Jude the Obscure

I am Himanshi Parmar, here i write a blog, as a part of thinking activity. The blog is about characters of Jude the Obscure.

Introduction :-

Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895, though the title page says 1896. It is Hardy's last completed novel. The protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man; he is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.

What is your reading of prominent female characters in Jude the Obscure?

1] Sue Bridehead :- 

The novel’s other protagonist and Jude’s cousin. Sue’s parents were divorced and she was raised in London and Christminster. She is an extremely intelligent woman who rejects Christianity and flirts with paganism, despite working as a religious artist and then teacher. Sue is often described as “ethereal” and “bodiless” and she generally lacks sexual passion, especially compared to Jude. Sue marries Phillotson as a kind of rebuke to Jude for his own marriage to Arabella, and is then repulsed by Phillotson as a husband. She is portrayed as inconsistent and emotional, often changing her mind abruptly, but she develops a strong relationship and love with Jude. Though she starts out nonreligious, the death of her children drives Sue to a harsh, legalistic version of Christianity as she believes she is being punished for her earlier rebellion against Christianity, and she returns to Phillotson even though she never ceases to love Jude.

It is easy for the modern reader to dislike Sue, even, as D. H. Lawrence did, to make her into the villain of the book. Jude, as well as Hardy, obviously sees her as charming, lively, intelligent, interesting, and attractive in the way that an adolescent girl is. But it is impossible not to see other sides to her personality: she is self-centered, wanting more than she is willing to give; she is intelligent but her knowledge is fashionable and her use of it is shallow; she is outspoken but afraid to suit her actions to her words; she wants to love and be loved but is morbidly afraid of her emotions and desires.

In short, she is something less than the ideal Jude sees in her; like him she is human. She is also a nineteenth-century woman who has given herself more freedom than she knows how to handle. She wants to believe that she is free to establish a new sort of relationship to men, even as she demands freedom to examine new ideas. But at the end she finds herself in the role of sinner performing penance for her misconduct. As Jude says, they were perhaps ahead of their time.If she is not an ideal, she is the means by which J tide encounters a different view of life, one which he comes to adopt even as she flees from it. She is also one of the means by which Jude's hopes are frustrated and he is made to undergo suffering and defeat. But it is a frustration which he invites or which is given him by a power neither he nor Sue understands or seems to control.

2] Arabella Donn :-

Jude’s first wife, a vain, sensual woman who is the daughter of a pig farmer. She decides to marry Jude and so tricks him into marrying her by pretending to be pregnant. Arabella sees marriage as a kind of entrapment and as a source of financial security, and she uses whatever means necessary to get what she wants. After Jude fails to provide for her, Arabella goes to Australia and takes a new husband there. She is often contrasted with the pure, intellectual Sue, as Arabella is associated with alcohol and sexual pleasure. When she wants Jude back she gets him drunk and forces him to marry her, and when he dies (or even just before) she immediately starts seeking a new husband.

She is so selfish, thoughtless, and manipulative that it's hard to take her seriously as a character in some ways she's like a cartoon villain or something. Of course, this isn't a romantic comedy, so Arabella's behavior gets a lot worse than backstabbing and prom antics.

Arabella tricks Jude into marrying her twice. In fact, it is almost impossible at times to know when if ever Arabella is telling the truth.

What is your reading of prominent male characters in Jude the Obscure?

1] Jude Fawley :- 

The novel’s protagonist, a poor orphan who is raised by his great-aunt after his parents divorced and died. Jude dreams of attending the university at Christminister, but he fails to be accepted because of his working class background. He is a skilled stonemason and a kindly soul who cannot hurt any living thing. Jude’s “fatal flaw” is his weakness regarding alcohol and women, and he allows his marriage to Arabella, even though it is unhappy, to distract himself from his dream. He shares a deep connection with his cousin Sue, but their relationship is doomed by their earlier marriages, society’s disapproval, and bad luck. Jude starts out pious and religious, but by the end of his life he has grown agnostic and bitter.

Jude is obscure in that he comes from uncertain origins, struggles largely unnoticed to realize his aspirations, and dies without having made any mark on the world. He is also obscure in the sense of being ambiguous: he is divided internally, and the conflicts range all the way from that between sexual desire and knowledge to that between two different views of the world. Jude is, therefore, struggling both with the world and with himself.

He is not well equipped to win. Though he is intelligent enough and determined, he tries to force his way to the knowledge he wants. Though well-intentioned and goodhearted, he often acts impulsively on the basis of too little objective evidence. Though he is unable to hurt an animal or another human being, he shows very little concern for himself and his own survival, often needlessly sacrificing his own good. He never learns, as Phillotson finally does perhaps too late, to calculate how to get what he wants. In short, he is more human than divine, as Hardy points out.

He is obsessed with ideals. Very early he makes Christminster into an ideal of the intellectual life, and his admitted failure there does not dim the luster with which it shines in his imagination to the very end of his life. He searches for the ideal woman who will be both lover and companion, and though he finds passion without intellectual interests in Arabella and wide interests but frigidity in Sue he maintains the latter as his ideal to his deathbed. Recognizing the Christminster holiday just before he dies, Jude says, "And I here. And Sue defiled!".

Jude is reconciled to his fate before he dies only in the sense that he recognizes what it is. In a conversation with Mrs. Edlin he says that perhaps he and Sue were ahead of their time in the way they wanted to live. He does not regret the struggle he has made-, at the least, as he lies ill he tries to puzzle out the meaning of his life. At the very end, however, like Job he wonders why he was born. But then so perhaps does every man, Hardy seems thonorable.

2]Richardson phillotson :-

Jude’s schoolmaster at Marygreen who moves to Christminster and fails to be accepted at the university there. Phillotson remains as a teacher, and he later hires Sue and falls in love with her. They marry, but Sue finds she cannot live with Phillotson as a husband. Though Phillotson is a conservative man, he finds that letting Sue leave him feels like the most moral decision, and he sticks by it even when he is punished by society for his disgrace and loses his job and respectability. Phillotson is a kindly, ethical man, but Sue’s lack of love for him causes him great torment.

Phillotson is eminently the respectable man. Though he fails to achieve the same goals Jude pursues, his bearing and view of things do not change much. Even when Arabella encounters him on the road to Alfredston, now down on his luck and teaching at Marygreen because it's the only place that will have him, this air of respectability remains. It must be this which Sue can't stand about him, the respectability plus the legal right to make love to her.

Sue's opinion of him does not make him any less decent. He is like Jude in many ways: he is goodhearted and honorable he allows instinct to overrule reason; he is too accommodating for his own good; he is intelligent. Like Jude he is ill-equipped to get what he wants in life and soon resigns himself to mediocrity. However, unlike Jude he no longer is dazzled by ideals, perhaps because he is older. Maybe too late he learns to act on the basis of calculation, estimating that Sue's return will be worth the benefits it may bring.Phillotson, in short, is a man whom it is easy neither to like nor to dislike; he goes largely honorable.

Conclusion :-

If we analyze Arabela and sue we found both them totally opposite characters, similarly jude and Richardson are also opposite characters. Here we see four of them in detail.

Words :- 1608

Paragraphs :- 8

References :-

1) Litcharts.com

2) Cliffnotes.com

3) Wikipedia.com