In this Blog I would like to analyse two characters from the novel- Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy.
First we throw some light on Novel and novelist.
Thomas Hardy:-
Born: 2 June 1840
Died: 11 January 1928
NOTABLE WORKS
“Tess of the D’Urbervilles”
“Jude the Obscure”
“The Return of the Native”
“The Woodlanders”
“The Dynasts”
“Far from the Madding Crowd”
“The Mayor of Casterbridge”
“A Pair of Blue Eyes”
“The Hand of Ethelberta”
“Wessex Poems”
Here is genius writer Thomas Hardy, who expanded the Victorian era and showed the realistic picture of it. To study the writer one has to study all the elements which writer is writing in his work. He uses make kind of concepts like pessimism, an overwhelming feeling of irony, naturalism, feminism. These all makes impact on the writing part and other things like Thomas Hardy is showing is about fate and chance, dignity of the person. Thomas Hardy portrays woman characters in a contrasting way. One cannot identify that Hardy is with the women character or he is showing the harshness and punishing women on the targeting on Victorian period. Thomas Hardy’s masterpieces of novel is Under the Greenwood Tree 1872, A Pair of Blue Eyes 1873, Far from the Madding Crowd 1874, The Return of the Native 1878, The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886, Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1891, Jude the Obscure 1896. In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after a great amount of negative criticism erupted from the publication of his novel Jude The Obscure, Hardy decided to give up writing novels permanently and to focus his literary efforts on writing poetry. All the facts show that Thomas Hardy gives major elements in his works and shows realness of the time.
In the early 1860s, after the appearance Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Thomas Hardy bravely challenged many of the sexual and religious conventions of the Victorian age, but he soon adopted the mechanical-determinist view of universe's cruelty, reflected in the inevitably tragic and self-destructive fates of his characters. In his poems Hardy depicted rural life without sentimentality? his mood was often stoically hopeless. Fate plays a major role in many of Hardy's novels; both Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge contain various instances where its effects are readily apparent. Moreover, Hardy's novels reflect a pessimistic view where fate, or chance, is responsible for a character's ruin.
Brief Introduction about novel:-
This novel is Hardy's last novel.Hardy passed the blame to society; your society can cripple you as well as your destiny. Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in Christminster, but his background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude was a child.
In it we find many themes like :-
1)Marriage
2)Fate
3)Social Criticism
4)Women in Society
5)Religion
Hardy used various symbols:-
1)Pigs
2)Gin Traps
3)Birds
After this now we talk about mani characters of novel that is a Jude and Sue Bridehead.
Jude:-
-Protogonist of the novel
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 to imply.
2) Sue Bridehead:-
-Second protogonist of the novel
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.
Sue Bridehead is in many ways at the centre of Jude the Obscure. It has been argued that she ‘takes the book away from the title character, because she is stronger, more complex, and more significant’. Her very inconsistency and elusiveness, the sense of profound depths lying beneath her ‘brilliant and puzzling surface’, create a fascinating ‘air of the inexplicable and even the mysterious’ (Heilman, 1966: 307). She is very much ‘The New Woman’, which is one of the titles Hardy himself proposed for a dramatisation of the novel (Millgate, 1971: 312). In her reading of Mill, Shelley and Swinburne, in her questioning of the institution of marriage, and above all in her search for a new model of womanhood, she fits the mould of the ‘modern intelligent mentally emancipated young woman of cities’ whom Hardy, writing of one of Florence Henniker’s heroines, reckoned to be ‘by far the most interesting type of femininity the world provides for man’s eyes at the present day’.
Conclusion:-
In sum up we can say that Hardy tried to portrayed very significantly that both characters.Commentators have long debated the place of Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last major novel, in terms of its Victorian and Modernist qualities.The novel explores several social problems in Victorian England, especially those relating to the institutions of marriage, the Church, and education. These themes are developed in particular through Hardy's use of contrast.
Word count:- 1368
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