I began Jude the Obscure diffidently, but now read it with relish. I wish it was more like Lord Jim, beyond depicting a tragic mind with a bevy of romantic antiques, so that I could weave a more literal thesis about late-victorian anxieties. Jude is hardly Jim. He's more like Childe Harold, because, unlike Jim, he doesn't even become a vestige of self-sacrifice--he is completely unable to reach any satisfactory union, any glimmer enlightenment. If character is fate, then society, as Zola described, accelerates as well and complicates the mechanism of the usual, classically-tragic, family heritage of doom. Jude's mother gives advice to him like the oracle at delphi; "[D]on't you ever marry. Tisn't for the Fawley's to take that step any more." (Jude the Obscure, I-2), which dictum is eventually transposed into pure biblical lamentation from the mouth of Jude's dying aunt much later in novel: "'Tis more than flesh and blood can bear...Ah! You'll rue this marrying as well as he." (III-9) A sick woman, possessed by true mania gives voice to the same classical fatalism of clearly spelled-out doom. W. Somerset Maugham began The Razors Edge talking about how marriage is as rich and challenging an ending as a funeral--one is the start of life, the other the close of it. But the extremes meet in Jude the Obscure. Marriage is always a negative state, and its union, its seal-of-approval on the procreative act, only reveals a contradiction in the systems and views of sex in general. Says Sue about the women of "nunnery", the Training School from which she escapes: "Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited...Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire." (III-6). Jude's idealized lust/love is really the same threat as Sue's Venus Urania: they both are relationships between intellectual and animalistic ideals unauthorized by a society concerned, ironically, with a clandestine market exchange of status and desire. So marriage become a death-sentence--not a surrender of the self to a "Thou", but a gasping, choking descent into inescapable social code.
My reading is steeped in Freud and post-modern preconceptions, because that is, in a way, the easiest course to take. It's remarkably general, really, but uses just the right terminology to make it seem legitimate. I'll write more on this subject, and many others, later
Jude the Obscure is truly an amazing work, that I find both difficult to stomach and difficult to understand. I think that your approach to it as a fatalistic tragedy and as a romantic novel works better than a Freudian/po-mo analysis. Lust seems to characterize Arabella more than Jude; Jude is multi-faceted while she's relatively allegorical. The Delphic pronouncement seems very fitting, but rather than Jude's demise coming as a result of his own hubris, it is the work of fatalism that recurs in so many of Hardy's texts.
ReplyDeleteOne credit to a Freudian interpretation would be how important the novel functions as a psychological text. Still, Freud's fixations fall short of the larger picture of human nature. While Zola's novels are characteristically socio-economic commentary, Jude the Obscure is more focused on the tragic protagonist. He struggles with a lot of things that I can't possibly understand. Frost's poem Home Burial deals similarly with the notion of a couple who must bury their children. I tried to ask a professor once why couples become estranged after the loss of their children, rather than become closer in mourning. He said that it wasn't something I'd be able to comprehend until later in life. Like much of the text, I think it's just beyond me.
Maybe we'll discuss it someday.
-Katie