Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy - Jeffrey Berman (essay date 1990)

Jeffrey Berman (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: "Infanticide and Object Loss in Jude the Obscure," in Narcissism and the Novel, New York University Press, 1990, pp. 176-98.

[In the following essay, Berman examines the bleak psychology of parents and children that appears in Jude the Obscure.]

Little Father Time's suicide in Jude the Obscure (1895) is the turning point of a novel demonstrating the cruelty that pervades nature and society. As if the boy's suicide is not terrible enough, Hardy has him hang his younger half-brother and half-sister, the three children suspended from closet hooks. Located near Father Time's body is a note with the victim's last words: "Done because we are too menny." The suicide letter reveals the boy's belief that his father, Jude Fawley, and stepmother, Sue Bridehead, would be better off without the children, who only add to the couple's woes in a Malthusian world. Jude sees his son's...

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