[In the following essay, Mallett discusses the relation between the confines of language and those of gender ideology in Jude the Obscure; he observes that "through its interruptions, silences, and juxtapositions, the narrative form of the novel dramatises and echoes the predicament of its heroine."]

Critical discussion of Jude the Obscure has quite properly concentrated on Sue Bridehead. There have been two main points of departure: the first is Hardy's own account of her in 1912 (teasingly offered as the opinion of an 'experienced reviewer' from Germany) which sees her as the first delineation in fiction of 'a woman of the feminist movement' who represents 'the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing'. The second major departure-point is the pseudopsychological reading offered two years later by Lawrence in his Study of Thomas Hardy, which is in effect an attack on what he sees as Sue's denial of her true female nature ('that which was female in her she wanted to consume within the male force'). But in running these two lines of inquiry—Sue as in some way representative, Sue as a warped individual—critical accounts of the novel have seemed to echo the question, or accusation, with which Jude confronts her as she breaks down at the end of the novel: 'What I don't understand is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to Woman?' John Goode has detected a sexist bias, or at least an element of confusion, in the kind of critical interrogation which follows Jude in demanding that Sue must be 'available to understanding'; as Goode points out [in Women Writing and Writing about Women, edited by Mary Jacobus, 1979], no such demand is made of Jude, or any other male character. Penny Boumelha goes further [in Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, 1982], and accuses the narrator of acting in 'collusion' with Jude, with the result that Sue is made the instrument of his tragedy rather than the subject of her own. Boumelha goes on to argue, however, that because Sue is distanced from the reader by being seen first through Jude's eyes and then through Arabella's, what we are offered in the novel is 'openly a man's picture of a woman': Sue is 'resistant to appropriation by the male narrator.' But this is an awkward argument which involves the narrator (assumed to be male), Jude and Arabella working together to produce an image of Sue which is simultaneously disavowed within the novel (how?) as 'a man's picture of a woman'. An d 'appropriation' is surely tendentious: as if the attempt by a male novelist to imagine a female character were intrinsically improper. (It is, after all, Jude, and not Hardy, who speaks of capitalised 'Woman'.) But it is precisely here that Boumelha's description of Jude as a novel pressing against the limits of realism is so useful. The nineteenth century realist novel allows and indeed invites the reader to regard the text as a kind of unseen window, opening directly onto reality. Jude is not in these terms a realist novel: or, more exactly, it is not realist in the presentation of Sue. The narrative form of the novel is organised to show how Sue is taught to see herself first of all as a woman, second as Sue Bridehead/Phillotson/ Fawley, and finally again as a woman: it does this to reveal the operation of sexual ideology, not to claim that Hardy (or his narrator) has been able to transcend ideology. Jude the Obscure is, as Rosemarie Morgan has recently argued [in Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, 1988], Hardy's most heterodox novel, but not simply because his sexual politics had become more radical by the 1890s. What distinguishes Jude from Hardy's earlier novels is that here the moral iconoclasm which had always characterised his work is no longer inhibited by fictional conventions at odds with his purpose.

Late in the novel (V,v) the narrator denies any obligation to express his 'personal' views on what had become known as 'the Marriage Question', but Hardy was well aware that he was entering this debate, as were the reviewers, whether broadly sympathetic like Edmund Gosse or, like Mrs Oliphant, vehemently hostile. It could hardly have been otherwise in a novel which follows the marriage, divorce, and remarriage of not one but two ill-matched couples, and which has at its centre the painful relationship of Jude and Sue, each registering with extreme sensitivity and as it were seismographically the shocks of the age. And , despite his disclaimers, the narrator's sympathies (like Hardy's own) are clearly with those who saw marriage in the late nineteenth century as an institution which needed to be questioned. In this novel, for example—as not in The Woodlanders (1887)—divorce is apparently easy to come by. Yet in each case it is the woman who seeks to end the marriage, but the man who has to instigate the divorce. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 provided for a husband to divorce his wife on the simple grounds of her adultery, whereas a woman was asked to prove adultery aggravated by desertion (for a period of two years), or by cruelty, incest, rape, bestiality or sodomy. It was, in effect an Act enabling men to divorce their wives. Consequently, Jude must divorce Arabella, and Phillotson divorce Sue, and the women must become the 'guilty' parties. Sue's divorce is the case of Phillotson versus Phillotson and Fawley; she is named as the property appropriated, and Jude as the man who has wrongfully taken her. By an irony characteristic of this novel, it was Jude, at the time Sue's nearest married relation, who originally 'gave her away' in marriage—'like a she-ass, or she-goat, or any other domestic animal', as Sue reflects indignantly (Ill.vii). An d while the narrator at times confesses uncertainty about Sue's feelings and motives, he never challenges her protests.

To take a second example from the same area of the novel. For reasons deliberately left unclear, Sue finds it a 'torture' to live on sexually responsive terms with Phillotson, and tells him so: 'For a man and woman to live on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery … however legal' (IV.iii). Here Sue (and Hardy) enter still more controversial areas of nineteenth century sexual politics. The Act of 1857 had been framed in terms of a man's need to ensure that his property would pass to an heir guaranteed to be his: hence the emphasis on the fidelity of the wife. But contemporary discussion about the Act had highlighted the male desire for the exclusive possession of women as a main element in the double standard—both as enacted in the divorce law, and as allowed by custom: that is, the rule of chastity for middle-class women, sexual license for middle-class men. The passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, and 1869), providing for the compulsory medical examination of suspected prostitutes in certain areas of the country, but not (of course) the examination of their male clients, and the defence of these Acts by the medical and military establishments, served to underline the way women's sexuality was being defined, in law, not as their own, but in terms of male demands upon it. Feminists such as Mona Caird (who was known to Hardy) began to speak of 'the twin system of marriage and prostitution', arguing that women were compelled on economic grounds to sell their sexuality, either unofficially and temporarily, in prostitution, or, where the man wanted to transmit either his name or his property, officially and more or less permanently within marriage. Here again it seems that Hardy's narrator adopts the radical position. There is no animus, no show of disgust, against Arabella when she begins to prepare for herself a possible match with the quack physician Vilbert; her sexuality is her best hope of security, and as she has already said, 'poor folks must live' (I,x). More significantly, however, Sue's need not to give herself to Phillotson, married though they are, is also treated sympathetically by the narrator. Sue has earlier assured Jude that 'no man short of a sensual savage' will molest a woman: 'Until she says by a look "Come on", he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes' (Ill.iv). But Sue has reckoned without marriage. Phillotson is hardly a sensual savage, but he tells her 'Yo u are committing a sin in not liking me' (IV.iii). His friend Gillingham takes a still harsher view: 'she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses—that's what I think!' (IV,iv). Phillotson's initial refusal to accept such advice leads to his dismissal from his post, and his 'returning to zero, with all its humiliations' (V.viii). What the 'sensual savage' took by force the husband could claim by law as his 'right', and Sue's wish to avoid this 'torture' is allowed in die novel the full force of that word. It is for this reason, surely, that we are allowed to feel both that Sue's reluctance is more general than commonly recognised, and to attribute it either to some peculiarity in Phillotson (which her great-aunt intuits, and Sue admits but refuses to explain), or alternatively to an exceptional fastidiousness on Sue's part. Whatever the reason, Sue ought not to be compelled to undergo 'torture'; the reason itself is immaterial, and it is deliberately left unclear. Sue's final capitulation and return to Phillotson's bed, however legal, is felt as a violation: 'a fanatic prostitution', as Jude says (VI,iv).

What these instances illustrate is Hardy's (novelistic) ability to reconstruct what is written in the law, or identified in contemporary polemic, as part of the lived experience of his characters, and especially of course of Sue as moment by moment she endures, explores, seeks to evade, or to exploit, the ways in which she is made to inhabit her gender: to be aware of herself as first and last a 'woman'. 'Made to inhabit her gender' because Hardy does not present Sue as 'having' a 'woman's nature' which she then seeks to express—as if 'woman's nature' were an ahistorical 'given'. Rather, he shows how she constantly has to adapt to being seen by others, and indeed to see herself, in terms of the ideology of woman-hood. Here again Hardy is in the middle of the sexual-political battlefield. When John Stuart Mil l insisted in The Subjection of Women (1869) that 'what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing', and so should not be made the basis for a theory of their social role as wives, mothers, and managers of house-holds, he was attacking those who too readily identified the 'natural' with the merely 'customary'—as for example slave-owners thought it natural that blacks should be enslaved—and not proposing his own account of women's 'nature'. With the Utilitarians' boundless faith in the efficacy of education to bring about change, Mil l did not regard women's nature as a given, one day finally to be disclosed and recognised. But those who opposed Mill from the high ground of late Victorian science took exactly this view. Menstruation, for example, was a fact of nature, and the principle of the conservation of energy was a law of nature. Dr Henry Maudsley explained what resulted from the conjunction of these two 'givens': if women expended their energies on higher education, they must expect to find their reproductive abilities stunted, if not destroyed—to become the mothers of 'a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race': 'When Nature spends in one direction, she must economise in another direction.' Nature, then, and not history, the 'given' of the female body, and not the putatively malleable structures of society, was the site of women's disabilities. They were the prisoners of their biology, and could not 'rebel … against the tyranny of their organisation'. The science, or quasi-science, which developed from Darwin's work on evolution and on sexual selection was quick to argue that women's natures were indeed just as they had been described, or prescribed, by the conservative theorists Mil l had sought to challenge. What was now called 'the nature of women' was natural, pace Mill , and not to be changed by human endeavour.

Jude the Obscure resists this position: specifically, it moves away from women's nature as given, and resites Sue in particular in history. We see her learning how she is seen, what is demanded of her, the ways in which she is to represent and articulate herself—embraced, as it were, in the ideology of 'woman'. To see how complete and entangling this embrace is, and better to understand Sue's struggles within it, it is necessary to stand back a little and consider die three leading themes of the novel. There is first the exploration of a woman's self-awareness in a patriarchal society—the Marriage Question, though it involves a good deal more than marriage alone. Second, there is the interest in Jude's attempts at self-education, and his failed academic hopes—the story of the young man who could not go to Oxford. Third, there is the account of the (diminishing) role of Christian belief in late Victorian society; Jude's desire to go to Oxford/ Christminster derives in part from its reputation as a place where clergymen are grown like radishes in a bed. Both Christminster education and Christminster religion are shown to be irrelevant to the real needs of Jude and Sue. Jude's learning, remarkable as it is, is also fragmented, his expression of it often stilted, his quotations at first innocently and later deliberately and perversely mis-applied. Orthodox Christian teaching is similarly discredited. Jude's 'dogmas' tell him that it is Sue's duty to overcome the 'pruderies' which prevent her from submitting to sexual intimacy with the man she has married, but 'experience and unbiased nature' contradict his theological judgment (IV.ii). Later in the novel, his own relationship with Sue, loving but illicit, leads to their persecution by other dogmatic believers, and dismissal from their work at Aldbrickham; as they await the inquest on their children the chapel organ plays 'Truly God is loving unto Israel', while two clergymen debate 'the eastward position' (VI,ii). Jude's academic books are spattered with pig-grease, and he burns his theological books; in both cases the reader's sympathy with his distress is modified by doubts about the value of what he is seeking.

All this is familiar. But it is important to recognise the interpenetration of these three themes, signalled in the way each draws on the same pool of vocabulary, opposing spirit and flesh, noble and gross, high and low. For example, the orthodox language of sexuality sees Arabella as 'low'; the narrator refers to her 'low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman,' and Sue describes her as a 'low-passioned woman'. But this is simultaneously the language of class; it's a matter for remark that Jude, who has kept himself 'up' with his academic ambitions, has now 'descended so low' as to walk with Arabella, and Sue goes on to describe her as 'too low, too coarse' for Jude's company (I.vii, V,ii). Jude has 'high' academic hopes: he wants to join the 'high thinkers' of the University, to enter the 'soul' of the Colleges instead of working outside on their 'carcases' ; simultaneously, and necessarily, he wants to 'rise' socially, and to earn his £5,000 a year. But this desire to 'rise', to become less 'rough' and more 'refined', all in class terms, leads back to the language of sexuality. That Sue seems sexually reticent and 'refined' appeals to 'all that's best and noblest' in Jude, and her 'freedom from everything that's gross' has 'elevated' him: the terms are of course social as well as moral (V,ii). When Sue tells Jude that she has always longed to 'ennoble some man to high aims' we can't separate out the acquisition of the higher knowledge, the access to a higher class, and the refusal of the 'low' vices of sexual desire and drunkenness to which Jude thinks himself subject, and which inhibit his belief in his ability to rise (Ill.iv). It is eventually Jude's doubts about his ability to subordinate the 'low' and 'fleshly' aspect of his nature to the 'high' and 'spiritual' side that persuade him to give up his ambition to enter the Church as a licentiate.

The dominant language of the book, then, though it is not one that is approved in the novel, privileges, or appears to privilege one set of terms over another: spirit, soul, noble, high, etc., over flesh, body, gross, low, etc.; and in the process suggests that whatever the ostensible topic of their discussions—religious belief, academic aims, sexual behaviour—Jude and Sue will have to encounter the same all-pervading dualism. Two points, I think, follow from this. First, it suggests the lines on which Hardy might have answered D. H. Lawrence's charge that he failed sufficiently to support his characters in their war against the age. Lawrence argues that in the tragic drama of Sophocles or Shakespeare the characters are pitted against 'the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself', and their defeat is inevitable. In the novels of Tolstoy and Hardy, however, it is merely 'the lesser human morality, the mechanical system' which is transgressed; accordingly, Sue and Jude (or Anna and Vronsky) ought to have won, to have come through: 'they were not at war with God, only with Society.' But this is to suppose that 'society' is one identifiable target, as it were 'out there', separate from the characters; what Hardy suggests is that the values of the society are not 'out there', distinct from the consciousness of Jude and Sue, but permeate their language and their being. This point is central to our understanding of the novel. However bracing Lawrence's energy in repudiating his society, we need to recognise that Hardy's vision of his characters' relation to society is entirely different: less romantic, but perhaps more persuasive. There is no rainbow vision, no world elsewhere, for Jude and Sue.

The second point is closely related. To show how all-encompassing and how damaging this dualism is, Hardy needed a double focus. Jude's may be the central consciousness of the novel, but Sue's is the central experience, and the two are mutally re-inforcing. They inhabit the same ideological world, and this helps to reveal the coercive power of the language they also inhabit. The natural comparison is with Hardy's own novel, The Return of the Native (1878), which also has a double focus. Here the two exceptional members of the community are Clym, filled with dreams of educating and improving his community, and Eustacia, who dreams of passionate love and sexual fulfilment. They are naturally drawn together, but to what purpose in the novel is unclear. Both are filled with Promethean fire and rebellion; both are defeated. But while Clym learns to take a grim satisfaction in the 'oppressive horizontality' of the heathland around him, Eustacia struggles to remain vertical until she is finally dragged down as if by 'a hand from beneath'. Clym, despite his early ambitions, becomes an agent of the force which destroys Eustacia; Eustacia, seeking her own fulfilment, helps bring Clym to his mood of grim acceptance. We are left uncertain: how are we invited to feel about rebellion and resignation, about acceptance and aspiration, when the two leading protagonists seem to belong each to a separate moral universe? In Jude Hardy avoids this confusion. Although the focus is in one case on class, and in the other on gender, Jude and Sue do share the same ideological world, the same language. Their every attempt to speak to each other exposes them to the same ideological forces, and exposes these forces to us as readers.

From here it is possible to see more clearly what it means to say that Sue is 'made to inhabit her gender', and how Hardy reveals sexual identity not as 'natural' or 'given' but as made or ideologically constructed. Early in the novel Jude as a boy dreams of an idealised Christminster, a 'city of light', a 'heavenly Jerusalem' (I.iii). The narrator quickly warns us that Jude's dreams 'were as gigantic as his surroundings were small'; the dream of Christminster takes its origin in the ugliness of the meanly utilitarian fields of Marygreen. And when Jude reaches Christminster, he ignores the palpable city before his eyes, and sees a visionary one still: 'when he passed objects out of harmony, … he allowed his eyes to slip over them' (II,i). The narrator is compassionate, but does not for a moment share Jude's obsessive love of the city; wiser than his hero, he forewarns us that Jude will eventually discover 'the deadly animosity' of all modern thought to what he holds dear in Christminster. Precisely this pattern of an idealising dream, and the narrator's refusal to share it, is used to introduce Sue. Even before they meet Jude is enough in love with her to kiss her photograph. When he sees her working in a shop selling religious articles, he thinks hers 'a sweet, saintly, Christian business', and imagines how she would be to him 'a kindly star, an elevating power' (italics added)—much as he had seen Christminster as his 'Alma Mater' and himself as her 'beloved son' (Il.ii). Already Jude has begun to insert Sue in this dominant idiom; and in order to reveal how arbitrary this is, the narrator allows us one of our very few glimpses of Sue outside the perceptions of the other characters. Here she is seen buying her plaster statuettes of Venus and Apollo, reading Gibbon on Julian the Apostate, and then turning to Swinburne's 'familiar poem' ('Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean'): far from the sweet and saintly girl of Jude's imaginings, she is so stirred by her adventure that after she has 'unrobed' her figures, and undressed herself, she lies 'tossing and staring' through the night (Il.iii). This palpable Sue, her clothes soiled by plaster from her statuettes, is not to be seen by Jude, any more than he sees the palpable Christminster. Just as his dream of the city was conceived against the ugliness of village life, so his dream of an ethereal Sue is conceived in opposition to the physicality of his marriage to Arabella. As she was a 'female animal', so Sue must be a female angel.

From the beginning of their relationship, then, Jude, 'sees' Sue in the dualistic, ideological terms noted earlier. But even as a child, we learn from Drusilla Fawley, Sue was taught to see herself in a gendered way. She would play happily on a slide among a group of boys, but her performance would be applauded; she would accuse the boys of being 'saucy'—i.e., of addressing her through an awareness of gender—and flee indoors; they would follow, and plead with her to return (II,vi). The pattern here is of advance; insertion into gender; retreat; discovery of the self as desired. To this we must add a sense of guilt: Sue, we are told, was often smacked for her 'impertinence' or immodesty—i.e., for failing to stay within the boundaries of her gender. This pattern is repeated with the three men in her adult life, beginning with the Christminster graduate with whom she tried to form a friendship as if they were two male friends or 'comrades'. He attempted to make her his mistress; she retreated; he responded with the claim that his desire for her was killing him. With both Phillotson and Jude Sue again looks for comradeship; is at once seen as a possible sexual partner; seeks to retreat, while still relishing the sense of being valued and approved; and eventually, trapped both by the guilt they produce in her, and by her own fear of losing their approval, allows herself to be caught in a sexual relationship. Denied the possibility of a gender-free comradeship, Sue must either leave the relationship, and forfeit friendship and approval, or surrender to a sexual role, guiltily, not freely, as the price to be paid for being approved. Refused what she asks for—a non-sexual love—she wishes at least to keep the sexual love she shares with Jude free from the constraints of a formal marriage. But as die novel makes clear, this affords her a merely token increase in freedom; she accepts the name 'Mrs Fawley', bears Jude's children, becomes economically dependent on Jude, and sees her fortunes fall with his.

Jude's revulsion from the low and physical Arabella, and his aspiration towards the high and spiritual Christminster, encourages him to see Sue as 'ethereal', 'refined', 'uncarnate': in short, as all but 'sexless'. Sue's desire to be approved, loved but not possessed, is inevitably reinforced by Jude's response. Here the contradictions within this dominant idiom begin to emerge. The narrator notes that Jude briefly has 'a true illumination': that the real centre of Christminster life is with the people who live and work in the town, and not within the Colleges (II,ii). Sue at times urges on him the same recognition. But this runs against the dominant high-low idiom. To embrace this 'low' life, which maintains the 'carcases' of the buildings, at the expense of the 'high' intellectual life of the spirit, would be to undermine Jude's project of self-improvement, and Sue's role as the ennobling and elevating presence in his life. So long as Jude privileges such words as 'elevated' and 'ethereal', bound up as they are with his class position and his academic dreams, he must structure Sue's sexuality in the same terms: 'grossness', sexually and socially, is the only alternative within the idiom. An d so long as Sue needs his approval, and sees that it depends on his valuation of her as elevated, she is necessarily inhibited from urging on him the value of the incarnate 'real life' of Christminster, as against the unreal and uncarnate life of his academic visions. 'Real life' in Christminster, as we see it in the novel, is never celebrated; it is either the occasion for, or the analogue to, Jude's vices of drunkenness or sexuality. With the sardonic humour so frequent in this work, Jude and Sue are seen as trapped between the 'high' world of the University dons of Christminster, and the 'low' world of Arabella, née Donn, of here, there and everywhere.

There is another way of describing the contradictions felt here in the language used by Jude and Sue. Sexual life is problematic for Sue, but not, it appears, for Arabella, who in the course of the novel marries two men twice each, one of these marriages being bigamous. For Arabella, sexual life means the satisfaction of her physical desires, or the exchange of her favours in return for economic security. This is sex without mystery. For Sue, however—in part because of the pressure from Jude—sex is made, not one experience, but the defining experience: the ultimate personal act. One sees these two views clashing when she discovers that Jude has again slept with Arabella: Jude dismisses the act as 'nothing', because it was without emotional meaning; Sue calls it 'gross' for the same reason (IV,v). Yet the act Jude describes as 'nothing' is also, when imagined as between himself and Sue, everything, and her denial of it all but unbearable. Sue, free from all that's gross, must participate in the act in order to keep Jude loyal to her, yet—if she is to retain his approval—she must be separate from it. On the one hand, as she realises with increasing distress, sexual love has been secularised, made subject to the law, to written contracts, and the involvement of courts, forms and registrars; on the other, it has been sacralised, made a mystery. It has become simultaneously the defining private act, and a matter for public legislation. Sue thus finds herself in an intolerable position: sexual love is 'nothing', and it is everything; it is 'gross', and it is the mark of an ultimate commitment; it belongs to a world that is high and elevated, and it is carried out to complete an official contract between two 'parties' of stated age, rank and condition.

This dominant language, at once coercive and contradictory, needs to be further related to the narrative form of the novel. In the Preface to the 1895 edition, Hardy described the novel as 'a series of seemings', and the question of 'their consistency or discordance' as 'not of the first importance'. This is to understate his position. In opposition to those who saw women's 'nature' as effectively fixed and immutable, Hardy chose to show how Sue's identity is constructed in language, and to trace the way in which that language is entangled with questions of social class, and sanctioned by the authority of the Church. He shows no desire to reconcile Sue's experience of contradiction by making her fully intelligible to us, while not so to herself. Instead, he leaves deliberate gaps in his narrative. Most notably, we only rarely see Sue away from Jude and Phillotson, the two men who most often ask her to be intelligible to them, or who seek to mould her into their own favoured idioms. Constantly the novel allows Jude and Phillotson to interrogate Sue; again and again they are refused entry into her mind. Jude speculates that his confessions about Arabella may have prompted Sue's engagement, but neither she nor the narrator confirms the suspicion. After her wedding to Phillotson she enters Jude's house for a moment, and Jude is convinced she is about to speak: but 'whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken' (Ill.vii). Sue argues that a person unhappy in marriage has a right to proclaim the fact 'even … upon the housetops', but she attributes her own misery to 'a reason I cannot disclose' (IV.ii). The apparent confidence of the narrator's account of her as 'quite unfitted by temperament and by instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson' is immediately qualified: 'possibly with scarce any man' (IV,iii). This is characteristic. 'Possibly', says the narrator, or 'perhaps', but rarely more: 'perhaps she knew that [Phillotson] was thinking of her thus' (II,v); 'that was just the one thing [Jude] would not be able to bear, as she probably knew' (Ill.i). The narrative can disclose the pressures operating on Sue, but does not allow us to suppose that she has some essential self, separate from these, but available to our understanding, as if we observed her from some neutral ground.

The sense that Sue is situated in language, and is not to be reached by some means other than language, and the fact that there is no 'objective' language in which to reach her, explains two other features of the text. It explains firstly what Mary Jacobus has described [in Essays in Criticism 25 (1975)] as the 'diagrammatic' plotting of the novel: the highly visible pattern of contrasts, repetitions and echoes, and their frequent grotesqueness. Hardy himself wrote to Gosse that 'the book is all contrasts … 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' . To these one might add: Sue as a heap outside Phillotson's window, Sue as a heap on the floor of St Silas' church; Arabella's two seductions of Jude; the clergyman's view that Sue has been 'saved as by fire' by her remarriage to Phillotson, Jude's sense that he is giving his body to be burned in re-marrying Arabella; and so on. These 'contrasts' should not be dismissed as examples of Hardy's supposed heavy-handedness. Their effect is to remind us of the fictionality of the novel; if one mark of the 'classic realist text' is that it tends to conceal its literary character, Jude the Obscure should perhaps be described as an anti-realist novel. Hardy eschews all claim to the sort of finality and authority associated with realist fiction (and, to a still greater extent, with Victorian 'scientific' accounts of women's nature); he explores the clash of languages around Sue, within which her identity is constructed, but does not pretend to offer a 'metalanguage' granting direct access to her being.

The paraphernalia of quotations and allusions that litter the pages of the novel may be understood in the same way: the narrator, the epigraphs, and the characters, all remind us of the fictionality of the work. Many of the allusions in the novel are distorted. In I,vi Jude imagines his future: 'Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater, and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased.' The reference here is to Matthew 3:17, and in the gospel a dove appears at this point; in the novel, a pig's-pizzle bangs against Jude's face, discrediting rather than confirming the words. After the death of their children, Sue quotes I Corinthians 4:9: 'We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!' (Vl.ii); Paul's words form part of his assertion of the imminence and supreme importance of divine judgment, but Sue's bitterness thrusts aside this context. The narrator too quotes inappropriately: for example, from William Barnes and Michael Drayton in IV,iv, as Phillotson makes his way in torment to see his friend Gillingham. The epigraphs interact uneasily with the sections of narrative they introduce. To take one example, that to Part Third ('At Melchester') is from Sappho: 'For there was no other girl, O Bridegroom, like her!' Sappho's poem is from a group of epithalamia and bridal songs, celebrating just that erotic joy which Sue does not find with her husband; the quotation is wrenched out of context, and made instead to anticipate the 'fastidiousness' by which Sue feels singled out. Numerous texts move through the pages of Jude the Obscure: the Bible, and the Nicene Creed; Horace, Ovid and Marcus Aurelius; Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Swinburne, Barnes, Longfellow, Poe; the 'spectres' who address Jude as he arrives in Christminster. The effect is to insist on the fictionality of the novel, to draw attention to its status as a construct. The language of the fiction, like the language of sexual identity, is being exposed as made, not given; the novel, that is to say, is not presented as a revelation, an uncovering of what is demonstrably 'there', but confesses itself the result of human action: imperfect therefore, and implicated in those forms of language in which Sue is seen to be entrapped. Through its interruptions, silences and juxtapositions, the narrative form of the novel dramatises and echoes the predicament of its heroine.