Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Thomas Hardy Read Free Book Online

more a cipher, symbol, or abstraction than a real person, the child who is the product of Jude’s and Arabella’s unhappy marriage tests the boundaries of realism. The end that Father Time comes to—almost an experiment in the grotesque extremes of the novel’s philosophies—suggests but never fully affirms a set of terrifying consequences of the modern. It is unclear, for instance, if the doctor’s appraisal of the boy’s profound pessimism—“it was in his nature to do it.... There are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life.... It is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live”—is validated by the text, or if his diagnosis is but part of the oppressive social forms that Jude and Sue have tried to rebel against (p. 345).
    Jude, whose philosophical affiliations at the start of his life consisted of traditional faith in education and religion, and Sue, who personified skepticism when Jude met her for the first time, are not consistent in their philosophies. Jude, who becomes increasingly un-tethered to traditional morality, at a certain point in the novel metaphorically switches places with Sue: “He was mentally approaching the position which Sue had occupied when he first met her” (p. 316). Because of the central horror that she experiences, Sue ultimately repudiates the modern position she has staked out for herself, even though she has fervently believed and convinced Jude that the trappings of modern social forms—social candor, the repudiation of hypocritical social forms, loss of family control, decay of religion, gender emancipation, as well as trains and hotels—would bring them happiness.
    Before the act of penitence at the end of the novel, Sue Bridehead embodies the “New Woman,” a character type identified in popular culture as well as in the novel in the late nineteenth century. Sue’s modernity is tied to her unconventional approach to gender; as a new woman, she is educated and emancipated, and, the novel implies, as a result nervous and oddly free of sexual interest; her description of her friendship with a young man in London captures her curious unconsciousness about sex. We are meant to understand that one of the most obvious facts about Sue—her palpable horror about sex—makes her peculiarly modern in that it gestures to the modern category of the neurosis: As Freud would later suggest, one of the primary characteristics of a neurotic personality is its incapacity for understanding erotic demands. A neurosis might be described as the self that is split between the social self and the desiring self, often producing lacerating submissions—of the kind, for instance, that Sue endures and even courts eventually by returning to Phillotson—to what society says we should want.
    Sue’s neurosis marks an innovation in the field of the novel, for the subtle psychologization of intimacy between two individuals and the bringing of neurosis into its depiction of sex makes Jude the Obscure a watershed novel. The novel, more than any other before it, depicts the minute-by-minute processes of married life, including sexual dysfunction, a neurotic relation to the sexual drive, and the depiction of unconscious desires. One need only think of Sue’s elaborate rigging of the closet that she sleeps in so that she can sense the approach of her husband, or her flinging herself from the bedroom window when Phillotson unadvisedly approaches her for sex, to realize the extent to which the novel opens up new frontiers for the twentieth-century novel. Up to this time the English novel had not only generally ended with marriage, but even when it continued past the fact of it having taken place it had never attempted to capture what it was like to be intimate with a spouse—let alone what it feels like to be intimate with someone for whom one feels physical repulsion. In this way Jude the Obscure leads to an enormous