Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy(1)

Thomas Hardy once said, "I have been looking for God 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him."(2) Given that Hardy never "discovered" God, it is reasonable to think that Jude the Obscure describes life without God, and that is, indeed, the case.

Jude the Obscure is the chronicle of a life, the life of a young man named Jude Fawley. He was born in poor circumstances, bereft of mother and father, and housed by a relative who owned a bakery. From an early age he aspired to be a scholar, to go to Christminster and attend the University. In order to realize his dream, he began to study on his own. He managed to acquire Greek and Latin grammars, and from there, he slowly added to a store of classics which he studied in detail. His ambitions were temporally derailed, however, by the connivance of Arabella, a practical, coarse, and sensual woman who deceived him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. This ill-starred union lasted but a few months. She left him and he moved to Christminster where he became a stone mason, working by day and studying by night. There he met Sue Bridehead, a cousin. He fell in love with her at once, and though he tried, -- he was, after all, still married, -- he could not overcome his obsession for her. The story of their relationship is the heart of the novel.

As the novel moves forward, three factors become apparent. They are nature, law, and transcendence. By nature, I mean the power of life that resides in each of us and in the world in general. By law, I mean, not only such laws as the Ten Commandments, but the laws of society, customs and expectations. By transcendence is meant the power of the human soul to view all things, reflect upon them, imagine possibilities that currently do not exist, and put them into action.

Sue Bridehead was the quintessential example of transcendence. Her gifted mind and soul were mercurial, imaginative, free, unchained, ever seeking to transcend her circumstances. As the novel unfolds, she did one thing after another in an attempt to overcome herself and the world. For example, she bought and brought into her room some pagan statues which offended her landlady. After she met Jude, she found herself falling in love with him. She felt this unnatural, he was her cousin and married, so she acted against her nature and married Phillotson, a rather stodgy man some twenty years her senior. She didn't love him, and once married, she loathed the idea of sleeping with him. In a moment of revulsion, she threw herself out a window rather than touch him. She then, contrary to the laws of social practice, asked Phillotson to give her permission to leave him and go to her lover, Jude. He gave his permission and she left him for Jude. Once Sue took up residence with Jude, she could not bring herself to marry him, feeling that marriage was a deadly institution that killed love by reducing it to a contract. As she once said to Jude, "We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others may feel confident in, I feel doubts of -- my being proof against the sordid conditions of a business contract again!"(3) Her desire to live the unfettered life was so intense that when Jude would ask her if she loved him, she could not bind herself to him with a yes. Consistently, she sought to transcend herself, society, even her attraction to Jude, ever seeking to overcome all obstacles to freedom.

Jude lived by his nature, or at least, he attempted to do so. Some time after Jude arrived in Christminster, he realized that his dream of becoming a university don was hopeless. Such posts were for the privileged, those of certain class with the requisite background. He was not one of them. He then shifted his goal, although, try as he might, the dream of becoming a scholar was never fully erased from his soul. It was in his nature. He then decided to become a cleric, a minister of the church. To that end, he began to study theology, and at the same time, to live with Sue. He did so because it was his nature to love. He loved all tender and living things. It pained him when he heard the cry of a rabbit caught in a trap, and when a child, he felt uneasy when trees were cut down and left to bleed, the sap oozing from their severed limbs. Above all, he loved Sue. He could not help but love her, and he loved her always, from the beginning to the end. It was his nature, and try as he might, he could not overcome his nature. Little by little, he realized that his faith, his religion, his attempts to be a Christian, were utterly at odds with his love for Sue. "When to defend his affection tooth and nail, to persist with headlong force in attentions to her, was all he thought of, he was condemned ipso facto as a professor of the accepted school of morals. He was unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been by social position, to fill the part of a propounder of accredited dogma."(4) He gave in to his to nature and threw away his theological books, burning all of them except for a handful of those old classics he had studied in late childhood. Nature had triumphed over law, morals and dogma.

Once Jude broke with religion, he and Sue entered upon the happiest times of their lives. Two children were born to them, and unlike other married couples, they remained in love. One sunny afternoon they attended a fair, Jude, Sue, and the little ones. "Jude, in his light grey holiday-suit was really proud of her companionship, not more for her external attractiveness, but for her sympathetic words and ways. That complete mutual understanding in which every glance and movement was as effectual as speech for conveying intelligence between them, made them almost the two parts of a single whole."(5) By chance, Arabella, Jude's first wife, was at the fair as well, accompanied by her husband of some few years. When she saw Jude and Sue, she left her husband at a bar and followed the young couple. As she watched them, she wished that she could have the happiness they obviously enjoyed. She returned to her husband at the bar. Then, in obvious contrast to Jude and Sue, "they left the tent together, this pot-bellied man and florid woman, in the antipathetic, recriminatory mood of the average husband and wife of Christendom."(6)

The happiness of Jude and Sue could not last. Society would not stand for it. The church would not accept it. Their love violated the law. Those around them began to whisper. Rumors spread that they were not married, that they were lovers, that they had married others. Jude's opportunities for work diminished. At one point, he managed to get a job repairing carvings of the Ten Commandments embedded in the wall of a church. After about two days of labor, he was dismissed on the basis of rumors that they were not married. Try as they might, they could not escape. Law, tradition, and custom triumphed over nature and transcendence.

As these events were unfolding, Arabella arrived one day at their doorstep to inform them that she had given birth to Jude's son, some eight months after leaving him years before. She claimed she could not take care of the child, and the child was unceremoniously given to Jude and Sue for their care. He was a strange child, bleak and dark. As their financial condition worsened, and on a bleak and gloomy day when they were desperate to find lodging, the child decided to end it all. He hung the two little ones and then himself.

Driven nearly mad by the horror, Sue once more sought to overcome herself, deciding that she and Jude were being punished by God for living together. In a final attempt to transcend her sinful past, and adopting a view she once hated, she decided to return to Phillotson and to ask him to marry her. She also decided to be his wife, that is, sleep in his bed and perform her conjugal duties. She told Jude of her intent. "All wrong, all wrong!" he said huskily. "Error -- perversity! It drives me out of my senses. Do you care for him? Do you love him? You know you don't. It will be a fanatic prostitution -- God forgive me, yes -- that's what it will be."(7)

Sue carried on with it. Phillotson welcomed the idea, knowing that his remarriage would restore the social position and status that he had lost when Sue left him for Jude. Knowing that she still loathed him, he asked her three times if she truly wished to come to his bedroom. She replied in the affirmative, and feeling justified, he brought her to his bed. It was her final act of transcendence. She killed her own soul.

In the meantime, Jude indifferent to his fate and drunk, was again conned by Arabella into marriage, her husband having died. She was hoping Jude would support her, but he became desperately sick. In a driving cold rain, Jude went to see Sue, thinking it would kill him. He found her and they gave way, holding each other in the cold and wet.

"Sue!" he said. Pressing her to him in his arms he bruised her lips with kisses: "If misery can know happiness, I have a moment's happiness now! Now, in the name of all you hold holy, tell me the truth, and no lie. Do you love me still?"
"I do! You know it too well ... But I musn't do this! -- I musn't kiss you back as I would!"
"But do!"
"And yet you are so dear! -- and you look so ill --"
"And so do you."

They tore themselves apart, returning to their mates, legally married but utterly wretched. Law had triumphed over nature. For a moment Jude's health seemed to improve, and then it worsened. As he lay dying, he quoted Job, chapter three, beginning with these words, "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, 'There is a man child conceived.'"(8) With his death, the novel came to an end.

Jude the Obscure depicts life without God, not simply because it is tragic, but more to the point, God never once entered into the novel in any real or compelling fashion. By "real and compelling," I mean an event in which the holy, transcendent, living God stooped to become real and concrete at a particular time and placing, appearing, speaking, convicting, forgiving, and bringing the whole person, body and soul, before God in a personal encounter that is concrete, specific and transcendent all in the same moment. This possibility is found throughout Scripture but it is never once found in Jude the Obscure.

Apart from that event, and in light of Jude the Obscure, human beings can go into one of two directions, or combinations of both. They can either conform to the law and slowly kill their own natures, or following Sue, allow the drive for human transcendence to overturn the law and live at defiance of God, society, and even, if it comes to it, one's very own life. Whether it be compliance or defiance, the result is the same, namely, destruction, be it at one's own hands or those of others. Or, to put it another way, one can live by the laws of church and society and have these laws destroy one's soul, or defy the law and be destroyed by a society that kills those who defy her laws. As the novel states on the title page, "The letter killeth." Those were the options narrated in Jude the Obscure. The only way out of this dilemma is for the law to be good as practiced by church and society, and for human nature to fulfill the law. In light of Jude the Obscure, that seems utterly impossible.

God, however, in the moment of encounter, fulfills nature and offers transcendence. Transcendence is given since God's holiness exalts the soul beyond finite possibilities. This can be seen, for example, in the moment of the Sanctus when, with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven, one is brought before the throne of God. At that moment, the beginning and end come together, and all places and peoples are united in praise of God who lifts the human soul into his presence, fully satisfying the human hunger for transcendent love. At the same time, the encounter with God fulfills the possibilities of our deepest hopes and desires. That is, in the encounter with God, the human soul is offered transcendence, and yet, at the same time, human nature is renewed so as to fulfill the deepest laws of our hearts. Love, the love dimly seen in Jude the Obscure, is perfected and human nature comes into her own. This is the biblical hope, and without that hope, we are left with death. Jude the Obscure makes that very clear.

In actual practice, however, the encounter with God puts the soul in opposition to the law as practiced both by society and the church, since both, their words to the contrary, often kill real love when they see it. Among other things, that is why Jesus had to die. An important step in killing love is to substitute law for love. Jude and Sue loved each other, but society could not see that. They only saw a couple living outside the law. They defined marriage as a contract, a binding contract. Then, when love dies, as it does sooner or later without God, one is left with the contract which becomes a slave master. That is why Sue hated the contract. She instinctively knew it enslaved. That is, in part, Paul's argument in Romans 1-8. The law enslaves. Unlike Sue, however, Paul knew the law was good because he knew a love that fulfilled the law.

Although it was in Jude's nature to live, he did not love wisely. He could not control his desires, especially his sexual desires and the desire for drink. It was this tendency that led to his first marriage with Arabella. Nor could he control his love for Sue. He couldn't help but love her, even though it was against social norms as well as the laws of consanguinity. As a result, he was led into misery, a misery he could not fully foresee. It wasn't society alone that destroyed Jude, although that is the emphasis of the novel. Jude destroyed himself because his passions were blind. There was nothing unusual in that. Our passions are blind. They care little for our long-term welfare, and as a result, they take us where we should not go. That is why the law is so important. It can warn us, especially when we are young, before we have eaten the bitter fruit. It is not in our nature, however, to take instruction. We must be born again, made new from the inside out by crucifying the desires of the flesh by the power of the cross and the Spirit. The result is freedom, walking in newness of life.

Jude the Obscure is not only a story of a couple in love, it is also a portrait of a society in late 19th century England. The church, the world of the university, and society in general, are all presented in the same light -- a world hostile to nature, to love, and to hope. Most appalling is the church, portrayed as the guardian of a heartless law that destroys love. When Sue returned to Phillotson and to certain death, the local curate expressed satisfaction that she had finally fulfilled her spiritual and social obligations. The same occurred when Jude remarried Arabella, although both events were cruel and unnatural by any humane measure.

According to the introduction written by Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy stood on the cusp of two ages and Jude the Obscure anticipated the impending new world, a world without God. Here are his words,

Jude the Obscure is Hardy's most distinctly "modern" work, for it rests upon a cluster of assumptions central to modernists literature: that in our time men wishing to be more than dumb clods must live in permanent doubt and intellectual crisis; that for such men, to whom traditional beliefs are no longer available, life has becoming inherently problematic; in the course of their years they must face even more than the usual allotment of loneliness and anguish; that in their cerebral over-development they run the danger of losing those primary appetites for life which keep the human race going; and that courage, if it is to be found at all, consists in the readiness to accept pain, while refusing the comforts of certainty.(9)

This quotation requires some comment. First, there is the assumption that those who cannot avail themselves of "traditional beliefs" "must face even more than the usual allotment of loneliness and anguish," and further, they must "accept pain, while refusing the comforts of certainty." This is the statement of a man who views religion from the outside, assuming that those who believe in God have "certainty," and further, that knowing God can somehow relieve a person of "loneliness and anguish." There is a form of certainty for Christians, the certainty of faith in God's final redemption, but there is little certainty that things will work out as we might wish in this life. Of course, contemporary Christian religion, by and large, promises love and happiness, with its endless parade of sermons, books, workshops, programs all promising God's love and care. Rarely do they describe what it is like to meet the living God, to have the ground cut out from under your feet, to find yourself utterly at odds with the church, and world, and at times, even with God whose ways lead, inexorably for those who follow the Lord Jesus, to the cross, a place of terrifying loneliness and anguish. There are amazing and great blessings in being a Christian, but these lie on the other side of the cross, not on this side. To be specific, the only real blessing is knowing Jesus, and not only his love as freedom from pain and sorrow, but also, directly in one's experience, his appalling cross which he gives to the ones he loves.

When Howe speaks of a "cluster of assumptions" apparently held by those who write "modernists literature," I would suppose he is simply making an empirical observation. This observation may not be entirely true, but it does reflect the fact that so much modernist literature is a literature of death. There are exceptions such as C.S. Lewis, perhaps Tolstoi, and a few others. By and large, however, the literature is a literature of darkness. How do we account for this?

At this point, I can only venture a few suggestions. Let us assume that literature does reflect something of an age, and that following Howe, Hardy anticipated the literature of the modern age. What happened as the modern age developed in the decades after Hardy's death? Hardy wrote as Britain was becoming an imperial power, and the emergence of the European imperial powers ushered in two world wars, dreadful revolutions, and finally, at present, the emergence of a single imperial power (the United States) whose inner life is utterly corrupt spiritually. The creation of empire, the subjugation of foreign peoples, is a profound social sin, and it can only take place as the dominant nation becomes inwardly corrupted by its wealth and power. As foreign countries are laid waste, the soul of the nation becomes a wasteland, accurately summarized in T.S Eliott's famous poem, The Wasteland, and described in the previous quotation by Howe. Hardy experienced this inner death. He absorbed its power and described its consequences, the death of love and the love of death. When love dies, when privilege, power and wealth dominate, horrific wars, bloody revolutions, and endless public hypocrisy are the result.

Spiritually speaking, the West succumbed to the devil's second temptation (Luke 4:5-8) in which the devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. That is what the devil has offered the West from the time of Columbus until now and western technology has made it possible. Succumbing to the devil's temptations is a terrifying prospect, and modernist literature reflected that fact. Hardy offered no solution, but compared to the normal political rhetoric which disguises the lust for power and wealth with such slogans as "freedom," "democracy," and "development," he is quite refreshing.

Endnotes

1. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
2. Hardy, p. xi.
3. Hardy, p. 226.
4.Hardy, p. 171.
5.Hardy, p. 230-31.
6.Hardy, p. 234.
7.Hardy, p. 286.
8.Hardy, p. 321.
9.Hardy, p. vii-viii.