SOURCE: "A Perspective of One's Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XII , No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 12-28.

[In the following essay, Langland investigates Hardy's portrayal of Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, concluding that she is an "unevenly conceived character" riddled with inconsistencies, but that these flaws point to the novel's "distinctly modern" narrative sensibility.]

Form and content are inseparable. Story depends on technique, depends, Henry James claimed, on "every word and every punctuation point." Although Thomas Hardy could be expected to resist his contemporary's strict attention to minutiae, James's broad point about the inter-dependence of idea and form nonetheless helps explain problems in Hardy's Jude the Obscure and particularly in that elusive character, Sue Bridehead, who is a touch-stone for many of the difficulties posed by Hardy's final novel. Critics have called this character childish, selfish, sadistic, masochistic, narcissistic, and frigid, all in explanation of what has been defined as her dominant trait: inconsistency. But these conclusions have not satisfied even their authors, among whom Irving Howe is representative in cautioning: "Yet one thing, surely the most important, must be said about Sue Bridehead. As she appears in the novel itself, rather than in the grinder of analysis, she is an utterly charming and vibrant creature." Perhaps a character can be so fluid and complex that she eludes the combined critical efforts to capture her. But, before despairing of analysis altogether, we should consider Sue's inconsistency and elusiveness in light of formal difficulties in Hardy's last novel.

That Sue Bridehead has resisted satisfactory analysis points both to problems in the formal conception of Jude and to the inadequacies of its point of view in conveying a growing sensitivity to other versions of the novel's central experiences. An omniscient narrator, such as Hardy offers in Jude, should be a guarantee of reliability, but Hardy's final narrator eludes and evades. And, for the first time, Hardy lets the perspective of a single character, Jude Fawley, dominate the story. To complicate matters further, it is not clear to what extent Jude's perspective is judged by the narrator, or even, as criticism has made clear, to what extent Hardy himself is involved in his narrator's and character's perspectives. In light of these complications, inconsistencies in Sue Bridehead's character and behavior call for reassessment.

We must disentangle Sue's character from the problematic narrative point of view which presents her—a point of view primarily Jude's, but buttressed by the narrator's. To do so, we confront questions of character autonomy and the matrix for judging character. As James saw, we cannot simply wrest character from the context of narrative technique and point of view. In discussing Sue's character, we must continually account for the novel's point of view which is closely allied with Jude's experience and with a man's perspective on an unconventional woman. And, any effort to resolve questions about Sue's personality must take into account the relationships among mimesis, narrative technique, and character development.

In this larger context, we recognize that Jude's primacy in the novel must shape Sue's role in it, much as in Tess of the D'Urbervilles the eponymous character determines and limits the representation of Alec D'Urberville and Angel Clare. In Jude the Obscure, Arabella and Sue clearly have as one primary function their appeal to opposite poles in the protagonist's nature: the fleshly and the spiritual. Such an observation has become commonplace, but its consequences for character representation have great importance. Hardy's last novel does not imitate Sue and Jude equally. It imitates the way in which one credulous and naive, but well-intentioned, man, Jude, confronts a world which he sees as increasingly inimical to his desires and goals. He is limited by the society in which he finds himself, by what Hardy calls the "hereditary curse of temperament," and by the conventionality of his own nature. Thus, one of Sue Bridehead's other narrative functions is to unmask the deep-seated assumptions which baffle Jude's hopes. That we come to recognize his personal limitations is essential to a tragic denouement which finds him partially responsible for his fate, not merely a pawn in society's or the universe's machinations. His share of responsibility gives Jude a tragic stature.

This imitation, with its focus on Jude's experience and his point of view, accords with the subject Hardy initially anticipated, the story of a young man '"who could not go to Oxford'—His struggles and ultimate failure. Suicide." But, in correspondence with Edmond Gosse after completing the work in 1895, Hardy admits his subject has broadened, stating that his novel is concerned first with the "labours of a poor student to get a University degree, and secondly with the tragic issues of two bad marriages. …" The new subject, now added to the original topic, potentially conflicts with full examination of the first, since it calls for examination of the positions and perspectives of both personalities in a marriage. Clearly feeling the increasing interest of his Sue plot, Hardy confessed to Florence Henniker in August 1895, "Curiously enough, I am more interested in the Sue story than in any I have written." Furthermore, dissatisfaction with his representation of Sue kept Hardy tinkering with her character through several revisions of the novel. Robert C. Slack has documented the textual changes in Jude the Obscure between the 1903 and 1912 Macmillan editions, and he finds them mainly concerned with revising passages which deal with Sue. Hardy's revisions alter the "affective meaning of a detail or of a passage … to give [Sue] more human sympathy." And, Slack adds, this group of revisions has "a consistent direction."

But the effect of such revisions must remain superficial when one considers both the force of Jude's controlling perspective on Sue and the continuing influence of the novel's original intention. A narrative technique focusing on Jude's perspectives is perhaps adequate to the story Hardy had initially envisioned but inadequate to the novel's subsequent development and to Hardy's growing interest in Sue. What had happened seems clear enough. Hardy's original story took on a new direction—or, perhaps it might be fairer to say, that a subplot of the envisioned original assumed greater importance in writing. A narrative technique which focused on Jude's perspective was perfectly adequate to depict the Sue of the story Hardy first envisioned, but not to depict the personality Hardy had become interested in as he wrote.

That Sue is enmeshed in Jude's limited point of view, then, helps account for our sense of inconsistencies in her character. We attempt to judge as a personality in her own right a figure intended to serve merely to define another personality. Often, when Jude looks at his cousin, he in fact gazes into a mirror which reflects the image of his own ambivalence. He finds Sue "almost an ideality" (p. 114 [Page references are to Jude the Obscure, the Wessex edition, 1912], "almost a divinity" (p. 174), "vision" (p. 223), "ethereal" (p. 224), "uncarnate" (p. 224), "disembodied creature" (p. 294), "sweet, tantalizing phantom" (p. 294), but he cannot ask whether this perceived spirituality is a reflection of her essence or an image of his fear that the fleshliness embodied in Arabella will once again ensnare him. It is Jude who tells us Sue is unpredictable and inconsistent: "her actions were always unpredictable" (p. 211), or "Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again … in all her colossal inconsistency" (p. 210), or he "decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious" (p. 190), a "riddle" (p. 160), "one lovely conundrum" (p. 162).

His tendency to blame his cousin in this "gentle" way often reveals Jude's rationalizations of his own failures to act decisively as well. Jude has a keen eye for Sue's departures from candor, but he does not question his own consistency or honesty in concealing his marriage to Arabella from Sue. Interpretations of Jude's interview with his cousin, Sue, after she has run away from Melchester Boarding School focus on the radical inconsistency of her behavior, yet that behavior appears in a different light when we remember that Jude, too, is with-holding information—his marriage to Arabella—and consequently behaving inconsistently. He cannot respond to Sue in expected ways, failing to kiss her when "by every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment.… [But Jude] had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it" (p. 189). Jude chides Sue for her frigidity, but never questions the conventional attitudes which underlie his assumption that it is all right to sleep with Arabella despite his relationship with Sue, or that mere sexual intimacy makes Arabella more his wife than Sue with whom he shares intimacies of a more substantial kind.

If we see Sue as merely a narrative device to reveal Jude, we need not trouble ourselves with these "inconsistencies" in her character. But Sue refuses to be read as a device. Although the critical literature acknowledges limitations in Jude's point of view, it rarely accounts for the resultant distortions in its judgment of Sue. Its failure to do so leads to the problematic conclusion that Sue is what Jude, despite his limitations, thinks she is.

The novel's narrator, whose omniscience seems a guarantee of his reliability, tends sporadically to confirm Jude's conclusions. But close examination reveals inconsistencies even in that supposedly omniscient perspective. When the narrator offers comment, he does little to establish a viewpoint more dispassionate and reliable than Jude's. In such cases, his remarks are often confusing rather than definitive. So, Dale Kramer has recently made an effort to "clarify the nature of the narrator's selfcontradictoriness." Kramer considers the striking example of a narrative comment which occurs after Sue and Jude kiss passionately for the first time—"Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfill the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man"—and concludes that the italicized words show a "temporal perspective [in the narrator] as limited as that of any human character." The remark is typical of a series of narrative comments which ultimately pose problems for readers. As in this case, the narrator's observations do not substantiate conclusions drawn from our interpretation of incident and character. In evident despite of the narrator's remarks, Sue has just kissed Jude passionately. And, Aunt Drusilla's remark about Phillotson ("there be certain men here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I should have said he was one" [p. 229]) helps support the perfectly natural aversion of Sue to her husband. Both Sue's actions and Aunt Drusilla's observation afford a more coherent view of Sue's character than the narrator offers.

Not only do Jude's and the narrator's perspectives present problems for our interpretation of Sue, but the continuing influence of the novel's original intention creates uncertainty over Sue's scope and purpose in the novel. The problem resolves itself into two main questions: what roles or role as fictional construct does Sue play in the novel, and in what ways does her "reality" seem to exceed these roles? In answer to the first, many critics have identified Sue's several functions: she is a double to Jude who, in formal terms, changes place with him in the course of the novel; she is the spiritual woman who contrasts with Arabella, the sensual woman; she represents the "sceptical voice of the present age"; she reveals the need and failure to make reason accord with feeling; she expresses the excess of selfishness and the lack of charity, of loving-kindness. In these interpretations, Sue is a schematic character, not a whole personality. She is one half of an equation: spirit/flesh, ego/alter ego, reason/feeling, intellect/emotion, selfishness/selflessness. Hardy encourages this interpretive bias in his claim, "O f course the book is all contrasts—or was meant to be in its original conception."

But Hardy's own reservation about the fulfillment of his original conception leads us to the second question, one more difficult but more essential to our problem here. To what extent does Sue become a cohesive personality and exceed the boundaries of those narrative functions intended for her? More particularly, to what extent does Sue become equal in significance to Jude and therefore exceed the capacities of the single perspective technique to reveal her adequately? And to what extent does she, as woman, not share Jude's problems, facing problems unique to her position in society and history instead? Finally, to what extent does Sue's role introduce larger contemporaneous issues of the "woman question" which ultimately cannot find resolution within the scope of the novel's subject.

The fullness of her role—a function of the developing story—and the slimness of her presentation—a function of the technique—have led critics to search beyond the novel's presentation to psychological interpretations of this character as being masochistic, narcissistic, frigid, or hysterical. Some of her comments seem to support such constructions. We hear narcissism in Sue's laments: "'Some women's love of being loved is insatiable …'" (p. 245), '"But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience"' (p. 290), or '"my liking for you is not as some women's perhaps. But it is a delight in being with you, of a supremely delicate kind …'" (p. 289). A masochism seems to dominate her tendency to self-blame: '"Everything is my fault always!"' (p. 189), or '" I am in the wrong! I always am!'" (p. 268), or '" I know I am a poor miserable creature'" (p. 288). And finally, frigidity suggests itself in the characterizations of her as "spirit … disembodied creature … tantalizing phantom" whose normal sexuality is asexuality:

A seraph of Heaven too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman…
(p. 294)

When Sue's character is not drawn along psychological lines, it is perceived along sociological lines. Sue is a "type" or the "type" of new woman, as flat and stereotypical in her own way as some of Charles Dickens's pure heroines. She is the "Bachelor girl" heralded by the reviewer Hardy cites in his "Postscript" to Jude. She grafts a new independence and intellectuality onto woman's traditional dependence and emotionalism, and in this grafting major inconsistencies necessarily result. This new feminist, in the words of Lloyd Fernando, ["New Women" in the Late Victorian Novel, 1977], "does not merely defy law and convention, she has put herself so far beyond them in spirit in the pursuit of individual independence that her personality has become grievously impoverished." Fernando continues, Sue "personifies the extreme refinement of sexual sensibility, the extreme moral fastidiousness toward which idealizing young feminists unwittingly tended." Robert Gittings concurs in seeing Sue as a type but disagrees as to which one. For Gittings, [in Young Thomas Hardy, 1975], Sue is not the "New Woman" of the 1890s, but "The Girl of the Period" in the 1860s. He bases his conclusions on the quality of Sue's intellectualisai: her typical loss of faith and substitution of Positivism. Hardy himself encourages such interpretations since he spoke of Sue as a "type of woman which has always had an attraction for me," seeming to refer to her spirituality and intellectuality.

It is reasonable to assume that Hardy's original intention for the novel did envision Sue in these comparatively one-dimensional ways—spiritual, new woman, girl of the period. But as the character gained prominence and complexity, her personality did not necessarily evolve along those lines. Indeed, as the novel and the character change tack, Sue gains dimensions which are incompatible with Hardy's original scheme.

Lest we appear simply to be affirming the old inconsistencies—sometimes Sue is one thing, sometimes another—we need to make some distinctions. A personality can be defined as inconsistent in a novel; if his portrayed nature is to be flighty, spasmatic, or impulsive, we are aesthetically comfortable with expecting the unexpected from him. Most critics have seen Sue's inconsistency in this way. But as we have seen, the consequences of this perspective is a sense that the grinder of analysis is an inadequate tool for capturing Sue's character. A more radical inconsistency emerges when the character is inconsistent with her own personality; that is, the creator has failed to create a completely credible individual; or the creator finds those adhesive tapes of shopworn philosophy—this time about women—easier to apply than to reexamine the premise of his narrative framework.

Although the presentation of Sue is already difficult because of the novel's point of view and changing intentions, that presentation is further complicated by the terms for character evaluation. We have trouble crediting Sue with a cohesive, healthy personality because of the novel's deep ambivalence over the proper terms for evaluation of her. Whereas Jude and the narrator are increasingly clear that the source of Jude's tragedy is not the wrath of God '"only … man and senseless circumstance"' (p. 413), neither is quite sure about the source of Sue's tragedy. Hardy himself seems uncertain. The wild card of evaluation is Sue qua Woman, the innate disposition of this mysterious sex.

Katharine Rogers has explored the pervasive, though subtle, bias against women—with Sue standing for "typical woman"—in her "Women in Thomas Hardy" [Centennial Review 19 (1975)]. Rogers points out that, even though they may "conscientiously" qualify such conclusions, both Jude and the narrator tend to blame Sue/ Woman for their own failures and pain. A characteristic passage captures the tensions:

Strange that [Jude's] first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—towards apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the natural sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?" (p. 261).

The second cause—inadequate social mechanisms—asks for a serious consideration, but the first, less unbiased, conviction that "women are to blame"—holds an equal attraction for Jude and the narrator.

This pervasive tendency to blame women's innate dispositions rather than to examine the social mechanisms which coerce them is mirrored on the individual level in Jude's tendency to search for the cause of Sue's behavior in the nature of her sex rather than in her situation. Jude speculates, giving Sue in marriage to PhiUotson, "Women were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic.… Or was Sue simply so perverse…" (p. 209). When Jude belatedly reveals his marriage to Arabella, he terms Sue's outrage and betrayal the "exercise of those narrow womanly humors on impulse that were necessary to give her sex" (p. 200). Readers aware of Jude's duplicity must find such reductive generalizations either revelatory of Jude's failures or indicative of a sudden narrowing of the novel's meaning and significance, not to mention its humane vision. The narrator, too, joins Jude in these generalizations: "With a woman's disregard of her dignity when in the presence of nobody but herself, she also trotted down, sobbing articulately as she went" (p. 319). These words describe Sue's response to Jude's departure to visit Arabella, and they force us to contemplate the character not as an individual in anguish and indecision, but as a gender performing according to its innate nature.

The explanation of Sue's behavior by gender is echoed in more subtle ways. For example, PhiUotson, discovering that Sue is avoiding him by sleeping in the clothes closet under stairs, speculates, " 'What must a woman's aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!'" (p. 266). Or Phillotson tries to decide, "What precise shade of satisfaction was to be gathered from a woman's gratitude that the man who loved her had not been often to see her?" (p. 193). Obviously Hardy is heightening the sexual significance of these scenes by referring to genders, but "the man who loved her" is an epithet for Phillotson, whereas the periphrases "a woman's aversion" and "a woman's gratitude" have a broader scope. They talk about more than Sue's particular behavior. Each invokes a class norm about women's response to general situations by which the character seeks to measure Sue. The effect, is, again, to evaluate Sue's behavior in terms of sex rather than in terms of individual character or particular situation.

Even Sue is made to participate in these generalizations either seriously, as when she explains her refusal to become Jude's lover as "a woman's natural timidity when the crisis comes" (p. 288), or in self-mockery, as when she comments on Phillotson, '"According to the rule of women's whims I suppose I ought to suddenly love him, because he has let me go so generously and unexpectedly'" (p. 286).

Finally, at the conclusion of the novel, Jude questions whether Sue's "extraordinary blindness … to [her] old logic is … common to woman. Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?" (p. 424). He claims, "I would argue with you if I didn't know that a woman in your state of feeling is quite beyond all appeals to her brains" (p. 470). Or, Jude ponders, "events which had enlarged his own views of life … had not operated in the same manner on Sue's" (pp. 415-16) and then, to explain her behavior, generalizes, "Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably" (p. 484). This reductive interpretation of a complex tragedy will hardly satisfy readers who have been attracted by the complex side of Hardy's vision.

On the other hand, when Sue judges Jude, she always ascribes his failure to inadequate social mechanisms or to his personal biases rather than to his nature as "Man." No comparable concept "Man" emerges in the novel, except in occasional comparisons between a man's and a woman's sexual appetites. Rather, the novel in its judgments of Jude, asks us to consider the interaction of the individual with social possibility, so that we recognize with Jude that "there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas" (p. 394). The ease with which we might dismiss Sue's social position and perspective as woman need not disturb us if Sue remains a minor character; but, as she achieves increasing prominence through the marriage plot, the inadequacies of a judgment by gender emerge. As Sue becomes more prominent in the novel, we tend to accord to her the same terms for evaluation we accord to Jude, recognizing that her "inconsistencies," as well as Jude's, can be traced to the discrepancies between social pressure and individual needs, between individual ideals and quotidian realities.

Despite the plenitude of social analysis regarding Jude's fate, the novel is relatively lacking in equivalent analyses of Sue's. The pressures she must face as a woman of conviction in the 1890s far outweigh Jude's, yet they are, within the confines imposed by the novel's techniques, largely ignored. The reader can speculate on Sue's problems in light of such famous contemporaneous works as Ibsen's Doll's House. And George Eliot's novels also have much to say about the social hobbles on women of talent and aspiration. But in Jude the Obscure, Hardy, the narrator, and Jude have not finally decided on the cause of Sue's failures.

That Sue is Woman is of enormous importance to the novel's tensions, even though neither Jude nor the narrator can perceive much of what must be Sue's inner struggles. Jude aspires beyond his class; Sue aspires beyond her class and her sex. Jude's aspirations accord with his nature as man. Although society's "freezing negative" tells him to stay in his place, we do not conclude he has a fragmented or inconsistent personality because he aspires. Males have always aspired; aspiration against social restrictions is expected and normal. So, the class conflict Jude experiences in no way undermines the cohesiveness of his personality. Sue's is not simply a class conflict; it is a conflict of genders, a conflict finally between what woman can and is expected to do. The sociological and psychological analyses of Sue miss this point. They see her as a type and assume that the inevitable fragmentation of her personality follows. In this view, her aspirations are merely symptoms of her fragmented personality. The novel—albeit unevenly—suggests another possibility, that of a coherent, cohesive personality give the appearance of fragmentation by conflicting demands on her as individual and by reductive generalizations about her as Woman.

Hardy finally cannot decide by what standard to judge Sue. Indeed, his problems increase as Sue becomes more prominent because her problems are partly a function of the all-obscuring fact that she is a woman. That fact is important, not as an explanation of innate disposition but as it explains Sue's particular circumstances, not as it reveals a "type," but as it sharpens an individual's dilemma. What is missing from the novel, then, are counterpoints to the generalizations about woman's nature, vivid depictions of what it means as a social and historical fact to be a woman in Jude's world. We are missing the analogues for Sue to the novel's frequent explanations of what it means to be a poor man of humble origins. One brief scene does touch on that meaning. It occurs just after Sue flees Melchester Boarding School and the focus reverts momentarily to Sue's seventy young peers:

Half-an-hour later they all lay in their cubicles, their tender feminine faces upturned to the flaring gas-jets which at intervals stretched down the long dormitories, every face bearing the legend "The Weaker" upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein they were moulded, which by no possible exertion of their willing hearts and abilities could be made strong while the inexorable laws of nature remain what they are. They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of whose pathos and beauty they were themselves unconscious, and would not discover till, amid the storms and strains of after-years, with their injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds would revert to this experience as to something which had been allowed to slip past them insufficiently regarded (p. 168).

The narrator still reverts to Nature—"the inexorable laws of [woman's] nature"—as explanation for "injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, bereavement," but the dramatized scene itself is sensitive to the chains social convention has forged for women. Women are locked in veritable prisons to safeguard their chastity of mind and body; by such lights, Sue has become a fallen woman. But the narrator's sense that social institutions imprison women is rare in Jude, the "laws of nature" being a more convenient view.

Conflicts of presentation and evaluation continue as we turn to a more pointed discussion of the distance between Sue's social position and her expectations and personal aspirations as articulated in the action of the novel but little understood by Jude, the novel's center of perception. Sue herself recognizes the obvious contradictions between intellect and emotion, statement and action. And her understanding articulates a consistency not superficially apparent. She tells Phillotson that she married him when her "theoretic unconventionality broke down" (p. 267), acknowledging her desire to be accepted socially at the same time that she cannot intellectually endure the terms of that acceptance. So, when Jude reproaches her for the "affectation of independent views" and accuses her of being "as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know," she does not admit the justice of his claim and argues, '"Not mentally. But I haven't the courage of my views, as I said before'" (p. 290). To identify Sue's rejection of tradition with a rejection of emotion and to see her intellect and ideas as divorced from her feelings is an oversimplification. Beneath both rejection and espousal lie deep feelings: a human desire to be accepted and loved and the passionate resistance of a cohesive personality to the self-suppression and loss of identity traditional love dictates and to the demands made on women in that contract. In this light, Sue suffers from a commitment to complexity of feeling rather than from an impoverishment of emotion.

Sue has integrity. Initially, she does not feel she should submit to anyone or anything against her feelings. She does not want to suffer, arguing with Phillotson, "'Wh y should I suffer for what I was born to be …'" (p. 268). The integrity of her life—in the face of enormous pressures from Jude and Phillotson—is remarkable. Jude is certainly incapable of the same strength of will in his relationship with Arabella. Sue wishes to make a life for herself not dependent on a man, and, even after she joins Jude, she insists on contributing her share of work with the result that Jude himself becomes more independent. She has the courage and self-respect not to bind Jude in marriage, and her pronouncements on this institution are consistently illuminating, intelligent, and rational. Hardy has, in fact, made Sue, not Jude, the mouthpiece for his own feelings expressed in the "postscript" to the novel.

Sue's attitudes toward sex and marriage provide the clearest measure of the distance separating her ambitions and desires from social possibilities shaping her self-realization. They provide the clearest measure of her cohesive personality. Her feelings about marriage and sex derive from a sense of her individuality and independence, which seem to her threatened by sexual or formal commitments. Sue wants an identity of her own. She does not see marriage as her ultimate goal in life. She is fearful of submerging her identity in that of another or worse, of becoming a kind of chattel. Before marrying Phillotson, she laments to Jude, "my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or a she-goat, or any other domestic animal" (p. 204). An d Jude echoes her unconventional opinion after her marriage by saying that she is still '"dear, free Sue Bridehead.… Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further individuality'" (p. 227). Partly in acknowledgment of Sue's feelings, Jude adopts the trade of monument mason: "it was the only arrangement under which Sue, who particularly wished to be no burden on him, could render any assistance" (p. 314).

In wanting an identity of her own, an identity through work and financial contribution, Sue is asking for something which men take for granted and which conventional women by and large reject. Arabella, for example, is always looking for a man to keep her, and she finally promises her father that she will take herself off his hands if he will help her snare Jude. Sue is torn between the conventional expectations that she needs to snare a man and essentially imprison him in marriage—a position so crudely expressed by Arabella—and her own understanding which teaches her to esteem herself. Her decision to avoid marriage is, by her lights, a mark of respect for herself and Jude, not an instance of flirtation, frigidity, childishness, or self-enclosure.

In the novel marriage does indeed emerge as a grotesque trap, a gin to maim the creatures caught in it. Arabella tricks Jude into marriage twice, once with a pretended pregnancy and once with liquor. When married, she complacently remarks, '"Don't take on, dear. What's done can't be undone,'" while Jude wonders "what he had done … that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a life-time?" (p. 71). If Sue demands her own freedom, she secures as much for Jude as well; living in their simple way, Jude is "more independent than before" (p. 314).

Neither Sue nor Jude can persuade themselves to marry. On this issue they share similar fears, although Sue again is more articulate than Jude. Kramer argues [in Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, 1975] that the "only condition of the matrimonial relationship that she [Sue] is unfitted to fill is its coerciveness." And, in fact, here Sue's sexuality appears perfectly healthy. As lovers, she and Jude remain in a "dreamy paradise" (p. 328), and the advent of the child, Father Time, "rather helped than injured their happiness" because it brings into their lives "a new and tender interest of an ennobling and unselfish kind" (p. 348). Still, Sue fears the "iron contract" of marriage because it exacts certain behavior from the participants; it "licenses" love. And Arabella's blunt advice that Sue should "coax" Jude to marry her so that she has legal remedies and protection against his possible brutality only confirms Sue in her feelings that marriage is a "hopelessly vulgar" (p. 326) institution, "a sort of trap to catch a man" (pp. 323-25). Her pride will not let her act in ways repugnant to her self-esteem. She adopts a courageous position, made the more courageous by the lack of understanding support.

The issues go deeper. Jude shares her fears: "though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he felt checked by the dread of incompetency just as she did" (p. 345). Jude seems to realize a possibility that he might lapse into indifference, and such a fear is not without validity since, as we have seen, Jude is very conventional about human relationships. What freedom he attains seems principally a reflex of Sue's vision. Arabella calls him a "baby" because he is so gullible to conventional appeals. He, of course, marries Arabella because she says she is pregnant. Once married, Jude, of course, regards the arrangement as lifelong. Arabella suggests divorce. Once Sue joins him, they should, of course, have sexual relations because men and women do. And once divorced from their first spouses, they should, of course, marry. And when Arabella returns, she is more his wife than Sue since Arabella and Jude have had sexual relations. Even at the end of the novel, when Jude remarries Arabella, he claims hotly, the conventional blinkers still on: "'I said I' d do anything to—save a woman's honour … And I've done it!'" (p. 464). Never does Jude see the tension between sex and friendship, between marriage and identity, although he initially thought that "if he could only get over the sense of her [Sue's] sex,… what a comrade she would make" (p. 184). Jude's complicated initial responses to Sue reveal the confusions in his attitude toward woman as friend and woman as sexual object. Conventional in his instincts, Jude here reminds us of Hardy's Angel Clare, whose instincts betrayed him back to a rigid conventionality in his response to Tess. Sue is justified in fearing that, in a conventional relationship, Jude might well behave in totally conventional ways. He himself senses and fears it.

This is not to blame Jude for the tragedy. Rather it argues that we conclude something more than that "Jude's choice of Sue is what dooms him" Unfortunately the novel's conclusion once again limits the complexity and cohesiveness we have afforded Sue's character and, in so doing, encourages rather simplistic explanations. The stereotypic case study of a masochistic, narcissistic, hysterical, or intellectual-but-emotionally-impoverished woman is fulfilled in Sue's decision to return to Phillotson. Yet that conclusion, beginning with the death of the children, is curiously attenuated. The children exist in the novel principally to die. They have no convincing life; they do not engage us as personalities. Jude, who has come to Christminster still dominated by his early illusions, finally "sees," whereas Sue blinds herself.

The final acts of Hardy's drama are ritualistic; the dancers simply change places. Sue—a complex personality—is relegated to "Woman": "was woman a thinking integer at all"; "Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance … narrow the views of women.…" Aspects of her character—independence from traditional form and beliefs, emotional integrity, her sparkling intellect—are lopped off as if they had never existed. Her grief becomes her undoing in the narrator's eyes, but that final sketch of Sue seriously reduces, even contradicts, the character we have come to know through the novel's action. If we compare her with Angel Clare, whose narrative role in Tess is analogous to Sue's in Jude, we discover great differences. Angel's liberal notions are tested by Tess's revelation of her relationship with Alec, and his ideas are immediately found incompatible with his instincts. Sue's ideas, especially about marriage, have been consistently supported by her instincts and feelings. The action shows her to be what she believes she is—until the end.

The critical need to construct a coherent and logical character out of Sue—consistent even in her inconsistencies—has led to portraits which often, as the critic stands back to survey his work, must be qualified by the statement that she is really much more wonderful than this. Perhaps the only way to explain the contradiction between a critic's and a reader's Sue is finally to acknowledge that the artist's conception itself is inconsistent and flawed, that because of Hardy's change of subject, there is an imbalance in the narrative technique never compensated for despite revision. And that imbalance is heightened by ambivalent and incomplete evaluation of Sue. Sue remains an unevenly conceived character. Hardy, sensitive to ambiguity in his final novel, has extended his narrative art to its limits. But if the narrative technique complicates the portrait of Sue, it partially compensates for these problems in rendering the pathos of limited human understanding and so anticipates narrative experimentation in the twentieth century. The flaws in Sue's presentation and the limits of the novel's evaluation of her seem to mirror Jude's partial understanding, the partial understanding which underlies and baffles all human intercourse, attempts at meaning, and strivings for self-realization. Despite the typically nineteenth-century attempt at an omniscient narrator, then, the narrative sensibility underlying Jude the Obscure is distinctively modern.

Problems of individual limitations are at the heart of Hardy's last novel. His former tendency to find the tragic source in malevolent forces or inimical nature is more muted. In Jude, we have nothing comparable to Egdon Heath, and the choric voice of previous novels finds a thin and unconvincing substitute in Aunt Drusilla's warnings to Jude and Sue about the doom of hereditary temperament. They are destroyed by the gins and nets of a society very imperfectly tuned to their individual needs and by their own failures to understand each other.

Seen in this light, it is not surprising that Jude the Obscure is Hardy's last novel. It is the novel in which judgments and pronouncements are not so easy. Point of view is problematic. The complexities of the world Hardy depicts are not easily placed in a large philosophical perspective. An d Jude, unlike Tess in her moments at Stonehenge, seems incapable of tragic transcendence and cathartic understanding. In earlier works, Hardy is genuinely comfortable in the philosophical, tragic mode. As his narrative vision and techniques become increasingly sensitive to the ambiguity of personal desire, social expectation and individual responsibility, his novelistic art becomes mature and subtle. But Thomas Hardy seems unhappy with the novelistic vision which stresses the ambiguity of experience, and he turns to a more congenial mode—poetry—which plays with the ambiguity of idea and which does not engage one in the painful complexities and failure of lived lives. Nonetheless, his final novel, Jude, stands as a testimony to Hardy's understanding of the painful immediacy of experience and the terrible ways in which personal limitations combine with social limitations to produce a disaster which no philosophy can redeem.