Lecture 6. 'The Letter Killeth': Jude the Obscure

 The area of country covered by the action of Jude the Obscure is considerable but confined to the north eastern area of Wessex.

 All the locations for the action are easily recognizable, and Hardy did nothing to cover up this fact. This new novel, however, differs considerably from all Hardy's previous books in terms of its restless, anxious movement where the characters shift about the countryside as if they were in a perpetual motion machine.

 Different also from previous novels is the way in which those characters had travelled. Previously they had all walked or travelled in carriages. Now the train is the most characteristic mode since, as Sue puts it, the station is now the centre of modern life.

This mechanisation of travel is anticipated in Hardy's earlier novels by other forms of mechanisation, all of which disturb the psychological tranquility of the countryside. Frank Troy's sword excercises were brilliant, but emotionally empty; Farfrae's seed-drill was cold and grotesque; the man trap laid to catch Fitzpiers acted as an emblem of the unfeeling mechanistic rule of law that entraps Grace Melbury, and the steam threshing machine at Flintcomb-Ash is physically and psychologically destructive.

The roots of Jude the Obscure lay in the countryside of Hardy's grandmother's family, the Hands. This was to be found on the chalk uplands north of Wantage that Hardy revisited in 1892 when he was thinking about his new novel. Great Fawley depressed him:

The character of Jude himself, divided between flesh and spirit, frustrated in his passion for education and destroyed by his marital relationships had affinities with a number of people whom Hardy knew including his uncle by marriage, the cobbler of Puddletown, John Antell.  Antell, sharp, intelligent, frustrated intriuged Hardy. Towards the end of a life of drinking, violence and self-disgust, he had this cynical photograph of himself taken. He was dying of cancer. The photograph like some of the text of the novel his brutal, harsh and unflinching.

There is something, of course, of Hardy himself in Jude. And while he was preparing for writing he went to help his builder brother in the restoration of West Knighton church. Hardy knew well the details of the work of the stone mason, and like Jude was able to produce mouldings, capitals and door frames at will.

During this same period Hardy was emotionally disturbed by the failing marriage with Emma, and in May 1893 the two of them visited the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Houghton in Dublin. His sister, Florence Henniker was there, elegant, intelligent and 38 years old. She was the wife of Arthur Henry Henniker-Major, a professional soldier and frequently absent. Hardy fell in love with, and though she was flattered she did not reciprocate. Meetings and a considerable correspondence followed, but eventually she made it clear that things could go not further. Some of Florence's characteristics can be found in Sue Bridehead.

 Frustrated on all sides, Hardy continued to ponder the nature of the relationship between sexuality and marriage in modern society. He had already explored this from various points of view in The Woodlander and Tess of the d'Urbervilles but Jude was different. Though this novel is much more explicit than previous ones, the female characters are curiously un erotic.

 Arabella is fleshy and vulgar, Sue neurasthenic and incorporeal. In this novel, sex is more of an issue than a senstation or feeling. There is no femme fatale like Eustacia Vye or Felice Charmond, and no beauty like Tess. Instead we have unattractive earthiness and disembodied fastidiousness. Above all this is a novel of ideas, and many of those ideas came from different sources.

Mill, whose On Liberty Hardy claimed 'to know by heart' was a profound influence on his attitude to the relationship between personal freedom and social necessity. In 1865 Hardy heard Mill accept the parliamentary candidature of Westminster. An event that had a strange echo years later in Jude the Obscure.

Sue Bridehead leaves her job of illuminating ecclesiastical objects, and walks out into the fields outside Christminster. There she sees and Italian selling plaster casts statues of well known classical figures.

As in the memory he had of J S Mill, Hardy places the white (classical and pagan) statues against the (christian and gothic) buildings of Christminster. Sue buys two, Apollo and Venus, takes them back to her lodging where they are deliberately broken under the heel of the high Church woman, Miss Fontover. She worships at St Silas (St Barnabus) and the conflict between pagan freedom and Christian repression is clear.

The church at Jude's adopted home, Marygreen, also plays a thematic role in the novel. St Mary's was consecrated in 1866 leaving no record of the previous building. The architect was G E Street.

The sense of uprootedness and alienation experienced by Jude who had been deposited as an unwanted child in Marygreen, is intensified by his job a a crow scarer in nearby Farmer Troutham's field

Jude's lack of awareness of history, of belonging denies him his true identity. The field that one can see just outside Great Fawley, is of course rich in history.

Rich, too, in history is the point to the north of the field that is one of the nodal centres of the novel. It was on the border of farmer Troutham's field that the newly married Jude and Arabella took a cottage, it was just below that cottage that Jude carved his name on a milestone signalling his passion to reach Christminster. It was at the road junction here that Sue's parents parted for the last time, and it was from the Red House that Jude saw, or thought he saw, the image of Christminster as some holy mirage.

Hardy's Christminster is of course, Oxford, and many of the places mentioned in the novel are clearly identifiable.

It is interesting to compare Hardy's treatment of the built environment in Casterbridge/Dorchester with his treatment of building and architecture in Christminster.

Jude enters the city by night, and the fantasies that had brought him there about educational improvement persist to the point that what he sees is a kind of ghost town.

By day, Jude with his binary nature switches from the romantic to the pragmatic, and the city architecture takes on a different but equally partial appearance.

Though the moments are rare, Hardy still adopts something of that symbolic architectural mode that had been so pronounced in The Mayor of Casterbridge. For example the three Protestant martyrs, Latimer, Cramner and Ridley were burned in 1555 on a spot outside the city walls now in Broad Street. It is a sinister place and one that in the novel marks the site of modern martyrdom.

Similarly, New College Lane that also passes round Sarcophagus College becomes an emblem of bleak, unthinking dispair for Sue Bridehead who takes lodgings there with her children.

'Silent, black and windowless' suggests something of the whole feeling of sensory deprivation that marks this novel. None of the characters enjoy the sensuous pleasures of life, of the warmth of the sun, of the colour of the landscape, or the delights of sex and love. They are all mentally blind to these things, and each of them has moment of complete scotamization.

I this novel nothing pleasurable is offered to the eye. Nothing comforting, consoling, uplifting. On its appearance is was accused of its Zolaresque tendencies where Hardy dwelt on the brutal, unpleasant, harsh aspect of life. The 'pig sticking' incident is one such moment, but less dramatic ones abound. For example, Jude is about to confess to Sue his previous marriage to Arabella.

This seems to us to he highly pictorial in origin and may have its roots in the current naturalist cult in the art world. In complete contrast to the sunlit world of Turner whose presence had been felt in Tess of the d'Urbervilles both French and English naturalist painting specialised in the unromantic and the banal.

Hardy, who was a regular visitor to the exhibitions of modern art in London must have been familiar with the king of this movement, Bastien Lepage, whose female, Poor Fauvette has affinities with the little, male, Jude as he is set to work in farmer Troutham's field.

In Britain it was George Clausen who led the naturalist field, using like Lepage, a very narrow range of colours to produce a low keyed representation of singularly bleak landscapes. In his picture Winter Work one can see something of the swede cutting incident in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Hardy's illustrator in Harper's Magazine adopted precisely this mode when he provided the twelve illustrations for Jude the Obscure. Hardy congratulated him on his work, and particularly admired his drawing of Jude, ill and dying, as he pauses at the milestone on which years before he had carved his name. It bears an uncanny similarity to the photograph of John Antell. Hatherell gave Hardy the full set of drawings, that Hardy hung in his home at Max Gate for the rest of his life.

The sense of repetition and repeat that informs this incident occurs with mechanical insistence throughout the novel as characters converge, diverge, and converge once again. Sue Bridehead provides one final instance. No longer able to abide the proximity of the sad figure of Phillotson, she jumps from the window of Old Grove's place in Shaston/Shaftesbury.

She disappeared in the darkness, and he heard her fall below.

Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply

against the newel in his haste.  Opening the heavy door he ascended

the two or three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the

gravel before him lay a white heap.  

Towards the end of the novel, Sue driven frantic by the death of her children that she ascribes to God's judgement on the wickedness of Jude and herself, she returns to the bosom of the Church represented by St Silas.

The cross that hangs near the altar in St Barnabus is there where it was in Hardy's day. It was made by the workmen when the church was being built and given by them as a gift to the parish. Ironically, Sue's father worked on the building of the church, and since his trade was mettle work he must have been largely responsible for the creation of this cross

But the parallel between Sue's act of defiance in jumping out of the window in Shaston and herself abasement in St Silas is inescapable as she has moved from self-assertion to self-abnegation.

It is not easy to find a positive note on which to end an account of a novel that is so bleak, but Hardy's description of Fourways or Carfax has about it the sense of a rich and colourful human history. None of the characters recognise this but the reader is permitted to understand something about human continuity that is hidden from them.