Hello readers,
Today I'm going to discuss about two character Jude and Sue Bridehead of thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure". This activity is assigned by our professor dr. Dilip Barad sir. So let's start…
◆Author’s Biography◆
Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet, was in born June of 1840. As the son of a local stonemason, he found himself without the family funds to pursue a formal education and left school at the age of sixteen. It was then that he endeavored to apprentice under a local architect; a talent that would see him go on to receive many accolades and eventually take him to London.
Thomas Hardy
However, despite enjoying a successful career, he often felt out of place in his new city, largely because of his astute awareness of how socially inferior he perceived himself to be. A large number of his poems and novels were influenced by Romanticism, and he had a particular fondness for anything akin to William Wordsworth. Despite having penned many novels, Hardy considered himself a poet above all else even though his first collection of poetry was not published until 1898, several years after he wrote his formative novels
Far from the Madding Crowd,
The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles and
Jude the Obscure.
The vast majority of his literary works focus on tragedy, telling the tale of disadvantaged characters who battle social circumstances and, of course, love. As a Victorian cum modernist novelist, Hardy is preoccupied with depicting the reality of the time for which he wrote. One major motif that runs through the modern narrative is disillusionment. Ayo Kehinde (2005) rightly posits that the modern novel is characterised by the tone of disillusionment and awash with alienation, despair, cruelty, absurdity, urban terrorism, crime, pain, dissonance, espionage, poverty, dislocation, disintegration, famine, frustration, anarchy, misogyny, betrayal, nihilism, isolation, dehumanisation and all forms of anomie. Thus, the tone of the modern novel, like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, is pessimistic and jeremiad as a result of multiple challenges that human race struggles with.
●Summary of the novel :
◆Jude the Obscure◆
Jude the Obscure did not receive critical acclaim from the public, and this was largely due to the strong nature of sex, religion and marriage. More importantly, it was considered to be an attack on the institution of marriage and caused stress in his own struggling relationship as his wife felt it was autobiographical in nature. Many booksellers are reported to have sold the book in brown paper bags, it is even believed that the Bishop of Wakefield set his copy on fire. Of course, Hardy saw this as humorous and has been quoted as saying,
“After these hostile verdicts from the press its next misfortune is to be burnt by a bishop probably in his despair to not being able to burn me.”
Jude the Obscure is a portrayal of the fractured world. It presents the narrator’s world set in within the madding crowd. In this novel, “we find carried to the furthest extreme conflicts which have been gaining in definition and momentum as Hardy’s novels have continued: the self - estrangement of the individual, the clash with social institutions and, emerging out of this clash, an increasingly sharp sense of the needs of the present time”. It is in line with the foregoing that this study investigates the trope of disillusionment in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
●Here is video about the review of the novel :
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 a young man, born and raised in the town of Marygreen. He has lofty dreams of pursuing his post - secondary career at the prestigious university in Christminster. However, burdened by fate, Jude was nothing more than an orphan raised by a lower-working class aunt and would never be capable of paying for higher education. Instead, he found employment as a stonemason.
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.
Jude's death at the young age of thirty (the approximate age of Jesus Christ at his death) indicates that he has been "crucified" by society. But even the flaws that contributed to his downfall are not really faults. If his sensitivity, kindness, sense of honor and idealism are considered weaknesses, they are also his strengths. His only real weakness is a tendency to drink when in despair, although he is not a drunkard.
His death in Christminster on Remembrance Day and his loneliness and desolation has a strange poignancy. The reader is left with a feeling of bitterness and waste at the ruin of a promising life.
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. (Lawrence thought Sue represented everything that was wrong with modern women.) 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.
Hardy captures Sue's quality of unpredictability and elusiveness. She buys nude statues of Greek divinities, then repents and conceals them from her landlady. She snaps irritably at Phillotson, then regrets it later. Sue is sometimes reckless and then diffident, stern and then kind, warm and then standoffish, candid and then evasive. In portraying these glimpses of Sue her unceasing reversals, her changes of heart and mind, her conflicting behavior Hardy creates a complex, fascinating character. The reader sees her telling Jude,
"You mustn't love me"
(Part III, Chapter 5)
and then writing to him, "you may." After her marriage she forbids Jude to come to see her, and then she revokes the ban and invites him the next week. Later, she cancels the invitation. Hardy indicates that along with her changing moods, she has a tendency to shift ground under pressure.
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.
Though a female character, Sue in Jude the Obscure embodies the important characteristics of the Byronic hero, such as: attraction, rebelliousness, liberalism, cruelty, hypersensitivity, mysteriosness, intellectuality, and exile. The paper pursues these characteristics as they appear in the character of Sue by stating the critics' views and therelated remarks from the novel. By this, Sue can be considered a Byronic heroine.
Thank you...
1868 words
