Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy

 "Jude The Obscure"

               Hello friends, today I am going to discuss among you a new topic called " Jude The Obscure".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. It is Hardy's last completed novel.  

       Thomas Hardy (1840- 1928) was an English novelist and poet. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England. His novel is so wonderful that he talks about human relationships. What kind of relationship was shown in this novel?  Whether a person can have a relationship with another without marriage is shown in this novel.  This novel depicts the difficulties that a couple may face if they keep their relationship unmarried.Just like what happens with the characters in this novel.  The same thing happens with real-time people that we see very clearly in this novel.  So here we will discuss what kind of characters Thomas Hardy has used and what kind of situation he has put them.

Jude The  Obscure :-

        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. It is Hardy's last completed novel. Its protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working class young man, 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.

Key Facts about Jude the Obscure:-

Full Title: Jude the Obscure

When Written: 1887-1895

Where Written: Dorchester, England

When Published: 1895

Literary Period: Victorian Realism

Genre: Realist Fiction, Tragedy

Setting: Southwest England, the fictional county of Wessex

Climax: Little Father Time kills himself and Sue’s children

Point of View: Third person omniscient

Characters of Jude The Obscure :-

Jude Fawley:-

     A young man from Marygreen who dreams of studying at Christminster but becomes a stone mason instead.

Susanna Bridehead:-

  Jude's cousin. She is unconventional in her beliefs and education, but marries the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson.

Arabella Donn

Jude's first wife. She enjoys spending time in bars and in the company of men.

Aunt Drusilla

The relative who raised Jude.

Richard Phillotson

     The schoolmaster who first introduces Jude to the idea of studying at the university. He later marries Sue.

Little Father Time (Little Jude)

       Jude and Arabella's son, raised in Australia by Arabella's parents. He is said to have the mind of an old man, though he is a young child.

          From Shakespeare's quotation we realize that man becomes good and bad by his thought.  Maybe sometimes nature makes him strong to be bad, sometimes his situation makes you bad and sometimes his relationships make man bad.  So Thomas Hardy has suggested to us in this novel that Jude and Sue can be both a good character and a bad character.  It is possible that we can show good on the one hand and bad on the other.  So let's get an introduction to both of them here.

Jude Fawley

             Judae is a character in Thomas Hardy's novel.  Who is portrayed as a good man.  But something happens in his life that makes him worse.  Its introduction is as follows.   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.

              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 was saying in his final moments when death was a little over.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 shows that like jude every man has something in his life but he remembers it at the last moment that I made this mistake in life, I had to do this in life and did nothing in life.  Hardy draws the attention of every reader to the fact that the mistakes made by man in the last days of life and his problems remind him one by one.  The situation is similar today.

Susanna Bridehead(Sue):-

         Sue is portrayed as a female character in Hardy's novel.  There are many problems in her life too and how she got annoyed with her choice and how she faced problems from society, herself and her own children is shown by her character in this novel.  Here is a brief introduction. 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.

          Sue lives a free life.  He makes all the decisions in his life which is important for a woman but sometimes the big problem arises due to making wrong decisions and it causes a lot of trouble to himself. The character of Sue is shown in this novel.  There are many such women even in the present times.  He himself wants complete freedom and lives with freedom but due to making some wrong decisions he is ready to face a lot of troubles and difficulties. 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.

        So through the characters of Thomas Hardy Jude and Sue we have tried to explain the reality that man has some wrong decisions in life, wrong ambitions or wrong expectations, or his own wrong goal sometimes puts man in trouble.  The whole family has to suffer.  Man faces many problems in life and struggles but sometimes when he hurts himself, his interest in life is completely shattered.  The marriage has become a joke and relationships have become very hollow. This novel shows how a free man can live his life.

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