SOURCE: "A n Affinity for Birds: Kindness in Hardy's Jude the Obscure," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XII I No. 3, 1981, pp. 250-65.

Though the manuscript evidence concerning the first pages of Jude the Obscure is still open to differing interpretations, those who have considered it agree on two points: (1) that the opening of the novel as we have it is not part of Hardy's original draft; and (2) that Hardy composed it, obviously with great care, after deciding that his heroine, Sue, should not be Jude's prime attraction to Christminster. The "deadly war" (p. 23) [all page references are to the New Wessex edition of Jude the Obscure, 1977] that Hardy set out to present, according to his Preface, required that Jude follow alternately the call of the spirit and the call of the flesh. Clearly, it was more appropriate to make the call to a place like Christminster spiritual. In the new opening, as a result, it is the schoolmaster, Phillotson, who invites Jude to visit him in the Heavenly Jerusalem, and it is his figure, not Sue's, that appears to Jude in the halo which glows over the city on the horizon (pp. 42-43). Yet, although he is possibly the best that out-of-the-way Marygreen has to offer, Phillotson is an uninspiring representative of spirit. He commands the affection of only one pupil, Jude, not one of the "regular day scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster's life …" (p. 29). He appears pathetic, in fact, standing by the "cumbersome" piano, a witness to his readily waning "enthusiasm," telling the boy about his "scheme or dream … to be a university graduate, and then to be ordained," a dream that might become reality at Christminster, "headquarters, so to speak," or near it (p. 29). It is obviously a key initial absurdity that the boy's own schemes and dreams should have crystallized on this figure and been nurtured by such stuff as his farewell address: "I shan't forget you, Jude," he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. "Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can. An d if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt me out for old acquaintance' sake" (p. 29).

In the rook episode which follows and in its aftermath, Hardy illustrates the risk involved in kindness to birds; he also points out that the boy was predisposed to kindness by oversensitivity and "born to ache a good deal" for it (p. 36). The mentor's high-minded advice at the beginning of his career is like the milestone on which Jude inscribes his goal, "THITHER," in that it inspires him for a while, then turns into an ironic commentary on his endeavors, on the vanity of trying to improve or merely to "be good." When Jude reaches Christminster, Phillotson loses "at one stroke the halo which had surrounded" him as an incarnation of spirit; the mentor lives in humble quarters on the edge of town; he does not remember his pupil "in the least," and he is understandably reluctant to speak of his former ambitions (pp. 121-22).

Hardy asserted that the clash of spirit and flesh was the key to Jude the Obscure, but he neglected to add that in order to bring up to date the traditional conflict he had distorted its traditional form: he had seldom given spirit the nobler part; he had made the issue uncertain throughout; and he had even allowed the opponents to switch sides in mid-clash. Just as he chose for his first representative of spirit a rather dispirited type, he let one of the two representatives of flesh turn out to be an epicene "sprite." He was playing. Despite or perhaps precisely because of his intense personal involvement in the story, Hardy allowed himself unprecedented detachment in tone and levity in treatment. His original title for the novel, The Simpletons, implied an ironic perspective on the protagonists; after the first serial installment this was modified to Hearts Insurgent, which sounded a more positive note. The third and final title, Jude the Obscure, for the restored manuscript in book form, suggested no attitude whatever; yet the tone remained set from the start. After building a reputation for "good men" (the stock of Gabriel Oak and Giles Winterbourne) and then trying their virtue in Tess, "a pure woman," Hardy was offering the modern Job, a man who naively follows conventional advice or traditional wisdom, attempting to "be good." He was of course no biblical Job. In Hardy's universe, there is neither a devil to try nor a god to authorize the trial and, eventually, vindicate suffering and offer compensators; here, defeat is attributable mostly to character, that is, individual weakness or flaw, and, to a lesser extent, to such forces as an inimical social environment, inflexible conventions or laws, inexplicable family curses, and an arbitrary fate. It is not really the way in which defeat comes about that is new in Jude, but the manner in which it is expressed: happenstance and "life's little ironies" are overwhelmed by words, by disputes, reflections, broodings, by painfully extended attempts to explain and to justify. The novel itself would succumb were it not for brilliant characterization, meticulous structuring, and an apparently new and, no doubt, reckless way with words. "The letter killeth," says the epigraph (omitting that "the spirit giveth life"). Indeed, it has been suggested that in Jude Hardy is well on his way to abandoning prose and shifting to an exclusively poetic use of language. Name and word games, of course, go back to his earliest literary efforts; but the persistence evident here suggests a new manner if not a new purpose that is readily illustrated by the mentor's farewell words in the opening scene, words which set Jude on his hopeless quest and, eventually, allow the reader to trace a lifetime of adversity back to an inherent (and possibly inherited) weakness—kindness to birds.

Hardy's lifelong concern for animals in general and birds in particular is well documented. His biographers usually trace his own extreme sensitivity to an episode recalled in Later Years, a winter walk during which his father "idly" felled with a stone a half-frozen field fare; "and the child Thomas picked it up and it was as light as a feather, all skin and bone, practically starved. He said he had never forgotten how the body of the field-fare felt in his hand: the memory had always haunted him" (LY, p. 263). "The most persistent symbolism in Hardy is connected with birds," says F. B. Pinion [in A Hardy Companion]. Birds, indeed, abound in the novels and stories, as well as in the poetry, symbolizing most frequently what Pinion has called "the Frost's decree," the harshness of life and the vulnerability of living creatures. But in Hardy, birds are also the scarcely noticed witnesses of human activity, offering comment by word or presence; sometimes they provide a traditional, symbolic extension for the characters; at other times, they allow very personal metaphoric or metonymie descriptions to be set against the traditional background. Hardy knows his birds well and chooses among them carefully; in Jude alone, which is not his birdiest novel, references are made to the rook, sparrow, nighthawk, robin, raven, cock, pigeon, ringdove, and screech owl. In a materialistic world where protagonists are distinguished by their sensitivity to animals, birds offer the suggestion, deliberately left vague, of another dimension and of a broader scale to gauge human endeavors.

During the twenty-five years which spanned his career as a novelist, Hardy had thoroughly individualized the traditional bird-woman motif. His first heroine, Cytherea Gray, in Desperate Remedies (1871), was fairly conventionally singled out for birdlike gracefulness in her initial presentation and was said to possess a sense of perfect balance (tragically absent in her architect father!); the melodramatic plot then turned her, just as conventionally, into a "terrified, … panting and fluttering … little bird …" (DR, XII , 5, p. 252). Subsequent heroines, from Fancy Day to Fanny Robin, Ethelberta, Elizabeth-Jane, Suke Damson, Tess, and the three Avices, are more and more specifically associated with birds. Yet even in these associations, Hardy never goes far beyond the conventional. In Jude the Obscure, with Sue, the device becomes a technique of characterization, used deliberately, consistently and in conjunction with key themes; the traditional bird suggestions of gracefulness and pathos are used little and then, often, mockingly. Tess had been consistently associated with birds, but without detracting from her chief role as incarnation of womanhood; as pure woman, she had to be thoroughly grounded, even when Angel Clare set her among the gods in the peculiar role of Artemis-Demeter (Tess, III , xx, p. 115). Sue, on the other hand, is not only called a bird, but a mass of detail concerning her appearance and comportment suggests she is a bird in the specific as well as the general and colloquial sense; her idiosyncrasies almost invariably elicit pejorative reflections about women.

All evidence suggests that the decade which culminates in the publication of Jude the Obscure, 1885-1895, was a time when Hardy for personal as well as professional reasons was much concerned with women. (In this decade he also completed The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Wessex Tales, A Group of Noble Dames, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Life's Little Ironies, and The Well-Beloved in its original version.) His biographers agree that, partly because of domestic problems, he was driven more and more during these years to enjoy the notoriety of a daring novelist among the fashionable ladies. He attracted admirers and readily assumed with them the literary counselor role. Notable among them were Rosamund (Ball) Tomson, who inscribed to him her poem collection The Bird Bride in 1889, and Florence Henniker, frequently considered one of the models for Sue, with whom Hardy began a long friendship in 1893. During the composition of Jude, entries from his notebooks and comments in the "biography" he prepared record not only his personal musings about women's inability "to manage an honest man" (LY, p. 22), but indications that he thought and acted like an authority on feminine matters. He participated in sophisticated debates with "beautiful women" on marriage laws (LY, p. 23). He reflected on the difference between coquetting and flirting (LY, p. 24), the effects of natural selection on women (LY, p. 25), and the mores of country servants in London (LY, p. 30). He went to the music halls and noted subsequently that the girls "owe their attractions to art" (EL, p. 296), or that "They should be penned and fattened for a month to round out their beauty" (LY, p. 14). Writing about a conversation on hypnotism, concerning the possibility "of willing, for example, certain types of women by speech to do as you desire," he commented that, "I f true, it seems to open up unpleasant possibilities" (LY, p. 34). His chief biographer, Robert Gittings, understandably finds this sexual blossoming of a man in his fifties intriguing.

It is of course impossible to indicate at which point personal preoccupation with women combined with Hardy's realization of the potential for verbal play yielded the bird motif in Jude. The suggestions were readily available. The woman-bird-bride association, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, goes at least as far back as the fourteenth century; the first instance cites dates from about 1300, and refers to Delilah, "that birde [var. bride, bryde, bruyd] was biddande bald." Connotations were not necessarily pejorative for a long time; by the end of the century, Chaucer still uses "bird" merely to designate a maid. Hardy himself played on bird-bride as early as 1866, in the poem "Postponement," in which, according to J. O. Bailey, he probably represents himself in the role of the lover who loses his bird-bride for lack of money:

"Ah, had I been like some I see,
Born to an evergreen nesting-tree,
None had eyed and twitted me,
  Cheerily mating!"

During the same year, in the uncollected "To a Bride-groom," he refers to the bride as a "fine-feathered jay."

From the start, Hardy's heroines first and flit, particularly on the point of betrothal, but until we meet Sue Bridehead, we have little to mark the evolution of a specific type which might be called the bird-bride. A specific source, could have been Rosamund Tomson's title ballad, "The Bird-Bride," which Gittings connects with Tess's "vision of the weird Arctic birds." It is based on a common folk motif. Tomson's bird-bride is a grey gull who, having assumed human shape, is abducted by an Eskimo hunter; she responds to his love and, eventually, bears him three children. Except for an occasional impulsive response to the call of the wind, she accepts exile. When, however, he breaks his word to her and, driven by hunger, slays four gulls, she turns bird again and flies off, taking the children along. It is quite likely that, while devising Sue Bridehead's character, giving her the oft-noted affinity with Shelley's blithe spirits, Hardy remembered also Rosamund Tomson's exiled bird-bride, and that he eventually decided to make this heroine into a bird, dubiously exiled and dubiously blithe.

Between "Postponement" (1866) and Jude (1895), Hardy is evidently groping for a particular elusive and coquettish type of heroine and reaching beyond conventional bird associations to suggest it. Just before turning to Sue, he had offered in The Well-Beloved (1894) the three Avices, whose bird name, as Michael Millgate pointed out, also "may have been a punning allusion to The Bird-Bride. …" Yet, by comparison these too were superficial character studies. "Sue is a type of woman," Hardy writes to Gosse, "which has always had an attraction for me, but the difficulty of drawing the type has kept me from attempting it till now" (LY, p. 42). In the concluding lines of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Fancy Day, having at last decided to marry Dick Dewey, is shown reflecting on the "secret" she will never tell him, while the nightingale overhead calls, "come hither, come hither, come hither." Fancy's secret is actually fairly innocent, and her nightingale merely evokes Arden and the fragility of human bliss. Twenty-one years later, however, coyness has yielded to pathological reticence in Hardy, and birds no longer invite men to the heart of Wessex for a carefree life. In April 1893, while working on Jude, Hardy notes that "a clever thrush and a stupid nightingale sing very much alike" (LY, p. 16). This introduces the tale of "Nat C—'s good-for-nothing grandson [who] 'turned ranter'—i.e. street-preacher" but was easily made to revert to type by "a girl he used to carry on with …" (LY, p. 16). A parallel in Jude, is Arabella's brief flirtation with the Chapel, ended when she flings away the tracts to be herself again (p. 335). We recall that her first achievement on the old course is to instruct the schoolmaster, Phillotson, about the ways of women and make him yearn for Sue's return, so that she herself might lure Jude once more. Hardy, who had chosen to associate Arabella with pigs, could not identify her as a bird also; yet she nonetheless assumed the role of the nightingale, in the colloquial sense of whore, far from stupid, calling "come hither" in a world where pastoral no longer offers an escape.

By 1893, pretty associations of maids and birds having long lost their place in his fiction, Hardy returns to them with a vengeance, creating Sue Bridehead and building, largely on what she says and does, a case against the ways of birds with men. Whatever she might owe to live models, to a certain "H . A." in the London of "Postponement" days, to the Sparks sisters, notably Tryphena in the Weymouth of 1870, or to Florence Henniker in the London of 1893, Hardy saw in her a chance to draw a type to which the name bird-bride might indeed apply and with which his earlier heroines had relatively innocent affinities. Sue remains forever a bride, as has been pointed out, and she is a bird from the moment we first see her flitting through Christminster till we last hear her "tears resounding through the house like a screech-owl" (p. 384) on the eve of her remarriage to Phillotson, near the end of the novel.

Hardy's design was to make the book "all contrasts … in its original conception" (LY, p. 42). Sue was to be opposed to the substantial Arabella, and, indeed, as bird, she would seem almost fleshless: "light and slight"; "There was nothing statuesque in her; all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living …" (p. 109); a "pretty liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman" (p. 113) whom Jude was at first content to worship from afar. On close observation, however, most of what seemed ethereal turns out to be based upon exceptional emotionality. "The voice, though positive and silvery, [was] tremulous" (p. 120). "She was so vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling. An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points was such that it might have been misread as vanity" (p. 122). Sue, in fact, tends to live on the verge of hysterics and to keep on an elevated plane by dramatizing the commonplace (her dramatic talent as a child in recitation of "The Raven" is one of the things noted about her: "She'd bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear … that you could see un a'most before your eyes" [p. 131]). But whether hysterical or merely fussy in nature, Sue's characteristic behavior pattern suggests birds: after flitting about erratically, she plunges headlong on a course, generally associated with freedom in her mind, then, timorous or exhausted, she seeks protection nearby. Hardy establishes this pattern most clearly in conjunction with her escape from the Melchester training school (duplicated later in Shaston): having flown out of the window, forded the river, and "rustle[d]" up Jude's dark stairs, Sue begs piteously for a place by his fire (p. 164). She appears "a slim and fragile being … pathetic in her defenselessness … (p. 164); as she warms up, however, she talks challengingly of herself and her life with the London undergraduate and offers her views on sex and religion. She becomes characteristically defensive. Jude notes the fact that many of her arguments are shallow, supported by an ever-ready supply of tears and tragic modulations of her voice; she has a tendency to "make such a personal matter of everything!" (p. 172). As usual, he allows himself to be dominated by feelings of tenderness toward her, but when his "faulty and tiresome little Sue" resolves they are "going to be very nice with each other" and looks up trustfully, her voice "trying to nestle in his breast," Jude "looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing" (p. 173).

As Sue Bridehead becomes bride, her birdlike attributes assert themselves even more pronouncedly. Her flightiness in the events leading to her marriage with Phillotson is defined as "perverseness": Jude must not only give her away, but satisfy her momentary whim and serve as surrogate groom. When he meets her again, after a night with Arabella, she seems by contrast his "good angel," "so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs …" (p. 207). In fact, Sue is downcast, but she will not confess to unhappiness, even when Jude confronts her with it at their aunt's funeral: "I can see you through your feathers, my poor little bird!" (p. 231). She admits her marriage was a mistake only after the rabbit episode, blaming her "cock-sureness" in the midst of ignorance (p. 236). They part on a peck, "a scarcely perceptible little kiss upon the top of his head," impulsively offered although deemed improper. For Jude, this is a turning point: "his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life," proof that he is ill-suited for a religious vocation (p. 237). Characteristically, he burns his theology books and veers on a new course. No less characteristically, the kiss makes Sue retreat or, rather, flutter about: she reviews the incident "with tears in her eyes" (p. 239), then, applying what Hardy calls her "extraordinary" logic to it, she takes the blame on herself, readies punishment for Jude, and, very contrite, offers her husband a partial confession by way of atonement (p. 240). The meeting with Jude, nonetheless, let her face up to her situation. By midnight, she has deserted the conjugal chamber and "made a little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters" of a closet under the stairway which she refuses to vacate (p. 241). The next morning, looking at the spider webs over the "little nest where she had lain," Phillotson realizes how great her aversion to him must be "when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!" (p. 242). He first offers her separate quarters but, eventually, agrees to let her go after she once more takes the avian way out, leaping out of the window when he mistakenly comes to her room (p. 247). Their last meal together leaves a permanent image "imprinted upon his vision; that look of her as she glided into the parlour to tea; a slim flexible figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and marked by the pallors of restless days and nights …" (p. 254).

Hardy repeatedly underlines Sue's pathological aversion to her husband and offers it as grounds for her flight out of the window in Shaston. Sue herself, however, attributes it to fright caused by a bad dream, to being awakened suddenly in a large house whose doors will not lock.… She sublimates this very rapidly. By the time she stands in The George, having learned it is the hotel where Jude recently spent the night with Arabella, she claims to have been betrayed and repeats: "I jumped out of the window!" (p. 264); her flight asserted commitment to higher values, whereas he merely yielded to base passions.

One finds only a slight departure from the bird analogy when Hardy presents a "ghostly" Sue, flitting in like a moth (p. 269), to the bedside of the ailing Phillotson and fussing about him "with a childlike, repentant kindness, as if she could not do too much for him" (pp. 270-71); on leaving, "she put her hand in his—or rather allowed it to flit through his; for she was significantly light in touch" (p. 271). The bird analogy returns dominant, however, when Arabella's reappearance on the scene determines Sue to share Jude's bed. '"The little bird is caught at last!' she said, a sadness showing in her smile. 'No—only nested,' he assured her" (p. 287). Nesting, for Sue, merely implies settling down, as opposed to marriage which would mean reentering the cage. Against Arabella's advice, she talks Jude out of marriage, and, as they walk away from the parish-clerk's office, she recites to him the end of Thomas Campbell's "Song":

Can you keep the bee from ranging,
Or the ring-dove's neck from changing?
No! Nor fettered love [from dying
In the knot there's no untying]                                               (p. 291).

(The last line, which Hardy used as a recurrent theme throughout his works, is left implied in Jude.)

Talk of marriage and a permanent bond invariably elicits a frightened, birdlike response from Sue. Thus, before leaving one more time to marry Jude at the Superintendent Registrar's Office, her "nervousness intensified": '"Jude, I want you to kiss me, as a lover, incorporeally,' she said, tremulously nestling up to him, with damp lashes. 'It won't be ever like this any more will it!'" (p. 302). But even when free of stress, at idyllic moments like their visit to the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, she is a bird: "Sue, in her new summer clothes, flexible and light as a bird, her little thumb stuck up by the stem of her white cotton sunshade, went along as if she hardly touched ground, and as if a moderately strong puff of wind would float her over the hedge into the next field" (p. 311). Arabella, who observes her unseen, calls her, with matronly disdain, "a slim fidgetty little thing … (p. 313); and Hardy underlines the contrast: whereas Sue fidgets and flits, Arabella and Cartlett "saunter" (pp. 310, 315).

Even in her own mind, Sue associates herself with the trapped little bird. Characteristically, she keeps a pair of pigeons for pets, and when they are sold at the auction to a butcher, for "a nice pie," she frees them, then regrets her act: "It was so foolish of me! O why should Nature's law be mutual butchery!" Jude, who early in his career had similarly questioned the natural scheme over the rooks, and learned it was to no avail, now knows he can only try to compensate the butcher (p. 327). Little Father Time, however, takes careful note of the "law," and when he later hears from Sue confirmation of his own suspicion that "It would be better to be out o' the world than in it" (p. 352), he acts on the information. While he is hanging the younger children, then himself, his father, who had failed to nest his brood the previous night and who must meet with Sue in separate quarters, is addressing her as kindly as ever: "Have breakfast with me now you are here, my bird.… There will be plenty of time to get back and prepare the children's meal before they wake" (p. 354).

When Sue overcomes the initial shock of her children's death and substitutes unquestionable dogma for her "enlightened" views, she is not as inconsistent as Jude claims. To the contrary, by temperament, she had all along been better suited for Victorian constraints than for rebellion against them; she had clung to Mil l with almost religious fervor, and a great deal of fetishism had already attended her rituals to Venus and Apollo in defiance of the "pale Galilean" (p. 115). Despite her occasional flight for freedom, she had been all along a timorous type of bird, savoring the retreat at least as much as the adventure and ever-ready to assume a contrite and pathetic stance to gain sympathy. Her ultimate choice of the safety of a confining marriage, that is, of the cage which she had still then sought to escape, is not surprising, and it is probably not altogether condemnable in Hardy's view; one recalls his note on April 25, 1893, during the composition of Jude, wondering why Fear should not be idealized, "which is a higher consciousness, and based on a deeper insight" than courage (LY, p. 17). She is actually very lucid in the process of retreat and, like Jude, she is apt to generalize from her own predicament to the condition of women as a whole. He contrasts her "old logic" with her present "extraordinary blindness" and wonders: "Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?" (p. 371). Sue, however, argues that she has merely come to "see the light at last" (p. 371), and generalizes from her own frigid reticence to the relative position of the sexes: "A n average woman is in this superior to an average man—that she never instigates, only responds. We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more" (p. 372). Yet she admits she knew all along that assuming a submissive posture is in itself an exercise of powers.

"At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion—the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man—was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then—I don't know how it was—I couldn't bear to let you go—possibly to Arabella again—and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you" (p. 373).

Instead of justifying her behavior in terms of personal preference or, as she had increasingly tended to do, in terms of her "wickedness," Sue now attributes it to women in general. Again, she is not inconsistent, and she does not differ much from Jude in recognizing overwhelming forces in nature and society and unbreakable laws that govern intercourse among men and women; she is only more ready than ever to accept and to justify them. Oddly enough, but very much in keeping with her repentant stance, she now presents herself not as the freedom-loving little bird whom Jude and others would catch and confine, but as the one who herself had an inborn "craving to attract and captivate" and who, though frightened, could not stop preying or let the prey go once he was caught.

As indicated, Sue's career as bird goes on until the end of the novel. Even as she is crying "like a screech-owl" on the eve of her remarriage to Phillotson, we hear, Gillingham, nearby, reminding his friend that he had always objected to "opening the cage-door and letting the bird go in such an obviously suicidal way" (p. 385). Then following her last flutter before Jude in the Marygreen church, Sue comes to her husband's chamber bringing her body as ultimate offering, in order to reverse, as she says, her flight out of the window at Shaston (p. 415).

Hardy claimed to have written a novel about the conflict between flesh and spirit; yet the thought that he was exposing the awesome and often nefarious powers of women must have crossed his mind, as evidenced by the epigram for the first part of the book:

"Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women.… O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?"—ESDRAS

Every one of the epigrams Hardy set at the beginning of the sections prior to publication in book form was carefully chosen. This particular one he abstracted from Esdras 4:26-32, which is the account of a contest among Darius's bodyguards to identify the greatest power in the land. The first guard argues for wine, the second for the King; the winner is the third, Zerubbabel, who argues that women have the most awesome strength, overwhelmed only by Truth.

The wiles of women, however, and their abuse of their power over men are not only the subject of the novel's first part: they are discussed all along, just as advice on how to deal with women is offered throughout. One is sometimes tempted to view Jude as Hardy's contribution to the bourgeois side in the querelle des femmes, an illustration of the ways of maids with men, bearing an undeniably misogynous bias. It is as though at some rudimentary level he had sought to balance out the sufferings of Tess, his "pure woman," at the hands of villainous men, by offering the sufferings of his good man and "simpleton" at the hands of bad women.

Though obviously no simple attitude emerges, the perspective offered in Jude is not flattering, and the rather pejorative association of women with birds is precisely what it seems to suggest. Women are flighty, deceptive, self-centered; they exploit mercilessly the passions which they arouse in men; and they are guided solely by their narrow self-interest. As indicated already, Hardy's heroines had been coquettes from the first: even the most innocent, like Tess and Marty South, had their moments of vanity. Very early, with Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), women's games with men revealed their lethal potential. Hardy's women had feigned helplessness to achieve their ends long before Sue, and they had arrayed seductive devices long before Arabella (one needs only recall Mrs . Charmond, who enhances her charms with false locks in Woodlanders). Sue and Arabella, however, become incarnations of women's power over men. Sue, the epicene, is the promise followed only by frustration; Arabella responds, but knows only her own interest. Sue adopts evasion as a life style; Arabella makes seduction into a crude profession. The coquette turns cocotte. In Woodlanders, Suke Damson (a nighthawk) still makes a pretence of confused identities and intended escape; but Arabella, with her cochin's egg, makes none whatever. Hardy presents her as the modern Delilah who sublimates neither her appetite nor her self-interest: Phillotson becomes a pawn in her hands, and, seated next to her, the obscure Jude can only ironically be likened to sunlike Samson. Jude as a victim of his kindness to women elicits sympathy; but he is characterized by "weaknesses" of a kind that topples no Philistine temples.

Had it been published a century earlier, Hardy's novel might have been entitled Jude or the Rewards of Kindness. It is fashionable to read into it innovation and to demonstrate how Hardy was ahead of his time. But it is just as easy, and probably more accurate, to note that his last novel was very traditional, not only because it used an Everyman for protagonist and his progress for story, but because it developed episodically around a simplistic argument: kindness does not pay. Jude is pronounced fatally weak from the start because he cannot hurt anything, because he has kindness to excess. To be sure, kindness is not his only weakness of character, but it is chief, and the others are generally made to seem related. Jude is unable to overcome it for reasons which Hardy suggests are temperamental and hereditary. Indeed, even after losing nearly all in his disastrous marriage to Arabella, and after renouncing Sue and giving her away to a man she cannot possibly love, Jude wonders about the order of things but does not doubt his own actions: "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?" (p. 238). Though seemingly aware now of his vulnerability before women, he remains unwilling and unable to turn his back on their plight: he takes in the escaping Sue, and, a while later, he rushes to help Arabella, because "she's a woman … an erring, careless, unreflecting fellow-creature" (pp. 284-85). For his troubles, he earns a fairly contemptuous appreciation from the latter: "Never such a tender fool as Jude is if a woman seems in trouble and coaxes him a bit! Just as he used to be about birds and things" (p. 289). He confirms this very soon by relieving her of the burden of Little Father Time. Eventually, he even accepts Sue's fastidiousness in everything relating to marriage and sex; and though it makes him wonder about women's intellectual capacity, he accepts her retreat into religion and her return to Phillotson, agreeing that "The woman mostly gets the worst of it in the long run" (p. 373). Then, when Arabella stands beneath his window asking to be taken in, out of the rain, and saved from prostitution or the workhouse, Jude consents, as he will consent to marry her again, most ironically, to save her "honor." Even drunk, he rants about kindness and duty to birds: "I' d marry the W of Babylon rather than do anything dishonourable!… I have never behaved dishonourably to a woman or to any living thing. I am not a man who wants to save himself at the expense of the weaker among us!" (pp. 401-2). On his deathbed we still hear him making excuses for women in general and for Sue in particular: "Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably" (p. 419). The excuses, of course, must serve him as well: "the time was not ripe for us!" (p. 419). Ironically, while he consoles himself and delights Mrs. Edlin with musings on the ways of birds, Arabella pours Vilbert his own "distillation of the juices of doves' hearts," telling herself in the process: "Well! Weak women must provide for a rainy day" (p. 421).

Hardy sets Arabella's views and most of her actions in direct opposition with those of Jude. He even allows her to elevate practical crassness to the level of doctrine, and to preach it to a very humble and attentive student, Phillotson. It turns out that Jude's former mentor, who had practiced kindness with Sue and then defended his acts so vehemently in Shaston that he was dismissed from his post and forced back to the Marygreen schoolhouse from where he had started, has not fatally committed himself to being good. Even though he still argues he had done "only what was right, and just, and moral" (pp. 336-37), he is in fact ready to learn from Arabella, especially after she tells him he had "dirtfied his] own nest" (p. 337). "There's nothing like bondage and a stone deaf taskmaster for taming … women," she tells him, adding that in imposing bondage he would even have had divine law on his side. Phillotson must admit that, indeed, "Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would!" (p. 338). He still claims ignorance of womankind on parting, but, when the opportunity arises, he shows that Arabella's teaching was not wasted on him: he has learned to seek out his interests above his convictions and, hence, to "make use" of Sue's new "views," even though they are not his (p. 378). He will "let crude loving-kindness take care of itself (p. 379) and be wary of women since they "are so strange in their influence, that they tempt you to misplaced kindness" (p. 386). Indeed, his friend Gillingham, who had all along advised against "opening the cage-door," now wonders whether "the reactionary spirit induced by the world's sneers and his own physical wishes would make Phillotson more orthodoxly cruel to [Sue] than he had erstwhile been informally and perversely kind" (p. 386).

Kindness and cruelty, which on a simplistic level are consistently opposed in the novel, are also shown to be ill-defined and easily reversible in weak men like Phillotson. In Hardy's view of evolution, likewise, the thrust to altruism is forever threatened by reversion to egotism. What is remarkable in Jude the Obscure is that, despite a very rudimentary philosophy and psychology for background, and despite the intrusion of petty biases growing out of personal experience, Hardy was able to write a novel in which the reader's impulse to classify and to judge, which is encouraged by the presentation, is frustrated at every turn by the obvious complexity of the issues and the depth of the characters. The device of pairing that Hardy acknowledged is, in fact, largely effective because it makes for comparisons and contrasts which are so facile that they must seem inadequate. As has often been pointed out, the contrast between Arabella and Sue, Jude and Arabella, Jude and Phillotson, or any other pair in the novel, is undermined by close resemblance between them. Similarly, the thematic pair of kindness and cruelty would seem to be parallel with the pair of spirit and flesh; yet spirit, throughout, proves unkind, and cruelty of flesh is made hard to condemn; always, "what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener …" (p. 36).

The bird motif examined here belongs to the whole array of devices used by Hardy to schematize his plot. They simplify only on the surface. The reader is confirmed in what he anticipates from the ambiguous designation of bird as it is applied to Sue; and yet he finds himself uncomfortable with the conventionally misogynous views suggested. Sue and Arabella appear to share a common ground as birds, and even as brides, but they obviously differ in their main personality traits; and Jude's kindness to them is misplaced only in a very narrow sense, that is, to the extent that we can identify kindness with naiveté and hence condemn it. On the whole, in the interaction between humans and birds, conventional associations seem to hold, but they often do so ironically, and, as a rule, what they suggest is too complex to formulate. The child, Jude, who robs nests but then lies awake until he can return, also feels fatefully akin to birds. The rook episode demonstrates that this kinship means vulnerability. Indeed, birds will eventually allow themselves to be caught by the adult Jude, but they will trap him in the process. A cochin hen's egg, "hatching" in Arabella's bosom, confirms his seduction and a feigned pregnancy clinches his marriage. The distinction between "caught" and "nested" is tenuous here. Sue yields to Jude only before the threat of Arabella. But even Vilbert, a professional bird catcher devoid of kindness, allows himself to be caught by Arabella, using for excuse the efficacy of his own dove philtre (p. 315). Like the Aeschylean world of the Agamemnon, which is never far back in Hardy's mind, the world of Jude the Obscure is inhabited by men and women, who, although they are vaguely aware of being caught in the net of fate, plot their way through life either by setting traps for others or by figuring out ways for getting out of the trap in which they find themselves. Taking kindness to birds for a theme, Hardy may well have tried to offer the fabulist's view to mitigate this spectacle.