Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure

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.

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damaging, but there are many others. It is after this marriage has ended that Jude manages to go to Christminster, the locale that has always stood for advancement and change in his thinking. Once more he faces the reality of Christminster as opposed to his illusion: In this university city Jude hope that he may by some means gain entrance to a college, despite his humble origins and irregular course of independent preparation. But social prejudice rules otherwise; Jude is doomed to the life of a stonecutter (Carpenter 139-140). This section of the book shapes Jude for the rest of the novel and the rest of his life: The Christminster episode balances his vision of Part I--the ideal life frustrated by the physical--with his recognition of the incompleteness of the ideal alone. On the day he awakens from his dream, his vision embraces the reality of Christminster from the heights and the depths (Brooks 259-260). Jude's obscurity is something he almost accepts once he decides that he will never have the education he has wanted. His marriage helped undermine his ability to get that education. Wrong marriages are repeated in this novel, which also includes a character who decides that marriage is a bad institution. Sue dec
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Approximate Word count = 3992
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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