Jude the obscure :
Hello readers, i am Dhruvita Dhameliya and today I write about Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the obscure and critical analysis of religion, education and society.
Introduction :
Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years.
First of all, literature makes variety kind of concept to understand and to come out with new idea that one must be learning of and make impact on the society. Here is genius writer Thomas Hardy, who expanded the Victorian era and showed the realistic picture of it. To study the writer one has to study all the elements which writer is writing in his work. He uses make kind of concepts like pessimism, an overwhelming feeling of irony, naturalism, feminism. These all makes impact on the writing part and other things like Thomas Hardy is showing is about fate and chance, dignity of the person. Thomas Hardy portrays woman characters in a contrasting way. One cannot identify that Hardy is with the women character or he is showing the harshness and punishing women on the targeting on Victorian period. Thomas Hardy’s masterpieces of novel is 'Under the Greenwood Tree 1872', 'A Pair of Blue Eyes 1873', 'Far from the Madding Crowd 1874' , 'The Return of the Native 1878', 'The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886', 'Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1891', 'Jude the Obscure 1896'. In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after a great amount of negative criticism erupted from the publication of his novel Jude The Obscure, Hardy decided to give up writing novels permanently and to focus his literary efforts on writing poetry. All the facts show that Thomas Hardy gives major elements in his works and shows realness of the time.
Jude the Obscure :
Jude the Obscure, the last but most radical novel by Thomas Hardy, raised a storm of protest among Victorian society upon its publication in 1895. Hardy’s adoption of a critical stance in his presentation of marriage was not particularly welcomed by many Victorian
readers. Many critics considered the novel extremely offensive to Victorian morality and its legal codes.
Jude the Obscure focuses on the life of a country stonemason, Jude, and his love for his cousin Sue, a schoolteacher. From the beginning Jude knows that marriage is an ill-fated venture in his family, and he believes that his love for Sue curses him doubly, because they are both members of a cursed clan. While love could be identified as a central theme in the novel, it is the institution of marriage that is the work's central focus. Jude and Sue are unhappily married to other people, and then drawn by an inevitable bond that pulls them together. Their relationship is beset by tragedy, not only because of the family curse but also by society's reluctance to accept their marriage as legitimate.
Religion :
Along with marriage and society, Hardy spends much of Jude the Obscure critiquing religion and the institution of Christianity. He often portrays Christianity as life-denying and belonging to
“THE LETTER” that “kILLETH” from the novel’s epigraph. In contrast, Sue is introduced as a kind of pre-Christian entity, an ethereal, pagan spirit, and she first appears buying figures of the ancient Greek gods Venus and Apollo. Jude, meanwhile, hopes to join the clergy as part of his intellectual pursuits. At a model of Jerusalem, Sue wonders why Jerusalem should be honored above Athens or Rome, but Jude is mesmerized by this city which is so important to Christianity.
As with most of his arguments, Hardy also undercuts himself and favors a nuanced approach to an issue. Even as he seems to reject Christianity, he also portrays almost all the main characters as Christ-figures at several points, even describing them with Biblical language. The “pagan joy” of Sue and Jude’s unmarried, unreligious love is not actually that joyful either, and Hardy thoroughly punishes them with his plot, ultimately driving Sue to submit to a harsh, legalistic version of Christianity. By associating Sue’s turn to religion with Jude’s turn to alcohol both used as relief from the tragedy of their children’s death,Hardy again adds more nuance – Christianity may be the “right” way for his country and time, but it can still be used for less-than-pure purposes. As “Nature’s law” fails Sue and Jude, so “Heaven’s law” also fails them, and the “LETTER” of the law of Christianity can seem less moral than human nature. Hardy gives many examples of this, including Sue’s return to Phillotson, which is a kind of adultery even though they are legally and religiously married. As usual, Hardy ends without any clear answer. He seems to reject a Christianity that is overly concerned with laws and traditions, but he doesn’t portray paganism or atheism as a particularly fulfilling alternative either.
Education :
The theme of education plays a major role in Hardy’s last novel Jude the Obscure. Right from the start, the protagonist Jude is shown to be aspiring for higher education in universities, despite being the apprentice of a stone mason. The novel courses, among many other issues, his pursuit of this dream, finally showing his failure to achieve it. But the fault is shown not to lie within him, but the society, in the very institution of education, which, rather than helping out people like Jude, rejects them, regardless of their troubles to get so far. Colleges and Universities are shown to pay more attention to the class of the student, rather than his merit. Its not too hard to envision the role education plays in this novel, when one discovers that one of its major settings is a city renowned for its famous university- Christminister.
Hardy highlights many kinds of education in Jude the Obscure. Most obviously, we have Jude's desire to get a university degree and become an academic. However, Hardy also emphasizes the importance of experiential education, because Jude is inexperienced with women and with social situations more generally, he is especially susceptible to Arabella's seduction. In the novel, the level of traditional education one reaches is closely tied to the class system, and if someone from Jude's class wants to learn, they must teach themselves. Although the narrator seems to admire Jude's willingness to teach himself, he also points out the limits of auto didacticism, noting that despite Jude's near-constant studies, he cannot hope to complete on the university entrance exam against richer men who have hired tutors.
In the first two parts of the book, the focus is on Jude, a working-class boy firmly attempting to educate himself. He struggles patiently to realize his dream of a university education but is thwarted by a cruel fate and rigid, conservative social order. Jude teaches himself the classics, Latin, Greek, and much more in the hopes that he will one day be able to further his education in the proper setting: college.
When one examines Hardy's presentation of the university and Jude's efforts to enter it, two main views become apparent. Jude's view is the romantic and illusory one, the society’s view is realistic, hence hard and unmerciful. As a child, he was always fascinated with Christminster.
He sees it as a "city of light," where
"the tree of knowledge grows"; it is like "a castle manned by scholarship and religion." Even years later, when he realizes his ambitions are futile, Christminster remains a shining ideal of intellectual life, "the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country." Broken and beaten by life, Jude still retains his attachment to the place and returns, wishing to die there.
Sue adopts a different standpoint. She does not share his romantic ideals and viciously attacks Christminster as an "ignorant place, full of fetishists and ghost seers" and a "nest of common schoolmasters" with a "timid obsequiousness to tradition". Its intellectual life is dismissed as "new wine in old bottles". She however is able to take a two years teacher’s training at the end of which she hopes to join a school, which will at least guarantee her economic freedom. Her institutional education is at a much higher level than of Jude.
Phillotson's view on the institution of education is rather plain. He is the ordinary, unassuming schoolmaster of Marygreen, but it is he who inspires Jude within the desire to go on to the university. He moves off to Christminster, and it is there that he marries Sue. However, his unconventional but kind attitude of letting Sue go back to Jude gets a lot of criticism from other teachers, including the chairman of the school committee. He is also sacked from the very educational institution he taught in, for his inability to keep his wife 'chained' under control. Thus the attitude of the educated class here is criticised in the sense that instead of a broader mindset, they are still narrow and clinging on to old traditions.
Jude is not wanted at Christminster, and often Hardy describes the gloom of the university city in unfavorable terms: "the rottenness of the stones--it seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers" The curt note from the master of the Biblical College, where he had written for admission, crushing Jude's hopes, emphasizes the loneliness of Jude's struggle. He is advised to remain in his own sphere and stick to his own trade, that of a stone mason, if he is to expect more chances of success in life. Neither does he have the money to get into a big institution, nor does he have the brilliancy to get a full scholarship. Thus his dream of becoming a scholar, a professor, remains unfulfilled.
Hardy criticizes social and educational structures which are so rigid and orthodox that someone like Jude, bright, hard-working, but lacking in means, is permanently expelled from the academic scene. Hardy wants to emphasize that Jude will always remain an outsider, denied access to improvement, not because of lack of ability, but because of his social class. The end of the book underlines this isolation with the bitter a picture of Jude on his death bed, lying alone, while the revelry of Remembrance Day occurs outside.
Class and society :
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.
Institution of Marriage :
A major theme in the novel is that people often make wrong choices in marrying. Given human error and the consequences of a poor choice in a marital partner, the story shows that people should not be bound to remain in unhappy relationships and suffer a lifetime of penance. Critics accused Hardy of attacking the institution of marriage, but he defends himself in the second preface—the 1912 Postscript—by saying "I have been charged ... with ... the present "shop-soiled" condition of the marriage theme. My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties—being then essentially and morally no marriage—and it seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy."
Hardy distinguished between the true marriage of minds and hearts and the legal contract that becomes void once the relationship dies. Despite the contractual nature, marriages die quite frequently, as evidenced by today's divorce statistics in a time when people are freer to dissolve their unions. Couples in Hardy's time, however, were forced to remain chained together like two unhappy convicts. It is easy enough to see the disastrous union between Jude and Arabella brought about originally by trickery and entrapment. However, had Arabella remained in Marygreen, the marriage would not have been easily dissolved. Nor does her departure for Australia free Jude from legal entanglements, although it does free him from the daily misery of her company.
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.
On the other hand, the real marriage of Jude and Sue causes people to persecute and ostracize them because the couple does not have a legal contract. The relentless hounding of the nonconformist couple results in their losing their livelihoods and relatively pleasant home in Aldbrickham. Their return to Christminster as paupers leads to the tragic destruction of their family.
Sue 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 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, and her failure to hide this information leads to the terrible murders perpetrated by Father Time. Ultimately Sue is broken by the tragedy and surrenders to social norms, returning to her actual husband to atone for what she sees as the sin of having and then losing her children.
Conclusion :
Life is pain. Your efforts to mitigate that pain may bear fruit occasionally but are more likely to be snuffed out by the cruel fate. “Indifference to fate, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not,” wrote Hardy in Far from the Madding Crowd. Genuinely passionate people like Jude are crushed, indifferent ones like Arabella teeter on the edge of villainy, and hardly a handful manage to achieve sublimity. That is the human destiny. Not quite a great one.
Words count : 2418
References :https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/jude/section7/
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