A Novel of Unfolding Disappointment

How the depressing banality of society is presented in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

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Cover taken from Goodreads.

Have you ever read a book that ignored your begging for things to get better? Did you ever suffer through the pains of a protagonist whose life just dwindled, dwindled, and dwindled, never to get any better?

This was my experience reading Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure.

Now, that’s not to say I found the novel itself disappointing, per se — I actually found it somewhat compelling if not tedious to read — but I felt that I had suffered a deep depression once I turned that final page.

The book is not bad by any stretch of the imagination — Thomas Hardy never fails to deliver with his writing; although, I wouldn’t say Jude the Obscure is his best either — but it is a sort of anti-bildungsroman, and an incredibly depressing one at that. Jude is not the protagonist who, after going through a series of trials and tribulations, comes out on top. Instead, this book is all about his fall from grace, his ongoing disappointments; and boy does he fall!

I struggled to see this book to the end because of how depressing it gets. More important, however, is just how quiet that depression is. It’s not the horrific “life is a living, tormenting hell” like the one in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; it’s the banal “huh, life kinda sucks” that I’m sure we’ve all felt at least once before.

And yet it’s that exact feeling, that tiresome sigh, that offers a profound commentary on the quiet, unseen machinations of our society.

“You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet.” (259)

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Disappointment 1: class

While there’s always those odd few “rags to riches” stories — and fewer, still, that are genuine — the average person living in the lower classes of society can never achieve certain dreams that extend beyond their capacity.

Life simply deals these people a losing hand.

For Jude, this becomes a tragic reality; one that haunts him for the rest of his life.

Born into a small, rural town in Wessex, Jude is dealt into the lower caste of society, and yet he is cursed with a dream: he wants to go to university and study as a scholar.

But this is 1800s England and no matter how many grammars and Greek and Latin classics he learns himself, the world of the university is a world beyond his own; the universities do not value intellect or self-preservation but, rather, patronage and networks — resources coveted by the elite.

Jude is distraughtly hit with this inexorable reality — the reality of class-divide — when, after finally making it to Christminster (the scholarly town of his desires, loosely resembling Oxford and Cambridge) he receives “advice” from a senior official at one of the universities:

“I have read your letter with interest; and judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that 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.” (146)

He is forever unable to achieve this dream of his simply because of the class-divide.

Whenever he is in Christminster he becomes a mere observer of the university world; he is an outsider, a stonemason, who the university students take no notice of, and he can do nothing but grasp at the gates and caress the walls of which he may never wander yonder.

Interestingly, Thomas Hardy, himself, was in a similar position, born before the late 1800s education reformations which would later nationalise education across England.

He, too, was unable to attend university due to the restrictions of his class; and some speculate that, being his last novel, Jude acts as the final word Hardy wished to tell in the story of his country and society. Only, Jude is more a representation of what could have become of Hardy’s life; for unlike Jude, Hardy was able to make something else of his life and achieve a dream considered to be beyond his station.

Jude’s life is that of the ordinary, unfortunately.

And so does the ordinary mirror the bleak reality of society.

Disappointment 2: marriage

“I have just the same dread lest an iron contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for you, as it did between our unfortunate parents”. (325)

Just as class prevents Jude from ever attaining his dreams, so does marriage hinder not only his intellectual aspirations but his bodily desires, his sexuality, and his ability to forge and maintain meaningful relationships.

He is constantly trapped between two women — Arabella Donn and Sue Bridehead — whom, both, represent a different side of the body-spirit binary; and marriage (or lack thereof in the case with Sue) is ultimately what sets his path towards ruin.

He is initially manipulated into marrying Arabella at the behest of a pregnancy scare: to have a child out of wedlock was unthinkable. But the union leads only to a slow death for their romance and sexual tension; and once it is a mere husk, Jude’s inner desire for something more intellectual and spiritual causes conflict.

Eventually he is left estranged by Arabella, cheated on, divorced, and finally forced into a remarriage with her under the influence of alcohol.

When Jude meets and falls in love with Sue — his cousin, might I add! — they try to avoid the same fate of the “iron contract” that bound and killed both their previous marriages. And yet, by not marrying, they are ostracised by society; Jude is left jobless and Sue struggles to find accommodation for her and the children.

The many failed relationships of the novel lend themselves to Hardy’s biggest question: what, ultimately, is the point of marriage?

To satisfy ourselves as individuals? I think not.

To satisfy the needless desire of society and Church? Most definitely.

There is the coin that is society, and marriage divides the same coin into two sides: the married and the unmarried; and these two sides divide the people unnecessarily. Through this lens, one can only experience one miserable side of the coin at any given time, and the true unity of the whole, that harmony, is left unattainable.

Marriage is an institution, a social construct, created under the guise of religious doctrines to control the binary of bodily desires and spiritual integrity.

Then there is the messy business of divorce, remarriage, and the objectification of the individual.

“The next morning came, and the self-sacrifice of the woman on the altar of what she was pleased to call her principles was acquiesced by these two friends, each from his own point of view.” (465)

Sue’s previous marriage was a banal one, a loveless, sexless one; and that lovelessness was only what made it all the more painful and all the more difficult to file for divorce, for “when people were tied up you could get the law of a man better if he beat you” (343).

It is the depressing reality of Sue’s life and, I’m sure, the lives of many others.

There is a strange moral voice that tells us not to divorce unless our partner is abusive — it only seems justified, that way. The silent pain and torture of a meaningless marriage is often gleamed over. Worse yet, however, Sue, ostracised by society and harbouring her own self-doubts of her queer union with Jude, returns to her previous loveless marriage.

Why?

Because it is her means to “salvation”; her means to right the wrong and become a normal, functioning member of society.

Yet that salvation is only out of an obligatory piety, not out of her own happiness.

And these are all eternal dilemmas: the uncertainty of marriage’s place in society still remains, even today.

Disappointment 3: parenting

Hardy’s writings are blatantly realist, sometimes pessimist, subtly feminist, and, in the case of Jude the Obscure, uncannily anti-natalist.

The final nail in the coffin for Jude and Sue is ultimately their children. They, like many misinformed couples, believe that if marriage could not strengthen their relationship, then children would.

And, oh! how terrible wrong they were.

The novel was terribly banal up until a particular point — and if you’ve read it, you’ll know what point I speak of — and then it hits: the full-blown disaster, the harrowing culmination of society’s banal pressure, weighs down upon Jude and Sue in a way that ends in a series of gruesome deaths all around them.

The class-divide, the failure of marriage, the crushing of dreams; it all compounds in their hopeless last resort: their children whom they cannot fully provide for.

For Sue, it is the dreaded revelation that sets her on her eternal path towards “salvation”.

For Jude, it is simply the final disappointment in his life, the final failure. He resigns himself to his fate of never being able to achieve his dream, yet hopes, then, to give that same dream to his children.

And then it is all snuffed out in an instant.

Jude has nothing left to live for. He dies in obscurity, alone, loveless, dreamless, in a marriage he never wanted, having achieved nothing in life.

It is a solitary, silent death.

A death that simply asks:

“Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?”

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What I found most interesting about this book is that the questions it asks are still, fundamentally, key questions we trifle with today.

Hardy wrote the book as an anachronism. The setting of Jude’s Wessex takes place roughly 50 years prior to Hardy’s own England while simultaneously bringing the questions of his time back into that pastoralist past.

Yet it also feels anachronistic to our own time today, asking those same questions of class, marriage, parenting, religion, gender, sex, etcetera.

And the scary part?

Most of the answers to those questions remain much the same.

Reading Jude the Obscure highlighted, for me, the immense reformations our society has undergone since Hardy’s time, but it also made me realise just how little we’ve progressed at the same time.

Class divides are more exacerbated than ever; marriage is still an institution that remains a point of contestation and conflict; anti-natalism is on the rise; many religions still seek to control the body-spirit binary; and the core institutions of our society, for the most part, remain just as banal as they were more than 100 years ago.

Progress is slow. Painfully slow.

I think Hardy would be happy with our society in some respects but disappointed in others. His ideas were certainly ahead of his time, and I’d hope he would maintain the same sentiment as expressed through his characters:

“When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!” (272)