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
