Books: Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy

Who knew that the Classics could be so Modern, and so. . . well, brutal? Hardy's last novel (the first of his I've read) is classic enough in its structure and diction, but includes content that most contemporary readers would still find shocking.

Perhaps known for being a bit racy, the book chronicles the life of one Jude Fawley, an intelligent and inspired orphan whose lofty dreams and aspirations are pulverized by the brutality of the earthy world. Raised by an old maid relation after his parents expire prematurely, who cares but not too much, Jude is most affected by the local schoolteacher, who, at the story's opening, is leaving their hamlet for the city of Christminster. From that point, Christminster—a local university town filled with Gothic spires and the ghosts of history's learned men—becomes Jude's obsession; he procures books with which he teaches himself Latin and Greek, he apprentices himself to a stone-worker that he might earn enough money to buy a proper education, and he works, by sunlight and candlelight, repairing crumbling churches and reading Homer, Pliny, and Aeschylus.

Reality, tempting in its fruits, sharp in its thorns, attacks Jude early, before he has even once visited the esteemed city of learning that is to hold his future. He forgets his books when a robust country girl, the daughter of a swine dealer, sets her eye upon him. The slope is short and slippery, for one moment Jude is walking with her through the country, wondering whether he is too forward in putting his arm around her waist, and the next moment she has announced that she is pregnant and that they must immediately be married. A man of much integrity, Jude resigns himself to this fate, leases a house, and prepares to have a different life than the one he planned.

His new wife, Arabella, quickly reveals herself to be far coarser than he could have imagined. Her long ponytail is a detachable hairpiece; her dimple is forced. She is cold, demanding, disparaging, and disrespectful. Not three months pass before she asks to leave him, and he lets her go, off with her family to Australia to hopefully begin again. Jude decides to leave for Christminster. None of this is shocking or brutal. A bit intense, perhaps, for 1895, even a bit scandalous, but far from brutal.

Once in Christminster, Jude sets up home in a rented room, and resumes his previous activities: cutting stone by day and reading the Hellenists by night. He also begins looking for a female cousin he knows lives in the town—a beautiful, unmarried female cousin—and it isn't long before he finds her and they become friends. She is as learned as he, even more well-read, but suddenly out of work. He brings her along to visit the only other person he knows in Christminster—that old, inspiring schoolteacher, Mr. Phillotson, who, as we now find out, never became anything more than a schoolteacher—and coincidence conspires to offer Jude's cousin and new friend Sue employment assisting at his school.

Jude, whose earthy desires coexist in some harmony with his more evolved interests, falls immediately in love with Sue, a radiant, frothy, delicate creature—learning's idealism embodied, but she is engaged to old Phillotson before he overcomes his shame and tells her. They are married and Jude falls once again to his baser instincts, seeking solace in drink. But Sue isn't any happier, and, repulsed by her sexual debt to her husband, she withdraws from him—first, to another bedroom, then out of their home altogether; she asks his permission to leave, and he grants it. She goes to live with Jude. Again, a bit forward for 1895, but, still, certainly not brutal. The couple has the promise of happiness in their future.

Sue's temperament is of course unlike Arabella's—she's as lofty as the other is base—and she is frightfully resistant to marrying (and we can assume, engaging in marital relations with) Jude. Arabella reappears, asking for a formal divorce, so that she can legally remarry the London pub-owner she illegally married in Australia, and Phillotson, too, for reasons of his own, files for a legal divorce from Sue (though the word "divorce" is never used in the book). Arabella springs a new surprise on the couple when she discloses to Jude that she bore him a son, who is approximately ten years of age and has been raised by her parents in Australia. She has no desire for the child, and Jude and Sue are thrilled to take him as their own. He arrives—a quiet, darkly intelligent, precocious child, lacking in the emotional characteristics that ought define childhood. Jude and Sue attempt to marry, for his sake, but she repeatedly balks, and eventually they settle for a weekend trip to London and the pretense of marriage; though not legally joined, they now live as husband and wife, as Sue bears two children and is pregnant with the third when Jude decides to move his family back to Christminster (everyone had, all this time, been moving all around the county in attempt to either find or avoid each other).

It is here that the brutality ensues, and, of course, this is a spoiler alert. The family of five plus one on the way has trouble finding lodgings, and Jude is able to rent two rooms of a house for Sue and the children, but not for himself as well. He goes out to find lodgings for himself, and Arabella's son asks Sue why they are having so much trouble. Overestimating his maturity (or simply his "natural" human empathy), she tells him that they are too many. And here comes the brutality. Sue leaves the three children alone to go out and find Jude. When she comes back, the couple sees three tiny bodies, hanging like sacks of flour from ropes tied around their necks. The two youngest hang from coat hooks. The oldest—Arabella's son— has a knocked over chair beside his feet. This, dear readers, is brutal, and the ennui that it typifies is modern.

There is aftermath, of course. Sue "loses her mind" to the extent that she—a woman who never paid religion or tradition any heed—begins spending time alone at church. She interprets the combined murder/suicide as the triumph of Arabella's legal marriage over her false relation with Jude, whom she leaves in order to remarry Phillotson after her pregnancy produces a child stillborn. Jude again encounters Arabella who gets him drunk enough for remarriage (she having lost her Australian husband to death years ago), and soon enough he dies of liquor and consumption, worsened by a trek through a storm to see Sue. This all is exceedingly typical of the time and not of much interest to me therefore. What clings in my mind's eye is the image of three limp children, hanging by their necks off the wall, dressed all in white.