Jude the Obscure

Summary

Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him. From a barn roof he sees the far-off lights of the city, which he calls a city of light, and he teaches himself Latin and Greek from secondhand grammars while working as a baker's boy and then as an apprentice stonemason. His plans are first interrupted by Arabella Donn, a pig-breeder's daughter, who draws him into an early marriage on a mistaken claim that she is expecting a child; the marriage soon fails and she sails for Australia. Jude goes to Christminster as a mason, repairing college stonework he cannot enter as a student. There he meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, quick, freethinking and restless, and falls in love with her. A college master answers his letter by advising him to stay in his own trade, and Jude turns instead toward the idea of becoming a country curate. Sue trains as a teacher at Melchester, then marries the much older Phillotson. Finding she cannot bear the marriage, she leaves him with his consent for Jude; Phillotson loses his school post at Shaston for allowing it. Jude and Sue, both later divorced, live together unmarried at Aldbrickham and repeatedly fail to go through with a wedding. Arabella sends Jude their son, a solemn child nicknamed Little Father Time. The family drifts from town to town as Jude takes work where neighbours do not know their history. Returning to Christminster on Remembrance Day, they cannot find lodgings; after Sue tells the boy that another baby is coming, he takes his own life and the lives of the two younger children. Sue, broken by grief and convinced it is a judgment, turns to a strict religious penitence and goes back to remarry Phillotson. Jude, ill and drinking, is drawn back into marriage with Arabella. He walks through rain to see Sue one last time, worsens, and dies alone in Christminster while the college festivities sound outside, repeating Job's curse on the day of his birth. Hardy wrote the novel between 1892 and 1894; it ran in Harper's New Monthly Magazine from December 1894 in a cut and altered form and appeared as a book in 1895 with his Preface restoring the full text. The fierce reviews that followed are often given as one reason he stopped writing novels and turned to poetry. The library text is the Project Gutenberg edition, with Hardy's 1895 Preface and the part epigraphs.

Plot or Argument

• Part First: At Marygreen

  The boy Jude is beaten for letting rooks eat a farmer's corn, glimpses Christminster's lights from the Brown House, and is cheated by the quack Physician Vilbert over promised grammars. He learns the classical tongues alone, becomes a stonemason, and is drawn into marriage with Arabella Donn, who soon leaves him.

• Part Second: At Christminster

  Jude works on college stonework, meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, and receives a college master's letter advising him to remain in his own sphere. In despair he recites the Creed in Latin in a tavern, then returns home and thinks of the Church as a humbler path.

• Part Third: At Melchester

  Sue studies at the training college, flees its rules after a night out with Jude, and tells him of her sceptical reading and past friendship with an undergraduate. She marries Phillotson; Jude meets Arabella again, now married in Australia.

• Part Fourth: At Shaston

  Sue's aversion to her husband grows until she leaps from a window to avoid him. Phillotson, quoting no rule but his conscience, lets her go to Jude, and is dismissed from his school for it.

• Part Fifth: At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere

  Free of their marriages, Jude and Sue still shrink from a wedding. Arabella sends Little Father Time; the family is shunned, Jude loses work lettering the Commandments in a church, and they wander as itinerant workers, selling cakes at fairs.

• Part Sixth: At Christminster Again

  The children's deaths shatter Sue, who remarries Phillotson as a penance. Jude, remarried to Arabella, makes a last visit to Sue in the rain and dies on the day of the college celebrations, while Mrs. Edlin and Arabella speak over his body.

Characters

• Jude Fawley, protagonist

  Self-taught stonemason who longs for learning at Christminster and later for the ministry.

• Sue Bridehead, cousin and beloved

  Brilliant, sceptical, nervous young woman who loves Jude but fears marriage.

• Arabella Donn, Jude's wife

  Practical, worldly pig-breeder's daughter who twice marries Jude.

• Richard Phillotson, schoolmaster

  Jude's first teacher, later Sue's husband, who releases her at cost to himself.

• Little Father Time, Jude's son

  Old-seeming child of Jude and Arabella, raised in Australia.

• Drusilla Fawley, great-aunt

  Marygreen baker who raises Jude and warns him the Fawleys should not marry.

• Physician Vilbert, quack doctor

  Itinerant seller of pills and philtres who reappears at Jude's deathbed.

• Mrs. Edlin, neighbour

  Kindly Marygreen widow who befriends Jude and Sue to the end.

Lessons

• Longing for learning

  Jude's lonely nights with Latin and Greek grammars show a real hunger for knowledge, and the closed gates of Christminster make that hunger the engine of the tragedy. Hardy honours the aspiration even as he records its defeat.

  • What does Christminster mean to the boy Jude before he ever sees it?
  • Is the college master's letter cruel, realistic, or both?
  • What does Jude gain from his studies even though he never enters a college?

• The letter and the spirit

  The book's motto from 2 Corinthians, that the letter kills, is quoted by Jude himself near the end. Hardy sets rules of marriage and religious form against inner conviction, and lets characters on each side argue in their own terms.

  • Why does Jude say that he and Sue are acting by the letter?
  • Is Phillotson's release of Sue an act of the spirit or of weakness?
  • How does Sue's final penitence differ from the faith Jude once hoped to preach?

• Two crossings of belief

  Jude begins devout and ends doubting; Sue begins sceptical and ends in rigid penitence. Their opposite paths show how grief, guilt and circumstance can reshape conviction.

  • Where do you first see Jude's faith weaken, and why?
  • Is Sue's return to Phillotson an act of faith or of despair?

• Suffering and the question of Job

  Jude dies speaking the words of Job 3, cursing the day he was born. The novel leaves the reader with Job's question of why the righteous suffer, without the voice from the whirlwind that answers Job in Scripture.

  • Why might Hardy choose Job's lament rather than Job's later submission?
  • Does the novel blame persons, society, chance, or something larger for Jude's fate?
  • How might a Christian reader answer the darkness of the last chapter?

Context

Jude belongs to the 1890s, when debates over marriage and divorce law, women's education, and the authority of the Church were sharp in England. Christminster is Hardy's figure for Oxford, which in this period was still closed in practice to working men; the new women's training colleges and the Divorce Court of 1857 also shape the plot.

Composition

By Hardy's own Preface, the scheme was jotted down in 1890 from notes begun in 1887, the scenes were revisited in 1892, and the full text was written from August 1893 into 1894. It was serialized in Harper's New Monthly Magazine from December 1894 under provisional titles, abridged for the magazine, and published complete as a book in 1895.

Reception

Many reviewers attacked the book for its treatment of marriage and religion; one review called it Jude the Obscene, and the Bishop of Wakefield said he had burned his copy. Others, including Edmund Gosse, reviewed it seriously. Hardy turned to poetry afterwards, and the novel is now read as one of the major English tragedies in prose.

Comparisons

• far-from-the-madding-crowd

  Hardy's earlier Wessex pastoral ends in a patient marriage of shared work; Jude, written twenty years later, ends with every marriage failing.

• middlemarch

  Dorothea Brooke and Jude both seek a great vocation and find it narrowed by circumstance; Eliot ends in quiet usefulness, Hardy in defeat.

• on-liberty

  Sue quotes Mill's words on choosing one's own plan of life to justify leaving Phillotson; the novel tests that individualist principle in a hard setting.

• the-bible

  The epigraph from 2 Corinthians and Jude's dying recitation of Job 3 frame the whole tragedy in scriptural language.

• great-expectations

  Pip and Jude both dream of rising beyond their trade; Dickens lets Pip learn humility, while Hardy lets Jude's aspiration end in exhaustion.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The view of Christminster's lights from the roof of the Brown House barn in Part First.
• Jude carving letters and mending college stone he may never study behind.
• Phillotson's decision at Shaston to let Sue go, and what it costs him.
• The scriptural epigraphs at the head of each part and their echoes in the plot.
• Jude's last words, drawn from Job 3, set against the hurrahs outside.

Key terms and names

Christminster

Hardy's name for Oxford, the university city Jude worships from afar and works in as a mason.

Marygreen

The downland village where Jude grows up, returns at crises, and makes his final journey.

Biblioll College

The college whose master advises Jude by letter to stay in his own sphere as a working man.

Little Father Time

Nickname of Jude and Arabella's son, a child who seems old and joyless from the start.

Remembrance Day

The Christminster commemoration day that frames both Jude's return in Part Sixth and his death.

The letter killeth

Words from 2 Corinthians 3:6 used as the novel's motto and quoted by Jude in his last meeting with Sue.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does the boy Jude come to see Christminster as the goal of his life?
2. Comprehension What does the Master of Biblioll's letter advise, and how does Jude respond to it?
3. Comprehension Why does Phillotson lose his post at Shaston?
4. Interpretation How do Jude's and Sue's religious views move in opposite directions over the six parts?
5. Interpretation What does Hardy achieve by naming each part after a place?
6. Interpretation Is Arabella simply a villain, or does Hardy give her own reasons and a kind of honesty?
7. Big Question Can a person's deepest longing be good even if the world never allows it to be fulfilled?
8. Big Question Does the novel's ending leave room for hope, and where might a reader look for it?

Faith Connections

• 2 Corinthians 3:6 (Scripture)

  Paul contrasts the letter that kills with the Spirit that gives life; Hardy takes the first half as his motto, and the reader can ask where the second half is missing.

• Job 3; Job 38–42 (Scripture)

  Jude dies with Job's lament on his lips; reading the whole book of Job shows how Scripture carries such a cry through to God's answer from the whirlwind.

• Augustine, Confessions (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's restless pursuit of learning and love that ends in rest in God is a natural contrast to Jude, whose restless seeking finds no such rest.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If a man's longing for learning and love is good, and the institutions of his time block both, then his suffering is a tragedy rather than a punishment; Hardy presents Jude's life to make the reader feel the force of that conclusion.

Rhetorical device: ironic juxtaposition. In Part Sixth, Ch. XI, Jude's whispered verses from Job alternate with the hurrahs of the Remembrance Day crowd, setting private death against public celebration.

Debate: Resolved: that Phillotson acted rightly in releasing Sue from their marriage.

Memory Work

It is a city of light

Writing Prompts

Essay: Argue whether Jude's tragedy comes chiefly from his own choices, from the institutions around him, or from chance, using his letter from Biblioll, his first marriage, and the final part.

Comparison with Far from the Madding Crowd: Compare the marriage of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba with the unions of Jude, Sue and Arabella: what makes Hardy's early love story end in a wedding and his last one in loss?

Medical Lens

Physician Vilbert is a fine portrait of the itinerant rural quack, selling golden ointment, life-drops, pills and a love-philtre to cottagers beyond the reach of licensed medicine. Little Father Time is described as having a morbid temperament, and the Doctor's comment after the children's deaths echoes fin-de-siècle talk of degeneration and of a new despair in the young; this is the characters' period theory, not a diagnosis the novel endorses. Aunt Drusilla's warning that the Fawleys should not marry hints at a family taint in the heredity language of the day. Jude's drinking at moments of failure, Sue's nervous collapse and penitential self-punishment after the deaths, and Jude's final wasting illness after his walk in the rain give further material. Any modern reading of Sue's or Little Father Time's states is interpretive.

• Part First, Ch. IV

  Physician Vilbert, the road-physician, is introduced selling remedies to cottagers and fails to bring Jude the grammars he promised.

  Quackery Charlatans
• Part Second, Ch. VII

  After the college master's rebuff Jude drinks in a Christminster tavern and recites the Creed in Latin to the company.

  Alcohol Melancholia Depression
• Part Sixth, Ch. II

  The deaths of the three children at the Christminster lodgings, the boy's note, and the Doctor's theory of children who wish not to live.

  Suicide Heredity Degeneration Grief
• Part Sixth, Ch. II–IV

  The premature birth and death of Sue's baby, her conviction of divine judgment, and her penitential return to Phillotson.

  Grief Melancholia Depression
• Part Sixth, Ch. X–XI

  Jude's final illness after the rainy journey to Marygreen, Vilbert's return at his bedside, and his death alone during the college festivities.

  Death Dying Quackery Charlatans

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the letter Jude might have sent to the Master of Biblioll College, asking how a working mason could become a scholar.

• Essay

  Trace the meaning of Christminster across the six parts, from city of light to the place where Jude dies.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between Phillotson and his friend Gillingham about whether a husband should release an unwilling wife.

Further Reading

• Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

  Hardy's preceding tragic novel, mentioned in his Preface to Jude.

• The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy (ed. Michael Millgate)

  Hardy's own autobiography, first issued under his second wife's name.

• Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Michael Millgate

• Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, Claire Tomalin