I'm writing this blog as a part of Assignment assign by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad, from English Department, MKBU. In this assignment, the topic which I'm going to deal with is, 'Opinions on Judes Journey: Analyzing Critical Views.'
■ Personal Information ■
Name: Unnati Baroliya
Batch: M.A Sem 1( 2023-25)
Enrollment number: 5108230002
Email Address: unnatibaroliya@gmail.com
Roll no: 32
■ Assignment details ■
Topic:- Opinion on Judes journey: Analyzing Critical views
Paper: Literature of the Victorians
Paper number: 104
Subject code: 22395
Submitted to: Smt. S. B Gardi Department of English M.K.B.U
■ Table of Content ■
♧ Abstract
♧ Key words
♧ Introduction
♧ The Evolution of Jude the Obscure by Patricia Ingham.
♧ The Attack on 'Jude The Obscure' : A Reappraisal by Irving A. Yevish
♧ The Modes of Perception: The will to Live in ' Jude The Obscure' by Richard Benvenuto
♧ Conclusion
♧ Reference
♧ Abstract ♧
"Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy is a novel that explores the challenges and societal constraints faced by Jude Fawley, a working-class man with aspirations of gaining higher education. The narrative delves into themes of love, marriage, social class, and the impact of societal expectations on individual dreams. Jude's tumultuous relationships and struggles with societal norms lead to a tragic and thought-provoking conclusion, highlighting the complexities of human aspirations and the harsh realities of Victorian society.
♧ key Words ♧
Patricia Ingham, Irving A. Yevish, Richard Benvenuto.
♧ Introduction ♧
Jude, a young and ambitious man from a working-class background, dreams of pursuing higher education and becoming a scholar. Jude decides to pursue education independently, facing societal challenges due to his class. Jude marries Arabella, but their relationship is strained. Arabella is manipulative, and the marriage becomes unhappy. Jude's cousin, Sue, enters the picture. They share a mutual attraction, but their complex family ties and societal norms create obstacles.
Jude divorces Arabella and marries Sue. Their relationship challenges societal norms, as they live together without formal marriage. The couple faces societal condemnation and isolation, leading to financial struggles and emotional strain. Jude and Sue face multiple personal tragedies, including the deaths of their children. These events intensify the strain on their relationship. The novel delves into religious and moral themes, criticizing societal norms and the impact of organized religion. Jude's dreams of academic success crumble due to external pressures and personal setbacks. The characters experience a downward spiral of despair, grappling with the consequences of their choices. The novel concludes with a poignant exploration of the characters facing the consequences of challenging societal norms. The ending is particularly bleak, highlighting the tragic outcomes of the characters' struggles against societal expectations.
♧ The Evolution of Jude the Obscure by Patricia Ingham ♧
After the composition of the outline and before the novel was written at full length (between August 1893 and March 1895), a conversation took (in July 1893) which may be relevant to Hardy's thinking. It occurred at Lady Londonderry's and concerned the marriage laws: also the difficulties of separation, of terminable marriages where there are children, and of the nervous strain of living with a man when you know he can throw you over at any moment.
During the period when he was writing out the novel at full length Hardy contributed in June 1894 to a symposium on sex education and marriage called The Tree of Knowledge. In it Hardy expressed his view that 'a girl should certainly not be allowed to enter into matrimony without a full knowledge of her probable future in that holy estate.... This seems reminiscent of Sue Bridehead's remarks to Phillotson about not understanding the implies of marriage. So much we can fill out rather sparsely of the notes, scheme, and outline stages in the novel's composition. In the manuscript we have presumably the first 'full length' version and an examination of it can help to show how the story evolved in Hardy's mind. The crucial fact is that the schoolmaster Phillotson evidently did not exist when the first eighty-four pages of the manuscript were written, since the references to him before that point are all additions or alterations. Moreover this theme was already treated both in its general and particular aspects. The general point made was the unnatural nature of the marriage bond, stressed even in the earliest version when Jude marries Arabella.
This seems to make explicit what Hardy had hinted at in the conclusion to his contribution to the symposium on The Tree of Knowledge. There he said that he would not enter into the question of whether marriage 'as we at present understand it, is such a desirable goal for all women as it is assumed to be...'; but by implication he answered the question by a negative, for he went on or whether civilisation can escape the humiliating indictment that, while it has been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, in literatures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes.
It seems to be this general aspect to which the name 'the marriage question' is applied. Hardy spoke of this to Sir George Douglas in a letter written shortly after the publication of the book, in which he said that it was made the vehicle of the tragedy, in one part, but I did not intend to argue it at all on its merits. I feel that a bad marriage is one of the direst things on earth, & one of the cruellest things, but beyond that my opinions on the subject are vague enough.
Surely the implication of all this is that by 'the marriage question' Hardy means the question of whether or not marriage is a satisfactory and rational institution, rather than 'the stringency of the marriage laws'. From the earliest version both Sue and Jude get their divorces with remarkable ease. One point to be stressed is that from the earliest identifiable stage the story is concerned with marriage as well as academic aspirations. Thus already we read how after his dismissal by Troutham Jude's aunt says
'We've never had anything to do with your dead uncle's folk since his wife, your father's sister, died.'
The boy asks why.
"Ah!' she said. "That needn't be spoke of. Don't 'ee ever marry, my child. Do as I did, and all med be well.'
Doing as she did, of course, means remaining unmarried. This hints at some disaster in the marriage of Sue's parents. Already here Sue is the focus of Jude's longing for Christ- minster, and as to the original nature of that I shall return.
Arabella has said tauntingly that they make 'a queer lot' as husbands and wives. Jude on questioning his aunt learns that his own parents separated, causing his mother to drown herself and 'It was the same with your father's sister. Her husband offended her, & she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went away to London with her little maid. There's sommat in our blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound. That's why you ought to have hearkened to me, & not ha' married.'
Moreover, whereas Jude is seen from the beginning as struggling for something other than academic status, the Christminster to which he aspires is seen as something less than ideal, although he romanticizes it. There is little even in the manuscript of its positive intellectual values: it is a beautiful city seen through a haze, that rejects an aspirant to real learning, that tells a workman scholar to stay in the class to which he belongs, that accepts unworthy students, and that finally engages in mindless frivolity while the true lover of learning dies in a garret. There is little to suggest that what he aspires to really exists. The voices of great men speak to him in his imagination in the earliest version, but they are spectres and seem to have no counterparts in the Christminster Jude knows. His 'struggles' are brief, his object a delusion; his failure not 'ultimate' but something which, although it happens early in his life, he cannot accept.
Thus the story from its earliest version is hardly the simple one that has sometimes been suggested. It sprang from an autobiographical description of Hardy's boyhood temperament. It grew into a consideration of what was by the 1890s his own deep concern: the relationship between the sexes as played out by a complex man who only partly understood himself and a woman ill at ease with her own sexuality. To this was added a more superficial and rather immature treatment of the man's academic aspirations and their frustration. The latter came to seem more symbolic as the writing progressed. An attempt was made to give the academic element emphasis by the addition of the schoolmaster Phillotson; but even he became gradually more important as a figure in the sexual story. In a move to widen the personal theme, towards the end of the novel a passage was written strengthening an attack on marriage in general by the use of Jude's experiences. At the proof stage of the first book edition the Christminster voices were still being added to in an overt expansion of the academic theme. Thus the evolution of Jude the Obscure is not linear: from the beginning it had an obsessive core to which other elements were attracted and by which they were transmuted.
♧ The Attack on Jude The Obscure: A Reappraisal by Irving A. Yevish ♧
Perhaps history will write that the attack on Jude the Obscure, begun in November 1895 and carried on through the Spring of 1897, marked it the first of our modern English novels. Jude, of course, is bleak tragedy. A country boy dreams of going to college Christminster to get a university degree. To this end he spends a good deal of time studying Latin and Greek and reading the classics. But before he is twenty he is seduced and trapped into marriage by Arabella, who tells him she is preg- nant by him. Young plans, his dreams about books and degrees and impossible scholarships, are all smashed.
When, however, there appears to be no child and Jude breaks up with his wife, the young stonecutter goes to the city of Christminster and seeks admission to the university. But he is un- able to compete in open scholarship with those who have passed their lives under trained teachers, and he cannot, of course, afford to pay. He is advised by one of the masters to remain in his own sphere of life as a working man. And so Jude is "elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." With the collapse of his university hopes, Jude's desire fixes. itself upon his cousin, Sue Bridehead. Winning her away from his former teacher, Phillotson, Jude lives with Sue without bene-fit of clergy, although in time both of them secure divorces. In- evitably there are children; but when they are shockingly mur- dered in one of the most fantastic scenes ever created by a writer of serious fiction Sue leaves Jude to return to Phillotson, and Jude, consumptive, dies.
Now there is much in this novel that a critic can deplore. The character "Little Father Time" is certainly a macabre creation, all out of keeping with any claim to realism; and the death of Jude's children comes as a shock not only because of its suddenness but because of its preposterousness. "Such scenes are in actuality of too rare occurrence to be representative of life; and the novel should reflect the great norm of existence, not the isolated exceptional phenomena.
Without a doubt Hardy had stepped out beyond the ethical comprehension of his age when he advocated 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."The English-speaking people of the 1890's simply were not ready to accept what one of Hardy's later critics had the courage to declare, that "the love of Jude and Sue, with all its errors and its agony, most nearly approaches the ideal love, and this is the one love that we are allowed to see persisting into years of married life."
Hypocrisy too proved to be Hardy's undoing. A glance through the newspapers of the 1890's reveals columns and columns of accounts of murder trials, divorce hearings, and even juicy bits of scandal, accounts which did not mince words as Hardy had minced them. Obviously these reports had an avid following, or they would have been supplanted by worthier items. But in Hardy's case Jude became "Jude the Obscene." Nor can one escape the notion that certain reviewers had never forgiven themselves for letting Tess of the D'Urbervilles slip through their line of fire some four years earlier. Jeanette L. Gilder, Mrs. Oliphant, Thomas G. Selby-all referred to Tess in their attacks on Jude as if anxious that their earlier critical estimates of Tess, whether made publicly or privately, be vindicated. Still, Hardy had enjoyed a considerable reputation at the time of Jude's publication he and Meredith were regarded as the two top novelists of their day-and it does not seem likely that an attack bordering on hysteria could grow out of either the perennial marriage question, a debatable coarseness, or a lingering uneasiness about Tess, or all three. The irritant, then, must have been something stronger, something that threatened to undermine the very structure of Victorian society. The irritant, I believe, was Hardy's attack on Oxford (Christminster) and the whole of the caste system that Oxford implied. It does not matter whether Hardy himself wanted or did not want in his youth to go to Oxford. The important thing is that Jude wanted to go to Christminster and because of his social origins was denied admittance there.
♧ The Modes of Perception: The will to Live in ' Jude The Obscure' By Richard Benvenuto.
THE FURY THAT GREETED the first appearance of Jude the Obscure has long since subsided, yet we are no closer than its reviewers were to an agreement upon Hardy's intent in the novel or the caliber of his performance in it. Jude is not an especially difficult novel; it continues to divide its readers, however, because it imposes upon them what are, by Victorian standards, rigorous and unusual demands. Until the final chapters of Jude, Hardy commits himself and the reader to the life of his hero and to the high-minded courage and independence Jude shows in adversity. His character is one of Hardy's strongest arguments for the value and dignity a man can possess in a world that is alien to the ideals of humanity. When Jude says, "Well I'm an outsider to the end of my days," not knowing how close he is to the end, he brings down the novel's condemnation on a system that behind its walls isolates itself from intelligence and integrity. At the end of the novel, faced with what amounts to a reversal of judgment, our sense of identification with Jude is strained to the critical point. Jude curses himself and bitterly denounces those ideals and actions that made up his life and gave it tragic power and won him our approval and respect. We can understand Jude's vision of himself as a modern Job, but I cannot agree with him that it would have been better had he never lived. If Jude the Obscure has anything to say to us, it is that the world needs more Judes, not fewer or none at all.
The narrator combines an ironic with a literal mode of discourse and implies two perspectives from which man can be viewed and judged. The narrator speaks ironically about Jude's "weakness" of character, but his conclusion that Jude's life is "unnecessary" is the exact corollary of his recognition that the general scheme of life does not conform to man's scale of values. We understand Jude's "weakness" to be a strength of character, because we see Jude's sensitivity from another, more humanizing perspective than that of the general scheme for which it is a defect. The humanizing perspective, if it is expanded to cover all of Jude's life, reveals the necessity of his life, just as it recognizes the value of his sympathy for the birds in Troutham's fields. To hold to that perspective is to read irony where the narrator does not intend it. The narrator switches his mode of discourse when he passes from a part to the whole of Jude's life, and he concludes that life is meaningless because it must be lived in a scheme of things that turns moral resources into physical hardships. Essentially the same reason leads Jude to conclude that his life has been meaningless, and Hardy's critics have split into two camps which dispute whether pleasure or knowledge is possible from a novel with that conclusion. By taking the general perspective as the only one that matters in Jude, neither side attends to Hardy's vision of life from within its own frame of reference or feels the weight of his argument against the wish not to live. The two perspectives in Jude are revealed through two modes of perception which elicit contrary values and meanings from human life. The perceptual modes are perhaps different in degree rather than in kind a character at any given moment may occupy a point midway between the two-but they are easily distinguishable as extremes; and it is upon the polarity of the two that Hardy expresses his sense of human life in Jude. The mode of perception that sees Jude's life to be "unnecessary" is objective and universal in its frame of reference. It has accurate knowledge of the laws governing life and recognizes that the general scheme of things-the universal forces that act as laws in a man's life-is amoral and indifferent to man. To see man objectively is to see him as minute and isolated within the general impersonality of existence. This is Father Time's mode of perception: "human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark world". He sees "the particulars" of life, and especially individual happiness, to be an illusion. He concludes that "All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun". From the objective mode of perception, which for Father Time is "right," human life is an irrelevant anomaly from the general scheme of things, and it is therefore a hardship he can find no reason to endure. He tells Sue on the evening before his suicide, "I wish I hadn't been born!" . He wishes not to live with a horrendous insistence that does not let him wait for the curtain of death to fall on its own and signify to him that all is well for his unnecessary life.
Critics too often give Hardy the role of grim realist dissecting the idealistic fallacies of selfdeluded men. What he reveals through Jude is that under the grim reality of an indifferent universe only a human mind can value specific, living things and perceive their reality, as Jude does with the pig, the earthworms, and the people he loves. Christminster is not the "heavenly Jerusalem" Jude once thought it. But Jude's continuing to value the city that should have been is as important to his character as his getting to know the city as it is. The indifferent universe does not dehumanize his spiritualizing vision. Rather, in a world without value, Jude's way of seeing becomes the only source of value. As he did with Sue, he continues to love Christminster, though he knows the city is not worth his love. He continues to value his own powers of thought and feeling, though he learns the incongruity of human consciousness to the general scheme of things. He knows that to succeed in the world one must adapt to the world's general conditions, and "be as coldblooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies." Jude attempted instead to "re-shape his course" to his own "aptness or bent"; he sought by his living to achieve his personalized image of life. Rather than condemn Jude's attempt as a misguided idealism, Hardy allows Jude to point out the common error of judging ways of life "not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes" . Objectively a failure and knowing himself, Jude still affirms the essential soundness of his life. He has a will to live, which is something other than a grasping at survival, or what Jude calls a "save-your-own-soulism", because it questions the universe and the laws by which the universe functions. Jude does not deny or ignore the universal law by which men blindly struggle to survive; he refuses to accept that kind of law as a basis for his actions or as the measure of his ideals. When he returns to Christminster, totally enlightened as to the scheme of things, he delivers an impassioned defense of the spiritualizing, selfemanating mode of perception. He says he is "in a chaos of principles groping in the dark-acting by instinct and not after example." The "fixed opinions" of his youth have "dropped away," and the further he goes the less sure he is but not of himself. He has lost the certainty of a mind that rests upon "fixed opinions."
The critical reception of "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy is marke by a spectrum of opinions that delve into its intricate exploration of societal norms and human relationships. On one hand, scholars and literary critics such as Patricia Ingham, Irving A. Yevish, Richard Benvenuto, Jhon Paterson, Janet Burstein, tec.... commend Hardy's bold critique of Victorian morality, his portrayal of characters struggling against oppressive societal structures, and his probing into the limitations imposed by class and religion. The tragic fate of the protagonist, Jude Fawley, is seen as a poignant reflection of the harsh realities of life in a society resistant to change. Conversely, some critics express reservations about the novel's perceived bleakness and the intensity of its assault on prevailing moral values. Hardy's explicit treatment of controversial themes, including marriage, religion, and sexuality, has been a point of contention. Detractors argue that the novel's relentless tragedy may overshadow its literary merits, potentially alienating readers who find the narrative too dark or pessimistic.
Indepth analysis reveals that "Jude the Obscure" stands as a provocative work challenging the status , forcing readers to confront uncomfortable truths about societal expectations and individual desires. The novel's enduring relevance lies in its ability to spark discussions on the constraints of societal norms and the consequences of defying them. Despite the controversy surrounding its themes, the depth of Hardy's social commentary continues to resonate, ensuring that "Jude the Obscure" remains a compelling subject of scholarly discourse and literary exploration.
♧ References ♧
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Paterson, John. “The Genesis of ‘Jude the Obscure.’”
Studies in Philology, vol. 57, no. 1, 1960, pp. 87–98.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4173303. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
Cronin, Frank C.
“THE DIMENSION OF TIME IN ‘JUDE THE OBSCURE.’
” CLA Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 1968, pp. 123–28.
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Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
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