyrdom is sure to destroy her. Going along with Sue helps him get back his livelihood and status in an unforgiving society.

In other words, Sue believes that women should be allowed to undo marriages that are clearly mistakes. She's also sure that lots of women feel this way, only they don't say so and Sue does. Unfortunately for Sue, she lives in the late nineteenth century, and the rules of her social environment won't let her live as she wants. Her insight into the ways that marriage will change over the twentieth century is almost dead on even though she are speaking in 1896, before the twentieth century even begins.

On the other hand, the real marriage of Jude and Sue causes people to persecute and ostracise them because the couple does not have a legal contract. The relentless hounding of the nonconformist couple results in them losing their livelihoods and relatively pleasant home in Aldbrickham. Their return to Christminster as paupers leads to the tragic destruction of their family.

Jude and Sue are in love but cannot marry because they are already married to other people. They live together and have children, but after their tragic deaths, they feel convicted of returning to their first spouses; Jude eventually dies, while Sue continues her loveless marriage.

Victorian Society:

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.The brutality of an impenetrable class system haunts Jude, who has the misfortune to be born into the 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.

Conversely, the truly loving relationship between Sue and Jude is destroyed because it exists outside of marriage which is not accepted in society. The social condemnation and ostracism they incur ravage what might otherwise have been a very happy family. Sue, Jude, and their children are brutalised, and made hungry and homeless, through the scorn levelled against them.

Conclusion:

“Of course no text, however hard it tries, stands free within its frame. But Jude the obscure rejoices in its enlargement.” -John Goode

Hardy’s treatment of the problems does not simply address the issues of Victorian era but is applicable to a larger extent to modern society. Hardy succeeds in giving his message, instead of being severely criticised by his contemporary writers and critics, for proposing the free approach towards life.

Jude the Obscure can be treated as one of Hardy’s contribution to the marriage question that deals marriage as a concerned problem in contemporary society.

At last I say these three themes of 'Jude the Obscure' are connected with each other in that time and also in contemporary time.

[Words 1683, Image 02]

Works cited :

Goetz, William R. “The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 38, no. 2, 1983, pp. 189–213. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044789. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022. 

Gray, Carol Grever. “Essay: JUDE AND THE ‘NEW’ MORALITY.” Newsletter of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, vol. 19, no. 2, 1970, pp. 14–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26331905. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022. 

Holland, Norman. “‘Jude the Obscure’: Hardy’s Symbolic Indictment of Christianity.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 9, no. 1, 1954, pp. 50–60. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044291. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022. 

Lu, Guorong, and Zhehui Zhang. “On the Theme of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.” English Language and Literature Studies, 20 Aug. 2019, https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v9n3p15. 

Schwartz, Barry N. “Jude the Obscure in the Age of Anxiety.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 10, no. 4, 1970, pp. 793–804. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/449715. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.