Thomas Hardy wrote novels about a region of England he called Wessex, and he shaped the region with a particular vision of the people who lived there and the manner in which they related to their largely rural society. One of his more striking characters is Jude Frawley, and the use of the term "obscure" to describe him in the title is indicative of his character, his relationships with others, and the way the author uses the character to comment on a social type represented by this character. The novel was not well received when it was first published, but time has been kinder to it, as Trevor Johnson indicates when referring to the original controversy:
At this distance we can see how irrelevant it all was. Jude now appears to be what Hardy called it, "a moral book," grimly, even frighteningly insistent on its major theme, the inevitable clash between "the ideal life a man wished to lead and the squalid real life he was forced to lead," as Hardy put it in a letter to his friend Gosse (Johnson 123).
Jude's obscurity is played out against the background of a number of specific settings, such as Christminster, Marygreen, and Shaston, among others. Some of these settings function almost as characters with which Jude interacts and which in different ways comment on and shape our perception of Jude's character.
Time and setting are key in Hardy's fiction, and of particular importance in Britain is the social structure, often depicted as rigid and hidebound. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy shows how the character of Jude is shaped by the era in which he lives and especially by the stratified society in which he lives. Hardy develops the structure of the novel in terms of the various settings and melds them with his prose style:
That Hardy does not for the most part rely on the highly-charged poetic imagery of the epic genre to develop this modern epic, but on bare narration and dialogue, acceptable to the prosaic modern s...