⚫ Character study of Jude and Sue Bridehead
⚫ Thomas Hardy ⚫
Thomas Hardy OM was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. 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.
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.
⚫ 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.
⚫ Plot Summary ⚫
The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardy's fictional county of Wessex), who yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modelled on Oxford. As a youth, Jude teaches himself Classical Greek and Latin in his spare time, while working first in his great-aunt's bakery, with the hope of entering university. But before he can try to do this the naïve Jude is seduced by Arabella Donn, a rather coarse, morally lax and superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. The marriage is a failure, and Arabella leaves Jude and later emigrates to Australia, where she enters into a bigamous marriage. By this time, Jude has abandoned his classical studies.
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⚫ Character study of "Jude" ⚫
Hardy's strongest point in Jude the Obscure is his character development. Jude, Sue and Phillotson are completely rounded individuals. It is this that gives the novel its realistic feel as well as a certain depth.
⚫ Jude Fawley ⚫
Jude is the hero and the central character of the book, and his life is interconnected with that of all the other major and minor characters in the story. Hardy presents the protagonist as an ordinary, working-class man of humble origins struggling hard to realize his dreams but thwarted by a cruel fate and a pitiless, snobbish social system. Despite the resemblance to the hero of Greek tragedy (in his nobility of character), Jude, of all Hardy's characters can be said to come closest to a kind of Marxist literary hero. He is the outsider who is denied access to improvement and social advancement by a rigid, conservative class-system.
The reader first sees Jude as a child of eleven, hardworking, persevering, affectionate, gentle and extremely sensitive. Hardy develops certain traits in Jude's personality as he grows older: he displays a lifelong inability to hurt any living creature or to see it suffer, whether it be an earthworm, a pig, a horse, a rabbit or even his wife, Arabella. His vulnerability and essential gentleness lead him to be careless regarding his own survival.
Part of Jude's tragedy arises from his incurable idealism. As a child he is fascinated with Christminster. It is the focus of all his dreams, a shining ideal of intellectual life. But even though he realizes his ambitions may be futile, the university remains an obsession with him. Similarly, he idealizes Sue as the perfect intellectual woman, but here too he is disillusioned and frustrated. His obsession with Sue continues nevertheless. Both Christminster, the intellectual ideal, and Sue, the ideal of womanhood, promise fulfillment, and both frustrate him. All his hard work and earnest effort at mastering Greek and Latin come to nothing, and despite his great patience with Sue and devotion to her, he loses his job, his children and finally even his title as husband. His utter loneliness and desolation create a strong emotional impact on the reader. It is here that Jude, despite his humble working-class origins, rises to heroic stature. Very often in the book he is compared to heroic figures such as Job; he has, like Job, the ability to bear great suffering. He reconciles himself to the endless tragedies and disappointments of life. At the end of the novel, he matures as a man. With all the setbacks life deals him, he never loses his dignity.
Jude's death at the young age of thirty (the approximate age of Jesus Christ at his death) indicates that he has been "crucified" by society. But even the flaws that contributed to his downfall are not really faults. If his sensitivity, kindness, sense of honor, naïveté and idealism are considered weaknesses, they are also his strengths. His only real weakness is a tendency to drink when in despair, although he is not a drunkard.
His death in Christminster on Remembrance Day and his loneliness and desolation has a strange poignancy. The reader is left with a feeling of bitterness and waste at the ruin of a promising life.
⚫Sue Bridehead⚫
Sue is one of Hardy's triumphs. What strikes the reader about Sue is her intellectual capacity. Both Jude and Phillotson are impressed by how well read she is: J.S. Mill and Gibbon are her heroes, she is familiar with Latin and Greek writers in translation, as well as Boccaccio, Sterne, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare and the Bible. She belongs to the eighteenth century tradition of critical intelligence and rational skepticism. Jude himself calls her "quite Voltairean." Towards the end of the novel, Jude, when talking to Mrs. Edlin, describes Sue as:
"a woman whose intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline lamp" (Part V, Chapter 10).
Phillotson too talks of her intellect which "sparkles like diamonds while mine smoulders like brown papers" (Part IV, Chapter 4).
She is quick-witted and observant and a good teacher. She is able to draw accurately from memory the model of Jerusalem she saw at an exhibition (Part II, Chapter 5).
She is also able to quote accurately when she wants to win an argument (Part IV, Chapter 3).
But though the reader can admire her daring and unconventional approach, one gets the impression that many of her opinions are borrowed from her undergraduate friend. She lacks the tolerance of the true, liberal intellectual. This is evident in her attempt to undermine Jude's beliefs with her sarcastic comments about his faith and ideals. In this sense she is very prejudiced: she cannot bear Jude to hold opinions opposed to her own. When her own opinions are attacked, she conveniently takes refuge in tears, displaying her emotional side.
At the same time one cannot resist Sue's charm. She is vivacious, friendly and yet refined. Hardy contrasts Sue with Arabella to represent the difference between the spirit and the flesh. Sue is often spoken of as "ethereal" and "aerial." Jude himself calls her, "you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom, hardly flesh at all..." Even Phillotson remarks on the rather spiritual affinity between Sue and Jude as something "Shelleyan." Though in some ways Sue represents a free spirit struggling against an oppressive, conventional social order, in other ways Sue can be very conventionally Victorian, for instance, in her shrinking from the physical and in her aversion to sex. She refuses to live with Jude as his lover even after leaving Phillotson. She regards physical relations as repugnant. Furthermore, she sees marriage as a "sordid contract" and a "hopelessly vulgar" institution. It often seems that she is merely seeking excuses to postpone marriage. Her dislike of Arabella is revealed in her comment to Jude about her being a "fleshy and coarse" and a "low-passioned woman."
Yet with all her sensitivity and apparent fragility, there is in Sue a selfishness and a corresponding insensitivity to the feelings of others. There is the Christminster undergraduate whose heart she broke, kind and decent Phillotson whose career she wrecks, and Jude, to whom she does great injury by undermining the beliefs which are essential to his well being. She utterly fails to realize the pain she inflicts on Jude with her wavering attitude. Despite all the sacrifices Jude has made for her, despite being free to marry him after her divorce, she will not make a commitment.
Hardy captures Sue's quality of unpredictability and elusiveness. She buys nude statues of Greek divinities, then repents and conceals them from her landlady. She snaps irritably at Phillotson, then regrets it later. Sue is sometimes reckless and then diffident, stern and then kind, warm and then standoffish, candid and then evasive. In portraying these glimpses of Sue--her unceasing reversals, her changes of heart and mind, her conflicting behavior-- Hardy creates a complex, fascinating character.
Finally, when tragedy strikes in the violent deaths of the three children, Sue is seen breaking down under the strain and becoming a sick woman. She plunges into a state of tormenting guilt and remorse. The reader sees a personality distorted by the effort to bear terrible burdens and now blindly seeking a self-inflicted punishment.
👇 Here is the video of the Hindi summary of " Jude The Obscure "
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