[In the following essay, Jacobus accepts Hardy's contention that Jude the Obscure is a novel of contrasting ideas, and thus analyzes the work by focusing on the character of Sue Bridehead, rather than that of Jude.]

Hardy's account of Jude the Obscure raises the problem at once:

Of course the book is all contrasts—or was meant to be in its original conception. Alas, what a miserable accomplishment it is, when I compare it with what I meant to make it!—e.g. Sue and her heathen gods set against Jude's reading the Greek testament; Christminster academical, Christminster in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude the sinner; Sue the Pagan, Sue the saint; marriage, no marriage; &c, &c.

The degree of Hardy's success in executing these strongly-marked contrasts remains the central question about Jude. The bare bones of its design lie dangerously close to the surface, and the urgency of Hardy's commitment constantly threatens its imaginative autonomy. Its realism and its diagrammatic plotting pull in opposite directions, and Hardy's disconcerting tendency to translate ideas into physical realities sometimes leave us uncertain of the intention behind his effects. This apparent discrepancy between intention and achievement is at its most acute in the character of Sue. What did Hardy mean by her, and what in the end did he create? Above all, with what success are Sue and the issues she raises integrated into the novel as a whole?

'The first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the feminist movement.' This was one reviewer's response to Sue Bridehead, recalled in the 1912 postscript to Jude. Hardy himself was non-committal; and although Sue has much in common with the 'New Woman' of the 1890s ('the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing'), she strikes us less as a specimen than as an individual whose vivid fictional life springs from and is defined by the novel itself. Hardy elsewhere wrote of her simply as 'a type of woman which has always had an attraction for me', adding that 'the difficulty of drawing the type has kept me from attempting it till now'. For most readers, this unique and painful individuality—at once confused and distinct, fragile and sharply etched—constitutes Hardy's main achievement; Sue is pitied, blamed, puzzled over, or mourned, as if she were a living woman. The difficulty lies in reconciling this fictional vividness with Hardy's elusive intention. To regard Sue primarily as a psychological portrait diminishes the importance of the ideas Hardy makes her express. It is particularly difficult to know where Hardy stands in relation to her feminism. In one sense his refusal to offer an un-ambiguous diagnosis, either within or outside the novel, contributes to our belief in Sue: she continues to haunt and perplex us long after we have finished reading because she is neither case-history nor propaganda. She too is 'obscure'. But Hardy's careful non-alignment also means that he can be accused of dodging or bungling the very issues he has raised. Kate Millett, for instance, sees in Sue's muddle ('by turns an enigma, a pathetic creature, a nut, and an iceberg') a reflection of her creator's intellectual uncertainty: 'Jude the Obscure is on very solid ground when attacking the class system, but when it turns to the sexual revolution, Hardy himself is troubled and confused' (Sexual Politics, 1969, pp. 133-4). The accusation is an important and damaging one. Jude stands or falls on the coherence of its tragic protest, and Hardy's art as well as his clarity is in question. If he fails in dealing with Sue's sexual revolt, then the structure of contrasts on which the novel depends is weakened where it should be strongest—in the power of Sue's tragedy to complement and illuminate Jude's.

The most influential account of Sue's character is pseudo-psychological. In his Study of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence sees Jude as divided between the male and the female within himself; his tragedy lies in

over-development of one principle of human life at the expense of the other; an over-balancing; a laying of all the stress on the Male, the love, the Spirit, the Mind, the Consciousness; a denying, a blaspheming against the Female, the Law, the Soul, the Senses, the Feelings. (Phoenix, 1936, p. 509)

In Lawrentian terms (the terms of 1914 and The Rainbow), Sue embodies the male principle: 'She was born with the vital female atrophied in her: she was almost male'. Her literary genealogy is that of the 'Amelias and Agneses, those women who submitted to the man-idea'—who betrayed the female within themselves in order to become 'the pure thing'. For such a woman, marriage can only be 'a submission, a service, a slavery', while the suppressed female within continually threatens to destroy her precarious equilibrium (pp. 496-7). Lawrence conveys his sense of her instability and inner division by an image of dizzy exposure:

She had climbed and climbed to be near the stars. And now, at last, on the topmost pinnacle, exposed to all the horrors and magnificence of space, she could not go back. Her strength had fallen from her. Up at that great height, with scarcely any foothold, but only space, space all round her, rising up to her from beneath, she was like a thing suspended, supported almost at the point of extinction by the density of her medium. Her body was lost to her, fallen away, gone. She existed there as a point of consciousness, no more, like one swooned at a great height, held up at the tip of a fine pinnacle that drove upwards into nothingness, (pp. 503-4)

Since Lawrence's Sue is at once self-possessed and self-divided, sexual consummation can only bring desecration to her and negation to Jude:

if it was death to her, or profanation, or pollution, or breaking, it was unnatural to him, blasphemy. How could he, a living, loving man, warm and productive, take with his body the moonlit cold body of a woman who did not live to him, and did not want him? It was monstrous, and it sent him mad. (p. 505)

Lawrence recreates the novel with such imaginative intensity that it is easy to substitute his version for Hardy's. To return to Jude itself is to confront an imagination no less powerful, but radically different in its emphases. More sympathetic, less diagnostic, Hardy also gives weight to ideas which the Study of Thomas Hardy entirely ignores.

Although Lawrence's blueprint does violence to the artistic and intellectual complexity of Jude, the Lawrentian view of Sue remains surprisingly current. Her crimes, ranging from frigidity to husband-murder, make her the villain of the piece in a number of recent critical accounts. And for Kate Millett—criticizing Hardy rather than Sue—she is 'the victim of a cultural literary convention (Lily and Rose) that in granting her a mind insists on withholding a body from her' (Sexual Politics, p. 133). Cast in this way as 'the frigid woman', the lily of her name, Sue becomes less a tragic figure in her own right than an aspect of Jude's tragedy. Of course, there can be no mistaking the depth of Hardy's sympathy for Jude, but has the novel been read too exclusively from his point of view?

To an extent which often goes unnoticed, Hardy offers us a dual focus which valuably modifies the literary convention identified by Kate Millett. We see Sue as she appears to Jude and Phillotson—lovable, ethereal, inconsistent, capable of inflicting great pain, and, for Jude at least, ultimately unforgivable. But during the course of the novel, Hardy also allows us to enter into Sue's consciousness—to hear her point of view at first hand, and, when we no longer do so, to speculate about it. Dialogue plays a central part in Jude, translating its underlying ideas into subjectively-perceived truths. [Edmund] Gosse's complaint that Sue and Jude talk 'a sort of University Extension jargon' is fair. But the novel does concern education—education through the testing of ideas against experience. That sense of life which in Hardy's earlier novels sprang from rural activity or landscape derives in Jude from conversation. Sue's attempts to articulate her changing consciousness—whether exploratory or penetrating, tailing off into uncertainty or toppling into neurotic self-blame—make her a vital counter-part to Jude. When we no longer hear her voice, it is because Sue is alienated from herself as well as us. Her retreat from emancipation to enslavement, from speech to silence, balances Jude's progress from idealism to bitter, articulate disillusion in a double movement which intensifies die novel's protest. 'What are my books but one long plea against "man's inhumanity to man"—to woman—and to the lower animals?' asked Hardy; Jude the Obscure is just such a plea.

On its appearance in the mid-'90s, Jude was inevitably linked with Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) as another contribution to 'the marriage question' ; for Mrs . Oliphant, it was a sign that Hardy had joined 'The Anti-Marriage League'. But Hardy himself pleaded innocence:

It is curious that some of the papers should look upon the novel as a manifesto on 'the marriage question' (although, of course, it involves it).… The only remarks which can be said to bear on the general marriage question occur in dialogue, and comprise no more than half a dozen pages in a book of five hundred.

The 1912 postscript to Jude clarifies the implications of its epigraph ('The letter killeth'): 'My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, mat a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties—being then essentially and morally no marriage'. But the novel itself says something both more disturbing and more radical, since the 'cruelty' bears particularly on the sensibility with which Hardy endows Sue. It is true that marriage has proved a trap to Jude, ensnared by the time-worn ruse of Arabella's fake pregnancy, but his disillusion with Arabella's artificial dimples and tresses brings neither the distress nor the personal discovery which marriage brings to Sue. '"O Susanna Florence Mary!… Yo u don't know what marriage means!"' (Wessex ed., 1912, p. 203) laments Jude to himself, when she marries Phillotson in a tangle of pique, muddle, obligation, and ignorance. We watch her gradual awakening. Her views on the marriage service come first, wryly conveyed in a letter to Jude—as yet unquestioning of conventional religion: '"my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or a she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Bless your exalted views of woman, O Churchman!'" (p. 204). What she discovers in marriage itself is the independent sexual identity which survives this property transaction. Her aversion to Phillotson (an aversion endorsed by the traditional wisdom of Aunt Drusilla and Wido w Edlin) is essentially a discovery about herself, tearfully and haltingly confessed to the more experienced Jude:

'though I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don't like him—it is a torture to me to—live with him as a husband!… 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!… (p. 255)

In the last phrase, Sue is partly being Shelleyan; but she is also protesting, as Mil l had done in The Subjection of Women (1869), at 'the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations' (p. 57). Mor e im portant, she no longer expresses a feminism that is only intellectually related to herself. She has now experienced, in a way too personal to tell anyone else, what 'belonging' to Phillotson actually means. As so often in the dialogue he gives Sue, Hard y holds the balance between her beliefs (the echoes of Shelley and Mill) and feelings which she has to articulate for herself—guiltily owning up to a sexual repugnance which 'the world in general' would refuse to recognize. Later the same night, when she and Jude have been woken by the cry of a trapped rabbit, Hardy stresses the change that has taken place in her consciousness; and again the mournful yet impatient speech rhythms authenticate Sue's new perception of herself:

'before I married him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me—there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced… I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick. …' (p. 258)

We are left with the image of the rabbit writhing in the gin. It is Sue's special tragedy that she has enough life to kick, but not enough strength to escape.

The image is picked up in the following chapter, when Jude reflects on his ow n experience of' "the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes'" (p. 261). Bot h he and Sue are released by partners who acknowledge other laws than 'the artificial system of things'—Arabella, impelled by an animal instinct when Jude has served her need; Phillotson, by genuine compassion. Bu t Hardy shows us that more is at issue than the freedom to choose another partner. He is not simply advocating divorce, but—as Mrs . Oliphant detected—questioning the institution of marriage itself. Again , it is primarily through Sue's consciousness that the novel explores the tyranny of sexual orthodoxy, implying the doubt elsewhere explicitly expressed by Hardy, 'whether marriage, as we at present understand it, is such a desirable goal for all women as it is assumed to be'. Sue's time with Phillotson has taught her to recognize the gap between the identity imposed by society, and her real inner self: 'I am called Mrs . Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. Bu t I am not really Mrs . Richard Phillotson, but a woma n tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies. …' (p. 247) To be called Mrs . Jude Fawley would be no less a denial of the troubled individual who is Sue Bridehead. The central aspect of Sue's character is not that in her the female is atrophied, as Lawrence maintained, but that in her the individual is highly developed. Havelock Elli s put it well, writing of 'the refinement of sexual sensibility with which this book largely deals':

To treat Jude, who wavers between two women, and Sue, who finds the laws of marriage too mighty for her lightly-poised organism, as shocking monstrosities, reveals a curious attitude in the critics who have committed themselves to that view. Clearly they consider human sexual relationships to be as simple as those of the farmyard. They are as shocked as a farmer would be to find that a hen had views of her own concerning the lord of the harem. If, let us say, you decide that Indian Game and Plymouth Rock make a good cross, you put your cock and hens together, and the matter is settled; and if you decide that a man and a woman are in love with each other, you marry them and the matter is likewise setüed for the whole term of their natural lives.

(Savoy, 6 October 1896, p. 46.)

Sue is not a hen with views of her own , but a woma n for who m the laws of the farmyard spell oppression. Institutionalized sex takes as little account of her 'lightly-poised organism' as it does of Jude's wavering between two women. Hardy told Gosse that Sue's sexuality was 'healthy as far as it goes, but unusually weak and fastidious'. Jude, by contrast, is aroused rather than repelled by the pig's pizzle which Arabella flings at him, and easily deflected from his dream of Christminster by her dimples. But the opposition between his need for sexual fulfilment and Sue's reserve is never presented simply in terms of Jude's frustration. Sue is allowed to state her ow n case when she speaks of her platonic relationship with the Christminster undergraduate wh o is responsible for many of her unorthodox ideas:' "People say I must be cold-natured—sexless—on account of it. Bu t I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives'" (pp. 178-9); later in the same conversation, she defends the Son g of Song s against its Christia n allegorists (' "I hate such humbug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!"' , p. 182). Hardy sets her passionate imagination against Jude's unthinking passion—and then tests each against the claims of the other, using a specific sexual relationship to intensify the novel's wider vision of human frustration and defeat.

From Jude's point of view, Sue's religion of pagan joy is a bitter irony; she first liberates him from his religious asceticism, then refuses to satisfy him. Seen from Sue's point of view, however, her paganism is primarily an expression of revolt. When she sets up statues of Venus and Apollo in her bedroom and chants Swinburne, she is striking a private blow at the self-denying spiritual fervour which at the same moment inspires Jude's plain living and high thinking in another part of Christminster. What stands out is not Sue's comical blaspheming against the ethos of Mis s Fontover's ecclesiastical knick-knack shop, but her inner refusal to conform. It is this area of personal freedom she tries to retain in her relationships. She will live with the Christminster undergraduate—but on her terms, not his. She is happy to go to Philotson 'as a friend' ; it is as a husband, with rights over her body, that she rejects him. In the same way—as critics have often noted—she is at her most forthcoming to Jude when she has put between them an engagement, or a marriage, or a window, or simply man's clothes, as on the evening of her flight from the Melchester teachers' training college. When she asks the bewildered Phillotson to let her go, she has found in John Stuart Mill the intellectual basis for her instinctive assertion of individuality:

'And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?' [asks Phillotson].

'Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude.'

'As his wife?'

'As I choose.'

Phillotson writhed.

She continued: 'She, or he, "who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation". J. S. Mill's words, those are. I have been reading it up. Why can't you act upon them? I wish to, always.'

'What do I care about J. S. Mill!' moaned he. 'I only want to lead a quiet life!' (p. 269)

Confronted by Sue's blithe application of theory to life, we are likely to have some sympathy with Phillotson. Yet the force of' "As I choose"' remains. Sue takes her text from the third chapter of On Liberty (1859), 'O f Individuality':

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life … exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass.… In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service, (pp. 106, 115, 120)

With this persuasive plea as a context, we may be less inclined to smile at Sue's earnestness. But' "Who were we,'" she laments at the end of the novel,' "to think we could act as pioneers!'" (p. 425).

Elsewhere, Sue's timidity, irresolution, and inconsistency often strike us more forcibly than her knowledge of Mill . The split between belief and instinctive behaviour is most acutely analyzed in the scenes leading up to the consummation of her relationship with Jude. Till she leaves Phillotson, Sue has successfully held out for the right to give or withhold herself as she chooses; the Christminster undergraduate dies unfulfilled, and Phillotson lets her go when her leap from a first-floor window convinces him of her aversion. The question which hangs over her third relationship is: will it prove a new departure, or only a repetition? a victory or a defeat? Hardy charts her surrender to Jude's more urgent sexuality with a mixture of acerbity and tenderness. The complexity of his sympathy is nowhere more enriching. He himself had known Mill' s On Liberty 'almost by heart' as a young man, as well as sharing Sue's taste for Shelley and Swinburne. But Jude the Obscure belongs to a period thirty years later, and its absolutes are qualified by experience. Moreover, Mill had been largely concerned with the relation of individual to society; Hardy is also concerned with the relation of individual to individual—with the conflict between personal freedom and human commitment. When Sue comes to Jude, she begins by re-enacting the pattern of advance and retreat, of boldness followed by flight, which had characterized her even as a child at Marygreen. By chance and authorial design, she and Jude go for their first night together to the same hotel, the same room even, in which Jude had spent a night with Arabella not long before. Sue's tearful indignation at this discovery (' "Why are you so gross! 7 jumped out of the window!'", p. 293) is only dispelled by extorting a rueful tribute to her own contrasting spirituality. The words she puts into Jude's mouth, from Shelley's Epipsychidion, have an additional irony when one recalls Hardy's mistrust of Shelleyan individuals such as Angel Clare and Eldred Fitzpiers:

' "There was a Being whom my spirit oft
  Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.
A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,
  Veiling beneath the radiant form of woman.… "

O it is too flattering, so I won't go on! But say it's
me!—say it's me!'

'It is you dear; exactly like you!' (p. 294)

Sue thus wins the first round at Jude's expense (he, apparently, must love only her, but she need not commit herself to him); and as he goes off sighingly to another room, the balance of our sympathy is surely with him.

But the balance is short-lived. Hardy is imaginatively generous towards both sides of the struggle, but as always his most intense feeling is for the loser. Sue's chief weapons are her undoubted attraction for Jude and her moral advantage (' "Why are you so gross!"'): Jude's weapon is simply his ability to take himself elsewhere. When Arabella returns to upset their precarious equilibrium (Jude pressing for marriage, Sue evasive as ever), she reveals to Sue that the price she pays for withholding herself is insecurity—that the complement of personal freedom must be self-reliance. Jude justifies his refusal to turn away his former wife in humane terms; but Sue's piteous entreaties show her tacit recognition of the sexual threat posed by Arabella:' "Don't go now, Jude!… O, it is only to entrap you.… Don't, don't go, dear! She is such a low-passioned woman. …'" (p. 318). Jude seizes this chance to make his protest against the conditions of intimacy which Sue had earlier forced him to celebrate:

' … Please, please stay at home, Jude, and not go to her, now she's not your wife any more than I!'

'Well, she is, rather more than you, come to that,' he said, taking his hat determinedly. 'I've wanted you to be, and I've waited with the patience of Job, and I don't see that I've got anything by my self-denial. I shall certainly give her something, and hear what she is so anxious to tell me; no man could do less!' (p. 318)

' "No man could do less'" opposes charitable humanity to Sue's ungiving chastity. Yet her meekness in the face of his resolve, her child-like distress when he goes out into the night to find Arabella, and her undisguised relief when he returns without having seen her, give poignancy to Sue's capitulation. She succumbs to Jude, but it is under duress:.' "I ought to have known you would conquer in the long run, living like this!'", she tells him;' "I give in!'" (p. 321). The blend of pleasure and regret which we feel in her defeat is beautifully caught in the kisses she exchanges with Jude the following day—kisses, Hardy tells us, returned by Sue 'in a way she had never done before. Times had decidedly changed. "The little bird is caught at last!" she said, a sadness showing in her smile.' (p. 322) Jude's reply (' "No—only nested'") consoles both her and us; but this time our sympathy is with her.

Hardy wrote that Jude had 'never really possessed [Sue] as freely as he desired'. But although she remains elusive to the last, 'That the twain were happy—between their times of sadness—was indubitable' (p. 348). Hardy subtly conveys the extent of her sexual awakening, and we gain enough sense of a shared sexual happiness to make its betrayal by Sue herself, at the end of the novel, a tragic one. In a central scene we see the two together, now lovers, visiting the Great Wessex Agricultural Show with Little Father Time in tow. It is a scene singled out by Lawrence—perhaps because, as in many of his own most sexually-charged scenes, flowers provide the catalyst:

when they went to the flower show, her sense of the roses, and Jude's sense of the roses, would be most, most poignant.… The roses, how the roses glowed for them! … the real marriage of Jude and Sue was in the roses. Then, in the third state, in the spirit, these two beings met upon the roses and in the roses were symbolized in consummation. The rose is the symbol of marriage-consummation in its beauty. (Phoenix, pp. 506-7)

Lawrence may be right that Sue and Jude never know 'actual, sure-footed happiness'; there is always a sense of precariousness in their lives, as there is always a sense of rootlessness. But his insistence that this is a communion of minds which sexual consummation can only violate misses the vibrancy of fulfilment in the scene as Hardy presents it. The day of holiday has brought Arabella and her husband—'the average husband and wife'—to the show along with Sue and Jude. While one couple are sullen and indifferent, the other ('the more exceptional') reveal 'that complete mutual understanding' which makes the cynical Arabella doubt that they are actually married. What kind of happiness theirs is emerges from an incident in the flower tent:

the more exceptional couple and the boy still lingered in the pavilion of flowers—an enchanted palace to their appreciative taste—Sue's usually pale cheeks reflecting the pink of the tinted roses at which she gazed; for the gay sights, the air, the music, and the excitement of a day's outing with Jude, had quickened her blood and made her eyes sparkle with vivacity. She adored roses, and what Arabella had witnessed was Sue detaining Jude almost against his will while she learnt the names of this variety and that, and put her face within an inch of their blooms to smell them.

'I should like to push my face quite into them—the dears!' she had said. 'But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them—isn't it, Jude?'

'Yes, you baby,' said he: and then playfully gave her a little push, so that her nose went among the petals.

'The policeman will be down on us, and I shall say it was my husband's fault!'

Then she looked up at him, and smiled in a way that told so much to Arabella, (pp. 357-8)

The roses are indeed symbolic, as Lawrence asserts—but they are symbolic of more than spiritual communion. The rose which complements the lily in Sue has been brought into flower by Jude; it is he who gives her the playful push into contact with her own sensuous nature, making her fully and joyously responsive here. The 'cultural literary convention (Lily and Rose)' has been realistically blurred. What Arabella sees makes her jealous enough to accept Vilbert's love-philtre, and her lowering presence, like that of Satan spying on Adam and Eve in their prelapserian garden, accentuates the innocence of their sexuality.

Nevertheless, Sue and Jude are childlike here—'The Simpletons' of the novel's original title.' "Silly fools—like two children!'" (p. 365), grumbles Arabella in the background. Their vulnerability is heightened by the exaggerated sense of transience voiced by Little Father Time—unable to enjoy the flowers because he knows they will soon be withered. What he foresees, in a parody of Hardy's own vision, Sue and Jude are to experience. 'The more exceptional couple', they also prove least able to withstand what time brings. Three years later, Arabella is a prosperous widow while Sue ekes out the family income selling Christminster cakes; Jude is sick and out of work, and Sue, already the mother of two children, is expecting a third. In the interval has come their restless movement from place to place, in search of work and the right to live by a private code of morals. They recoil from the cynical forms of civil marriage and the unthinking bourgeois ritual enacted in the name of religion; they are turned off from the job of restoring the Ten Commandments painted on the wall of a country church, in an episode which makes the point of Hardy's epigraph—the difference between Old Testament law and New Testament charity—with graphic plainness. In Mill' s words, 'the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place' (On Liberty, pp. 149-50).

But Hardy is not simply concerned to show the tragic defeat of exceptional individuals at the hands of society—what he elsewhere calls 'the triumph of the crowd over the hero, of the commonplace majority over the exceptional few'. Nature also conspires against them. Fulfilling natural laws, they have to face natural consequences—children. Mil l had written of a scheme of things that 'cannot have had, for its sole or even principal object, the good of human or other sentient beings. Sue echoes his opinion of parenthood when she tells Arabella that' "it seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world'" (p. 375)—

The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing—unless the being on which it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. (On Liberty, p. 194)

This is the view of life that prematurely overwhelms Little Father Time; for him, his parents have committed a crime in bringing children into the world, not he who commits one in taking them out of it. Hardy's engineering of the novel's tragic crisis may lack tact; but the urgency of his protest against the double tyranny of society and Nature over 'the exceptional few' gives classic inexorability to his modern theme.

Like the flinging of the pig's pizzle (showing 'the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to lead'), the death of the children brings the novel's underlying metaphors into the open. The family's doomed return to Christminster confronts us with more than just the death of Jude's hopes and his inevitable exclusion from Arnold's city of lost causes (' "I' m an outsider to the end of my days!'", p. 396). We also witness in Christminster the collapse of the couple's struggle for happiness on a purely personal level; as Mill had promised, 'from him that hath not, shall be taken even that which he hath'. The death of the children is the price Sue and Jude have to pay for their sexual fulfilment, in the face of a hostile society and the absence of contraception. Mrs . Oliphant jeered at Hardy for what she called his 'solution of the great insoluble question of what is to be the fate of children in such circumstances': 'Does Mr. Hardy think this is really a good way of disposing of the unfortunate progeny of such connections?' The episode is indeed grotesque; but the idea which underlies it, as often in Jude, is more powerful and more valid than the means used to express it. Its true force emerges less from the clumsily-contrived massacre than from the painful conversation which precipitates it. Pregnant and encumbered by children, Sue has has only found lodgings in Christminster on condition that Jude goes elsewhere; even so, the landlady's husband refuses to let them stay beyond the next day. It is in this context that Sue and Little Father Time, deeply depressed, talk together;

'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?'

'Oh—because it is a law of nature.'

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

'No indeed.' (p. 402)

The gap between adult's and child's perception is deceptively narrowed (Little Father Time groping to express what Sue knows too well); and—like Jude when Sue blames herself afterwards—we can comprehend her mistaken honesty in breaking the news that another child is on the way:

The boy burst out weeping. 'O you don't care, you don't care!' he cried in bitter reproach. 'How ever could you, mother, be so wicked and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was better off, and father well!—To bring us all into more trouble! No room for us, and father a-forced to go away, and we turned out tomorrow; and yet you be going to have another of us soon! … 'Tis done o'purpose!—'tis—'tis!' He walked up and down sobbing, (p. 403)

All Sue can reply is' "I can't explain, dear! But it—is not quite on purpose—I can't help it!"' (p. 403), and indeed she can't. What Little Father Time understands is already too much for him (' "I wish I hadn't been born!"', p. 402); what he can't understand accentuates Sue's helplessness. After the tragedy, she expresses with terrible clarity her sense of the forces massed against them: ' "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!' First it said, 'Yo u shan't learn!' Then it said, 'Yo u shan't labour!' Now it says, 'Yo u shan't love!'"' (p. 407). 'The coming universal wish not to live', portentously diagnosed by the doctor, objectifies Sue's feelings here and anticipates Jude's final, deathbed negation of life:' "Let the day perish wherein I was born …" ' (pp. 406, 488).

The death of the children is the most flagrant instance of Hardy's preparedness to sacrifice verisimilitude to his diagrammatic design, but we are never allowed to forget that Jude is a novel of contrasting ideas. The culminating and most crucial of them is that between Sue's unbalance and Jude's disillusion. Throughout the book, however, the rigid ironies of Hardy's scheme have been translated into the changing consciousness of his characters. Hence the unexpected effect of a novel at once fixed and fluid, over-emphatic and true to life. Events which seem contrived precipitate inner changes which are painfully authenticated. The peculiar modernity of Jude lies in the weight it gives to such changes. The sturdy Wessex world of Hardy's earlier novels has been ousted by 'the ache of modernism'; no longer sustained by an enduring rural context, Sue and Jude have nothing to fall back on but their ideas, and one by one these fail them. Jude's mental education reveals the limitations of Christminster and evangelical Christianity. Sue's education—her experience as a woman—brings her from clarity to compromise, from compromise to collapse. The birdlike, white-clothed figure at the Great Wessex Agricultural Show becomes a heap of black garments sobbing and abasing herself beneath the cross in the Church of St. Silas of Ceremonies. Arnold's Christminster, for all its sweetness and light, gives Jude only his bitter sense of exclusion: Newman's Christminster—its Victorian complement—gives Sue her sense of guilt. She begins with Hellenic intellect as her light, and ends with Hebraic conscience as her yoke. Jude (increasingly the recording consciousness of the novel) underlines the tragic reversal of their positions:

'she was once a woman whose intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline lamp: who saw all my superstitions as cobwebs that she could brush away with a word. Then bitter affliction came to us, and her intellect broke, and she veered round to darkness. Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably.' (p. 484)

It is precisely Sue's femaleness which breaks her. When she loses her unborn child—her last stake in the future—we can only find Lawrence's psychic interpretation appallingly inappropriate: 'She was no woman. An d her children, the proof thereof, vanished like hoarfrost from her' (Phoenix, p. 507).

Sue's self-mortification after the death of her children (' "We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!'", p. 416) is psychologically plausible; we recall the self-punishing impulse -hinted at earlier in her pre-enactment with Jude of the wedding ceremony which will bind her to Phillotson. But it is too easy to write off her return to Phillotson as a morbid recurrence of this 'emotional epicureanism', the 'colossal inconsistency', noted by Jude years before. The tragic implications of her return emerge from Hardy's insistence that Sue is both the same person and significantly different. The woman who remarries Phillotson is not the girl who had married him long before:

She had never in her life looked so much like the lily her name connoted as she did in that pallid morning light. Chastened, world-weary, remorseful, the strain on her nerves had preyed upon her flesh and bones, and she appeared smaller in outline than she had formerly done, though Sue had not been a large woman in her days of rudest health. (p. 445)

The oblique reminder of Sue's sprite-like insubstantiality gives pitying perspective to this second wedding; the burden has been too heavy, the bearer too frail. But it is not just that Sue is worn out by suffering. A younger Sue had denied her sexuality in ignorance: the older Sue does so knowingly. As we see from her reunion with Jude, three months later, she does still love him as passionately and physically as she is able. When Jude upbraids her (' "Sue, Sue, you are not worth a man's love!"') she bursts out:

'I can't endure you to say that! … Don't, don't scorn me! Kiss me, O kiss me lots of times, and say I am not a coward and a contemptible humbug—I can't bear it!' She rushed up to him and, with her mouth on his, continued: 'I must tell you—O I must—my darling Love! It has been—only a church marriage—an apparent marriage I mean!' (pp. 470-1)

Afterwards, she confesses to Widow Edlin:' "I find I still love him—O, grossly'" (p. 476)—applying to herself the word she had once used disapprovingly of Jude. But' "I've got over myself now'", she tells him, reminded of their dead children. We see the lengths she is prepared to go in getting over herself in the ritual reparation which is our last direct sight of Sue. Sex with love has brought only the death of her children: sex without love now brings the death of her deepest self. Earlier she had rent her embroidered nightgown, symbol of her shared joy with Jude, replacing it by a sacrificial, shroud-like calico garment in which to act out this penance. Hardy spares us nothing that matters of the harrowing scene in which she offers up her body on the altar of conventional morality, as she has earlier offered up her mind to a repressive form of Christianity. We overhear the conversation at Phillotson's bedroom door, gain a glimpse of his impatience ('There was something in [his] tone now which seemed to show that his three months of re-marriage with Sue had somehow not been so satisfactory as his magnanimity or amative patience had anticipated', p. 479); we witness Sue's oath of self-denial, her irrepressible repugnance (' "O God!"'), and her final submission—the subjection of the female to a covertly sadistic sexual code which demands the total surrender of her consciousness, individuality, and specialness:

Placing the candlestick on the chest of drawers he led her through the doorway, and lifting her bodily, kissed her. A quick look of aversion passed over her face, but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry. (p. 480)

As silence falls, Widow Edlin offers her choric comment on this life-denying consummation:' "Ah ! poor soul! Weddings be funerals 'a b'lieve nowadays"' (p. 481).

The reviewer who identified Sue as a 'New Woman' also recorded his regret that 'the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed her to break down at the end'. Hardy was writing less to celebrate her revolt than 'to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims' (p. viii); and while his sex did not prevent him doing justice to the anguish of Sue's tragedy, he did in one important respect subordinate it to Jude's. Sue's breakdown accentuates Jude's strength and his fidelity to the values which originally inspired their struggle. As she blinds and shackles herself, he grows ever more clear-sighted. Though she is enslaved in body, and he enslaved by his own, he at least retains his intellectual freedom, railing against the state of things to the end. This contrast means that the complaint that Jude the Obscure is not fully tragic—that its hero remains a muddler, a man dragged down by his own weakness—is un-justified. Her submission to doctrine may be paralleled by his drunken remarriage to Arabella (gin-drunk as she is creed-drunk); but as his body grows weaker, his mind grows stronger. What Sue betrays, he cleaves to. In the painful scene in which she abjures their sexual relationship, Jude is spokesman for a humane code which she is unable to sustain. Jude's anguished accusation,' "You have never loved me as I love you—never—never!'" is no more than the truth, and there is poetic justice when he turns back on Sue the Shelleyan tribute she had once forced him to make:' "Yo u are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite—not a woman!'" (p. 426). Jude's plea,' "Stay with me for humanity's sake'", seeks to transcend differences of sex and creed, binding them together in their common humanity. His symbolic action is the more moving because his belief in the sacredness of their bond remains:' "Then let the veil of our temple be rent in two from this hour!". He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows thereon, and flung it to the floor' (pp. 427-8). When he goes to see Sue for the last time, he reproaches her with' "I would have died game!'" (p. 470), and the reproach signals his tragic determination to remain true to his values even in death. His last, suicidal visit to Sue springs from a consciously undertaken resolution. He tells the scornful and incredulous Arabella:

'You think you are the stronger; and so you are, in a physical sense, now.… But I am not so weak in another way as you think. I made up my mind that a man confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a particular woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish those two wishes at one stroke, by taking this journey in the rain. That I've done. I have seen her for the last time, and I've finished myself—put an end to a feverish life which ought never to have been begun!' (p. 473)

' "I meant to do for myself", he asserts, and he succeeds. Like Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude wills himself out of existence; his act of self-obliteration is also self-affirming because he heroically refuses to betray what he believes—Samson-like, not only in his weakness for women, but in his final strength of purpose. However bitter, however despairing, he does die game, and Sue remains unforgiven.

But the last word in the novel goes to Sue, as Arabella and Widow Edlin talk beside Jude's open coffin to the sound of another Remembrance Day celebration:

'Did he forgive her?' [asks Widow Edlin]

'Not as I know.'

'Well—poor little thing, 'tis to be believed she's found forgiveness somewhere! She said she had found peace!'

'She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her necklace till she's hoarse, but it won't be true!' said Arabella. 'She's never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she's as he is now!' (pp. 493-4)

In the end, Sue's tormented consciousness haunts us more than Jude's bitter oblivion. What her life with Phillotson can be we are left to imagine—' "Quite a staid, worn woman now. 'Tis the man—she can't stomach un, even now!'" (p. 493), reports Widow Edlin—but it is clearly a living death. Arabella, with the crude insight which characterizes her throughout, offers Phillotson her own cynical view of the Mosaic law under which Sue suffers: '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."' (p. 384)

Thus the novel's thesis—'The letter killeth'—is worked out in the interlocking tragedies of a man and a woman; and Hardy's attempt 'to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity' (p. viii), comprehends Sue's specialized suffering along with Jude's. In one of those astonishing leaps of sympathy which occur in his own novels, Lawrence voices the novel's central plea for Sue:

Sue had a being, special and beautiful.… Why must man be so utterly irreverent, that he approaches each being as if it were a no-being? Why must it be assumed that Sue is an 'ordinary' woman—as if such a thing existed? Why must she feel ashamed if she is specialized? (Phoenix, p. 510).

'She was Sue Bridehead, something very particular. Why was there no place for her?' is indeed the question Hardy leaves us asking at the end of Jude the Obscure. This overwhelming sense of Sue's specialness is at once the basis of Hardy's protest on her behalf, and a measure of his imaginative achievement. The cogency of his general plea combines with his portrayal of Sue's individual 'obscurity'; the realistic sense of the gap between what she thinks and what she does, between belief and behaviour, imparts unique complexity and life to the static contrasts of the novel's original conception. Through Jude's obscurity Hardy exposes 'the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to lead': through Sue's obscurity he probes the relationship between character and ideas in such a way as to leave one's mind engaged with her as it is engaged with few other women in fiction. Hardy's intention in Jude may be incompletely realized, but the novel is not less suggestive, and its protest not less eloquent, for that.