Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Back when I was in college, I took a literature course called "Realism and Naturalism." I didn't know anything about this literary period when I first went into the class, but it was my favorite one by the time I came out of it. Something about the stories I read here fascinated me. They were gritty and dark and pretty much always ended with a tragedy, but still, I was in love. For the first time, I found myself having actual thoughts and opinions about literature. I started raising my hand and speaking with classmates. I started reading classic novels with the same kind of interest that I had for contemporary novels. Best of all, this was the class where I met some of my favorite authors. Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and Henry James became authors that I still seek out and read to this day.

The instructor for this course was a young graduate student, but her enthusiasm for this period and her expertise were clear. I loved the reading selections she made and the way she taught the course. I distinctly remember her telling us one day that her favorite naturalism novel of all time was Jude the Obscure. This wasn't one of the readings assigned in the class, but I always remembered the title, and meant to read it myself one day. When I saw that one of the categories in the Back to the Classics challenge was a "classic tragedy," I figured that this was the perfect time to pick it up.

The plot of the novel follows Jude Fawley, a young orphan being raised by his aunt in a small English village. Despite being born into a poor family, Jude has scholarly aspirations. He dreams of attending one of the colleges in Christminster, a nearby, academically-focused city. He embarks on a course of self-study, teaching himself Latin and Greek and reading everything he can get his hands on as he grows into maturity. In an effort to fund his reading materials and eventual tuition payments, Jude apprentices himself to a stone mason, and he eventually becomes quite skilled at that trade. As he works and trains, however, he always holds fast to his dreams of higher education and uses all his free time to continue his personal studies.

Things begin to veer off track for him when he meets Arabella Donn, a country girl living near his aunt's house. He begins a relationship with her that becomes physical very quickly. A pregnancy scare leads him to push his studies aside and get married, a step he almost immediately comes to regret. His marriage with Arabella is a very unhappy one. They quarrel constantly and are obviously unsuited for each other. After a particularly bad fight, Arabella decides to move with her family to Australia, and Jude is only too happy to let her go. He returns to his studies again, but with a shadow over his heart. By entering into a marriage, he knows that he has spoiled any future romantic prospects in his life. His wife may be out of the country, but she is still his wife, and he is living in a time where the social attitudes concerning marriage and divorce are extremely conservative. Marriage is forever here, so Jude has doomed himself.

He still has his academic dreams though, and he resolves to continue forward on that path. He redoubles his efforts in that direction and finally moves himself to Christminster, the city he has been in love with since his childhood. He is soon thrown off track again, however, for two reasons. One, he discovers that the cost of attending a university is so expensive that he will realistically never be able to afford the tuition no matter how hard he works, and two, he meets his cousin, Sue Bridehead, and falls hopelessly in love with her. Both of these events are disastrous for Jude. Realizing that his scholarly goals will never happen ruins a huge part of his identity, and his love for Sue is tragically impossible. He is already married, and she is about to be married to someone else herself. Sue has strong romantic feelings for Jude too, but she goes through with her own wedding anyway, and winds up desperately unhappy.

Despite that fact that everything about a relationship between Jude and Sue is inappropriate at this point, the pair can't keep away from each other. Through a combination of moving between different towns and making arrangements with their original spouses, they manage to get divorces and move in together. However, neither wants to get married again, even to each other, based on the bad experiences they had the first time around. Instead, they live together and have children out of wedlock, an act that alienates them from society and creates huge financial difficulties for them. Things go from bad to worse for the pair until a truly shocking act drives them towards their final ruin.

I don't use the word "shocking" here lightly. The end of Jude the Obscure is horrific and tragic and I did not see it coming. If any readers out there aren't already spoiled as to the specifics of it, I strongly encourage you to read the book for yourself and let it hit you. It feels like a punch in the chest. It will be a reading moment you always remember, which is something I love about novels from this time period.

I don't mean to imply, however, that the final events in the novel are just a gimmick or there merely for shock value.Thomas Hardy's themes are clear throughout the text. His message is all about how harmful social divisions and expectations can be, especially the attitudes and laws around marriages in the late 1800s. We see this in Jude's failed academic pursuits and in the string of failed marriages taking place across the novel. In Jude, we have a character that is doing the best he can. He saves money and studies to achieve academic success, he marries a woman when he believes it is the only honorable course of action, he lets that woman go when it becomes clear they are both unhappy, and he tries to be a good provider for the woman he discovers later on to be his one true love. None of that is good enough.

The problem is, Jude wasn't born at the right social station to do anything more than be a tradesman and follow the rules. He reaches too high and gets smacked right back down. Hardy's story allows that reader to see that Jude didn't deserve this, and that the rules governing society at this time period are unnecessarily punitive. Why is it so improper and ridiculous for a man to want to improve himself? Why is the barrier to entering a university so high? Why can't people obtain divorces easily and without intense social stigma? Why is a marriage necessary for domestic happiness at all?

These kinds of questions brought Hardy some negative reviews when Jude was first published. People interpreted his work as being anti-marriage and labeled the novel as "obscene." Hardy wrote about these reactions in the postscript to the first edition of the work, in which he defended himself as being not anti-marriage, but pro-divorce. His opinion was that, "a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties," a view that seems quite reasonable now, but was very controversial during his lifetime. He ended up being so disappointed with the reception to this novel that he never wrote another one. Jude the Obscure is his very last book, which is a shame, because he lived another 33 years after it's publication.

Along with from the complex themes present in the novel, there are many other aspects to enjoy. Hardy's prose is masterful, his characters are layered and nuanced, and his plot twists and turns are very engaging. This is one of those classics that is on the longer side, but still easy and relatively quick to read. The only thing difficult about it is how dark it is. Nothing goes right for Jude, and that gets to be heavy after a while. However, if you enjoy sad novels, you can't do much better than this one.   

Thinking back to my college instructor who called Jude the Obscure her favorite book, I can understand why she liked it. This is a well-written work that asks interesting social questions and gives readers a wonderfully tragic story to hang those questions around. This novel didn't grab me in the same way the other works we read in the class did, so I would still say I prefer Edith Wharton or Frank Norris overall, but this was still a very worthwhile read and an excellent choice for my "classic tragedy" challenge category.   


Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#33 on my list): 46/100 
Back to the Classics 2019 (Classic Tragedy) 7/12 Books Read 

Total Books Read in 2019: 30