Assignment Paper:-104 (Literature of Victorians)

 

                   Personal Information :-

• Name : Aarti Bhupatbhai Sarvaiya

• Batch : M.A. Sem. 1 (2022-2024)

• Enrollment N/o. : 4069206420220027

• Roll N/o. : 01

• Subject Code & Paper N/o. : 22395 - Paper 104: Literature of Victorians 

• Email Address : aartisarvaiya7010@gmail.com

• Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English – Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University – Bhavnagar – 364001

• Date of Online Submission : 04 November, 2022

• Date of Offline Submission : 07th November, 2022

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• Criticism on Thomas Hardy's Novel 'Jude The Obscure :-

 

Jude the Obscure, the last completed novel by Thomas Hardy, received a mixed critical reception upon its publication in 1895.  (Buzwell)

Thomas Hardy, shaken by the hostility aroused by the novel dubbed "Jude the Obscene", would never write fiction again. And it was a new beginning because henceforth he would become one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century. (McCrum)

Jude the Obscure is an angry book, and a deeply radical one. To write it, Hardy went further into himself than ever before, exposed his deepest feelings and was creatively wounded by the hostility of the response to what one critic called "the most indecent book ever written". (McCrum)

• Subtitles of the Assignment :-

• Introduction

• About the Playwright

• About the Novel

• Criticisms of the Novel

• Conclusion

• References

• Introduction :-

In this Assignment I'm going to discuss Criticism on Thomas Hardy's Novel 'Jude The Obscure '. In this Assignment I will discuss the above topics. 

• About the Playwright :-

Thomas Hardy was a great British writer of the 19th century. Thomas was born in the village of Higher Bockhampton, Dorset on 2 June 1840. His father, also called Thomas, was a stonemason. His mother was named Jemima. They had 4 children. (Thomas had a brother and two sisters). Thomas was the oldest child. He went to school in Bockhampton, and later in Dorchester. He also learned to play the violin. (Lambert)

In 1856 Thomas was apprenticed to an architect. In 1862 Hardy left for London where he worked as a draughtsman. In 1867 he moved back to Dorset where he worked as an architect. But Thomas wanted to be a writer. He wrote a novel titled The Poor Man And The Lady, which was never published. Undeterred Hardy wrote a second novel called Desperate Remedies, which was published in 1871. Hardy then wrote Under The Greenwood Tree, which was published in 1872 and he wrote A Pair of Blue Eyes which was published in 1873. (Lambert)

Meanwhile, Thomas married Emma Gifford in September 1873. As a young man, Hardy became very skeptical about religion. (Lambert)

However Thomas Hardy really found fame with his novel Far From The Madding Crowd published in 1874. Hardy then wrote The Hand of Ethelberta, which was published in 1876. Hardy then wrote The Return of the Native, which was published in 1878. (Lambert)

Next, he wrote The Trumpet Major (published in 1880), A Laodicean (published in 1881), and Two on a Tower (published in 1882). His novel The Mayor of Casterbridge followed in 1886. (Lambert)

Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles was published in 1891. It was followed by Jude The Obscure in 1895. His novel The Well-Beloved was published in 1897. (Lambert)

In later life, Hardy turned from writing novels to writing poetry. Poems of the Past and the Present was published in 1901. Satires of Circumstance was published in 1914. (Lambert)

Emma Hardy died in 1912. Thomas married Florence Dugdale in 1914. Thomas Hardy died on 11 January 1928. On 16 January 1928, his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey. (Lambert)

After Dickens, Thomas Hardy was perhaps the most eminent of all the Victorian novelists. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that Hardy dominated the late Victorian era just as Dickens had dominated the early part of the era. Moreover, there are strong similarities between the moral impulse underlying Dickens's works and the same of Hardy's works. (McCrum)

As Morgan has written :-

Because the wiseman has historically held a respected position in many cultures, both Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy adopted this role. In Dickens's novel Hard Times, he emphasizes the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution . . . In The Mayor of Casterbridge thirty years later, Thomas Hardy examines the structure of the nuclear family. (paragraph 1)

Both Dickens and Hardy, then, were committed to using the power of literature to fulfill an old-fashioned prophetic role, in the sense of reflecting society and its ills through a critical perspective that can make people more acutely sensitive to the problems at hand and more motivated to address those problems. (McCrum)

Thomas Hardy's Works :-

The final novel written by Hardy was perhaps also one of his greatest: its title is Jude the Obscure. Thematically, the novel contains all of Hardy's signature concerns: (McCrum)

With a brilliant economy, Hardy opens up three themes: 

the struggle of the poor and disadvantaged to make their way in a bourgeois world; the tyranny of marriage in the lives of women oppressed by a patriarchal society; and the stranglehold on English life by an established church. (paragraph 2)

In general, Hardy had a great deal of animus toward the structures and institutions of mainstream English society, and the fact that Jude the Obscure was his final novel, even though he lived quite a while longer, is in a way also an example of this animus. It would seem that he stopped writing because he was sick of being derided and misunderstood by the critics and the public. (McCrum)

Another work by Hardy that bears his thematic watermark consists of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. This is a novel whose protagonist gets involved in an unorthodox sexual situation and through her story, Hardy strongly criticizes the patriarchal and hypocritical sexual mores that he saw as dominating his Victorian society.  (McCrum)

In an important sense, it can be suggested that Hardy was always operating in terms of a strongly postconventional morality: he cared not for the social conventions of his day and age, but only for what he perceived to be deeper and more universal human truths. In gauging moral dilemmas, Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development highlights the path one takes when analyzing moral dilemmas. (McCrum)

• About the Novel :-

Jude the Obscure is one of Hardy’s masterpieces. At the time of the novel’s composition, Thomas Hardy 

(1840–1928) was living between the turn of the 20th century and the eve of the 19th century. The Victorian age is an eventful period, during which great changes have taken place. Schopenhauer’s mysterious theory of voluntarism and gloomy pessimism, as well as the rudiment of feminism made a notable impact in Hardy’s theme creation. It is widely accepted today that Hardy is a pessimist and voluntarist. Some people even argue that the female image in Jude the Obscure was appreciated by the author, but it also made the author sigh with regret. And Sue’s consciousness of feminism started to awaken, but lack of thoroughness. (Gong, 2011, p. 15). 

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure got the most attention of the critical world in the nineteenth century of Britain. The theme was always regarded as the embodiment of original sin, pessimism and voluntarism. (Lu and Zhang)

However, after analyzing key steps, a three-phase pattern, in the theme creation, it is found to differ from the previous view completely. By way of the analysis of the use of symbols and images, Darwin’ Theory of 

Evolution, the conflict between character and environment, the expression of religious rebellion and the advanced female image, it can be concluded that Thomas Hardy is not a pessimist and voluntarist at all and the novel conveys readers the kindness tendency, the courage to face the harsh reality and a sense of rationality. (Lu and Zhang)

• Criticisms of the Novel :-

Jude the Obscure, the last completed novel by Thomas Hardy, received a mixed critical reception upon its publication in 1895. The novelist H G Wells in an unsigned piece for the Saturday Review eulogised ‘There is no other novelist alive with the breadth of sympathy, the knowledge or the power for the creation of Jude’. In stark contrast the reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette renamed the book ‘Jude the Obscene’, and branded the book a work of ‘Naked squalor and Ugliness’. The Bishop of Wakefield went even further, being reputedly so disgusted by the novel he threw his copy into the fire. Even Edmund Gosse, a generally sympathetic critic of Hardy’s work and a personal friend, was given to reflect: ‘What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his creator?’. (Buzwell)

It is easy to see the reasons underlying the book’s critical mauling at the hands of conservative Victorian society, as well as its more positive reception from those, like H G Wells, at the vanguard of a new generation of intellectuals. Jude the Obscure attacks the hypocrisy and double-standards inherent in late-Victorian attitudes towards class, education, the role of women and marriage. At the same time, the book reveals the lie behind the widely held Victorian belief – as expressed for example in Samuel Smiles’s bestseller Self Help (1859) – that hard work, talent and application were in themselves sufficient for individuals to achieve success and advancement. Jude studies tirelessly to realise his ambitions but an indifferent Fate, allied to society’s entrenched attitudes towards the working classes, condemn his efforts to failure. (Buzwell)

• Marriage and Role of Women :-

If the dominant theme in the first part of the novel is education, then the focus in the second is marriage and the opportunities available to women in a largely patriarchal society. Jude the Obscure addresses the horrors of sexual relationships devoid of love; the consequences arising from ignorance about sex, and the unenlightened view held by society and the Church that an unhappy marriage was preferable to a loving, sexual relationship outside of wedlock. It also explores society’s attitude towards women as they attempt to secure financial security for themselves – either via marriage or the pursuit of a career. (Buzwell)

Two women play a key role in the exploration of these ideas, and each highlights in a different fashion the choices faced by women at the time: Arabella Donn – seductive, intelligent but uneducated, manipulative and a born survivor; and Sue Bridehead, Jude’s cousin – intelligent, free-spirited. Sue’s ability to support herself financially via her career as a teacher, and her opposition to marriage marks her out as someone readers at the time would have readily labelled a ‘New Woman’. (Buzwell)

• Contrasting Sue and Arabella :-

Two completely different women, Susanna Bridehead and Arabella Donn, share the same man in Thomas Hardy´s Jude the Obscure. (Bastug)

Sue and Arabella are not just contrasting in their appearance but they have oppositional ideas, beliefs and attitudes towards life. Therefore, they lead their lives under different circumstances and get different social recognition. By this example, Hardy criticizes the rigidity of certain conventions in the Victorian Age. (Bastug)

• Two Women’s Relation to Jude :-

Jude Fawley, the protagonist of Hardy's novel, links the two female characters. Although they are so unlike, he has a relationship with both of them because he yearns for a merge of rationality and feeling. His cousin Sue symbolizes rationality. She supports his dream to study at the University of Christminster, in the town they meet for the first time. (Bastug)

Jude falls in love with Sue and He desires her as a lover, though they do not marry. Sue and Jude begin to live together and except for sexuality, they are like husband and wife. Sue asks for Jude´s patience and he shows respect although he wants to love her in every way. (Bastug)

At this point, Jude is confronted with the separation of his needs. Sue´s intellect enriches him, she is everything to him but obviously the lack of sexual intimacy causes an imperfection of their relationship. Jude sees no other choice than satisfying his craving with Arabella. Actually, he does not want to betray Sue but Arabella is his legal wife and he has the right to be together with her. (Bastug)

Compared to his relationship with Sue, Arabella is just a woman fulfilling her husband’s desires. They have no other similarities or bondings holding them together.(Bastug)

• Contract Between Jude's Destiny and Dream :-

It is difficult at this late date, in what may be called the era of the scatalogical novel, to understand what it was that profoundly outraged some of the critics and readers of Hardy's time. After all, Jude contained no objectionable four-letter words; it did not even attempt to describe the sex act. No pimps, dope Bends, or homosexuals cluttered its pages. And yet it is only by looking back that we can see how far we have come. Perhaps history will write that the attack on Jude the Obscure, begun in November 1895 and carried on through the Spring of 1897, marked it the first of our modern English novels. (JSTOR)

Jude, of course, is a bleak tragedy. A country boy dreams of going to college in Christminster to get a university degree. To this end he spends a good deal of time studying Latin and Greek and reading the classics. But before he is twenty he is seduced and trapped into marriage by Arabella, who tells him she is pregnant by him. Young Jude's plans, his dreams about books and degrees and impossible scholarships, are all smashed. (JSTOR)

When, however, there appears to be no child and Jude breaks up with his wife, the young stonecutter goes to the city of Christminster and seeks admission to the university. But he is unable to compete in open scholarship with those who have passed their lives under trained teachers, and he cannot, of course, afford to pay. He is advised by one of the masters to remain in his own sphere of life as a working man. And so Jude is "elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons."(JSTOR)

With the collapse of his university hopes, Jude's desire fixes itself upon his cousin, Sue Bridehead. Winning her away from his former teacher, Phillotson, Jude lives with Sue without marriage. (JSTOR)

• Unhappy Marriages :-

This chapter examines the role of divorce as an option in unhappy marriages, in a reading of another tragic novel by Thomas Hardy. Divorce law was substantially reformed during the mid-nineteenth century, in part as a result of the impact of novels, so that access to divorce expanded dramatically. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act then influenced subsequent novels in turn, as they pondered the human meaning of adultery and cruelty provisions. (Claybaugh)

In Jude the Obscure (1895), as in several earlier novels, Hardy both examines “matrimonial divergences” and also tries to imagine solutions to them. But although these novels expand our conception of matrimonial suffering, they do not end up arguing for a further reform of marriage law, as Hardy's tragic sensibility leads him away from the reformist spirit. (Claybaugh)

Unhappily married couples in this novel take it for granted that they cannot divorce their unsuitable spouses, and then they find out that they can. But this ends up making no real difference, as Jude and Sue feel that a “tragic doom” hangs over them. In Jude, the law is not so cruel or obtuse as it is irrelevant to the deeper sufferings of human beings. (Claybaugh)

• Conclusion :-

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure reveals different struggles that Jude, the eponymous character, passes through. Through Hardy’s explicit portrayal of life in Victorian society, Hardy condemns human institutions which endlessly perpetuate people in suffering, castration of hopes and limit them sociopolitically. In spite of his legitimate and lofty dreams, Jude dies like a dog. Moreover, social factor responsible for the abortion of Jude’s ambitions and ruination of his destiny are emphasised in the study. The literary relevance of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is not limited to the Victorian period which was the time when he wrote. This assertion is based on the fact that Hardy has fictionalised the struggle of the common man in the face of helplessness. Thus, the narrative has universal and timeless significance. Disillusioned protagonist is a recurrent figure in much of the twentieth century English fiction. The trope of disillusionment is an attempt to depict the hopelessness, confusion, frustration, alienation, disintegration and estrangement of modern man. (Olaniyan)

• References :- 

1. Bastug, Nermin. “Contrasting Sue and Arabella in Thomas Hardy's ‘Jude the Obscure.’” GRIN, 1 June 2012, www.grin.com/document/195177. 

2. Buzwell, Greg. “An Introduction to Jude the Obscure.” British Library, 15 May 2014, www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-jude-the-obscure. 

3. Claybaugh, Amanda, '2 Jude the Obscure: The Irrelevance of Marriage Law', in Martha C. Nussbaum, and Alison L. LaCroix (eds), Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (New York, 2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Jan. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812042.003.0003, accessed 4 Nov. 2022.

4. gong, c. t. (2011). the female images in thomas hardy’s “the novels of character and environment”. thesis, shanghai normal university.

5. Lambert, Tim. “A Brief Biography of Thomas Hardy.” Local Histories, 2 Aug. 2022, localhistories.org/a-brief-biography-of-thomas-hardy/. 

6. Lu, Guorong, and Zhehui Zhang. “ On the Theme of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.” English Language and Literature Studies; 20 Aug. 2019, www.researchgate.net/publication/335275879_On_the_Theme_of_Thomas_Hardy's_Jude_the_Obscure. 

7. McCrum, Robert. “The 100 Best Novels: No 29 – Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895).” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 7 Apr. 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/07/100-best-novels-jude-obscure-thomas-hardy. 

8. McCrum, Robert. “The 7 Most Epic Literary Writers of the Victorian Era.” Ultius, 20 Sept. 2016, www.ultius.com/ultius-blog/entry/the-7-most-epic-literary-writers-of-the-victorian-era.html.

9. Olaniyan, S. O. “Trope of Disillusionment in Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure: Solomon O. Olaniyan”. SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH, vol. 4, no. 4, Sept. 2017, p. 22, https://ijellh.com/OJS/index.php/OJS/article/view/1267.

10. Yevish, Irving A. “THE ATTACK ON JUDE THE OBSCURE: A REAPPRAISAL SOME SEVENTY YEARS AFTER.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 18, no. 4, 1967, pp. 239–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27796038. Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.

Word Count :- 2990

Images :-3

References :- 10

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