SOURCE: "Becoming a Ma n in Jude the Obscure," in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 32-48.

[In the following essay, Langland evaluates Jude's dilemma of identity in terms of his struggles with the social ideologies of class and gender.]

Because Thomas Hardy's representations of women, by and large, exceed the simple stereotypes scholars initially identified as characteristic images of women, feminist critics early turned to his novels. While those first studies opened up possibilities of a rewarding feminist approach to Hardy, recent work looks more broadly at gender, exploring the problem of masculinity as well as femininity. Poised between centuries (nineteenth and twentieth), between cultures (rural and urban), and between classes (peasantry and middling), Hardy engaged profound social dislocations in ways that disturbed the stability of gender classifications. His representation in Jude the Obscure of the social and material construction of masculinity and femininity reveals something that feminist and gender critics are only beginning to explore: the extent to which patriarchal constructions of masculinity become constrictions and, when inflected by class, create contradictions for individual males. To speak of "patriarchy" in this way exposes a basic truth. Patriarchy (like the resistance to it) is not only outside but also inside, structuring language, logic, our very understanding of human subjectivity. Part of the novel's brilliance derives from Hardy's ability to represent Jude's battle with the class and gender self-constructions his culture offers him. His embattlement gives the novel its richness and generates its tragic denouement.

The novel articulates Jude's dilemma of identity largely through his conflicting responses to his cousin, Sue Bridehead. This interpretation of Jude the Obscure turns attention away from questions of the authenticity of Sue's character—where it has often focused—and queries instead Sue's place in the construction of Jude's masculinity, her role as catalyst for the text's trenchant critique of gender and class paradigms. In an earlier article, I have demonstrated that Sue as character is filtered almost entirely through Jude's perspective. Thus, she is known to us through his experience and interpretations of her. I will argue here that Jude increasingly embraces relationship with his cousin as a means of self-fulfillment. He seizes upon her as an answer to the difficulty of "growing up," his feeling that "He did not want to be a man" (1.2.15) [page references are to the New American Library edition of Jude the Obscure, 1961]. Through kinship and twinship with Sue, Jude seeks an alternative to the frustrating constructions of his masculinity that his culture holds out.

By linking issues of self-definition to cultural practices, discourses, and institutions, Teresa de Lauretis and Linda Alcoff provide a way of thinking about a human subject [in Signs 13 (Spring 1988)] "constructed through a continuous process, an ongoing constant renewal based on an interaction with the world … [defined] as experience. 'And thus [subjectivity] is produced not by external ideas, values, or material causes, but by one's personal, subjective engagement in the practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning, and affect) to the events of the world.'" Alcoff goes on to note that this is the process "through which one's subjectivity becomes en-gendered."

We may merge this concept of subjectivity with a Bakhtinian distinction between authoritatively persuasive and internally persuasive discourses that interact in the historical and cultural construction of a subject. Often, Bakhtin explains [in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1981],

an individual's becoming, an ideological process, is characterized precisely by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one, the authoritative word (religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, not by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code. The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness.

Bakhtin offers an important dialogical model of an individual's engagement with the world, the struggle between the authoritatively persuasive and the internally persuasive word. In the wide gap between the two, however, he locates idealistically the possibility of individual choice and control over one's destiny.

In contrast, I would agree with Alcoff that authoritative discourse often takes on the aspect of the internally persuasive word, if not at first then at last. De Lauretis explains further [in Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, edited by De Lauretis, 1986]: "Self and identity, in other words, are always grasped and understood within particular discursive configurations. Consciousness, therefore, is never fixed, never attained once and for all, because discursive boundaries change with historical conditions." Such a theory allows us to account for Jude's initial embrace, rejection, and final recuperation of his culture's religious, political, sexual, and moral discourses: the authoritative word of a father, of adults, of teachers. Jude's longing for Sue Bridehead is culturally embedded within this dynamic: he interprets her as that which his culture forbids. As an alternative to authoritative discourses, she embodies the internally persuasive voice.

It is a striking detail of the novel that Jude longs for Sue before he sees her, before he has even seen a picture of her. Why? Sue is introduced early in the novel in Aunt Drusilla's comments to a neighbor overheard by Jude. She links her two foster children through their love of books—"His cousin Sue is just the same" (1.2.9). Yet, she also contrasts Sue, a "tomboy," to Jude, a "poor useless boy," who has the sensibility and frame of a girl. Slender and small, Jude weeps easily and feels pain keenly: "he was a boy who could not himself bear to hurt anything," a tendency the narrator terms, only half-ironically, a "weakness of character" (1.2.13). Jude feels the assaults of his life so sharply that he wishes "he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man" (1.2.15). Jude's desire to evade the constraints of manhood leads him to posit an alternative that he reifies in the character at once like and unlike him, his cousin, Sue.

The problem of becoming a man and the prohibition of Sue Bridehead are linked in Jude's mind by the early events at Mary green and Aunt Drusilla's comments on the tragic issue of Fawley marriages. If marriage is fatal to one Fawley, the same blood flowing through two linked individuals must culminate in tragedy. Sue is, therefore, forbidden to Jude. Hardy encodes that prohibition as a function of fate or nature. Aunt Drusilla warns: "Jude, my child, don't you ever marry. Tisn't for the Fawleys to take that step any more" (1.2.9). Hardy himself defined his concern in the novel as "the tragic issues of two bad marriages, owing in the main to a doom or curse of hereditary temperament peculiar to the family of the partners." The idea of hereditary taint reproduces in the narrator's attitudes the same conflicts that doom Jude. Such fatalistic discourse disguises the extent to which actual institutions coerce and thwart individuals, a process traced throughout the novel, which contemporaneous critics rightly recognized as a trenchant attack on authoritarian social practices and institutions.

That attack begins in the early events of the novel when Jude is hired to scare away the rooks come to peck the grain in Farmer Troutham's field. "His heart grew sympathetic with the birds' thwarted desires" (1.2.11), and he lets them feed until surprised by his angry employer who beats him. That beating, which chastens desire, initiates Jude's reluctance to become a man, at least a man fashioned after the class models most readily available to him.

In the process of formulating his identity, Jude fastens on Christminster and becoming a "university graduate," "the necessary hallmark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching" (1.1.4). Both are associated with Mr. Phillotson, his early model, and both are utterly distinguished from his current life, substituting as they do a middle-class for a lower-class model of manhood. Ironically, his aunt puts the idea in his head that such an occupation might suit her "poor boy." After Troutham fires Jude, she complains: "Jude, Jude, why didstn't go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere?" (1.2.14). He reverently anticipates that "Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased" (1.6.41). Although the Latin makes the school his mother, in fact, by entering Christminster, Jude would embrace an established patriarchal tradition, a fact underscored in the Biblical passage that Jude's rhetoric echoes: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17).

Hardy frames the larger issue of Jude's struggle with social codes by stressing his desire to learn the languages of the past. Jude will master Latin and Greek with the goal of ultimately being authorized to speak as an educated, middle-class man. Latin, in particular, holds power over him even before he knows anything about it except its ascribed value. His longing for that authority culminates in a fanciful idea of Christminster as a "new Jerusalem" (1.3.20) and as a "mistress" (1.3.22) who is beckoning him to his fulfillment. The intensity with which Jude applies himself to these dead languages reveals their power, which is not simply the authoritatively persuasive word of his "fathers" and of the past, but quickly becomes an internally persuasive word guiding Jude's first major struggle toward self-definition. His ability to use Latin and to understand Latin will determine his behavior at later moments of crisis.

Until he is nineteen, Jude's sexual impulses are held completely in abeyance by his infatuation for the scholastic life. But Jude's encounter with Arabella Donn temporarily displaces the authority of intellectual discourse with another ideology. Generally, Jude's distraction has been interpreted as a capitulation to his natural sexual instincts, what the narrator characterizes as "The unvoiced call of woman to man, which … held Jude to the spot against his intention—almost against his will" (1.6.44). But sexual desire is not, in fact, what traps Jude. Notably, he is never the sexual aggressor with Arabella; she sees all his advances as "rather mild!" (1.7.52), and she has to plot rather cleverly to bring him to the point.

Two cultural paradigms of masculinity motivate Jude's divided drives. The first dictates that a "natural" man will find the stimulus of a proximate woman sufficient to arouse strong sexual desire, and it cuts across classes. The second involves the rhetoric of chivalric or honorable love and courtship and belongs more properly to the middle and upper classes. According to the first essentialist discourse, men are sexually different from women. Even Phillotson, a middle-aged, staid scholar, can consummate and reconsummate his marriage with a rigid and unresponsive Sue Bridehead. He, after all, is a "man." Thus, although the rhetoric of the novel presents Jude's weakness for women as a fault, it also insists on that "weakness" or susceptibility as important evidence of manliness. When Jude fails to live up to other discursive formulations of his masculinity, this one never fails him, as we shall discover in the crucial final scenes of the novel.

Surprisingly, this rhetoric of manliness is not undercut by the behavior of Arabella Donn, who is always equally ready to engage in sexual relations. We may attribute that curious gap to the presence of the second authoritative discourse we have identified. When Jude becomes sexually involved with Arabella, he simultaneously becomes entangled in another discourse of manliness whose hall-mark is romance, chivalry, and honor: "It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!" (1.7.53). These two discourses cooperate to construct the "gentle-man," a middle-class ideal. Notably, Phillotson is as bound by the second discourse as Jude; it initially determines his decision to let Sue leave him to go to Jude. He justifies his decision to Gillingham in the following way: "I don't think you are in a position to give an opinion. I have been that man, and it makes all the difference in the world, if one has any manliness or chivalry in him" (4.4.278).

Jude's susceptibility to the chivalric code of helpless women and protective and honorable men allows Arabella to use her claim of pregnancy to trap him into marriage. In spite of the fact that Jude knows too well "that Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind," "he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences" and "save [her] ready or no" (1.9.65, 70). His susceptibility to this discourse—a function of his middle-class aspirations—distinguishes Jude's "finer" aspirations and sensibilities from the "peasant cynicism" of country women like Arabella and Aunt Drusilla. According to their discourse, he is a "simple fool" (1.9.65) and "poor silly fellow" (1.9.66). When Arabella's plot is revealed, Jude vaguely ponders not his own folly, but "something wrong in a social ritual" (1.9.70). In fact, Jude's construction of manliness betrays him because he applies a middle-class ethic to Arabella's classic peasant ruse.

After Jude should have learned the bankruptcy of this patriarchal code of male honor and female victims—in its inapplicability to his relationship with Arabella where he is the defenseless innocent and she the practiced seducer—it seems inexplicably naive of him to persist in it. Yet such persistence provides another example of the ways in which authoritative discourses becomes internally persuasive. Indeed, Jude clings to such constructions both because they define him as middle-class and because they define him as masculine (not simply as male). Jude learns from Arabella not to question the adequacy of such formulations but only to "feel dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done" (1.10.76).

Such class and gender constructions of his masculinity come to seem essential to Jude's identity. When Arabella and Jude separate at her instigation, Jude returns to his dream of education in Christminster, motivated by another pair of self-images. First, he reaffirms his dream of modeling his manhood and embourgeoisement on the schoolteacher, Phillotson. In addition, he pursues an elusive superiority and gender neutrality figured by his middle-class cousin, Sue Bridehead, whom he has seen only in a photograph. The narrator explains this new motive as "more nearly related to the emotional side of him than to the intellectual, as is often the case with young men." It really is surprising that Jude should be led to Christminster by a photograph, especially after his disastrous marriage. But we accept the motive, I believe, because we recognize that Sue offers an alternative version of his problematic self. She is like Jude, after all, also "of the inimical branch of the family" (2.1.90).

Entering Christminster at evening, Jude immediately feels himself in the presence of "those other sons of the place" (2.1.93), a kind of patrillineage that seems to promise accommodation for a humble laborer. But in the morning, "he found that the colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances.… The spirits of the great men had disappeared" (2.2.97). Although Jude is momentarily impressed by the dignity of manual labor, what the narrator calls a "true illumination"—that the "stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of colleges"—he soon loses this impression "under the stress of his old idea" (2.2.98). Ironically, this discourse of manual labor's dignity stems from the middle-class intellectual elite, and the very condescension implicit in the perspective undermines its validity. So the narrator reproduces in his own rhetoric the conflicts that will doom Jude. Because Jude will be a manual laborer denied access to scholarly pursuits, the gap opened up will lead him increasingly to Sue as an authentic alternative. Not surprisingly, then, no sooner is Jude aware of the gap between his aspirations and his pursuits than his passion for Sue intensifies. He insists his aunt send his cousin's portrait, "kissed it—he did not know why—and felt more at home.… It was … the one thing uniting him to the emotions of the living city" (2.2.99).

This extraordinary scene of alienation and "at homeness" makes Sue pivotal to the construction of Jude's identity. Jude's claim of blood and emotional kinship (she "belongs" to him) suggests that his investment in her is deeply tied to his gender identity (2.2.103). Before meeting her, Jude has already internalized Sue's being as essential to his own subjecthood, a process intensified by his aunt's prohibition that "he was not to bring disturbance into the family by going to see the girl" (2.2.99). Sue represents what is in him but also what he is not to seek in himself, which is here coded as the feminine. His desire to discover that alternative, of course, results from his frustrations with both lower-class social definitions of manhood and the conflicts introduced by middle-class codes. When he first locates Sue, he "recognized in the accents certain qualities of his own voice." (2.2.103) [my emphasis]. Later Jude sees Sue, dressed in his clothes, as "a slim and fragile being masquerading as himself on a Sunday" (3.3.173). He affirms, "Yo u are just like me at heart!" (4.1.243). Phillotson corroborates the "extraordinary sympathy, or similarity, between the pair.… They seem to be one person split in two!" (4.4.276). Jude appropriates Sue to ground his floundering self in her "social and spiritual possibilities" (2.3.107).

Jude alternates between reflections on Sue as an "ideality" or a "divinity"—totally divorced from the coarse Arabella—and sexual longings for her. The tension in Jude's view has often been interpreted as stemming from Sue's "inconsistency"—her waxing hot and cold, her frigidity coupled with her desire for attention. But this approach to her character as a charming neurotic tends to ignore her fictional, cultural, and tendentious construction. I propose, instead, that the tension within the narrator's depiction of Sue reflects Jude's complex investment in her, which also causes him to hide from her his marriage to Arabella.

The urgent need Jude feels for Sue stems from his increasingly precarious sense of masculine identity and social significance. Comparing Christminster's "town life" to its "gown life" (2.6.139), he characterizes the former as the "real Christminster life" (2.7.141). The text implies that, if Jude were not possessed by "the modern vice of unrest" (2.2.98), not a "paltry victim of the spirit of mental and social restlessness" (6.1.393-94), he might be able to have a more authentic existence, that is, one grounded in a secure sense of who and what he is. At such moments, the narrator seems implicated in the same ideological illusions and conflicts that condemn Jude. The idea of an authentic existence is problematic in the text. Thus, Jude flounders among social markers for masculine identity and increasingly turns to Sue as the source of his meaning, finally concluding, "with Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile" (2.6.137). Of course, Jude is naive to believe he can easily renounce his ambitions; they are already too important to his self-concept, as we shall see.

In the novel's first half, Jude progresses from would-be intellectual, to honorable young husband (Marygreen), to would-be intellectual again (Christminster), to would-be ecclesiastic (Melchester)—each stage dominated by a particular authoritative discourse that promises to make a man of Jude. All the while Jude keeps in reserve his dream of Sue as a means to construct a self outside un-satisfactory patriarchal models: "To keep Sue Bridehead near him was now a desire which operated without regard of consequences" (2.4.121). Only the force of his need explains why Jude cannot tell Sue of his marriage to Arabella and must instead project his failure and secreti veness onto her as her inconsistency. When he finally and belatedly informs her and lamely excuses himself—"It seemed cruel to tell it"—she justly rebukes him, "To yourself, Jude. So it was better to be cruel to me!" (3.6.198).

When Jude finally reveals his marriage to Arabella, he also begins to generalize about Sue as a "woman." Such generalizations characterize the two points in the narrative when Jude must defend himself against separation from Sue, first here and then at the end of the novel. Previously, Sue has been represented in a more gender-neutral way, as a "tomboy," who joins boys in their exploits, or as a "comrade" with a "curious unconsciousness of gender" (3.4.179), who mixes with men "almost as one of their own sex" (3.4.177). Impelled to defend his own sexuality, Jude now stresses Sue's need to exercise "those narrow womanly humours on impulse that were necessary to give her sex" (3.6.200). Sue both is and is not a typical woman depending on Jude's psychosocial investment in her. At those points when he fears he will lose her, he tends to brand her typical of her sex to distance himself from his need for her. He repeats this distancing act at Susanna's marriage to Phillotson: "Women were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead of more sensitive, as reported, more callous and less romantic?" (3.7.209).

Sue's self-generalizations as woman have a somewhat different textual function. She says, for example, in reference to herself, "some women's love of being loved is insatiable" (4.1.245). Such comments reinforce Jude's characterizations of Sue as asexual "spirit," a "disembodied creature," a "dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom—hardly flesh at all" (4.5.294). The spiritualization preserves her as the endlessly desired object, a Shelleyan Epipsyche. The text demands, above all, "the elusiveness of her curious double nature" (4.2.251).

The last half of the novel focuses the tension between Jude's need to be the man his culture demands and his desire to locate a more fulfilling existence outside custom and convention. When Jude argues his similarity to his cousin—"for you are just like me at heart"—she demurs, "But not at head." And when he insists, "we are both alike," she corrects him, "Not in our thoughts" (4.1.243). Their disagreement arises because Sue's attractiveness disrupts but cannot displace the categories of masculinity Jude has already internalized. Jude is drawn in two directions because he can never fully abandon the categories of thought he has imbibed from his culture.

Constructed as an outsider to patriarchal culture, Sue can articulate social tensions that Jude can then increasingly recognize. She argues, "the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns" (4.1.246-47). When Sue asks Jude, hypothetically, if a woman with a repugnance for her husband ought "to try to overcome her pruderies," he responds in contradictory ways, "speaking as an orderloving man … I should say yes. Speaking from experience and unbiased nature, I should say no" (4.2.252). Shortly thereafter, under pressure of his love for Sue, Jude announces, "my doctrines and I begin to part company" (4.2.258). After he passionately kisses Sue, Jude realizes that "he was as unfit, obviously by nature, as he had been by social position, to fill the part of a propounder of accredited dogma." Yet barred by Sue's marriage to Phillotson and his own marriage to Arabella, Jude has recourse to the category of "woman" to explain his difficulties: "Strange that his first aspiration—toward academical proficiency—had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—toward apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. 'Is it,' he said, 'that women are to blame.'" (4.3.261).

The conclusion, "women are to blame," lodges Jude's reasoning within a traditional framework that takes him back to the Garden of Eden, Genesis, and Eve's temptation and fall. Although Jude should reject a discourse so inadequate to his experience, instead he reauthorizes its tenets on women. Such constructions are so essential to his subjectivity that they cannot be completely abandoned. Indeed, it is important to Jude that "he might go on believing as before but he professed nothing" (4.3.262, my italics).

The role of women as temptresses in this narrative corresponds to an ideology of masculinity that suggests sex is, for a man, a snare that leads first to entrapment, then disillusionment, and even damnation. As we have seen, a deep ideological subtext of the novel argues that a "man" is inherently disposed toward sexual relations and will find women a lure to physical intimacy. The fact that sexual familiarity may culminate in contempt does not prevent his being ready to behave sexually on the next encounter. A companion ideology stipulates that, whatever his feelings, a "gentle-man" will then behave honorably toward the "victimized" woman. The logic of these interlocking ideologies supports Jude's sexual relations with Arabella, both initially and following a chance encounter after several years' separation.

Jude's embrace of the gentlemanly ethic allows the lower-class Arabella repeatedly to exploit him. Similarly, when Arabella later appeals to Jude to follow her to her hotel to hear her story, and Sue objects, Jude argues: "I shall certainly give her something, and hear what it is she is so anxious to tell me; no man could do less!" (5.2.318). Arabella pronounces, "Never such a tender fool as Jude is if a woman seems in trouble" (5.2.324).

All of Jude's justifications of his behavior produce essentialist views of men and women. When Sue asks, "Why should you take such trouble for a woman who has served you so badly," he responds, "But, Sue, she's a woman, and I once cared for her; and one [a man] can't be a brute in such circumstances" (5.2.319). In response to Sue's accusation that his behavior is "gross," Jude replies, "Yo u don't understand me either—women never do!" (4.5.293). By generalizing from "you"—Sue—to "women," Jude also implicitly generalizes from "me"—Jude—to "men." Women do not understand men or male sexuality.

Jude's determination to fulfill a "man's" obligations to Arabella exerts a sexual coercion on Sue, who precipitously agrees to sleep with Jude to erase Arabella's claims on him. When Sue capitulates, Jude transfers to her his sexual allegiance and chivalric code. Arabella is no longer "a woman" but her clever self: "You haven't the least idea how Arabella is able to shift for herself" (5.2.322).

The sexual possession of Sue marks a crux in the novel and in Jude's self-construction. It permits him to define his male "nature" as one given to sensual indulgence—wine, women, and blasphemy. But he also aspires to a value outside a carnal construction of his masculinity that he locates in his relations with Sue. He tells her: "All that's best and noblest in me loves you, and your freedom from everything that's gross has elevated me, and enabled me to do what I should never have dreamt myself capable of, or any man, a year or two ago" (5.2.320, my italics). The kinship Jude feels for this female self allows him to move beyond the patriarchal imprimatur, defining an identity he had not believed accessible to himself or any man. In the "nomadic" phase of their life together, Jude "was mentally approaching the position which Sue had occupied when he first met her" (5.7.373).

Their kinship will be undermined by the cultural codes that define Jude's masculinity. Although Jude is represented as sharing Sue's anxiety about the constraints of marriage, his behavior is simultaneously shaped by Biblical injunctions on manhood: "For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hath not taken her?" (5.4.338). And although the couple is exquisitely happy in their life together—returned, in Sue's words, to "Greek joyousness" (5.5.358)—Jude reveals his continuing attraction to Christminster in the Model of Cardinal College he and Sue have made for the Wessex Agricultural Show. Despite the narrator's insistence on Jude's independence of thought, he chooses to bake "Christminster cakes" when he is pressed for employment after his illness. Arabella neatly pinpoints his continuing obsession and slavery to his former ideals: "Still harping on Christminster—even in his cakes.… Just like Jude. A ruling passion." Sue admits: "Of course Christminster is a sort of fixed vision with him, which I suppose he'll never be cured of believing in. He still thinks it a great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is, a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition" (5.7.376).

Arabella's accidental meeting with Phillotson, immediately following her rencontre with Sue, sets the stage for the series of reversals or "returns" that conclude the novel. Her crude invocation of Old Testament law and learning as a model for contemporary behavior prepares us for the way in which Jude, as well as Phillotson, will be drawn back to the authority and consequence held out to them as men in a patriarchal society. Arabella states: "There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side Moses knew.… 'Then shall the man be guiltless; but the woman shall bear her iniquity'" (5.8.384). Arabella's addendum—"Damn rough on us women; but we must grin and put up wi' it!"—comfortably accepts a damaging gender bifurcation that Jude and even Phillotson have struggled to overcome in their response to Sue Bridehead. When Sue questions, "Why should you care so much for Christminster?" Jude replies: "I can't help it. I love the place.… it is the centre of the universe to me, because of my early dream.… I should like to go back to live there—perhaps to die there!" (5.8.386). Part 5 culminates with the realization of his dream to return there; Part 6 culminates with the realization of his dream to die there.

We, too, ask Sue's questions: why does Jude suddenly develop a passionate desire to return to Christminster for this Remembrance Day, and why does he return in a way so entirely forgetful of Sue and his children? Then, why does Jude persist in his resolve to seek work in Christminster after it has become the scene of his grotesque tragedy and can serve only as a reminder of that tragedy? In fact, the text occludes these questions and shifts focus to Sue Bridehead's intellectual, sexual, and emotional degradation. But there are significant ideological implications in that textual strategy. These breaks and shifts reveal their inner logic if we keep our eye on Jude's alternating evasion and pursuit of manhood.

Jude's return to Christminster spells a rejection of Sue and a reembrace of the patriarchal discourse that originally attracted him. Whereas on one level it seems absurd to say that Jude has rejected Sue since he pleads for her emotional and physical return to him, the subtext of the novel argues differently. By returning to Christminster, Jude privileges a hierarchic order in opposition to his more egalitarian relationship with Sue. Indeed, by delaying the search for housing, he shifts the burden of their relationship onto Sue, who bears the visible evidence of their three children and her pregnancy while he again becomes, in effect, the unencumbered novice who first entered the city several years earlier. When he again seeks lodging in his old quarter, Beersheba, he continues to replicate his earlier patterns. The unbearable poignancy of the novel's last section derives not only from the representation of Sue's collapse but also from the painful tension between Jude's embrace and rejection of Sue, a rejection that demands the collapse of her textual function as a significant alternative.

Jude longs for the spirit of the law, but is drawn to the letter as primary ground of his identity. Jude finally seeks an authority to define the meaning of his life, and he must do that from within the system, from a position that validates the system and its judgments of him as a failed man who has "missed everything." This final need for authority explains Jude's return to Christminster. Jude wants that intellectual milieu to frame the tragic limitation of his manhood. If, as Sue says, Christminster is only a "nest of commonplace schoolmasters," then Jude's life is a relative success. To give his life the tragic cast he favors, he must reauthorize Christminster. Relationship with Sue originally provided a focal point for a critique of authoritative discourse. Now that relationship, in its domestic and quotidian aspects, cuts away the ground of meaning necessary to Jude's "tragedy." The triumphant tragedy of Jude's life is only apparent when inscribed within the dominant, authoritative discourse of Christminster. It is under that authority that he can echo Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in summarizing his life: "However, it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one" (6.1.393).

The narrative sequence supports a reading of Jude's return to Christminster as a rejection of Sue Bridehead. First, Jude chooses to return on Remembrance Day when the city is teeming with visitors. Upon arrival he initially insists that "the first thing is lodgings," but he quickly abandons that goal in his desire to hurry to the procession, ignoring Sue's demurral: "Oughtn't we to get a house over our heads first?" Although "his soul seemed full of the anniversary," Jude announces that Remembrance Day is really "Humiliation Day for me!" a "lesson in presumption," an image of his own "failure" (6.1.390). Of course, to see his failure is also to see the possibility of success, to see that he might have become "a son of the University." The Alma Mater as pater familias. As it begins to rain and "Sue again wished not to stay," Jude grows more enthusiastic as he rediscovers old friends and reevaluates his life. He says he is "in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example" (6.1.394), thereby grounding his identity in the context of Christminster and its definitions of success. Through that prism he reexamines his life, granting to Christminster authority to write his "romance," the middle-class tragic romance of the common man: "I' m an outsider to the end of my days!" (6.1.396).

Throughout the entire day, through thunderstorms and drenchings, Jude ignores his pale, reluctant wife and his several children to bask once more in the reflected glory of Christminster, "to catch a few words of the Latin," and so, in spirit, join the fraternity that has otherwise excluded him. He may tell Sue that "I'll never care any more about the infernal cursed place," but as they belatedly begin to search for lodgings, Jude is drawn to "Mildew Lane," close to the back of a college, a spot he finds "irresistible" and Sue "not so fascinating" (6.1.396). She is finally housed outside Sarcophagus and Rubric Colleges, Hardy's symbolically appropriate names, and she contemplates "the strange operation of a simple-minded man's ruling passion, that it should have led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly, to place them here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still haunted by his dream" (6.2.401). Jude's pursuit of his "dream" has left Sue and the children terribly exposed, and the events culminate in Father Time's suicide and murder of the other two children. Sue claims responsibility for these tragic events and neither the narrator nor Jude disputes her interpretation, yet responsibility really belongs to Jude who, in returning to Christminster, rejected Sue and his children for his old "dream."

Sue now takes on the narrative function of justifying Jude: "M y poor Jude—how you've missed everything!—you more than I, for I did get you! To think you should know that [the chorus of the Agamemnon] by your unassisted reading, and yet be in poverty and despair!" (6.2.409). There is nothing in the narrative that contradicts Sue's assessment. Thus the text can endorse the position that Jude "missed everything" while Sue, in getting Jude, apparently "got" what she wanted. It is ironic that she, who was supposed to be what he wanted, now stands debased, as the coin he received for his labors, an emblem of what riches he has missed.

It is a further irony that the only blame Jude accepts is for "seducing" Sue, a grotesque reinterpretation of his desire for Sue. He claims, "I have seemed to myself lately … to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous—the men called seducers.… Yes, Sue—that's what I am. I seduced you.… Yo u were a distinct type—a refined creature, intended by Nature to be left intact" (6.3.414). The idea of Jude as seducer presents an absurd reduction of their complex relationship with its twin fulfillments of independence and happiness. But a reconstruction of the scenario with himself as seducer serves the function of reconstructing yet another social aspect of Jude's manhood.

As Jude adopts these conventional, middle-class gender terms, he deprives Sue of any meaningful textual role outside parallel gender stereotypes, which dictate that the chaste but violated female move toward self-sacrificing, punitive, masochistic degradation. We return, once more, to the generalizations about women that were absent during the long emotional and sexual intimacy between Jude and Sue: "Is woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?" (6.3.424). The text's positioning of comments like this one suggests that Sue's function as desirable other, a space free from the socially coded and rigid definition of manhood, has been exhausted or used up. In order for Jude to reclaim the construction of his manhood implicit first in Christminster and then in his relationship with Arabella, Sue must be reinterpreted as merely a pathetic woman whose mind has become unhinged. Hence, her "inconsistency."

This strict sexual bifurcation figures in the novel's closing rhetoric. Sue says to Jude, "Your wickedness was only the natural man's desire to possess the woman" (6.3.426). And , on Sue's return, Phillotson says ominously, "I know woman better now" (6.5.442). Sue accounts for her own role in the relationship by admitting to an "inborn craving which undermines some women's morals.… the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man" (6.3.426).

Jude returns to the twin evils of his life, his "two Arch Enemies … my weakness for womankind and my impulse to strong liquor" (6.3.427). He embraces in his Christminster dreams and the cruel reality of marriage to Arabella the same constricting construction of his man-hood which figured prominently in the opening pages of the novel. Although drunk, Jude calls up the established discourse of manliness to justify remarrying Arabella: "I' d marry the W -of Babylon rather than do anything dishonourable.… marry her I will, so help me God!… I am not a man who wants to save himself at the expense of the weaker among us!" (6.7.461-62). By sacrificing himself to the sham of this "meretricious contract with Arabella," Jude, of course, preserves a definition of manhood essential to his identity.

The honor, the rectitude, the righteousness, and the learning that Jude claims as the hallmarks of his middle-class manhood allow him to die with the words of Job on his lips: "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived" (6.11.488). Such an invocation accords well with the other discourses Jude has previously embraced.

In Jude the Obscure, Hardy has given us a novel in which the authoritatively persuasive word ultimately becomes the internally persuasive one in the construction of one man's subjectivity. In the process, Hardy has revealed masculinity as a cultural and social class construct, one that coerces and limits individuals even as it holds out the irresistible promise of conferring definitive meaning on their lives. In Jude's longing for Sue, Hardy has made us feel the poignant desire for a self free from such coercive definitions, the need for some more flexible way to confront the problem of "growing up … to be a man," for some way to feel satisfied with himself as a man (1.2.15). In Sue's emotional and intellectual collapse, which proleptically justifies Jude's return to the Christminster way, he has made us feel the virtual impossibility of any individual defining himself in opposition to the dominant culture of his or her society. Jude's death and Sue's degradation, the events concluding the novel, arrest but do not resolve the text's testing of discursive formulations of gender paradigms. The anticipated unfolding of a subject proves to be an involution, a collapse inward resisted only by social practices and discourses that mock the idea of individual self-determination and locate self-fulfillment in death.

Early in her relationship with Jude, Sue Bridehead claims that, "We are a little beforehand, that's all" (5.4.345). In fact, she is only partly right; Jude and Sue are constructed by die very terms they seek to transcend. The lingering sadness of this novel lies in its apprehension of the ways destructive cultural self-constructions ultimately reach out to claim them, the ways, indeed, they are always already within, crucial to the formation and development of individual subjecthood and therefore perilous to reject. This modern understanding of the problematic subject and the material basis for subjectivity allows Hardy to give us a trenchant interrogation of the cultural construction of gender paradigms and their often contradictory inflections by class. It also allows him to generate a new form of tragic irony in the disparity between what we can understand and aspire to and what we can ultimately become—undermined, as we are, from within. Hardy's depiction of this ineluctable dilemma of identity gives him a distinctive place in the Victorian canon and suggests significant links with a modern sensibility, which has been acknowledged in his poetry but not so readily in his novels. In this regard, we may recognize Hardy as both the most modern of Victorians, and, in the poignancy of his final novel, the most Victorian of moderns.