SOURCE: "Modes of Perception: The Will to Live in Jude the Obscure", in Studies in the Novel, Vol . 11, No. 1, 1970, pp. 31-41.

[In the following essay, Benvenuto observes two differing modes of perception in Jude the Obscure: an objective, amoral mode that is indifferent to humanity and Jude's idealist, personalizing mode wherein lies the stonecutter's desire to live.]

The Fury that greeted the first appearance of Jude the Obscure has long since subsided, yet we are no closer than its reviewers were to an agreement upon Hardy's intent in the novel or the caliber of his performance in it. Jude is not an especially difficult novel; it continues to divide its readers, however, because it imposes upon them what are, by Victorian standards, rigorous and unusual demands. Until the final chapters of Jude, Hardy commits himself and the reader to the life of his hero and to the high-minded courage and independence Jude shows in adversity. His character is one of Hardy's strongest arguments for the value and dignity a man can possess in a world that is alien to the ideals of humanity. When Jude says, "Well—I'm an outsider to the end of my days," not knowing how close he is to the end, he brings down the novel's condemnation on a system that behind its walls isolates itself from intelligence and integrity. ¹ At the end of the novel, faced with what amounts to a reversal of judgment, our sense of identification with Jude is strained to the critical point. Jude curses himself and bitterly denounces those ideals and actions that made up his life and gave it tragic power and won him our approval and respect. We can understand Jude's vision of himself as a modern Job, but I cannot agree with him that it would have been better had he never lived. If Jude the Obscure has anything to say to us, it is that the world needs more Judes, not fewer or none at all.

When he curses the day of his birth, Jude speaks out of a broken spirit and in a semi-delirium. We would as a matter of course see in his last words the tragic fall and defeat of a man who is no longer a reliable witness for himself or the novel's norms and vision of life. Surely Hardy is not telling men that it would have been better for them if they had not been born. But we cannot assume even that much, because we cannot readily dissociate Jude's summation of his life from the novel's pervasive image of life. Early in the novel, the narrator spoke of Jude's "weakness of character"—his sensitivity to cruelties inflicted on life—which "suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again" (p. 13). The narrator combines an ironic with a literal mode of discourse and implies two perspectives from which man can be viewed and judged. The narrator speaks ironically about Jude's "weakness" of character, but his conclusion that Jude's life is "unnecessary" is the exact corollary of his recognition that the general scheme of life does not conform to man's scale of values. We understand Jude's "weakness" to be a strength of character, because we see Jude's sensitivity from another, more humanizing perspective than that of the general scheme for which it is a defect. The humanizing perspective, if it is expanded to cover all of Jude's life, reveals the necessity of his life, just as it recognizes the value of his sympathy for the birds in Troutham's fields. To hold to that perspective is to read irony where the narrator does not intend it. The narrator switches his mode of discourse when he passes from a part to the whole of Jude's life, and he concludes that life is meaningless because it must be lived in a scheme of things that turns moral resources into physical hardships. Essentially the same reason leads Jude to conclude that his life has been meaningless, and Hardy's critics have split into two camps which dispute whether pleasure or knowledge is possible from a novel with that conclusion. By taking the general perspective as the only one that matters in Jude, neither side attends to Hardy's vision of life from within its own frame of reference or feels the weight of his argument against the wish not to live.

The two perspectives in Jude are revealed through two modes of perception which elicit contrary values and meanings from human life. The perceptual modes are perhaps different in degree rather than in kind—a character at any given moment may occupy a point midway between the two—but they are easily distinguishable as extremes; and it is upon the polarity of the two that Hardy expresses his sense of human life in Jude. The mode of perception that sees Jude's life to be "unnecessary" is objective and universal in its frame of reference. It has accurate knowledge of the laws governing life and recognizes that the general scheme of things—the universal forces that act as laws in a man's life—is amoral and indifferent to man. To see man objectively is to see him as minute and isolated within the general impersonality of existence. This is Father Time's mode of perception: "The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars." He does not see "houses," "willows," or "fields," but rather "human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark world" (p. 334). He sees "the particulars" of life, and especially individual happiness, to be an illusion. He concludes that "All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun" (p. 332). From the objective mode of perception, which for Father Time is "right," human life is an irrelevant anomaly from the general scheme of things, and it is therefore a hardship he can find no reason to endure. He tells Sue on the evening before his suicide, "I wish I hadn't been born!" (p. 402). He wishes not to live with a horrendous insistence that does not let him wait for the curtain of death to fall on its own and signify to him that all is well for his unnecessary life.

Father Time is wrong to kill himself and the other children, of course, just as Jude is wrong about himself on his death bed. The child's objective awareness of the insignificance of life has led him to treat people as though they were no more significant in themselves than they are for the conditions in which they live. He sees himself and others as superfluous, or as his note explains: "Done because we are too menny" (p. 405). In direct contrast to his son, Jude refused to kill "a single one" of the "scores" of earthworms covering the road between Troutham's field and his aunt's cottage (p. 13). Jude's mode of perception is individualistic and emotive; its frame of reference is composed of specific living things, which are as important for. Jude as the abstract scheme is for Father Time. Jude's perception personalizes the world: it makes what he sees an extension of himself and endows it with human values. "He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them …" (p. 13). Father Time makes his image of self conform to his conception of the universe. Jude makes his conception of the universe conform to his image of self. His initial perceptions of Christminster project his individual yearnings and desires outward with such force that for his mind the scheme of things becomes as personal and as morally fitted to man as for Father Time's mind it is indifferent and inhumane. Jude perceives even inanimate nature as a reflection of human personality and emotions: "You," he said, addressing the breeze caressingly, 'were in Christminster city between one and two hours ago … touching Mr. Phillotson's face, being breathed by him; and now you are here, breathed by me—you, the very same'" (pp. 21-22). Though Jude is eventually disillusioned by Christminster and comes to see it and external nature more objectively the mode of vision which he possessed on top of the Brown House remains as a part of his consciousness, and it operates within the novel as a corrective against the a priori disillusionment of Father Time.

Neither the personal nor the objective mode of perception perceives life completely, and both Jude and Father Time suffer because of their limitations. Their perceptions, moreover, take shape within a larger mental pattern or system of beliefs about life. When Jude sees Christminster as "a city of light," and when Father Time watches his fellow passengers laughing in the absence of any cause for laughter "under the sun," they convert their perceptions into judgments of life. The mode in which they see life becomes for each a basis for evaluating life. Perception and judgment become one and the same act. The Christminster that Jude perceives as a child is simultaneously a moral standard, a criterion by which he measures conditions in Marygreen and to which he, as an individual, aspires. He yearns for Christminster to be a place "which he could call admirable" (p. 24), and he immediately concludes, with no further evidence than what he can supply from within himself, that "It would just suit me" (p. 25). His vision of Christminster shapes what it sees according to what it values. It is ambiguous, therefore, whether the Christminster, that Jude sees is more truly an object of perception—a spot on the landscape—or an emanation of his moral sensibility. "It was Christminster, unquestionably," that Jude saw, "either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere" (p. 10). It is both: "directly seen" by Jude's personalized mode of vision, whose medium is the "peculiar atmosphere" of Jude's moral values.

Jude is an idealist, but he is not thereby guilty of an illusionistic fantasy of which his growing up or the real world only can cure him. His mode of perception does not disguise truth from him. It enables him to see individual existences as real and to respect them as valuable. It keeps Hardy's novel from reducing itself to Father Time's wish not to live.² Father Time's perception is objectively accurate for a world which, when seen as a whole, has many sorrows and little joy, but it is no less than Jude's an act of evaluation as well as of vision. And the consequences of Father Time's perceptual judgment pose a far greater threat to human life than do those of Jude's. Father Time's perception corrupts his appreciation of even those few joys which sensitive minds can experience. The pavilion of flowers at the great Wessex Agricultural Show is "an enchanted palace" to the "appreciative taste" of Sue and Jude. It provides the single glimpse of unalloyed happiness the reader has of them. The lovers press their faces to the flowers and speak of "Greek joyousness" and escape from sorrow. Father Time, the only shadow on the scene, refuses to participate with them. '" I am very, very sorry, father and mother,' he said. 'But please don't mind—I can't help it. I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days!'" (p. 358). The words condense the issues of the entire novel to an image or a tableau. Father Time's perception of the conditions of mortal life is correct: the flowers will wither and die like all other forms of life. But because the flowers will decay, they are as good as dead for Father Time even while they are in bloom and beautiful. He denies value to individual life because he perceives the flowers not as they are in themselves, but as they are subject to universal laws. His perception and his judgment take place in the abstract, while the flowers exist in a specific moment. The point is not that one mode of perception is to be preferred, but that there are two modes of perception and two value systems by which Jude the Obscure sees and assesses human life. By contraposing the personalized to the objectifying mode of vision, the pavilion scene reveals life to be a source of joy and value as well as an object of despair.

In showing us the flowers before they wither, the pavilion scene stands out from the novel, and at the same time it heightens the dilemma in which Hardy places his human beings. Hardy is not content to divide human experience into two opposing perspectives. Rather, he suggests the need for syncretization of the two. It is clearly important to his design that we see the validity of Sue's conclusion that "Nature's law" is "mutual butchery" (p. 371), and that we share the narrator's "perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener …" (p. 13). The novel's recurrent perception of life is from the objective mode, which sees men trapped on the one side by the forces of evolutionary nature and on the other by the rigid systems of social conformity. It is equally important to Hardy's design that we see the significance of men themselves and of individual living things, apart from the forces enclosing them.³ Given "the flaw in the terrestrial scheme," the flowers are beautiful at the time Sue and Jude enjoy them. If to know life fully one must perceive the general laws governing life, to be willing to live he must perceive individual lives as sources of value. To disregard either mode of perception is to oversimplifly Hardy's vision of life and to reduce considerably the tension of emotions in Jude. The issue is whether man can will to live when he knows that life does not mean anything to the powers unaffected by his will—whether Jude in particular can sustain the mode of perception evoking his will to live as he acquires the mode that negates it. Because perceptions take on a normative function, moreover, it is vital for each mode of perceptual judgment to adhere to its own frame of reference—the personalized or the objective—and not transgress the other's. Jude made his frustration inevitable by taking the Christminster of his personalized perception for an objective standard of value in the universe. He seeks outside of himself the "heavenly Jerusalem" his vision created. Famer Time is equally, if not more mistaken. He allows his objective knowledge of an inhuman universe to dehumanize all value out of individual lives and to be a sentence of death upon himself.

His verdict—"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it …" (p. 402)—applies to the personal perspective of life the reductive logic of Father Time's objective mode of perception. Because he can see no meaning for life in a transcendent pattern of existence, Father Time denies any possibility for value in the act of living itself, and he does so with horrifying consistency: "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!" (p. 402). The immediate causes of Father Time's despair are his father's having to take lodgings in another house and the family's economic peril. As is manifest in his violent reaction to the news of Sue's pregnancy, the actual cause is his judgment that life is not a sufficient reason for the suffering men incur while living. The universe which reduces men to isolated, suffering units becomes Father Time's moral reference, the basis from which he argues for the direct killing of children "that are not wanted. …" Because it dehumanizes men into conformity with the inhumane, his proposal is an outrage against humanity and human values and a direct challenge to the personalized mode of perception. It is, therefore, critically important to know whether the novel makes an adequate reply.

In so far as it is informed by the narrator's mode of perceptual judgment, the novel does not reply. The narrator, though not to the unrelieved exclusiveness of Father Time, sees the world from the objective mode and is aware of personalized values only as ironically incongruous to the general scheme of things. He is sensitive to Jude's ambition to become a classical scholar, but his perspective reduces Jude to a helpless, pathetic figure waiting for guidance in a world where nobody came to guide him because "nobody does …" (p. 32). Though he speaks frequently in his own person elsewhere, the narrator makes no comment on Father Time's suicide or on his method of dispensing with unwanted children. Like Father Time, the narrator cannot see the particulars of life fully in their own light, because of his concern with "the generals of life …" (p. 334). Father Time's refusal to enjoy the roses that are beautiful and living, because they are doomed to decay, converts an accurate perception from the objective perspective into a false evaluation in the personalized perspective. An abstracting perception of what will be conditions his judgment of what is. When referring to Jude's "unnecessary life," the narrator blinds himself to the particular beauty and impact of that life because he perceives that it will have no account in the cosmic sum of things. Of course it will not; yet this does not prevent Hardy from considering Jude a very important man. The narrator speaks for what we know Hardy's cosmic vision to have been, but he should not be taken for what Wayne Booth calls a novel's "implied author."⁴ His consciousness of life's meaning and value does not delimit the novel's portrait of life. The narrator tends to reduce the details of life to theorems about life and to see particular events in the light of what one can generally expect from life. His portrait of life is sometimes a stereotyped one.

This is true of the way he sees marriage, which shows the influence of objective realities upon the narrator's perceptual judgment of specific experience. Hardy wanted the marriage laws reformed, and he expressed his views of the general state of matrimony through the narrator's indignation at a society that calmly accepted the first exchange of vows between Jude and Arabella (pp. 65-66). But the narrator seldom sees more of marriage than what a stereotype of marriage would condition him to see. In this respect, he is very like Sue, who convinces herself of what marriage is before she marries. For both, marriage is fatal to love, as though by universal law. Hence, the narrator singles out Arabella and Cartlett as illustrating "the antipathetic, recriminatory mood of the average husband and wife of Christendom" (p. 357)—a judgment he does not corroborate with evidence drawn from their married life, the typicalness of which we have no way of knowing. Jude and Arabella's landlord "doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and ultimately flinging a shoe at his head, he recognized the note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more" (pp. 465-66). It is a bad marriage, but equally bad is the logic that makes affection dependent upon alcohol and equates respectability with violence.⁵ This is not to say that Hardy's logic was flawless and easily distinguishable from his narrator's. It is to point out that the narrator, Sue, and Father Time have fixed, undeviating minds. Once they seize the general law, they feel qualified to judge as though they knew all the particulars.

We need to be more cautious of identifying the discursive commentator in Hardy's fiction with the novelist who created him, and especially because, as most critics have noted, the commentary of the novels is usually inept beside the dramatic power of their scenes. The pig killing, with its open conflict between Arabella's pragmatism and Jude's idealism, is particularly successful in relating perceptual mode to moral judgment. Arabella and Jude reveal what they are by how they perceive inhuman conditions. Jude sees the killing as "a hateful business"; Arabella replies simply that "Pigs must be killed" (p. 75). Taken in context, their contrary modes of perception extend to the inevitable death awaiting all living things. For Arabella the pig is merely an object with no value independent from its subjugation to the domain of general law: "Poor folks must live" (p. 75). Her perception neither falsifies things as they are nor comprehends them fully. Objectively, there is no inherent value in the pig, but Arabella recognizes no value in man's ability to personalize his world in a way that defines the ethical norms of his humanity. In effect, she denies value to men as well as to pigs, to those who perceive as well as to what they perceive. Perceiving the world to be a collection of objects governed only by the law of self-preservation, she gets rid of the inconvenient presence of her child, and she reacts to Jude's death in precisely the same way as she did to the pig's. Her mode of perception makes no distinction between the two. She gives the love-philter to Vilbert while Jude is dying, because "Weak women must provide for a rainy day" (p. 485). As with its parallel, "Poor folks must live," the objective conformity of this perception to general law corrupts and dehumanizes specific human values. It results in a fixed judgment of life in a world of objects, between which and itself the perceiving mind sees no qualitative difference. Like Father Time's and the narrator's, Arabella's mode of perception does not confer value upon men.⁶

Jude's mode of perception does, though he suffers because of it. Indeed, his greatness derives in large measure from the suffering he endures because he does not dehumanize his vision into conformity with the impersonal laws of nature. The spilled pail of pig's blood formed "a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle—to those who saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat" (p. 75), to a Jude, that is, who sees the spectacle as emblematic of his moral responsibility to life.⁷ The necessity of the killing outrages his emotions and ideals; and though he was "aware of his lack of common sense," he "felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done …" (p. 76). His common sense and his feelings relate to the different perspectives in which a given event may be seen. By placing himself under the judgment of his feelings despite his common sense, he makes moral standards relevant to an event that has only pragmatic meaning to the morally indifferent Arabella. Without denying his common sense or submitting to it, Jude by personalizing the world spiritualizes it. As his common sense develops and as he becomes more objectively aware of the world, his feeling for life intensifies and the perception which spiritualizes life becomes more active and urgent within him. He pities Arabella as an "unreflecting fellow-creature" (p. 319), though he knows how she has used him; he has deep compassion for Father Time before he has seen the boy (p. 330). He perceives that Sue is "not worth a man's love" (p. 470), but he continues to love her. The truth of one mode of perception does not alter the importance of his love. ⁸ Neither his pity nor his love is ever repaid, but that does not mean he was foolish because he loved. It is precisely because Jude's ideals exist nowhere else but in his personalizing vision that Hardy stresses its importance as a mode of perception.

Critics too often give Hardy the role of grim realist dissecting the idealistic fallacies of self-deluded men. What he reveals through Jude is that under the grim reality of an indifferent universe only a human mind can value specific, living things and perceive their reality, as Jude does with the pig, the earthworms, and the people he loves. Christminster is not the "heavenly Jerusalem" Jude once thought it. But Jude's continuing to value the city that should have been is as important to his character as his getting to know the city as it is. The indifferent universe does not dehumanize his spiritualizing vision. Rather, in a world without value, Jude's way of seeing becomes the only source of value. As he did with Sue, he continues to love Christminster, though he knows the city is not worth his love. He continues to value his own powers of thought and feeling, though he learns the incongruity of human consciousness to the general scheme of things. He knows that to succeed in the world one must adapt to the world's general conditions, and "be as coldblooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies." Jude attempted instead to "reshape his course" to his own "aptness or bent"; he sought by his living to achieve his personalized image of life. Rather than condemn Jude's attempt as a misguided idealism, Hardy allows Jude to point out the common error of judging ways of life "not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes" (p. 393). Objectively a failure and knowing himself so, Jude still affirms the essential soundness of his life.

He has a will to live, which is something other than a grasping at survival, or what Jude calls a "save-your-own-soulism" (p. 330), because it questions the universe and the laws by which the universe functions. Jude does not deny or ignore the universal law by which men blindly struggle to survive; he refuses to accept that kind of law as a basis for his actions or as the measure of his ideals. When he returns to Christminster, totally enlightened as to the scheme of things, he delivers an impassioned defense of the spiritualizing, self-emanating mode of perception. He says he is "in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example." The "fixed opinions" of his youth have "dropped away," and the further he goes the less sure he is—but not of himself. He has lost the certainty of a mind that rests upon "fixed opinions." The principles that seemed to apply to life are "in a chaos." But he does not replace the principles which he has lost from his personalized mode of vision with principles that belong to the objective mode of vision. He accepts the necessity of living without "fixed opinions" and replaces principles with feelings, "inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best" (p. 394). It is not a stunning victory for the spirit of man, but neither is it one that we can afford to overlook. To be sure, Christminster is the obsolescent, corrupt institution that Sue ridicules, but it also remains an ideal within Jude's consciousness, which creates value by virtue of Jude's capacity for love. "Why should you care so much for Christminster," Sue asks him. "Christminster cares nothing for you. …" Jude answers simply, "I love the place …" (p. 386). Like the guilt that he feels for killing the pig, Jude's love is illogical. It also keeps him from despair in a life without hope. It is his commitment to the little that remains to humanity in the midst of the inhumane.

Jude's love is the shaping force behind his personalizing vision, and it is what Father Time and the narrator leave out of their perceptions of life. "… if children make so much trouble," Father Time asks Sue, "why do people have 'em?" (p. 402). It is the question of the reason for existence and the value of life that Hardy poses through all of Jude. Sue's answer, "O—because it is a law of nature," generalizes the meaning of life and reduces men to the status of creatures swept along in the struggle for survival. Jude's love suggests another answer because it affirms the independence of human value, if not the independence of man's fate, from natural law and cosmic scheme. In his Christminster speech, Jude accepts his own obscurity, from the objective point of view, as irrelevant to the spiritual experience and value of life; and he sees that external laws and abstract norms do not constitute a fixed design for living. In "a chaos," he must find rules to live by within his own individuality. After the "senseless circumstance" of the children's death, his spiritual independence of self contrasts strongly to Sue's self-destructive acceptance of "something external to us which says, 'Yo u shan't!'" (p. 407). Jude shows the finest qualities of his love as a way of seeing when he comforts Sue, though he mourns for his children himself, though he watches her withdraw from him and destroy him. He is destroyed, but only when he stops loving, when his emotions lose their individualizing power and submit to the reductive logic of the objective universe. It is a tragic loss not only of "unfulfilled aims," as Hardy states in his "Preface," but of a vision of life that had fulfilled a man's essential humanity. In his death-bed despair, Jude is as wrong about himself as he was about Christminster in his idealism. We cannot agree that he should not have been born—we do not regret his failure to jump through the ice on the night Arabella left him. That impulse is part of the paternity of Father Time, but Jude outgrew his son and his son's logic of what to do with unwanted life. If we think of his last visit to Sue as a symbolic and successful return to the frozen pond, we grasp the tragic loss of a man whose soul came to him, who in his maturity and clearest senses spoke and acted as one who possessed, against the odds of logic, the will to live.

NOTES

¹Jude the Obscure (London, 1965), p. 396. Subsequent references to Jude are to this edition, called The Greenwood Edition.

² A wide sentiment among Hardy's critics is summed up in Evelyn Hardy's remark that Jude is "a denial of life as we know it," although not all would agree with her that it "verges on the pathological. …" For Kathleen R. Hoopes, Jude's idealism is in conflict with the true and the real: "With the vanishing of his most precious ghosts, his will to live disintegrated, for he could not exist in the world of men." See Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (London, 1954), pp. 253, 246; and "Illusion and Reality in Jude the Obscure," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XI I (September 1957), 157. In one of the better articles on Jude, "The Child: The Circus: and Jude the Obscure," The Cambridge Journal, VII (June 1954), 531-46, Emma Clifford recognizes that Jude's vision "remains a glorious vision … that is both sustained and destroyed in the garish atmosphere of Thomas Hardy's special kind of hell" (542).

³ Hardy often shrinks his characters to mere dots in a vast panorama, yet he does not treat them or the particulars of their lives as though they were insignificant. His "Preface" to Two on a Tower states that his aim was to set "the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men." In Jude, Hardy's art has matured and no longer needs a stupendous background, but his "sentiment" is fundamentally the same.

⁴The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 71-77.

⁵ Reviewing Jude for Harper's Weekly on December 7, 1895, William Dean Howells advanced a moderate and sensible reading of Hardy's view of the marriage problem: "I f the experience of Jude with Arabella seems to arraign marriage, and it is made to appear not only ridiculous but impious that two young, ignorant, impassioned creatures should promise lifelong fealty and constancy when they can have no real sense of what they are doing, and that then they should be held to their rash vow by all the forces of society, it is surely not the lesson of the story that any other relation than marriage is tolerable for the man and woman who live together." Howells' review has been reprinted in Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, ed. Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom (London, 1968), pp. 115-17, esp. p. 117.

⁶ Arabella's undeniable will to survive is more mechanical than vital, a predatory instinct and not a human alternative to the wish not to live. She is as destructive to life as Father Time is, and in the egotism which preserves her, she is the most spiritually impoverished of the main characters in Jude. Defenders of Arabella tend to exaggerate the health and freedom of her spirit as compared with Sue's neurotic indecisiveness, and they obscure her close affinities with the unscrupulous Vilbert.

⁷ Cf. Arthur Mizener, "Jude the Obscure As A Tragedy." The Southern Review, VI (1940), 205-6. The mighty opposites of tragedy that Mizener does not find in Jude and Arabella exist in the differing modes of perception that constitute the novel.

⁸ As A. Alvarez observes in his "Afterword" to Jude the Obscure (New York: Signet Classics Edition, 1961), "… the truth and power of the novel lie in the way in which Jude, in the end, is able to understand his love for Sue without lessening it" (p. 410, original italics).