Victorian & Early Modernist Literature

Tutor David Jenkins Handy

Student David Jones

Question Discuss the manner in which conventions and traditional

certainties were undermined and subverted by the new ideas and
practices which authors of the period supported or resisted

Title "We are a little beforehand": Jude The Obscure's Relationship to

a Changing World

MHRA Citation

2904 Words
David Jones English II "We are a little beforehand": Jude The Obscure's relationship to a changing
world

November/December 2001

“We are a little beforehand”: Jude The Obscure's

Relationship To A Changing World

It is unsurprising that Jude The Obscure, the work of one of the most popular
novelists of its time, caused enormous controversy in 1895. Taking as priorities
‘novelty of position and view in relation to known subjects’ and ‘absolute novelty of
subject’ (Casagrande 1994, 16) Hardy undermines the fundamentals of his society to a
far broader audience than those who consumed the equally controversial ‘seditious
plays’. Countless critics identify Jude as a ‘prophetic’ text, a link between late
Victorian England and the rise of modernism. It exemplifies the Marxist ideal of
presenting ‘typical characters in typical circumstances’ in a revolutionary way,
drawing attention to two great marginalised archetypes of its time – the working man
desiring education and the woman desiring something beyond a traditional female
role. This essay broadly divides Jude into form and content. It contends that much of
the content is subversive, examining its depiction of the rural, the distinction between
town and city, education, marriage and religion. In terms of form, however, it remains
overwhelmingly conventional, and the essay subsequently investigates its use of third
person omniscient narration and genre appropriation.
In Jude Hardy undermines the idyllic depiction of the countryside, of man at
one with nature, found in much of his earlier work and throughout Victorian fiction.
The Marygreen of Jude’s childhood is not a retreat from industrialisation as in
Dickens rural excursions where ‘everything was at peace’ (1998, 352). It is instead
closely tied to high-speed travel and urbanisation; its ancient buildings have been
pulled down by the almost Dickensian caricature of ‘a certain obliterator of historic
records who had run down from London and back in a day’. The image of Clym
Yeobright working surrounded by Egdon Heath wildlife is replaced with brutally
realistic pig-slaughter, snared rabbits and desperately mating earthworms. The
connection between man and nature is relegated to mutual misery; young Jude takes
pity on the hungry birds because ‘they seemed, like himself, to be living in a world
which did not want them’. While the countryside is damaged by negative aspects of
the changing world (‘The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in

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a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse’) it is also ‘a
lonely place’, initially presented as remote from education and liberalisation of
thought.
This bleak portrait is more than the product of a changing world however. Hardy
initially presents rural communities as inherently ignorant of anything other than
physical work. Farmer Troutham describes Jude’s study as ‘idling at the
schoolmasters’, while even the main protagonists are taken in at some point by ‘the
quack’ Physician Vilbert. The customs and conventions to which they adhere are
restrictive, especially for a nonconformist such as Jude. Hardy stresses this by
appearing to embark on his traditional romanticisation of bygone ages:

To every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare
-echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy
deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety,
horse-play, bickerings, weariness.

At the end of this series of comfortable images he shifts the tone by adding that this is
also a tradition in which girls give themselves to lovers ‘who would not turn their
heads to look at them by the next harvest’ and of ‘love-promises’ leading to unhappy
lives.
These early scenes are not merely illustrative but use unconventional rural
bleakness to establish the novel’s pessimistic tone towards Jude’s aspirations. The pig
slaughter is a device establishing the disparity between dream and reality, Jude’s
fundamental tragedy. Phillotson’s parting words to the young Jude are “be kind to
animals and birds, and read all you can”. Being kind to animals proves impossible in
the real world. However diligently Jude adheres to his mentor’s words “Pigs must be
killed”; Dohney notes the ironic use of ‘mercifully’ to describe the killing (?66).
Hardy attacks the ‘flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God’s
birds was bad for God’s gardener’ attacking religion ambiguously inbetween Jude’s
thought and the narrator’s commentary. The hopelessness of Phillotson’s first piece of
advice creates the impression that the second, the basis of Jude’s educational
ambitions, is equally unlikely to translate to the real world.
Jude's rural portrait not only subverts traditional romance but also challenges
ideas of a homogenous rural class, and of the urban and rural being in binary
opposition. Jude is clearly out of place among his class, but some rural folk actually
prove less prejudiced than those encountered in the city. The local policeman quietly

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allows Jude to read while driving a cart, reasoning that in his nonconformity ‘the chief
danger was to Jude himself’. Widow Edlin at first seems archaic, ‘honestly saying the
Lord’s Prayer in a loud voice, as the Rubric directed’ while Jude and Sue reappraise
both religious dogma and the marriage ceremony. Her maxim ‘marry in haste and
repent at leisure’ describes a major element of Sue and Jude’s tragedy. However, as
Dohney notes (??, 65) she simply has a more pragmatic view of marriage because she
can distinguish it as a practical partnership beyond and detached from the conventions
that straightjacket Jude and Sue: ‘Nobody thought o’ being afeard o’ matrimony in my
time . . . we thought no more o’t than of a game o’ dibs!’. Jude is contrastingly
obsessesed with convention:

There was not the least doubt that from his own orthodox point of view the
situation was growing immoral. For Sue to be the loved one of a man who was
licensed by the laws of his country to love Arabella and none other unto his
life's end, was a pretty bad second beginning

Widow Edlin implicitly understands the unspoken remainder of the epigraph

overshadowing the various tragedies, that ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’
(Dennis Taylor identifies the idea that 'the letter killeth' may be 'not so much formal
laws as social conventions [1998, xviii]). It takes Jude almost the entire story to
realise this. Consequently this uneducated exemplar of the conventional, steeped in
religious rhetoric, is the only one to stand up for Sue when she cannot stand up for
herself. She presents the radical stance of the novel in franker terms than the narrator
can afford:

I was never much for religion nor against it, but it can’t be right to let her do this
. . . Of course everybody will say it was very good and forgiving of [Phillotson]
to take her to ‘ee again. But for my part I don't . . . She’s [Jude’s] wife if
anybody’s. She’s had three children by him, and he loves her dearly . . .She's got
nobody on her side . . . I knowed you’d be affronted at what I had to say; but I
don’t mind that. The truth’s the truth.

Conventional distinctions between country and town are destroyed in Jude.

Hardy to some extent attributes Sue’s emotional deficiencies to her reliance on the
modern; when ‘vexed’ she answers Jude’s suggestion of going to a Cathedral: ‘I think
I’d rather sit in the railway station’. Arabella embodies the breakdown of the
rural/urban distinction. At first she seems the archetypal rough country girl – washing
pigs’ chitterlings and using a bantam egg in her bosom as a seduction tool. It is

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difficult to ascertain whether the presumptuous statement ‘His wife was absolutely
useless in a town-lodging’ belongs to Jude’s free indirect thought or the narrator.
Either way, this creates a huge turning point when Arabella mentions that she was a
bar-maid at Aldbrickham. She later demonstrates her aptitude for the job when Jude
rediscovers her, flirting with customers in a bar in Christminster. The narrator aligns
himself with Jude, in the feeling that the town produces in some women ‘an instinct
towards artificiality in their very blood, and [they] became adepts at counterfeiting at
the first glimpse of it’. It is one of the falsehoods she entraps Jude with, alongside her
hair extensions and constructed dimples.
However Dohney feels that Arabella ‘introduces into the novel . . . not only a
different set of values to Jude and Sue but a commentary on theirs which changes our
view of the various manifestations of their dilemma” (??, 65). This is clearly reading
against the text, against a narrator who places Arabella in the role of villain because
she leaves the eponym ‘enshrouded in darkness’ detracted from his aspirations. Even
so, Arabella has crafted herself to function in the world in a way that Jude has not,
adamant that “Poor folks must live”. Jude is both a product of the changing world and
entirely incompatible with it. His agony is a full understanding of the horrors of the
conventions of his time, alongside a complete inability to change anything. The
logical progression of his predicament is Little Father Time, one of the

boys of a sort unknown in the last generation - the outcome of new views of life.
They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power
to resist them [they are] the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.

Arabella prevents this kind of self-destruction by living within existing conventions

but holding them in low regard, putting herself first. Her polygamy is a means of
survival: 'I can’t pick and choose now as I could when I was younger. Hardy is
hypocritical in implicitly condemning her, regarding her according to conventional
opinion - ‘the letter’ that ‘killeth’ – that condemns Jude through life. Under a different
narrator the novel could easily have become Arabella The Pragmatist.
When Arabella disrupts Jude’s aspirations, she unconsciously places herself
against a major aspect of the novel, the virtue of education. The narrator is at pains to
demonstrate how much Jude needs and deserves a university degree, he devotes pages
to describing Jude's reading and the tribulations of self learning, such as his young
endurance to get hold of Latin and Greek grammars. Jude and Sue are kindred spirits,

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‘one person split in two’ as both are aspiring intellectuals, though society forces Jude
into a working life, preventing him from reading as much as her. Tragedy again arises
from the impossibility of translating the dream into the reality of the late Victorian
period. The young Jude gazing from the Brown House at far away Christminster, in
his mind ‘the heavenly Jerusalem’, mirrors Eustacia’s aspirations to escape to
Budmouth or Paris in The Return Of The Native. Her tragedy was that she did not get
there, she never becomes what she could have been. By Jude Hardy’s use of tragedy
in the modern world has become even more pessimistic. Jude’s does ‘get there’, only
to realise that his dream is not simply unobtainable but diseased by social convention.
Hardy is clearly against the conventional organisation of education. The
educated in Jude invariably take learning for granted, from the regular day scholars
who stand ‘afar off’ rather than help the schoolmaster’s packing in the opening
chapter onwards. Jude ironically encounters ‘devil-may-care . . . gownless
undergraduates’ in the bar he frequents immediately after being deemed unworthy for
university admission. When Jude drunkenly recites the Articles of the Creed one of
them applauds though he ‘had not the slightest conception of a single word’ (121).
Jude’s rejection letter from Biblioll College ties education resolutely to class: ‘you
will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and
sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course’. The narrator sarcastically
opines that this is ‘terribly sensible advice’. This is the way the world is, the
implication is that it is wrong. Though too controversial for the narrator to declare, a
drunken Jude sums up the failure of an education system that works on money rather
than merit, condemning academics: “What I know is that I’d lick ‘em on their own
ground if they’d give me a chance, and show ‘em a few things they are not up to
yet!”. Sue is similarly prevented from making full use of her extensive education, the
prescriptive limitations of the training school leave her feeling that she has ‘lived so
much in the Middle Ages . . . these last few years!’
The world does shift during the novel’s chronology however. Jude refers to the
Oxbridge extension movement of the 1870s: “I hear that soon there is going to be a
better chance for such helpless students as I was. There are schemes afoot for making
the university less exclusive, and extending its influence. I don’t know much about it.
And it is too late, too late for me! Ah – and for how many worthier ones before me!”
In terms of education then, Jude is not universally pessimistic, but represents the
tragedy of one man and his predecessors through the ages.

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This is not the case in its representation of marriage and religion. Characters’
marrying the wrong person under duress, with tragic consequences, is a staple of
Hardy’s fiction and an archetype of melodrama. In Jude however Hardy attacks the
very concept of marriage as a piece of institutionalised rhetoric. He repeatedly ‘zooms
out’ on Jude and Arabella’s early relationship to situate it in part of a constant cycle of
tragic matrimony:

People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday clothes; they were
mainly lovers –such pairs as Jude and Arabella had been when they sported
along the same track some months earlier. These pedestrians turned to stare at
the extraordinary spectacle [Arabella] now presented
(I.xi, 69)

Gillingham comes to represents the voice of public opinion and convention here.
Phillotson is initially swayed by Sue’s anti-marriage argument, proved true by to the
morality of the novel. When he tries to bring the remarriage in line with convention he
takes Gillingham’s advice and determines to be stricter and more cruel.
The series of caricature weddings, Jude and Sue’s ‘object lesson’, also support
the idea of matrimony as an administrative convention (‘Law-books in musty calf
covered one wall, and elsewhere were post-office directories, and other books of
reference). Hence the pregnant and beaten woman marries the soldier, while another
woman tries to attach herself to a man straight out of gaol ‘her mouth shaping itself
like that of a child about to give way to grief’. Tony Davis feels that Sue’s conviction
that marriage is merely a ‘business contract’ to enforce monogamy has been born out
by the tide of feeling of the following century. Her declaration is utterly prophetic:
‘Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a
hundred, years the descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They will
see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now’.
The remarriages towards Jude's close, under Sue’s delusion that they are the
only moral option, challenge the very concept of a universal, conventionalised
morality, the idea of an unbending ‘respectability’ and ‘the proper’, and as such
challenge Victorianism itself. The vignette of a broken Sue, ‘prostrate on the paving’
of a church, sobbing in the shadow of a swaying Latin cross is a powerful image of
religion’s capacity for corrupting genuine humanity. She has not been destroyed for
breaking religious rhetoric but the ‘irony of fate, and the curious trick in Sue’s nature
of tempting Providence at critical times’. Traditional religious fervour only

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compounds her tragedy by detaching her from the one object she loves. Arabella’s
closing comment powerfully debunks traditional religious sacrifice, judging Sue’s
declaration to have found forgiveness and peace: ‘she may swear that on her knees to
the holy cross upon her necklace till she’s hoarse, but it won't be true!’ As with Jude’s
educational aspirations, Sue’s marriage tragedy is described not as a tragedy of the
modern world but a universal one. As she puts it herself, ‘I am not modern . . . I am
more ancient than mediaevalism’.
Jude’s great rite of passage is the loss of his faith in ‘the letter’ of Christian
law, to rediscover ‘the spirit’ that he attempted to condition away in his early life,
when curiously pagan instincts led him to worship the moon ‘the shiny goddess, who
seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings’. Jude again articulates a truth too
controversial for the narrator: ‘It is monstrous and unnatural for you to be so
remorseful when you have done no wrong . . . You make me hate Christianity, or
mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may be called’. Jude’s remarriage to
Arabella has the blessing of every aspect of Victorian convention and is clearly absurd
– Jude descends quickly from alcholism to death. It is, he remarks sarcastically to
himself, ‘true religion’.
Nonetheless, the content of Jude is not entirely subversive. Although the
narrator treats Sue’s frigidity as a bizarre deficiency, it holds a similarly dark view of
sexual intercourse and its implications. Jude’s physical desire for Arabella is twice his
undoing. Firstly she detracts him from his Christminster scheme, arousing the typical
ambiguity between pure narrative and Jude's thought: 'What a wicked worthless
fellow he had been to give vent as he had done to an animal passion for a woman'.
Secondly, Jude neglects Sue’s trip to Alfredstone when Arabella reappears and they
spend the night in ‘a third-rate inn’. Phillotson's desire to get Sue back is a shamefully
sexual. Sex as the great evil of marriage culminates in Sue’s discussion with Father
Time, in which the information that marriage has lead to too many children proves the
impetus for Jude’s most powerful tragic set piece. The hints of misogyny in the
epigraph from Esdras ‘many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women’
extend to Hardy’s basic mistrust of female friendship. Arabella’s friends contruct the
scheme by which she seduces Jude, the age-old female trick of getting oneself
pregnant to keep a man. Jude’s integrity is damaged by their gossip: ‘he would have
felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings and doings on the
previous evening were private’. As Casagrande claims (32) this is a novel that places

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women in positions of power, but power is only ever used there as a tool that
represses Jude and causes him pain. Finally, the overarching motif that ‘the letter
killeth’ is self-defeating, for while it condemns religious rhetoric it is a piece of
religious rhetoric itself.
For all its radical content, Jude remains a 'classic realist novel' (Macabe, 1979,
34) with a third person omniscient narrator atop its discourse hierarchy. As has been
shown, Hardy sometimes softens his most controversial opinions by degrading them
inside the 'perverted commas' of a character's discourse, taking advantage of
ambiguity between pure narrative and characters' thought. It also adheres to David
Lodge's revisionist view of Victorian novels (Correa, 2000, 190), appropriating
generic forms from very traditional sources rather than inventing new ones. There are
elements of the gothic to Sue's extreme violence – leaping from a window as a 'white
heap' – when terrified of sexual intercourse (interestingly, she becomes a 'black heap
of clothes' when she is falling under the dark shadow of religion). Phillotson has
elements of the archetypal cuckold, and Arabella's first scene, in which she seduces
Jude alongside two maidens, is strongly reminiscent of medieval romance. In Sir
Launfal the eponym is similarly accosted by three maidens in fine weather, the main
female fulfilling his sexual desire. Hardy corrupts this – the medieval maidens bear
riches rather than the severed penis of a catrated pig, but is essentially using this
archetypal situations to evoke the implications of male sexual desire as a means to
self-destruction. Finally, the entire novel is tied into the tragic power of Fate found
throughout Hardy's writing, for ‘it always ended badly with us Fawleys’. This force
accounts for more tragedy than all the wrongs of social convention.
In conclusion, Jude The Obscure undermines several conventions and
traditional certainties of its time, supporting new ideas such as education regardless of
class. Its forward-looking implications mark it out as a 'transitional' text. Its outlook
on sexual activity is conservative however, and its form is that of the typical Victorian
novel. Several areas here have the potential for hugely expanded investigation –
Hardy's dismissal but reliance on religious rhetoric, and the relationship between
radical content and non-radical form (especially in relation to characterisation). A full
investigation of Jude's revolutionary qualities could only be carried out on a linguistic
level, investigating its multitude of first OED citations.

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Sources Cited
Casagrande, Peter J. 'Something More To Be Said: Hardy's Creative Process & The
Case Of Tess & Jude' in Pettit, Charles ed. 1994 New Perspectives On Thomas
Hardy, Ipswitch: Macmillan

Dickens, Charles 1998 Hard Times (1854), Schlicke, Paul ed. Oxford: Oxford
Univ.Press

Dohney, John 'Characterisation in Hardy's Jude The Obscure: The Function of

Arabella' in Pettit, Charles P.C. ??? Reading Thomas Hardy [book unavailable
– taken from photocopies

Hardy, Thomas Jude The Obscure (1895) Taylor, Dennis ed. Suffolk: Penguin

Macabe, Colin 1979 James Joyce & The Revolution Of The Word: Language
Discourse, Society London & Basingstoke: Macmillan

Taylor, Dennis 'The Letter Of What Law?' in Hardy, Thomas Jude The Obscure
(1895) Taylor, Dennis ed. Suffolk: Penguin

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