Jude The Obscuredocx

=== Jude the obscure ===

Jude the obscure – Sue Bridehead

Known for his depictions of nature and women of all social classes in the Victorian era, Thomas Hardy remains one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During Queen Victoria’s reign, the British society suffered very important changes, changes such as industrialization, imperial expansion and the extension of democracy. The middle class made great progress, its members having various possibilities to climb the social ladder in different areas: business, industry, the civil service and others. It was also notable how the Victorian society began to be dominated by the values of those from the middleclass. The lower classes were entertained with “tales of seduction, adultery, forgery, and murder, now a strong moral tone pervades the writing: one exactly replicates the sentiments expressed in the answers to correspondents to be found elsewhere in the magazine”.

It is considered one the most prosperous era in the history of England and is characterized by progress in science, medicine or urban blossoming, and this was also reflected in literature, especially in that novel became very popular among readers. Because until then there were great stories of chivalry, English literature felt the need for a change. Thus, it appeared a new type of novel, which was considered a true representation of life then and habits of people. Although initially the main theme novels were biographies, personal experiences of the authors or historical subjects, in time they had more complex issues, especially because of the fact that this type of writing was intended mainly for the middle class people, and therefore writers were forced to reflect the problems and conflicts of that era.

The novel in the Victorian era was seen as a form of entertainment, relaxation, even though the writers approached quite difficult and unpleasant themes that showed the society's true face, the face that those in power were trying to hide as much as possible. However, readers expected to regain these issues in the pages they read, as writers wanted to surprise them with their scenes, to amuse or keep them in a state of suspense.

The Victorian reader expected a certain structure of the novel, as Irina Toma points out in Victorian Contrasts. In her opinion, the Victorian public expected from the novel “a well-knit realistic narrative whose characters and settings are used as instruments of a plot whose dynamism stems from causality rather than from sequencial chronology.”

The characters from a Victorian novel “are aware of themselves in terms of their relations to others; they come to know and fulfill themselves byway of other people.”SO we can think about two perspectives regarding the awareness in the Victorian novel, one from the part of the author and one from the character’s part. “Therefore a Victorian novel may most inclusively be defined as “a structure of interpenetrating minds.”

The specialists in literature have noted a pattern of the novel in the Victorian era. First, the novel has a moralizing role, trying to educate the public. Then, the reader is directly involved in the action by asking the advice and commenting with the reader the most important issues or behavioral changes of the characters. Not least, the novel does not have a single strand of action, but is divided into several levels of narrative, which usually have a happy ending, resolved in an ideal way, through love.

The relation author reader from the Victorian novel is opposed to the relation from the postmodern novel. In her book, Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction (John Fowles, John Barth, Thomas Pinchon), Irina Toma faithfully transposes the importance of the relation between the author and the reader in the postmodernist fiction.

She states that the relation between the author and the reader is very important for the creation and “destiny” of the novel, bringing forward the “principle of integrating digression into the progression of the novel.”

The communication between reader-author in the 18th century novel evolves differently compared to the postmodernist novel:

If the prevailing characteristic of communication between author and reader in the 18th century novel was balance and their dialogue could go on endlessly grounded on the same mutual sense of significance, the trait pervading the postmodernist novel is the permanent shifting of distance, the alternate placing in the foreground or deliberately effacing of the reader, in keeping with the writer’s intentions.

As Louis James states in The Victorian Novel, “the term ‘Victorian novel’ is at best an academic flag of convenience”. The novel in Victorian era faced some difficult moments when some books were banned because some considered them offensive or a bad example for young people.

In terms of characters, heroes and heroines are presented throughout their life, from childhood until maturity and characters change their behaviour depending on the evolution of the book. In the same book, Thomas Hardy is named “an early disciple of Darwin, turned from the sunny orchards of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and, in The Return of the Native (1878), set doomed human passions against the impassive natural cycles of Egdon Heath.”

David Lodge has remarked that ‘novels burn facts as engines burn fuel’, and Victorian fiction consumed whole forests of miscellaneous information.

We get a more vivid presentation of the Victorian novel from The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian novel edited by Deirdre David:

Reading provoked a good deal of anxiety during the Victorian period. At the centre of this anxiety about what constituted suitable reading material and ways of reading lay concerns about class, and concerns about gender. In both cases, fiction was regarded as particularly suspect: likely to influence adversely, to stimulate inappropriate ambitions and desires, to corrupt.

The writers of the Victorian era novel are divided into two categories, namely in two generations. The first generation is characterized by the writers who tried to be closer to the reader by addressing topical issues, and this generation comprises Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, David Copperfield), William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair), George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch) and sisters Bronte. Their writings have enjoyed immense popularity, especially because they were created in the best traditions of Great Britain and they were not influenced by other cultures and literatures.

The second generation of novel writers of the Victorian era is characterized by the authors who removed the Victorian ideologies; they no longer used them and wrote the novels as to react against all those principles. This made their writings unpopular because the language was a cynical and pessimistic one, the themes being influenced by the European literature, philosophy and scientific progress in the field. This generation comprises Samuel Butler, George Meredith (Emilia, Rhoda Fleming, Selfish) and Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles).

Jude the Obscure, which is part of the second category, focuses on themes of longing, of uprooting, and is the toughest and experimental novel written by Hardy. When it was published, the book scandalized England. It should be taken into account that at that time, late nineteenth century, the conservative United Kingdom did not allow people to divorce, children without parents to get married and, as a woman, especially, to have different ideas related to society; in fact, it was simply not conceived for a woman to have different ideas.

In this novel, Hardy also deals with portraits; not of people but of society, of life or of the various aspects of life. One of them would be the situation of the working class. Jude belongs to this category and dreams to study at the University of Christminster, but gets to be a stonemason, falls in love with a certain Arabella, they get married, but she moves to Australia.

Thomas Hardy writes about strong, independent minded women who are determined to live life on their own terms. The New Woman was nothing new to Thomas Hardy. As Penny Boumelha notes in her introduction to The Woodlanders, Hardy was no pioneer in the debate on women’s rights and marriage laws in the press and Parliament in the 1880s and 1890s, but he was certainly part of the dialogue. Because of his willingness to address sensitive issues regarding social expectations and sexuality, Hardy, Boumelha posits, “was soon depicted as a willing conscript in the so called ‘Anti-Marriage League’ of moral skeptics and social critics identified in the 1890s as crusading conservatives”. Hardy, however was not against marriage; he simply opposed what was unnatural in the conventions of obligatory unions and repression of innate desire.

Boumelha also addresses the desire found in Hardy’s novels: “The continual mutability of sexual relationship is driven, it would seem, by instinctive response rather than by emotional (or, still less, legal) commitment.” She adds: “Character after character experiences desire as force overmastering individual will…Stunned, mesmerized, dizzied by desire, these characters act under the power of a kind of natural law that at once motivates and undermines the making and unmaking of their socially ratified relationships”.

Set in the nineteenth century, the novel tells the story of Jude, an eternal idealist, born in a clearly dysfunctional family, trapped in an unwanted marriage and love with a chimera, his life exemplifying the highest aspirations, how any man can be truncated easily by desire. Along with his cousin Sue, such a contradictory creature in thought and behavior, the great adulterous love of his life, forms a facing society which, in certain passages, becomes the caricature couple.

As much of the Hardy's work, Jude the Obscure is a powerful, moving and tragic novel. Young Jude Fawley is not made for the impoverished world in which he lives and dreams of becoming a scholar. The novel begins in Jude’s childhood, with its pathetic attempts to gain money as a living scarecrow; Jude is fired because he feels sympathy for the crows, and thinks they should be allowed to eat.

The boy’s aspirations are high. While he was walking through the fields, he can see the university town of Christminster (one fictional Oxford) on the horizon, eager to attend. Although intellectually capable, the attention is captured by a series of romantic and sexual dispute that preclude his way to Christminster.

Jude Fawley's life, who wants to study in the university city of Christminster in order to become a respectable person, is conducted outside the strict conventions of Victorian England.

The story begins with the starting preparations of the teacher from Marygreen. Jude, an orphan boy who was received by Aunt Drucilla, is the only one who truly regrets the departure of this man. Perplexed, he asks Mr. Phillotson the reasons that cause him to leave. The teacher talks about the lovely university town of Christminster, a miniature Oxford, where you can get a degree with which the Church in your career is assured.

The little boy left to his own fate, which no one cares of, naive and impressionable, but infatuated with books and knowledge, Jude builds his own beautiful dream that nourishes him and it grows in the shade of an idealized image of Christminster. The idea of living in this city becomes for him a purpose in life and therefore he starts to learn Latin and Greek, almost by heart.

Although he spends seven or eight years of his life studying to fulfill his dream – because we are talking here of a dream and not of an ambition – his plans are thwarted by the first woman who pays attention to him and he marries her. Their marriage lasts only a few months, because Arabella realizes Jude is not the kind of person she needs. Consequently she leaves him and goes to Australia with her parents.

Jude finally reaches Christminster and continues to study to enter the university, but soon he realizes that its doors are closed for him, that his preparation is not sufficient and he also doesn’t have enough money to buy a place at the university. The variant that is proposed to him is to become a preacher because that does not require a university degree, but it easy to obtain a license for a man as smart as he is.

Meanwhile he meets his cousin, Sue, whose picture he saw at his aunt's house Drucilla, a moment which is decisive in the course of his life. Even if at first they are only two people connected by their relatives, slowly their story becomes a romance. Jude falls in love very quickly despite the fact that Sue is his cousin and it is forbidden to love her. When he realizes that his love goes beyond the boundaries of kinship and even to physical desire, he feels extremely guilty.

The kindness and diligence that he possesses are not enough to help him save his marriage nor help him achieve his dream. He lives somewhere in the margins of society, with the feeling of failure and love does not bring him happiness.

He is confused by ideas too daring at the time, about the free union, without the blessing of churches and the terrible death of his children appears as divine punishment for disregarding the social order. During the celebrations of the university he dies alone, left alone.

When Jude Fawley leaves the village Marygreen and Alfredston for Christminster, he prefers to walk the last few kilometers, trying, though, to increase the distance that he has to travel, a distance measured in hope or ambition and enthusiasm of a wonderful man who does not know what obstacles await.

Jude, the stonemason, brings to the city the social class of his origin and its history. At first, it is a source for spiritual enrichment; He eyed the artist monumental architecture buildings college. Gradually, the social origin becomes an obstacle for his aspirations. The letter from the dean of the College Biblioll which advises Jude to limit to his "sphere" is a revelation of a raw pragmatism. Jude's failed marriage and unconventional relationship have a tragic ending and Jude's reaction is eloquent.

Despair, resentment, anger and pride are interwoven with a sense of exile; the more painful the more remains unsaid. Having been denied access to "the world doctrine" of whose existence knows, Jude is rejected twice, ambitions alienating him from its social roots, the same roots whilst preventing him to achieve his goal.

Sue Bridehead is a complex and sophisticated character. It was said that Sue was the first heroine from Hardy’s list who is similar to the new and modern woman who started somehow the feminist movement. She is a human being impossible to describe in a few words, being like Jude in many respects, less the essential ones.

If Jude is a conventional person, who believes in the church and believes that all its canons and traditions must be respected blindly, Sue is a very unconventional person who questions the idea of blind faith and morality of a society that respects the rules and tradition without passing it through the filter of reason. If there is one word that best describes her Sue, then it is rational. Yet this rationality doesn’t stop her from having impulsive gestures.

The smooth path which the two follow, provoke great changes for both of them. Jude learns how to think “outside the box”, while Sue becomes more tempered. The highlight in the lives of the two is reached when the feelings and thinking of the two is in perfect symbiosis.

A tragedy changes their lives and especially the way they think, and this is where the two are once again separated from each other intellectually. From this tragic accident which also brings the end to Jude, because Sue leaves him and returns to her ex-husband by surviving an ordeal. At this point Sue still loves Jude, but considering the fact that this love is a curse which brings salvation to both, everything changes.

Although Jude and his troubled family will eventually move to the city, they remain in the social and economic side of the society. One of his sons, hearing that his mother is pregnant, takes the most terrible decision.

Jude becomes more convinced than ever by the "philosophy" of Sue, and Sue denies her own "philosophy" and starts believing in God, or rather divine punishment, and is convinced that social norms and conventions must be respected at all price. Thus each other reaches the point where the other started, making their life together impossible:

“I see marriage differently now. My babies have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella's child killing mine was a judgment—the right slaying the wrong. What, shall I do! I am such a vile creature—too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings!”

Sue explains her religious regression after the death of her children. Maybe the most important thing in observing this ideological change is her tendency of being self-centered. She seems to think her children have no other importance besides the effect they have on her own life. Of course, this isn’t a new trait since sue shows the same egoism in her interactions with Jude and in her last conversation with the little child.

Sue is a woman with her own rules, her own determination and her own principles on life, but eventually she forgets about the social and religious restrictions. Both man and woman have to endure the misery associated with an inappropriate marriage and all their ambitions of doing something with their lives lead to nothing. The marriage system gives the right to the man to choose the woman, while she hasn’t the right to do so.

While he tries to convince Sue to escape with him, Jude highlights some of the most controversial points connected to marriage and religion. Jude suggests many times that religion allows people to become inert emotionally speaking. By comparing his owns feelings with those of Sue, Jude brings forward the gap which was created between them, the difference between the way of dealing with their own emotions. Sue tries to find consolation in religion, while Jude finds comfort in alcohol. Both have the tendency to focus on external elements, instead of solving the problems in a logical way.

“We've both remarried out of our senses. I was made drunk to do it. You were the same. I was gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk. Either form of intoxication takes away the nobler vision… Let us then shake off our mistakes, and run away together!”

Jude and Sue are not allowed to live together since they are not legally married. No family wants to live with a sinful couple around. Sue’s liberal view on marriage towards the sacred institution of marriage is sanctioned and is she is perceived in a suspicious way by her fellow creatures. This is one of the reasons why the little boy decides to kill the babies and kill himself. In his opinion, the parents would live much better without having to raise the children.

When Sue rejects Jude’s suggestion of staying together in the cathedral, she shows her own opinions concerning religion. Analyzing her decision of choosing the railway instead of the cathedral, we can infer Sue is more practical and more logical than Jude. She is not impressed by the cathedral’s grandeur and beauty as he is. On the other hand she comments upon the changes society has undergone. The idea that the railway station is in the center of the town suggests the fact that community is less important now:

“Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I'd rather sit in the railway station … That's the centre of the town life now. … The cathedral was a very good place four or five centuries ago; but it is played out now… I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew.”

She questions the very logic behind this system of marriage; she questions the idea of marriage, trying to discover whether it is a scared and religious bond or only a social contract:

“If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing it is possibly wrong, but it is only a sordid contract based on material convenience in house holding, rating and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children making it necessary that the male parent should be known.”

Sue criticizes the way in which marriage subdues the individual needs and confuses them with those of the society, thus losing the personal identity. Still, she brings forward the ways in which marriage harms especially women. Her personality, her own needs and principles are left aside and she has no right to interpose

I have been thinking … that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

The remorse takes Jude back to the religious path and to Philotson, while Jude returns to alcohol and To Arabella because of his weakness. Their story is more than a love story. Because unconventional ideas are exposed in such a modern way that they shock. Especially if we consider that the novel was first published in 1895. An example can be found in Sue's conversations about marriage:

Apart from us and our unfortunate quirks, it is not in human nature to love a person when they say we need to love and be loved. It would make it rather whether he would command you not love. If the secret wedding would consist of an oath and a contract with the signature of both parties, which would bind signatories to cease to love since that day, given that they have gained ownership over each other and to beware each as far as possible in the company of other public, there were more married couples who love than there is now. Imagine secret meetings between husband and wife perjury, how will deny that they have seen, think how they would climb out the window to get into the bedroom and how will they hide in small rooms! Then love would not cool. "

But the central theme here is the theme of those goals which are not achieved. The book is not a denial of the existence of excess temptations to achieve their ideals. Jude is torn apart between the two women, Sue who represents reason and Arabella, who is the representative of instinct.

In Sue’s opinion, mean and women are equal in rights. Each person has one personality, personal aspirations and needs. Sue states that: “People say I must be cold-natured,-sexless-…But I will not have it. Some of the most passionately poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.”

With these words she rejects the accusations of being frigid. It was said many times that Sue is the unreal woman, the product of the men’s’ mind and this connection with the romantic poets who consume the passion without accomplishing it makes us compare Sue with one of the heroines of the romances, always pure and demanding a veneration which is confounded with the cult of Virgin Mary.

The narrator comments on Jude and Arabella's choices – and by extension, the institution of marriage at another level. Jude the Obscure provides an unflinching glimpse into the problems that can appear even when people think they will be happy in marriage. Hardy emphasizes the permanence of marriage, particularly with respect to the ephemeral feelings, like infatuation and sexual attraction that often lead people into it. The novel's intimations that society might be better without marriage were extremely controversial in the nineteenth century, and led to hard criticism and censorship for Hardy:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

All Hardy’s books follow the same pattern in terms of composition. Firstly there are presented very clear circumstances where character’s life begins, there are presented the characters and then things start to happen and to reveal all their complexity. Then atmosphere darkens and everything ends in a tragic note. What is fascinating, however, is that his characters do change throughout life, a slow change, but obviously, very natural, very real, which hardly can be seen from many writers.

In his Jude the Obscure: Pessimism and Fictional Form, David Lodge analyzes Sue’s tendency of putting obstacles between herself and the interlocutor. Somehow she seems to avoid the physical contact, compared to Arabela, who is always in the search of it. Of all her qualities, however, her sexuality confounds critics the most. Compared to Arabella, she seems part of a woman with loose morals/virgin dichotomy.

Having Sue by his side, Jude is capable of everything. He gives his intellectual life a force and depth for a new life. She teaches him how to forget the conventions which kill the freedom and destroy the human desire for living. In order to achieve this goal, she proposes him a lifestyle based on fellowship and communication.

On the other hand, Sue is capable of a possessive love. She asks for more love than she can give in return. In the end of the novel, when Sue decides to go back to Phillotson, Jude understands one of Sue’s greatest flaws, which is her incapacity of self-denial: “I will never come to see you again, ever if I had the strength to come, which I shall not have any more. Sue, you are not worth a man’s love!”

Even though she is being accused by Jude for her incapacity of offering love, at the same time she is aware of her feelings and attitude:

At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion–the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man–was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then–I don't know how it was– I couldn't bear to let you go–possibly to Arabella again–and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.

Sue Bridehead sums up her reasons for marrying Phillotson in her confession to Jude, “When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what they will say!”

In the end of the novel, Jude proves his last act of rebelliousness which he was capable of:

“I made up my mind that a man confined to his room by inflammation of the lung, a fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a particular woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish those two wishes at one stroke by taking this journey in the rain.”

Sue clearly attacks the relation of the husband and wife, she thinks that the institution of marriage brings limitation to the life and relationship of the husband and wife, but again it is the patriarchal society that allows a man to have dominance over his woman.

Most of the conflict around Sue’s sexuality appears in her relationships with Jude and Phillotson, through which we see her resisting sex for a number of reasons. Sexual aversion cannot account for all of these conflicts and the descriptions Hardy assigns to them. Rather, Sue demonstrates all signs of being an asexual before the dominant ideology became aware of or understood asexuality. Asexuals, as opposed to sexuals, do not experience sexual attraction or desire for sex.

The theme of desire is of vital importance in the work. As a proof for this aspect, Sue Bridehead is intelligent and brave, but sometimes timid. On the other hand, Arabella appears to be an instinctual character, in the search of superficial heart, dark inadvertent triggering of the final tragedy.

We have seen how Sue uses convention in an unconventionally way in order to induce sensation. Another way she uses it is to shield herself from sex, for reasons very much of her own, as we have also seen. For instance, she goes to visit Phillotson during his illness after she has left him. He shows signs of warming from friend to husband, and Sue, in her “incipient fright” shows herself ready to seize on “any line of defense against marital feelings in him.”

Sue differs greatly in the way she experiences attraction and in her relationship goals and fantasies. Jude’s sexual nature, though presented primarily as normal and healthy, causes immense conflict in his relationship with Sue. At one point, Jude confesses that he “shall always care” for Sue, to which Sue replies, “And I for you. Because you are single-hearted and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!”

Sue is unconventional in other cases, for example, Sue does not believe in prayer at all. She tells Jude honestly that if it were to join the prayer of the evening, she would act in a hypocritical way. Unlike Jude, Sue has no respect for Christminster.

Motherhood is an important subject in hardy’s novels. Most of his heroines are mothers or future mothers who have to live in an oppressive society. Sue is always described as being a responsible mother and she makes sure that her children are dressed, fed and educated. On the other hand she takes care of Arabella’s child who brings forward her generosity and her good intentions.

The complicated subject offers the author the possibility of presenting and exemplifying the thesis in an interesting way. For Hardy, the marriage shouldn’t be an irrevocable contract signed for your entire life. If love comes to an end, but you continue to live under the same shelter, then the idea of a happy marriage is annulled. The couple should always live without thinking about the social conventions.

The end of love in a marriage or the absence of it is a recurrent theme in Hardy’s novels. He creates images of couples, marriages which are harshly sanctioned by society. This love stories are meant to fail since the very beginning.

When Jude marries his first wife, he does it forced by the social conventions. On the other hand he feels sorry about it and has the impression that he fell in a trap: a natural instinct like sexual desire is punished by society with the obligation of living with a person who is totally different, with a person who does not share the same values as yours.

As Louis James points out,

Jude the Obscure (1895) caused outright scandal with the stonemason Jude, torn between his love for Arabella Donn, a sensual, extravert pig farmer’s daughter, and for his highly strung and sexually inhibited cousin, Sue Brideshead. Protests caused by its overt treatment of sexual passion and its attacks on orthodox Christianity, popular education and the institution of marriage drove Hardy to abandon writing fiction for poetry.

Meanwhile, Sue gives voice to women who marry “by giving them the dignity and social benefits they get.” Although this is not exactly the case of Sue, the author makes visible the situation of women whose only destination is socially acceptable marriage. And yet, it totally abolishes the will of a person, making it a passive, subordinate to the will of the husband. As pointed out by the girl during the ceremony of her own wedding, while the groom chooses his wife at will, the bride is given by another man.

To complete this list of perspectives on marriage, Thomas Hardy uses Phillotson, the husband who leaves Sue. While Jude assumed with some relief that he will leave her, because he doesn’t love her, Phillotson represents the man who loves other women who decide to end their life together. Her sense of justice compels him to accept the reality.

Jude is depicted as man who, on one hand wants to be spiritual and deep, but on the other hand, things which are happening in his life overcome him and he lives tortured by it. In that respect, he's a character in a perpetual state of frustration, though intelligent and coherent. He acquires a great culture and possibly if he had not been a farmer and someone had opened the doors of the university he would have become a scholar, but learn for himself what is already true in many respects. Although he is has much stronger than his cousin, actually his love for her makes him give up and do things that perhaps do not lead to the right path.

Sue is the type of the neurotic woman who ends up deciding which option to take in her life: whether to live according to social conventions or do what really dictates her heart. In this way, throughout the novel she has changes in attitude. Similarly, it appears that she converts to Christianity and marries a man who hates only to punish herself and torture both Jude and her husband, bringing negative feedback.

It's not her fault. Both her attitude changes, her lack of promptitude are the result of the hypocrisy that dominated at that time the entire sexual theme. She is a very intelligent and educated young woman, who at one point breaks all her fears and becomes brave, although the consequences of this decision will only increase the problems of conscience.

Other characters such as Jude's wife, Arabella or Sue’s husband are just as interesting or complex, but ultimately Arabella is the one who can actually enjoy life as she is concerned only with the present, without asking great moral dilemmas when taking decisions, without thinking twice when taking a decision.

We may not agree with Sue’s decisions, but irrespective of her thoughts we have to agree that Sue Bridehead is a woman ahead of her time. Her personal perspective of marriage, which is being criticized during her age, will be later approved:

I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done ignorantly! I daresay it happens to a lot of women; only they submit, and I kick….When people of a certain later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!

Sue considers women should be allowed to cancel marriages which are clearly a mistake. Many women are in the same situation that have the same feelings and don’t tell anything. Unfortunately for Sue, she lives in the XIXth century, a period whose rules for the social environment won’t let her live as she pleases. Her opinions and beliefs are totally different compared to those of her age:

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them–one or two of them particularly– almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel–to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man– no man short of a sensual savage–will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.

For Hardy it is a real problem for those women who cannot get a divorce when they are not happy with their husbands. Jude the obscure appears to be a manifest against all those conventions which force the woman to live an unhappy life. On the other hand, this kind of commitment also harms the man.

When Jude expresses the desire to move back to Christminster at the end of “At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere”, Sue underlines the fact that Jude did more for the city than the city did for him. She refers not only to the city, but also to the university, where Jude couldn’t get in because of his poverty and his lower social status. This passage is a crucial moment in Hardy’s criticism:

“Why should you care so much for Christminster? … Christminster cares nothing for you, poor dear!”

Thomas Hardy wanted to base “a tragic fable” in intended to “show that, as Diderot said, the civil law should be just the statement of a natural law.” However, this personal illustration of the conflict between law and instinct was greeted with such fury and uproar by his contemporaries who became a bishop to publicly burn. “Maybe the world says one of his characters is not enough lit to understand an experience like ours”, and Hardy could well have defended with their words.

Jude the Obscure was the first novel that dared to speak of his time, in full and openly, treating subjects such as sex, marriage and religion. and despite fierce criticism, or perhaps because of them-the work to its author became a celebrity in the early twentieth century.

Beyond their relatively trivial story, Thomas Hardy builds disturbing characters, defeated by the fatality of the conventions of the era, but mostly submerged by the inability of their spirit to endure until the end the implications of a liberty barely visible, but desperately desired.

What is troubling in Hardy’s novels is exactly the message they convey. A lover of Greek tragedies, he presents the lives of his characters as being guided by fate and as having a predetermined route which cannot be influenced by personal character or judgment.

In fact, while reading, you may have the impression that Hardy's characters do not take decisions thinking first. They dream and desire, but do nothing concrete to achieve them as if they know that their task is not to plan the future.

The author makes this very clear, saying: “But it was not his job to think of something that would follow; He had only to look for things which were evident .This lack of control over life, submission to an immutable destiny is frightening.”

Hardy's merit is that it does not use the usual style of happy ending “love conquers all” that one may expect. The portrait in shades of gray of the social determinism that decides the lives of the weak is completed by the end of the two characters. In the struggle for survival, the two, Jude, especially, are two beings unknown, over the life of the Victorian era that passed careless.