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

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

Little Father Time's suicide in Jude the Obscure (1895) is the turning point of a novel demonstrating the cruelty that pervades nature and society. As if the boy's suicide is not terrible enough, Hardy has him hang his younger half-brother and half-sister, the three children suspended from closet hooks. Located near Father Time's body is a note with the victim's last words: "Done because we are too menny." The suicide letter reveals the boy's belief that his father, Jude Fawley, and stepmother, Sue Bridehead, would be better off without the children, who only add to the couple's woes in a Malthusian world. Jude sees his son's suicide as symbolic of an impending universal death wish, and he mournfully reassures Sue that she could not have averted the tragedy. "It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life." These boys, adds Jude, see all the terrors of life before they are strong enough to resist them. "He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live. He's an advanced man, the doctor: but he can give no consolation to—" (406) [all page references are to the Macmillan edition of Jude the Obscure, 1971].

Curiously, although no subject is more important to society than the nurture of its children, the double murder and suicide in Jude the Obscure have elicited virtually no literary commentary—a scholarly neglect confirming Father Time's judgment that the world would be better off without the children. The dearth of criticism is more surprising in light of the fact that the violent deaths of the three children represent, in Ian Gregor's words [in The Great Web: The Form of Hardy's Major Fiction, 1974], the "most terrible scene in Hardy's fiction, indeed it might be reasonably argued in English fiction." Nearly all readers have agreed with Irving Howe's conclusion [in Thomas Hardy, 1967] that the suicide is aesthetically botched: "botched not in conception but in execution: it was a genuine insight to present the little boy as one of those who were losing the will to live, but a failure in tact to burden him with so much philosophical weight." Howe consigns this observation to a parenthesis, however, and Hardy's critics have condemned Father Time's suicide without investigating the underlying causes.

There are, admittedly, several objections that may be raised to a psychological interpretation of the double murder and suicide. Father Time is clearly an allegorical, not a realistic, character. Few literary children have appeared so relentlessly morbid and fatalistic, and his melodramatic entrance and exit strain credibility. To take seriously his fears and vulnerability may strike some readers as misplaced critical attention. Does it matter how Hardy disposes of the three shadowy children, two of whom are neither named nor described?

Despite these criticisms, Jude the Obscure remains one of the most psychologically rich novels in our language, as the published criticism confirms. However artistically contrived Father Time's ending may be, the fictional suicide reveals many of the characteristics of real-life suicides. More importantly, Father Time's actions fore-shadow the murderous impulses culminating in Sue's grim return to her former husband, Richard Phillotson, and Jude's own self-destruction. Father Time is not biologically related to Sue, but he is the true heir to the gloomy philosophy of his father and adoptive mother. Although Jude and Sue attribute Father Time's death to his "incurably sad nature," the suicide is the logical result of a series of narcissistic injuries involving defective parenting. This is a more disturbing interpretation of Father Time's suicide, since it implicates the parents in the children's deaths.

To be sure, from the beginning of the novel, Hardy seems to be indicting nature, specifically, the brutality of a scheme in which the living are condemned to a woeful existence. Nature itself appears to be a defective parent, allowing one species to survive, temporarily, at the expense of another. An early incident, young Jude's identification with a flock of rooks scavenging for food, evokes Hardy's pessimistic naturalism. "They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them" (11). Instead of scaring away the birds to prevent them from devouring the produce destined for human consumption, as Farmer Troutham has paid him to do, Jude allows them to feed off the land. He is swiftly punished for the act. The narrator remarks upon the "flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener" (13). To be alive is to be victimized, the novel suggests, and the Tennysonian belief in nature "red in tooth and claw" pervades Wessex. Jude cannot walk across a pasture without thinking about the coupled earthworms waiting to be crushed on the damp ground. "Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony" (15).

Although the narrator ascribes these gloomy thoughts to Jude's "weakness of character," reflective of an unusually sensitive disposition, the other major figures in the story echo the awareness of injustice. Jude's dismay during the pig-killing scene with Arabella foreshadows Sue's horror at the thought of pigeons intended for Sunday dinner. "O why should Nature's law be mutual butchery!" she exclaims (371). Phillotson similarly observes to Arabella that "Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would!" (384). Jude the Obscure "fluctuates between two opposing views of 'nature,'" Robert B. Heilman notes, [in his Introduction to Jude the Obscure, Harper and Row, 1966], "between a romantic naturalism … and the pessimistic aftermath of scientific naturalism." Nature itself appears to be fundamentally defective, perpetuating suffering and death.

To demonstrate the unfortunate consequences of nature, Hardy introduces Little Father Time into the novel. He is the accidental product of the ill-fated marriage between Jude and Arabella. Born eight months after Arabella left England for Australia, the boy spends his early years with her. Arabella hands over die unwanted child to her parents, who in turn decide they no longer wish to be "encumbered" with him. Arabella then turns him over to Jude. Symptomatic of Father Time's past treatment is the fact that he was never christened, because, he explains, "if I died in damnation, 'twould save the expense of a Christian funeral" (337). His mother and grandparents name him "Little Father Time" because of his aged appearance. He is, the narrator states, "Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices" (332). Sue observes that his face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy. A younger and more extreme portrait of Jude, Father Time is obsessed with death and indignant over the inevitable termination of life. His response to flowers seems almost pathological, especially coming from a child. "I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days!" (358). By the same logic he might have concluded that the flowers' fragility compels us to admire their beauty and vitality. The lively exchange in Sons and Lovers on how to pick flowers is missing from Jude the Obscure. Unlike Jude, Father Time makes no effort to escape his surroundings or pursue a better life; for this reason he remains pathetic, not tragic, defeated too easily and quickly.

Jude agrees to accept his newly discovered son, telling Sue: "I don't like to leave the unfortunate little fellow to neglect. Just think of his life in a Lambeth pothouse, and all its evil influences, with a parent who doesn't want him, and has, indeed, hardly seen him, and a stepfather who doesn't know him" (330). Jude recognizes that a child's healthy development depends upon loving parents and a friendly environment. Sue intuitively empathizes with Father Time's situation, and she is moved to tears when he calls her "mother." But she is distressed by the physical resemblance between Arabella and Father Time, which causes Jude to exclaim: "Jealous little Sue!" (335). Ironically, Little Father Time shares his adoptive mother's gloomy temperament. A number of years pass, with Father Time bringing unexpected joy into his parents' lives. Even though Jude and Sue live together without marrying, consequently suffering social ostracism, they are portrayed as loving, conscientious parents. Jude's decision to move elsewhere for employment prompts Sue to reaffirm her allegiance to Father Time. "But whatever we do, wherever we go, you won't take him away from me, Jude dear? I could not let him go now! The cloud upon his young mind makes him so pathetic to me; I do hope to lift it some day!" (361). Jude reassures her that the family will remain intact.

The crucial scene preceding the children's deaths takes place in Part Sixth, ii, when Sue and Father Time are together in a cheerless room of a lodging house from which they have just been ordered to leave. Opposite the lodging house stands Sarcophagus College, whose outer walls "threw their four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room she occupied" (401). Despondent over the loss of lodgings and Jude's declining prospects for employment, Sue mirrors this gloom to Father Time. When he asks her if he can do anything to help the family, she replies: "No! All is trouble, adversity and suffering!" (402). As the dialogue continues, it becomes increasingly clear that Sue's despair exacerbates the boy's innately melancholy temperament:

"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"

"Partly."

"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"

"It would almost, dear."

"Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a good lodging?"

"Well—people do object to children sometimes."

"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have'em?"

"O—because it is a law of nature."

"But we don't ask to be born?"

"No indeed." (402)

Instead of heeding the child's cry for help, Sue validates Father Time's worst fears—namely, that he and the other two children are responsible for the family's desperate situation. Sue repeatedly misses the opportunity to allay his suspicion of being unwanted and unloved. In the next line Father Time expresses the fear of becoming a burden to his family, a fear intensified by die fact that Sue is not his biological mother and, therefore, under no obligation to care for him. "I oughtn't to have come to 'ee—that's the real truth! I troubled'em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I wish I hadn't been born!"

Here is the perfect moment for Sue to reassure Father Time that he is indeed loved by his parents. If they didn't want him, she could have truthfully said, they never would have consented to adopt him. With luck and determination, she might have added, their lives will improve. However allegorical Father Time's role may be in the novel, during this scene he acts and talks like a scared child. The reader responds to him as if he is fully human, deserving of sympathy. Father Time needs simply to be reassured that the family's circumstances will improve in the future. Indeed, he expects only a reasonable reassurance, not a rosy promise of future happiness. He certainly does not need to hear that unwanted children are responsible for their parents' suffering. How does Sue respond to his wish never to have been born? "You couldn't help it, my dear."

Sue's empathie failure triggers Father Time's inner violence, and his statements become increasingly frantic. "I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!" (402). These unwanted children are Father Time and his two siblings. Father Time contemplates infanticide because Sue has already given up on him; she does nothing to diminish his despair because she shares it fully. The narrator similarly regards Father Time's pessimism as philosophically justified and, hence, beyond disagreement. "Sue did not reply" to the boy's accusations, the narrator tell us, since she was "doubtfully pondering how to treat this too reflective child" (402). Father Time is too reflective, but that is not the issue. His thinking remains morbid, obsessional, and frighteningly simplistic in its solution to suffering.

Mary Jacobus refers to Sue's "mistaken honesty" in telling Father Time that another child is on the way, but Sue's real mistake lies in her failure to understand her child's needs. She equates Father Time's pessimism with profundity, resolves silently to be "honest and candid" with him, as if he were a mature adult rather than a terrified child, and then informs him that she is pregnant again. The information predictably drives him into a frenzy. The dialogue closes with the distracted boy vowing that "if we children was gone there'd be no trouble at all!" Sue answers, "don't think that, dear" (403). Even when she tries to be reassuring, she succeeds only in confirming his fears. The next time she sees him, the three children are hanging from their necks. Devastated by the sight, Sue prematurely goes into labor and suffers a miscarriage.

Jude and Sue adopt Father Time to avoid exposing him to further parental neglect, yet, as the final dialogue between mother and son indicates, it would be hard to imagine a more chilling family environment for the child. Sue is not an abusive or overcontrolling mother, as Mrs . Joe and Miss Havisham are in Great Expectations, and she does not deliberately intend to harm Father Time. She is a depressed mother, not a sadistic one, and since she cannot help herself, readers may reasonably ask how she can be expected to help others, especially someone intent upon killing himself and his two siblings. An d yet, unlike Father Time, Sue is an adult, therefore, responsible for the consequences of her actions. However much we empathize with Sue, we cannot suspend our judgment of her.

Jude the Obscure implies that suicide runs in families, like a defective gene passed from one doomed generation to another, but a more plausible explanation for this family curse lies in environmental and interactional causes. Sue remains only partly aware of this. She reads Father Time's suicide letter and breaks down, convinced that their previous conversation has triggered his violence. Sue and Jude plausibly conjecture that upon waking from sleep, Father Time was unable to find his mother and, fearing abandonment, committed the double murder and suicide. Sue accepts responsibility for Father Time's actions, but her explanations mitigate her complicity in the boy's suicide. Perhaps she should have told him all the "facts of life" or none of them, as she says. Nevertheless, the disclosure of the pregnancy is less wounding to Father Time's self-esteem than her failure to convince him that he is wanted and loved.

By projecting her morbidity onto Father Time and confirming his infanticidal fantasies, Sue effectively places a noose around the child's neck. Father Time's inability to enjoy flowers because they will be withered in a few days has its counterpart in Sue's rationalization of the children's deaths. "It is best, perhaps, that they should be gone.—Yes—I see it is! Better that they should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!" (409). Jude remains supportive, agreeing that what has happened is probably for the best. "Some say that the elders should rejoice when their children die in infancy" (409). Jude does not rejoice at the children's deaths, but he remains unaware of how his statements here and elsewhere mirror the self-destructive philosophy that has victimized the Fawleys. Even the attending physician's interpretation of Father Time's suicide—"the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live"—contains a subtle rationalization. If nothing could have been done to prevent the three deaths, then no one is to blame for the tragedy.

Sue's empathie failure is striking. Her inconsistency of love and self-distraction overwhelm Father Time, as they later do Jude. The defective maternal mirroring represents Father Time's final narcissistic injury. By treating Father Time as an extension of herself, Sue acts out her own unresolved inner conflicts. Moreover, by reinforcing Father Time's suspicion that all children are monstrous, she repeats Victor Frankenstein's abandonment of the Creature. Sue is the opposite of the healthy mother Alice Miller writes about in Prisoners of Childhood: "I f a child is lucky enough to grow up with a mirroring mother, who allows herself to be cathected narcissistically, who is at the child's disposal—that is, a mother who allows herself to be 'made use of as a function of the child's narcissistic development, … then a healthy self-feeling can gradually develop in the growing child." The issue is no whether Sue is a perfect mother, but whether she is a good enough mother who can prepare her children for the vicissitudes of life.

In suggesting that Sue is implicated in her children's deaths, I raise several questions. How is her abandonment of Father Time related to other conflicts in her life? Why does she forsake Jude, the man she loves, for Phillotson, whom she does not love? How does she enact the roles of both Narcissus and Echo?

Sue's contradictions are dazzling. Intellectually liberated but emotionally repressed, she claims to reject the church's outmoded teachings but then embraces reactionary dogma. Refined and ethereal—Jude calls her a "phantasmal, bodiless, creature" with hardly any "animal passion" (312)—Sue arouses men mainly to reject them. Torn between the conflicting claims of body and mind, she sacrifices the integrity of both in a futile quest for self-absolution. The pattern of her behavior suggests defiance, guilt, self-punishment, and abject submission. "There was no limit to the strange and unnecessary penances which Sue would meekly undertake when in a contrite mood" (322). Early in the story she buys two plaster statuettes of Venus and Apollo, symbolic of her attraction to classical beauty and wisdom, respectively, but when the landlady asks her to identify the objects, she dissembles, claiming they are casts of St. Peter and Mary Magdalene. She cannot tell the truth to Jude, not even after the landlady has spitefully shattered the pagan objects.

To understand the origins of Sue's conflicts, we must examine her childhood, but unfortunately, Hardy passes over this period, as Albert J. Guerard points out [in Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories, 1949]. "The origin of Sue's epicene reticence lies somewhere in her childhood, of which Hardy tells us almost nothing; the origin of her moral masochism lies there also." Hardy gives us an important clue, though, about her history before introducing her into the story—a "friendly intimacy" with a Christminster undergraduate. Sue accepted his invitation to live with him in London, but when she arrived there and realized his intentions, she made a counterproposal—to live with him in a sexless union. Sue's relationship with the Christminster undergraduate remains ambiguous. Was she aware of the sexual implications of his invitation to live with him, and, if so, for what reasons did she decline a passionate romance? Several possibilities come to mind, including fear of pregnancy and threat of social ostracism. The friends shared a sitting room for fifteen months, until he was taken ill and forced to go abroad. Although the shadowy episode represents part of her struggle to emancipate herself from repressive social conventions, Sue blames herself for the undergraduate's death. It remains unclear whether she actually intended to hurt him. In narrating the student's account of their relationship, she seems to accept his version of reality, including his censure. "He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty—though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely" (177-78).

We have no way to authenticate what actually happened between Sue and the Christminster undergraduate, but we can analyze the transference implications of Sue's narrating style. Just as patients' stories in psychoanalysis repeat the themes and conflicts of their past, so do fictional characters' narrating styles represent "memorializations of their unresolved pasts." Expressing the hope that the student died of consumption and not from herself, Sue reveals a tendency to hold herself responsible for all the failures in her relationships. In characterizing the young man as a victim of love, she depicts herself as a victimizer. She feels remorse for her cruelty but also satisfaction over her power, even though in hurting others, she hurts herself. Jude is understandably horrified by Sue's story, which provokes her to say, with a "contralto note of tragedy" in her voice: "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" (178). But Sue knows how Jude will react to the story. Like Estella, who repeatedly warns Pip that she will break his heart if he becomes romantically involved with her, Sue forewarns Jude about the dangers of intimacy with her—a heeding he fatally disregards.

Sue's relationships with Phillotson and Jude are replays of the unhappy union with the Christminster undergraduate. Phillotson is a hardworking school teacher whose name evokes his conventional social views and stolid character. Eighteen years older than Sue, he is a father figure to her, a fact that troubles his rival, Jude. Despite the temperamental and age differences between teacher and student, they enter into a chilling marriage and wisely agree to a divorce when their incompatibility becomes apparent. Sue moves in with Jude and bears two children. After their deaths, Sue inexplicably returns to Phillotson and remarries him. As Mrs . Edlin observes at the end, "Weddings be funerals a' b'lieve nowadays" (481).

Sue marries Phillotson largely to seek revenge on Jude, who she incorrectly believes has betrayed her. The engagement and marriage to Phillotson follow Jude's disclosure of his imprudent marriage to Arabella. As if to hurt Jude further, Sue asks him to give her away at the wedding. She even teases him by calling him "father," a term for the man who gives away the bride. The rejected suitor represses his response to the word: "Jude could have said 'Phillotson's age entitles him to be called that!' But he would not annoy her by such a cheap retort" (206). During a morning walk, Sue and Jude find themselves in front of the church where the scheduled marriage is to take place. She holds Jude's arm "almost as if she loved him," and they stroll down the nave as if they are married. Sue defends her provocative behavior by saying that she likes "to do things like this." Shortly before the wedding ceremony, Jude reflects on Sue's cruelty toward him, concluding that "possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and again, in all her colossal inconsistency" (210).

Sue's wish to captivate men has Oedipal and pre-Oedipal implications. By marrying Phillotson, she may hope to repair the troubled relationship with her own father. By calling Jude "father," she projects the same complicated symbolism onto him. But if Sue sees Phillotson and Jude as variations of Oedipus, she seems to view herself as a female Narcissus, exerting fatal attraction over men. "I should shock you by letting you know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I feel that I shouldn't have been provided with attractiveness unless it were meant to be exercised! Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving" (245). Sue's infatuations end in disillusionment and failure. She later expands upon the reasons for her marriage to Phillotson. "But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong" (290).

Like Narcissus, Sue seems to be in love with the unobtainable, the elusive, the spectral; like other narcissistic lovers, she proceeds from idealization to devaluation. Sue is also an Echo, denying her own independence and free will. Toward the end of the novel, she admits that she began her relationship with Jude in the "selfish and cruel wish" to make his heart ache for her. "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" (426). Although she has grown to love Jude, she abruptly abandons him, causing anguish to them both. "And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me," Jude says, to which she replies: "Ah—yes! The further I flounder, the more harm I do!" (426).

Significantly, Sue's need to be loved by men has little to do with the wish for sexual gratification. She is so horrified at the possibility of intercourse with her husband that she throws herself out of the bedroom window when he accidentally enters her room. Jude calls her return to Phillotson, with whom she has never had sexual relations, a "fanatic prostitution" (436). Sue returns to her former husband presumably to punish herself and Jude for their nonconformist behavior. The "wickedness" of her feelings at the end of the novel is the same self-revulsion she experiences scarcely eight weeks into her first marriage to Phillotson. Denying there is anything wrong with her marriage, Sue delivers to Jude one of the most revealing speeches in the book:

"But it is not as you think!—there is nothing wrong except my own wickedness, I suppose you'd call it—a repugnance on my part, for a reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by the world in general!… What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!… I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for feeling as I do! But he does nothing, except that he has grown a little cold since he has found out how I feel. That's why he didn't come to the funeral.… O, I am very miserable—I don't know what to do!… Don't come near me, Jude, because you mustn't. Don't—don't!" (255-56)

Sue's speech reveals a multitude of defenses gone awry. The middle sentences confirm the need for outside intervention denied in the beginning and end. Her cry for help anticipates Father Time's appeal for assistance preceding his suicide. Through displacement, Phillotson becomes the hated object, a projection screen for Sue's inner conflicts. Phillotson is not a brutal man; when he releases her from marriage, he shows enlightened judgment. Sue's first marriage to Phillotson may be attributed in part to naïveté and inexperience, but her second marriage suggests an unconscious need to continue her self-punishment. Her sexual surrender takes on the appearance of the "fanatic prostitution" Jude has sadly prophesied.

In remarrying Phillotson, Sue chooses to act out rather than analyze her conflicts. Unable to divorce herself from the institution of marriage she no longer believes in, she falls back upon martyrdom. Even as she punishes herself by returning to a husband she has never loved, she abandons the lover who has remained devoted to her. Sue occupies a dual role in the novel, victim (of Phillotson) and victimizer (of Jude). The roles are interrelated. In terms of ego psychology, she identifies with the aggressor—a process, Anna Freud remarks, in which passive is converted to active. "B y impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat." Sue invokes an unsound social code to rationalize an unhealthy psychological situation. The repressive institution of marriage—repressive to Hardy because its rigidity did not allow a relationship to be dissolvable as soon as it became a cruelty to either party—legitimizes her self-punishment. Sue's second marriage thus becomes a more sinister replay of her first marriage, an example of a repetition compulsion principle that dominates Jude the Obscure.

In acting out their parents' broken marriages, Sue and Jude demonstrate how the present repeats the past. Sue's family background is almost identical to that of Jude, her first cousin. In endowing them with similar family backgrounds, Hardy intimates their unity of character. "They seem to be one person split in two," Phillotson remarks (276), vexed by his failure to understand either of them. To this extent, Sue and Jude resemble Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, who struggle to regain lost unity. The products of broken marriages, Jude and Sue have lost one or both parents at an early age and are raised by indifferent caretakers. According to Arabella, Jude's father ill-used his wife in the same way that Jude's paternal aunt (Sue's mother) mistreated her husband. Both marriages are doomed. After Jude becomes involved with Arabella, his great-aunt, Drusilla Fawley, informs him that his parents never got along with each other, parting company when he was a baby. Jude's mother, continues Arabella, drowned herself shortly afterwards. Drusilla makes no effort to soften the revelation or anticipate its terrible impact upon Jude. Drusilla's empathic failure repeats his mother's earlier rejection of him and foreshadows Sue's rejection of Father Time. After hearing the details of his mother's death, Jude attempts suicide in a similar way by walking on a partly frozen pond. The cracking ice manages to sustain his weight, temporarily thwarting his self-annihilation.

Hardy does not elaborate on the reasons for Jude's half-serious suicide attempt, but the painful repetition of the past cannot be ignored. As with most suicide attempts, including Father Time's, the motivation is overdetermined. Jude's attempt to repeat his mother's suicide is unmistakable, recalling John Bowlby's observation that children who suffer early maternal loss are vulnerable to suicide. Jude's suicide attempt suggests a wish for reunion with the lost mother, a desire for revenge, a need to punish himself for harboring murderous feelings toward the lost love object, and a feeling that life is not worth living. Both Jude and Father Time attempt or commit suicide following maternal loss; they are mirror images of each other, portraits of the same abandoned child. After his mother's death, Jude is raised by a father about whom he never speaks, not even after he has grown up and become a father himself. As with Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure remains preoccupied with the consequences of defective parenting but gives little information about absent parents. After his father's death, Jude is taken in by his great-aunt, who makes it clear that he would have been better off dead, like his parents. "It would ha' been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi' thy mother and father, poor useless boy!" (8-9).

Against a background of parental loss, Jude develops into a compassionate and idealistic man. Nothing in his family history accounts for his remarkable sensitivity, and for a time it seems as if he has escaped his past. His willingness to adopt Father Time demonstrates his generosity of spirit, and he remains devoted to his wife and children. Jude is a better parent to his newly discovered son than presumably his own parents were to him. Nevertheless, Jude is absent when Father Time most needs him, during the moments preceding the suicide. Although his role in Father Time's suicide is more ambiguous than Sue's, Jude readily accepts the inevitability of his son's death.

Sue's background reveals a similar pattern of parental loss. According to Drusilla, Sue's father offended his wife early in the marriage, and the latter "so disliked living with him afterwards that she went away to London with her little maid" (81). We never discover the length of time she lives with her mother in London or the circumstances of their life. Sue is then brought up by her father to hate her mother's family. Like Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, another motherless daughter raised by a remote male guardian, Sue grows up to reject conventional society. Her rebellion, no less than Eustacia's, is singularly unsuccessful. Sue's defiance as a twelve-year-old girl, boldly exhibiting her body as she wades into a pond, reveals a spiritedness that contrasts her later inability to be touched by her husband. Her craving for conformity culminates in her sexual surrender to Phillotson. In a novel filled with agonizing self-inflicted deaths, Sue's decision to remarry is one of the most horrifying moments—in effect, another suicide. She returns to her former husband, not to seek a better life, but to punish herself for the past. Sue can survive, paradoxically, only through self-debasement. Jude the Obscure reflects a closed system in which loveless marriages, restrictive social conventions, and unmerciful superegos thwart the possibility of a fulfilling life.

Sue's pattern of defiance followed by blind submission suggests, clinically, the child's ambivalence toward the parents: the rejection of the mother, the original love object, followed by the need to recover the lost unity of infancy. Sue and Jude return to the wrong marital partners, and the attempt toward reparation is doomed. From the viewpoint of object relations, Sue and Jude's inner world is precarious and turbulent. Each returns to a despised marital partner, suggesting the child's inability to separate from a defective caretaker. Phillotson and Arabella represent the omnipotent parents who can never be defied successfully. They offer punishment, not love, to the returning child, humbled and broken. Sue's submission to Phillotson parallels Jude's submission to Arabella. Both Sue and Jude regress to infantile modes of behavior (one is creed-drunk, the other is gin-drunk), obliterating themselves in a fatal union with hated love objects.

Object loss is a central theme in Jude the Obscure, and Freud's seminal essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) casts light on many of the baffling psychological dynamics of Hardy's characters. Freud's definition of melancholia (depression) [in "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917] describes many of Sue's conflicts: "a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment." In depression, Freud suggests, "dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature" (248). This is especially true of Sue's self-punishing tendencies. Freud argues that the self-recriminations characteristic of depression are "reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient's own ego" (248). Depression is related to object loss in that the sadism directed initially against the object is converted to masochism. In both mourning and depression, the loss of an object deprives a person of the love necessary for growth and nurture. Unlike mourning, which is usually a temporary phenomenon, depression may last permanently. Freud viewed depression as arising from hostile feelings, initially directed toward parents, that are internalized, producing guilt and low self-esteem.

Depression is widely regarded as one of the most common of psychiatric illnesses, but there is disagreement over its origin and treatment. Analysts distinguish object-related depression from narcissistic depression. The sense of helplessness and lowered self-esteem are common to both forms of depression, but their origins appear to be different. Object-related depression, which Freud had in mind, awakens virulent aggression toward the disappointing love object. Narcissistic depression, by contrast, originates from disappointments in achieving fanta-sized or idealized states. For object relations theorists like Otto Kernberg, depression represents the internalization of aggression originally directed toward the rejecting love object. The major conflicts in object-related depression involve aggression: the fear of one's own destructive rage and the fear of retaliation by the object. For theorists like Heinz Kohut, on the other hand, depression represents the inability to merge with the idealized object. The major conflicts in narcissistic depression involve unrealistic or unobtainable goals, such as the pursuit of a perfect relationship.

Elements of both forms of depression appear in Jude the Obscure. The family backgrounds of Sue and Jude reflect a long history of parental neglect and abandonment. Both suffer object loss as children and parents. Their sadomasochistic relationship represents a defense against further object loss. That is, the sadist and masochist "play out both sides of the pain-inducing/pain-suffering object relationship." Masochism represents a bond—or, more accurately, a bondage—to the early sadistic object. Contrary to their separation at the end, Sue and Jude remain symbiotically bonded, just as sadism and masochism are inextricably conjoined. The narcissistic element of their depression appears in their failure to merge with healthy, empathie selfobjects. Neither Jude nor Sue can sustain former ambitions, goals, ideals; both fall victim to bitter disillusionment. Sue's movement from social rebellion to repressive conformity parallels Jude's journey from unquestioning acceptance of life to embittered rejection.

Nowhere is Jude's idealizing power more evident than in his desire to pursue a university education at Christminster. The novel opens with Phillotson telling Jude why a university degree is important. "It is the necessary hallmark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching" (4). Jude invests Christminster with mystical significance, transforming it into a radiant city of light, a "heavenly Jerusalem" (18). The eleven-year-old Jude associates his esteemed schoolteacher with holy Christminster, and he is understandably distressed by Phillotson's departure. Jude's infatuation with Christminster has erotic significance. "He was getting so romantically attached to Christminster that, like a young lover alluding to his mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning its name again" (22). At the same time, Jude speaks of his devotion to Christminster in terms of a son's devotion to his mother. "Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased" (41). Before leaving Jude, Phillotson invites him to Christminster, promising never to forget him. The promise is broken years later when Jude visits Phillotson and discovers that the teacher cannot remember him. Jude thus experiences his rejection by Christminster and Phillotson as repetitions of maternal and paternal abandonment.

Jude's lofty idealization of Christminster becomes a deadly mirage, as elusive as Narcissus' reflection. Jude's idealization is really an attempt to compensate for disappointment over parental abandonment. But on discovering the reality of university life, he is dismayed by its hypocrisy, rigidity, and narrowmindedness. Jude suffers other setbacks: he is deceived by the quack Vilbert, who reneges on the promise to supply him with Greek and Latin grammars; he is disillusioned at learning that Phillotson has given up the scheme to receive a university degree; and he is distressed upon receiving a letter from a Christminster professor advising him to renounce intellectual aspirations. We feel Jude's crushing rejection, his outrage at the collapse of his hopes for a university education. And yet, given Jude's impossible idealization of Christminster, we sense that he would have been disillusioned by any university system.

Jude comes to perceive, with Hardy's approval, that "there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine,—if, indeed, they ever discover it—at least in our time" (394). Jude does not perceive, however, the narcissistic meaning of his idealizing tendencies. As Kernberg and other analysts point out, defensive idealization conceals fundamentally ambivalent feelings toward the love object, feelings that arise in the early mother-child relationship. The repetitive and compulsive nature of idealization suggests the continual effort to deny the disappointment and aggression associated with early object loss. Jude is eloquent in his social criticism and knowledge of literary and political history, but he is less convincing in his understanding of psychology. Wounded by early narcissistic injuries, Jude is rendered finally into a pining Echo, and his last words echo Job's: "Let the day perish wherein I was born" (488).

We can now see more clearly the parallel between Father Time's infanticide and the defective nurturing Jude and Sue received as children. A shadowy bad parent haunts Jude the Obscure, linking three generations of Fawleys. Each generation executes a death sentence in the name of the parents. Sue interprets her children's deaths as a sign of divine punishment for her wicked union with Jude. "I see marriage differently now. My babies have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella's child killing mine was a judgment—the right slaying the wrong. What, What shall I do! I am such a vile creature—too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings!" (422-23). The reversal is astonishing. She now views Father Time, the murderer of her own children, as an agent of divine retribution, while the two innocent children are evil, like herself. Sue submits herself to a vindictive God, a reflection of her bad father. She seems close to psychotic, lost in a terrible delusion. The violent self-hatred revealed in her speech to Phillotson conceals her infanticidal fantasies, now rationalized in the name of religious purification. "M y children—are dead—and it is right that they should be! I am glad—almost. They were sin-begotten. They were sacrificed to teach me how to live!—their death was the first stage of my purification. That's why they have not died in vain!… Yo u will take me back?" (439). By splitting the children into good and bad objects, Sue denies her ambivalence toward them, thus preserving her psychic life from massive extinction.

Jude and Sue miss the most terrifying insight of all, the realization that their ambivalence has slain the children. Sue's key admission, that she is "glad—almost" of the children's deaths, betrays an unconscious wish. This explains her complicity in Father Time's decision to annihilate the unwanted children of the world. The boy obediently carries out her wishes. Long before she brings children into the world, Sue has been punishing herself relentlessly for feelings of wickedness. The murders objectify her repressed wishes. By endorsing Father Time's infanticidal actions, Sue reveals herself as the abandoning parent, determined to destroy the hated child within herself. At the same time, she is the abandoned child, intent upon merging with the hated father, Phillotson. Although Jude, Sue, and Father Time refuse to name the bad parent, they create situations in which they punish themselves and the parental surrogates who have failed them. For the tragic protagonists of Jude the Obscure, the present repeats the nightmarish past. Hardy's symmetrical plot demonstrates his deterministic view that "What's done can't be undone" (70).

Jude the Obscure portrays Nature as a deficient mother, the law as a repressive father, the two antagonists locked in a deadly, indissolvable marriage. "Radical disorder in the universe is finally matched by radical disorder in human personality," Heilman has remarked about the novel. Hardy's philosophical pessimism cannot be reduced to a single biographical determinant; yet the "General Principles" behind his artistic vision reflect the defective parenting, empathie failure, and object loss implicit in Jude the Obscure. In The Life of Thomas Hardy, ostensibly written by his second wife, Florence Emily Hardy, but largely ghost-written by the novelist himself, there is an important passage that evokes the spirit of the Fawleys:

General Principles. Law has produced in man a child who cannot but constantly reproach its parent for doing much and yet not all, and constantly say to such parent that it would have been better never to have begun doing than to have overdone so indecisively; that is, than to have created so far beyond all apparent first intention (on the emotional side), without mending matters by a second intent and execution, to eliminate the evils of the blunder of overdoing. The emotions have no place in a world of defect, and it is a cruel injustice that they should have been developed in it.

Although it is unlikely that Hardy intended this passage either as a criticism of his own parents or as a commentary on Jude the Obscure, the novelist's world view reflects the philosophical pessimism in Father Time's farewell speech. It would be misleading, of course, to identify Hardy with a single fictional character, especially with a boy who ends his life before he has a chance to live it. Nevertheless, despite the claim of objectivity in Jude the Obscure—"The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views" (348)—the narrator is implicated in the characters' gloomy vision. To give but one example, early in the novel the narrator asks why no one comes along to befriend the young Jude, already disillusioned by his hopeless struggle to master Greek and Latin. "But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world" (32). In "I'd Have My Life Unbe" (1984), Frank Giordano traces the pattern of self-destructive characters in Hardy's world, concluding that, for the novelist, "the desire never to have been born was far more than a traditional poetic trope, while the wish to have his life 'unbe' seems to have recurred often and been very powerful at certain stages."

It is now possible to inquire into the biographical elements of Hardy's novel. Not surprisingly, Hardy insisted that "there is not a scrap of personal detail" in Jude the Obscure. There is little in his biography to indicate overt object loss, certainly nothing like the early traumatic loss experienced by Jude and Sue. One fascinating detail emerges, however, about Hardy's entry into the world. When the infant was born, he was presumed dead and cast into a basket by the surgeon in order to attend to the mother, herself in distress. "Dead! Stop a minute: he's alive enough, sure!" the midwife exclaimed (The Life of Thomas Hardy, 14). The incident has a tragicomic quality entirely befitting Hardy's later vision of life. As a child, he was extremely delicate and sickly, often cared for by a neighbor. Hardy's biographers acknowledge his inauspicious beginning in life, suggesting a possible link between his early deprivation and life-long bouts of depression. Robert Gittings speaks about an "early thread of perverse morbidity in Hardy, something near abnormality," [in Young Thomas Hardy, 1975] while Michael Millgate observes [in Thomas Hardy, 1982] that Hardy's parents took little interest in him because they believed he would die in childhood.

James W. Hamilton, a psychoanalyst, has suggested that the actual circumstances of Hardy's birth burdened him "with profound guilt for having damaged and almost killed his mother," as revealed in his first poem, "Discouragement." An incident in Tess of the D'Urbervilles reveals a mother's underloving and overloving tendencies. Hamilton speculates that Tess's ambivalence toward her infant son, aptly named Sorrow (corresponding, perhaps, to the allegorical Father Time in Jude the Obscure), may well reflect Jemima Hardy's feelings toward her own child. "When the infant had taken its fill," Hardy writes in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, "the young mother sat it upright in her lap, and looking into the far distance dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely combined passionateness with contempt." Sorrow's death, like Father Time's, implicates both nature and nurture: "So passed away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law" (Tess, 81).

Hardy's acknowledgement that the fictional portrait of Mrs . Yeobright in The Return of the Native was closely based upon his own mother is also revealing. Closely resembling Mrs . Morel in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Mrs . Yeobright is an intimidating woman, alternating between moods of gentleness and anger. Like Paul Mo rel, Clym Yeobright is implicated in his mother's death. Michael Millgate points out in his biography that while Jemima Hardy always commanded the unquestioning devotion of her children, she could be "cold in her manner, intolerant in her views, and tyrannical in her governance" (21). The same could be said about nearly all parents at one time or another, but Mrs. Yeobright, like Mrs . Morel, is particularly overbearing.

To what extent did Hardy suffer narcissistic injuries as a consequence of erratic maternal care? Giordano notes that Hardy was plagued by feelings of low self-esteem, referring to himself on his forty-seventh birthday as "Thomas the Unworthy" (The Life of Thomas Hardy, 200). Although we do not usually think of Hardy as a mother-fixated novelist, as we do of D. H. Lawrence, Gittings observes that he repeatedly fell in love with women (in particular, with several maternal cousins) who reminded him of his mother. "More than most mother-fixed youths, Hardy was falling in love with his own mother over and over again, in a physical and consistent way that was a typical part of his almost literal-minded nature" (Young Thomas Hardy, 64). Hardy's attraction to his cousin, Tryphena Sparks, one of the chief sources of Sue Bridehead, has generated intense biographical speculation. Whatever actually happened between Hardy and his mysterious cousin, Jude and Sue reflect the novelist's fascination with incestuous love and its elusive, forbidden nature. Hardy's tragic heroes and heroines repeatedly find themselves pursuing the unobtainable. Like Narcissus, they discover the bittersweet quality of infatuation, ending their lives defeated and broken, unable to recover lost primal unity.

Hardy's little-known novel The Well-Beloved (1897) powerfully confirms the narcissistic infatuation to which his characters are particularly vulnerable. Hardy wrote The Well-Beloved, subtitled "A Sketch of a Temperament," at about the same time he was working on Jude the Obscure. Both novels explore spectral love. Critics generally agree that The Well-Beloved is Hardy's most autobiographical novel in its revelations of his unhappy love life. Jocelyn Pierston is a sculptor, not a writer, but like Hardy he is blessed and cursed by a seemingly endless series of blinding infatuations that end in bitter disillusionment. Pierston tires of his lovers as soon as he knows them well, and only one aspect of his life remains constant: the instability of his love. Unusually introspective, Pierston meticulously analyzes his infatuations, lamenting the havoc they wreak upon his life:

To see the creature who has hitherto been perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the divinity which has informed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasure for any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest of some beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left it to fill with snow.

Pierston's pursuit of the Beloved One, as he calls his elusive love object, suggests defensive idealization, concealing hostility toward women. "Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in awhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have been concerned, a corpse, worse luck!" (33). Like Narcissus, Pierston realizes that he is doomed to pursue phantoms who vanish upon close approach. Poetic justice catches up with him when he finds himself infatuated hopelessly with a young woman (the daughter of the woman he rejected earlier) who, driven by the same psychology, tantalizes and finally spurns him. Pierston is in love with the idea of love, as Sue Bridehead is. Indeed, Sue's revealing admission, that sometimes her love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, causing her to treat a man cruelly, applies equally well to Pierston. Both Sue and Pierston fail in their reparative efforts to undo the harm they have caused others.

In an illuminating article on The Well-Beloved [in Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years, edited by Lance St. John Boiler, 1977] that reveals as much about the creative source of his own fiction as it does about Hardy's, John Fowles has identified the real object of Pierston's hopeless quest. "The vanished young mother of infancy is quite as elusive as the Well-Beloved—indeed, she is the Well-Beloved, although the adult writer transmogrifies her according to the pleasures and fancies that have in the older man superseded the nameless ones of the child—most commonly into a young female sexual ideal of some kind, to be attained or pursued (or denied) by himself hiding behind some male character." Intrigued by an interpretation of The French Lieutenant's Woman published by the Yale psychoanalyst Gilbert Rose, Fowles posits in Hardy and other novelists an unconscious drive toward the unobtainable. Fowles accepts Rose's thesis that the wish to reestablish unity with the lost mother of infancy is an important motive behind the creative impulse. Behind Tryphena Sparks and the other incarnations of the Well-Beloved, including Sue Bridehead and Tess, both of whom Fowles calls in The French Lieutenant's Woman "pure Tryphena in spirit," lies the pre-Oedipal mother, the muse behind all creativity.

Yet Hardy's maternal muse was profoundly paradoxical, both creative and destructive. Jude the Obscure remains his bleakest novel, arguably the bleakest in English literature. Of all Hardy's great tragic novels, Jude the Obscure alone lacks convincing affirmation. Despite Hardy's sympathy toward Jude and Sue, he casts them into an indifferent world and then shows, in a novel at once beautiful and terrible, the tragedy of their self-extinction. "How cruel you are," Swinburne wrote to Hardy in an otherwise glowing review the novelist cites in his biography. "Only the great and awful father of 'Pierrette' and i'Enfant Maudit' was ever so merciless to his children" (270). Speaking like a disillusioned parent renouncing further children, Hardy observes, in the "Postscript to the Preface" to Jude the Obscure, that the experience of writing the book cured him completely of the wish to write additional novels. The novel provoked so much hostility, in fact, that he later referred to a book-burning incident in which the real object of the flames was the novelist himself. It may seem extravagant to compare Father Time's infanticide to Hardy's decision to silence forever his fictional voice. The fact remains, however, that although Hardy published a voluminous amount of poetry in the remaining thirty-three years of his life, he repudiated the art of fiction, perhaps believing, like Father Time, that the world would be better off without him. In that decision lies the greatest loss of all.