SOURCE: "Hardy's Sue Bridehead", in Nineteenth Century Fiction, University of California Press, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1966, pp. 307-23.

[In the following essay, Heilman examines Hardy's complex portrayal of the character of Sue Bridehead, calling it "an imaginative feat" that expresses Hardy's perception of modern human reality.]

In Jude the Obscure, a novel in which skillful characterization eventually wins the day over laborious editorializing, Thomas Hardy comes close to genius in the portrayal of Sue Bridehead. Sue takes the book away from the title character, because she is stronger, more complex, and more significant, and because her contradictory impulses, creating a spontaneous air of the inexplicable and even the mysterious, are dramatized with extraordinary fullness and concreteness, and with hardly a word of interpretation or admonishment by the author. To say this is to say that as a character she has taken off on her own, sped far away from a conceptual role, and developed as a being whose brilliant and puzzling surface provides only partial clues to the depuis in which we can sense the presence of profound and representative problems.

Sue's original role, of course, is that of counterpoint to Arabella: spirit against flesh, or Houyhnhnm against Yahoo. Sue and Arabella are meant to represent different sides of Jude, who consistently thinks about them together, contrasts them, regards them as mutually exclusive opposites (e.g., Ill, 9, 10; IV , 5). Early in their acquaintance he sees in Sue "almost an ideality" (II, 4), "almost a divinity" (III , 3); the better he gets to know her, the more he uses, in speech or thought, such terms as "ethereal" (III , 9; IV , 3; VI , 3), "uncarnate" (III , 9), "aerial" (IV, 3), "spirit, … disembodied creature … hardly flesh" (IV , 5) "phantasmal, bodiless creature" (V, 1), "least sensual," "a sort of fay, or sprite" (VI , 3). She herself asks Jude to kiss her "incorporeally" (V, 4), and she puts Mrs . Edlin "in mind of a sperrit" (VI , 9).

The allegorical content in Hardy's delineation of Sue has also a historical base: she is made a figure of Shelleyan idealism. When Phillotson describes the rather spiritualized affinity that he perceives between Jude and Sue, Gillingham exclaims "Platonic!" and Phillotson qualifies, "Well, no. Shelleyan would be nearer to it. They remind me of Laon and Cythna" (IV , 4), the idealized liberators and martyrs in The Revolt of Islam (which is quoted later in another context—V, 4). Sue asks Jude to apply to her certain lines from Shelley's "Epipsychidion"—" … a Being whom my spirit oft / Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.… A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human" (IV, 5)—and Jude later calls Sue a "sensitive plant" (VI , 3).

Deliberately or instinctively Hardy is using certain Romantic values as a critical instrument against those of his own day, a free spirit against an oppressive society, the ethereal against commonplace and material. But a very odd thing happens: in conceiving of Sue as "spirit," and then letting her develop logically in such terms, he finds her coming up with a powerful aversion to sex—in other words, with a strong infusion of the very Victorianism that many of her feelings and intellectual attitudes run counter to. On the one hand, her objection to allegorizing the Song of Solomon (III, 4) is anti-Victorian; but when, in refusing to have intercourse with Jude, she says, "I resolved to trust you to set my wishes above your gratification," her view of herself as a supra-sexual holder of prerogative and of him as a mere seeker of "gratification" is quite Victorian. She calls him "gross," apparently both for his night with Arabella and for desiring her physically, and under her pressure he begs, "Forgive me for being gross, as you call it!" (IV, 5) Again, he uses the apologetic phrase, "we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance" (V, 1). All of Sue's terms for Arabella come out of middle-class propriety: "fleshy, coarse woman," "low-passioned woman," "too low, too coarse for you," as does her argument that Jude should not go to help her because "she's not your wife. …" Jude is not entirely pliant here; in fact, there is some defiance in his saying that perhaps he is "coarse, too, worse luck!" But even while arguing against her refusal of sex he can say that "your freedom from everything that's gross has elevated me," accepting the current view of the male as a lower being who needs to be lifted up to a higher life (V, 2). Even when, near the end, he is vehemently urging Sue not to break their union, he can entertain the possibility that in overturning her proscription of sex he may have "spoiled one of the highest and purest loves that ever existed between man and woman" (VI , 3); the "average sensual man" all but gives up his case to a conventional opinion of his own time. Other aspects of Sue's vocabulary betray the Victorian tinge: when she first calls marriage a "sordid contract" (IV, 2) it seems fresh and independent, but the continuing chorus of "horrible and sordid" (V, 1), "vulgar" and "low" (V, 3), "vulgar" and "sordid" (V, 4) suggests finally an over-nice and complacent personality. The style is a spontaneous accompaniment of the moral elevation which she assumes in herself and which in part she uses—Hardy is very shrewd in getting at the power-sense in self-conscious "virtue"—to keep Jude in subjection.

There is a very striking irony here: perhaps unwittingly Hardy has forged or come upon a link between a romantic idea of spirit (loftiness, freedom) and a Victorian self-congratulatory "spirituality"—a possibly remarkable feat of the historical imagination. He has also come fairly close to putting the novel on the side of the Houyhnhnms, a difficulty that he never gets around quite satisfactorily. But above all he has given a sharp image of inconsistency in Sue, for whatever the paradoxical link between her manifestations of spirit, she nevertheless appears as the special outsider on the one hand and as quite conventional on the other. In this he continues a line of characterization that he has followed very skillfully from the beginning. Repeatedly he uses such words as "perverseness," "riddle" (III, 1), "conundrum" (III , 2), "unreasonable … capricious" (III , 5), "perverse," "colossal inconsistency" (III, 7), "elusiveness of her curious double nature," "ridiculously inconsistent" (IV , 2), "logic … extraordinarily compounded," "puzzling and unpredictable" (IV, 3), "riddle" (IV, 4), "that mystery, her heart" (IV, 5), "ever evasive" (V, 5). With an inferior novelist, such an array of terms might be an effort to do by words what the action failed to do; here, they only show that Hardy knew what he was doing in the action, for all the difficulties, puzzles, and unpredictability have been dramatized with utmost variety and thoroughness. From the beginning, in major actions and lesser ones, Sue is consistently one thing and then another: reckless, then diffident; independent, then needing support; severe, and then kindly; inviting, and then offish. The portrayal of her is the major achievement of the novel. It is an imaginative feat, devoid of analytical props; for all of the descriptive words that he uses, Hardy never explains her or places her, as he is likely to do with lesser characters. She simply is, and it is up to the reader to sense the inner truth that creates multiple, lively, totally conflicting impressions. With her still more than with the other characters Hardy has escaped from the allegorical formula in which his addiction to such words as "spirit" might have trapped him.

From the beginning her inconsistency has a pattern which teases us with obscure hints of an elusive meaningfulness. Her first action characterizes her economically; she buys nude statues of classical divinities, but "trembled," almost repented, concealed them, misrepresented them to her landlady, and kept waking up anxiously at night (II, 3). She reads Gibbon but is superstitious about the scene of her first meeting with Jude (II , 4). She criticizes unrestrainedly the beliefs of Jude and Phillotson, but is wounded by any kind of retort (II, 5); repeatedly she can challenge, censure, and deride others but be hypersensitive to even mild replies, as if expecting immunity from the normal reciprocities of argument and emotion (III, 4; IV , 5; VI , 3, 4, 8). She reacts excessively to the unexpected visit of the school inspector, snaps at Phillotson "petulantly," and then "regretted that she had upbraided him" (II, 5). Aunt Drusilla reports that as a girl Sue was "pert … too often, with her tight-strained nerves," and an inclination to scoff at the by-laws of modesty; she was a tomboy who would suddenly run away from the boys (II, 6).

These initial glimpses of Sue prepare for the remarkable central drama of the novel: her unceasing reversals, apparent changes of mind and heart, acceptances and rejections, alternations of warmth and offishness, of evasiveness and candor, of impulsive acts and later regrets, of commitment and withdrawal, of freedom and constraint, unconventionality and propriety. She is cool about seeing Jude, then very eager, then offish (III, 1). She escapes from confinement at school but appears increasingly less up to the exploit already concluded (III, 3-5). She tells Jude, "Yo u mustn't love me," then writes "you may," quarrels with him, and writes, "Forgive … my petulance. …" (Ill, 5) Before and after marriage she resists talking about Phillotson ("But I am not going to be cross-examined …") and then talks about him almost without reserve (III, 6, 9; IV , 2). Again she forbids Jude to come to see her (III, 9), then "with sweet humility" revokes the prohibition (III, 10), is changeable when he comes, invites him for the next week (IV, 1), and then cancels the invitation (IV, 2). She "tearfully" refuses to kiss Jude, and then suddenly kisses him (IV, 3). Hardy identifies, as a natural accompaniment of her shifting of attitude and mood, a tendency to shift ground under pressure. Since she dislikes firm reply, argument, or questioning from others, she may simply declare herself "hurt." Another ploy is to make a hyperbolic statement of desolation or self-condemnation. "I wish I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" (Ill, 5) "I am in the wrong. I always am!" (IV, 3) "I know I am a poor, miserable creature" (IV, 5). Another self-protective, situation-controlling move is to fall back directly on her emotional responsiveness to a difficult moment. She will not sleep with Jude but is jealous of Arabella; so she simply tells Jude, "… I don't like you as well as I did!" (IV, 5) When she will not acknowledge loving him and he remarks on the danger of the game of elusiveness, her reply, "in a tragic voice," is, "I don't think I like you today so well as I did …" (V, 1). For all of her intellectual freedom, she seems to accept the ancient dogma of "women's whims" (IV, 5) and calls Jude "good" because "you give way to all my whims!" (V, 4)

Through all the sensitiveness, fragility, and caprice there appears an impulse for power, for retaining control of a situation, very delicately or even overtly, in one's own terms. The Victorian acceptance of woman's pedestal implies a superiority to be acknowledged. Early in the story, just after Jude sees "in her almost a divinity" (III , 3), Sue states candidly that she "did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims" (III , 4)—which might be pure generosity or an idealism infected with egoism. She trusts Jude not to pursue her with a desire for "gratification" (IV, 5). She would rather go on "always" without sex because "It is so much sweeter—for the woman at least, and when she is sure of the man" (V, 1). The reappearance of Arabella so disturbs Sue's confidence in ownership that she tries to get rid of Arabella without Jude's seeing her, and when that fails, accepts the sexual bond only as a necessary means of binding Jude to her (V, 2). This gives her new confidence—"So I am not a bit frightened about losing you, now …"—and hence she resists marriage (V, 3). Behind this near-compulsion to prescribe terms is a need which Sue states three different times: "Some women's love of being loved is insatiable" (IV, 1); "But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience …" (IV, 5); "the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man" (VI , 3). Here again Hardy avoids both allegory and that idealizing of a character whom her own associates find it easy to idealize.

At the center of hypersensitivity he perceives a self-concern which can mean a high insensitivity to others and hence a habit of hurting them which may actually embody an unconscious intention (another version of the power-sense). Despite her formal words of regret and self-censure, Sue seems almost to relish the complaint of the student that she "was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters" (III , 4). Though she resents criticism of or even disagreement with her, all that Jude believes in and holds dear she attacks with an unrestraint that ranges from inconsiderateness to condescension to an outright desire to wound—the church, the university, and their traditions (III , 1, 2, and 4). Always careless of Phillotson's feelings, she does not even let him know about her expulsion from school (III , 6). Hardy presents her desire to leave Phillotson as understandable and defensible, but at the same time he portrays her style with Phillotson as fantastically inconsiderate. For instance, as he "writhed," she upbraided him in a doctrinaire style for not having a free mind as J. S. Mill advised (IV, 3); later, he lies "writhing like a man in hell" (IV, 6) as she lets him think that her relation with Jude is adulterous. She is indifferent to Jude's feelings when she refuses to have sexual intercourse with him. She insists that Jude must "love me dearly" (V, 3), but when he gives her an opening for speaking affectionately to him, she says only, "Yo u are always trying to make me confess to all sorts of absurdities" (V, 5). She moves variously toward self-protection, self-assertion, and self-indulgence. One of the most remarkable cases of giving way to her own feelings in complete disregard of their impact on others is her telling Father Time, "vehemently," that "Nature's law [is] mutual butchery!" (V, 6)—a view that with any imagination at all she would know him utterly unfitted to cope with. It prepares for her thoughtless reply of "almost" to his statement that it "would be better to be out o' the world than in it" and her total ineptitude in dealing with his surmise that all their trouble is due to the children and with his desperation in finding that there is to be another child. Sue actually provides the psychological occasion, if not the cause, of the double murder and suicide (VI , 2)—the disasters that, with massive irony, begin her downward course to death-in-life.

The final touch in Sue as Victorian is her "I can't explain" when Father Time is driven frantic by the news that there will be another child. This is a lesser echo of Sue's embarrassment in all matters of sex—a disability the more marked in one who enters into otherwise intimate relations with a series of men. In her feeling free to deny the very center of the relationship what looks like naiveté or innocence masks a paradoxical double design of self-interest: she wants to be sexually attractive and powerful but to remain sexually unavailable. Sue has something of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, leaving men not "palely loitering" but worse off than that: of the three men who have desired her, one finally has her but only as a shuddering sacrificial victim, and the other two die of "consumption," which modern medical practice regards as predominantly of psychosomatic origin. She does give in to Jude, indeed, but immediately begins campaigning against marriage, and in terms so inapplicable—she repeatedly argues from the example of their earlier marriages, which are simply not relevant (e.g., V, 4)—that they exist not for their own sake but as a symbolic continuation of the resistance to sex. They secretly help to prepare us for her eventual flight from Jude, and to keep us from crediting her later statement that she and Jude found a pagan joy in sensual life (Hardy's belated effort to do something for sex, which he has hardly moved an inch from the most conventional position). True, she declares, just before resuming sexual relations with Phillotson, "I find I still love [Jude]—oh, grossly!" (VI , 9), but at this time the words seem less an intuition of truth than a reaction from the horror of her penitential life; and it is noteworthy that, in whatever sense they may be true, they are spoken by her only when the action they imply is now finally beyond possibility.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci cannot practice mercilessness without being belle—beautiful, or charming, or fascinating. Though Sue may be, as Arabella puts it, "not a particular warm-hearted creature" and "a slim, fidgety little thing" who "don't know what love is" (V, 5), even Gillingham feels what the three men in her life respond to, her "indefinable charm" (VI , 5). She is always spontaneous, often vivacious, occasionally kindly and tender. More important, Hardy has caught a paradoxical and yet powerful kind of charm: the physical attractiveness of the person who seems hardly to have physical existence and hence evokes such terms as "aerial" and "ethereal." The possibility that she unconsciously holds out to men in the enrichment of the ordinary sensual experience by its very opposite: all modes—or rather, the two extremes—of relationship are present at once in an extraordinary fusion. But this special charm is tenuously interwoven with the much more evident charm, the sheer power to fascinate, of an unpredictable personality. Though Sue may, as she herself theorizes, get into "these scrapes" through "curiosity to hunt up a new sensation," she does not have in her very much of the cold experimenter. Jude senses sadistic and masochistic elements in her (elements much noted by more recent critics). He theorizes that she "wilfully gave herself and him pain" for the pleasure of feeling pity for both, and he suspects that she will "go on inflicting such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and again" (III, 7). Her selfishness is never consistent; she can be virtually ruthless in seeking ends, and then try to make reparation. She can be contemptuous and cutting, and then penitent and tearful. She can be daring and then scared ("scared" and "frightened" are used of her repeatedly); inconsiderate, and then generous: self-indulgent, and then self-punishing; callous, and then all but heartbroken—always with a kind of rushing spontaneity. Such endless shifts as these, which Hardy presents with unflagging resourcefulness, make Jude call Sue a "flirt" (IV, 1). Jude merely names what the reader feels on page after page: the unconscious coquetry that Sue practices. The novel is, in one light, a remarkable treatment of coquetry, for it implicitly defines the underlying bases of the style. The ordinary coquette may tease and chill by plan, invite and hold off deliberately, heighten desire by displaying readiness and simulating retreat: the piquant puzzle. This is what Arabella offers with great crudity in the beginning: Hardy's preparation, by contrast, for the brilliant unconscious tactics of Sue.

The true, ultimate coquette, the coquette in nature, has no plans, no deliberations, no contrived puzzles. Her inconsistency of act is the inconsistency of being. She goes this way, and then that way, for no other reason than that she cannot help it. She acts in terms of one impulse that seems clear and commanding, and is then pulled away by another that comes up and, though undefined, is not subject to her control. On the one hand, she freely puts conventional limitations behind her; on the other, she hardly comes up to conventional expectations. She has freedom of thought but not freedom of action and being. She is desirable but does not desire. She wishes to be desirable, which means making the moves that signify accessibility to desire; the cost of love is then a commitment from which she must frantically or stubbornly withdraw. She is thoughtless and even punitive, but she has pangs of conscience; yet to be certain that she has conscience, she must create situations that evoke pity for others and blame of self. Hardy catches very successfully the spontaneity of each of her acts and gestures; they are authentic, unprogrammed expressions of diverse elements in her personality. Coquetry is, in the end, the external drama of inner divisions, of divergent impulses each of which is strong enough to determine action at any time, but not at all times or even with any regularity. The failure of unity is greater than that of the ordinary personality, and the possibilities of trouble correspondingly greater. If the coquette is not fortunate in finding men with great tolerance for her diversity—and ordinarily she has an instinct for the type she needs—and situations that do not subject her to too great pressure, she will hardly avoid disaster.

The split that creates the coquette is not unlike the tragic split; the latter, of course, implies deeper emotional commitments and more momentous situations. Yet one might entitle an essay on Sue "The Coquette as Tragic Heroine." Because she has a stronger personality than Jude, has more initiative, and endeavors more to impose her will, she is closer to tragic stature than he. Like traditional tragic heroes, she believes that she can dictate terms and clothe herself in special immunities; like them, she has finally to reckon with neglected elements in herself and in the order of life. If the catastrophe which she helps precipitate is not in the first instance her own, nevertheless it becomes a turning point for her, a shock that opens up a new illumination, a new sense of self and of the moral order. After the death of the children Sue comes into some remarkable self-knowledge. She identifies precisely her errors in dealing with Father Time (VI , 2). Her phrase "proud in my own conceit" describes her style as a free-swinging critic of others and of the world. She recognizes that her relations with Jude became sexual only when "envy stimulated me to oust Arabella." She acknowledges to Jude," … I merely wanted you to love me … it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you." Such passages, with their burden of tragic self-understanding, predominate over others in which Sue looks for objects of blame, falls into self-pity, or frantically repeats her ancient self-protective plea, "Don't criticize me, Jude—I can't bear it!" (VI , 3)

But the passages that indicate growth by understanding are predominated over, in turn, by others in which Sue violently and excessively blames herself and pronounces on herself a life sentence of the severest mortification that she can imagine. Under great stress the precarious structure of her divided personality has broken down, and it has been replaced by a narrow, rigid unity under the tyrannical control of a single element in the personality—the self-blaming, self-flagellating impulse which Sue now formulates in Christian terms but which has been part of her all along. In place of the tragic understanding there is only black misery. Hence she ignores all Jude's arguments; Hardy may sympathize with these, but he knows what development is in character for Sue. A basic lack of wholeness has been converted, by heavy strains, into illness. Not that an imposition of a penalty is in itself pathological; we see no illness in the self-execution of Othello, or, more comparably, in the self-blinding of Oedipus. Facts become clear to them, and they accept responsibility by prompt and final action. Sue not only judges her ignoble deeds but undiscriminatingly condemns a whole life; she converts all her deeds into vice, and crawls into an everlasting hell on earth. Remorse has become morbid, and punishment seems less a symbolic acknowledgement of error than the craving of a sick nature.

The problem is, then, whether the story of Sue merely. touches on tragedy, with its characteristic reordering of a chaotic moral world, or becomes mainly a case history of clinical disorder, a sardonic prediction of an endless night. As always, the problem of illness is its representativeness: have we a special case, interesting for its own sake, pitiable, shocking, but limited in its relevance, or is the illness symbolic, containing a human truth that transcends its immediate terms? There is a real danger of reading Sue's story as if its confines were quite narrow. If she is simply taken as an undersexed woman, the human range will not seem a large one. If she is simply defined as "sado-masochistic," we have only an abnormality. If she appears only as the victim of conventions which the world should get rid of, the romantic rebel unjustly punished, the intellectual range will seem too narrow, wholly without the comprehensiveness of George Eliot, who could see at once the pain inflicted by, and the inevitability of, conventions. If she seems simply a person of insufficient maturity—and Hardy used the words child and children repeatedly of Jude and Sue, and makes Sue say, "… I crave to get back to the life of my infancy and its freedom" (III, 2)—we will seem to have only the obvious truth that it is risky for a child to be abroad in a man's world. If she seems simply an innocent or idealist done in by a harsh world, the story will seem banal, if not actually sentimental. A Christian apologist might argue that her history shows the inescapability of Christian thought; an anti-Christian, that she is the victim of wrong ideas without which she would have been saved. The answer to the former is that such a Christian triumph would be a melancholy and hardly persuasive one, and to the latter that Sue's nature would find in whatever system of values might be available, religious or secular, the doctrinal grounds for acting out her own disorder.

She does not strike us, in the end, as of narrow significance. She is the rather familiar being whose resources are not up to the demands made upon them. This is not so much a matter of weakness and bad luck as it is of an impulsiveness and wilfulness that carry her beyond her depth; even as a child she shows signs of strain and tension. She has many of the makings of the nun, but she wants the world too; she is peculiarly in need of protection, but she wants always to assert and attack. She works partly from an unrecognized egotism, sometimes from an open desire to wound and conquer; her aggressiveness leads her into injurious actions not unlike those of tragic protagonists. Aside from inflicting unfulfilled relationships upon three men, she does a subtler but deeper injury to Jude: with a mixture of the deliberate and the wanton she helps undermine the beliefs that are apparently essential to his well-being; she cannot stand that he should have any gods but her own. She has the style of the blue-stocking who has found a new key to truth and is intolerant of all who have not opened the same door. Though she is sympathetic with Jude in many ways, she lacks the imagination to understand the real needs of his nature; instead of understanding either him or her substantial indifferences to his well-being, she volubly pities him because the university and the world are indifferent to him. Having lost his faith and hope, he leans heavily on her; then she takes that support away when her own needs set her on another course. Symbolically, she comes fairly close to husband-murder.

In them Hardy activates two important, and naturally hostile, strains of nineteenth-century thought and feeling. Jude is under the influence of the Tractarian Movement, which, appealing to some of the best minds in university and church, displayed great vitality in pursuing its traditionalist and anti-liberal aims. Yet his allegiance does not hold up under the blows of Sue's modernist criticism; she looks at Jude as a sort of archaeological specimen, "a man puzzling out his way along a labyrinth from which one had one's self escaped" (III , 2) and refers sarcastically to his "Tractarian stage" as if he had not grown up (III, 4). So he falls into a secular liberalism which simply fails to sustain him. Sue, on the other hand, has felt the influence of utilitarianism (she quotes Mil l to Phillotson very dogmatically); but her skepticism wilts under catastrophe, and she falls into an ascetic self-torment which utterly distorts the value of renunciation (the reduction of hubris to measure). Sue often talks about charity, but, despite her moments of sweetness and kindliness, it is hardly among her virtues; as a surrogate for charity to others she adopts a violent uncharitableness to herself.

Hardy may be intentionally commenting on the inadequacy of two important movements, perhaps because neither corresponds enough to human complexity. But as novelist he is rather exhibiting two characters who in different ways fail, despite unusual conscious attention to the problem, to find philosophical bases of life that are emotionally satisfactory. They like to think of themselves as ahead of their times, but this is rather a device of self-reassurance in people who are less ahead of their times than not up to them. One suspects that in the twentieth century, which has done away with the obstacles that loomed large before their eyes, they would be no better off—either because they lack some essential strength for survival or because they elect roles too onerous for them. Hardy, indeed, has imagined characters who could hardly survive in any order less than idyllic.

In Sue the inadequacy of resources is a representative one that gives her character great resonance. The clue is provided by a crucial experience of her intellectual hero, John Stuart Mill : under the strain of a severe logical discipline he broke down and discovered the therapeutic value of poetry. Sue, so to speak, never finds a therapy. In all ways she is allied with a tradition of intellect; she is specifically made a child of the eighteenth century. She dislikes everything medieval, admires classical writers and architecture, looks at the work of neo-classical secular painters, conspicuously reads eighteenth century fiction and the satirists of all ages. Jude calls her "Voltairean," and she is a devotee of Gibbon. She is influenced, among later figures, by Shelley as intellectual rebel, by Mill's liberalism, and by the new historical criticism of Christianity. Rational skepticism, critical intelligence are her aims; in his last interview with her, Jude attacks her for losing her "reason," "faculties," "brains," "intellect" (VI , 8). Muc h as she is an individual who cannot finally be identified by categories, she is a child of the Enlightenment, with all its virtues and with the liabilities inseparable from it. Hardy was very early in intuiting, though he did not expressly define it, what in the twentieth century has become a familiar doctrine: the danger of trying to live by rationality alone.

In Sue, Hardy detects the specific form of the danger: the tendency of the skeptical intelligence to rule out the nonrational foundations of life and security. Sue cuts herself off from the two principal such foundations—from the community as it is expressed in traditional beliefs and institutions and from the physical reality of sex. The former she tends to regard as fraudulent and coercive, the latter as "gross"; in resisting marriage she resists both, and so she has not much left. Her deficiency in sex, whatever its precise psychological nature (we need not fall into the diagnositis of looking for a childhood trauma), is a logical correlative of her enthroning of critical intellect; thus a private peculiarity takes on a symbolic meaning of very wide relevance. The rationalist drawing away from nonrational sources of relationship creates the solitary; Sue is that, as she implies when, considering marriage because of the arrival of Father Time, she remarks, sadly," … I feel myself getting intertwined with my kind" (V, 3). Precisely. But she is unwilling to be quite the solitary, and for such a person, the anchorite in search of an appropriate society, the natural dream is a private utopia—an endless unconsummated idyl with a single infinitely devoted lover.

At the heart of the drama of Sue is the always simmering revolt of the modes of life which she rejects, the devious self-assertion of the rejected values. Hence much of her inconsistency, of the maddening reversals that constitute a natural coquetry, the wonderfully dramatized mystery that simply stands on its own until the clues appear in the final section. Sue cannot really either reject or accept men, and in attempting to do both at once she leaves men irritated or troubled or desperate, and herself not much better off. She revolts against conventions, but never without strain; and here Hardy introduces an inner drama of conventions far more significant than the criticisms leveled by Jude and Sue. He detects in conventions, not merely inflexible and irrational pressures from without, but a power over human nature because of the way in which human nature is constituted. Sue is one of the first characters in fiction to make the honest mistake of regarding a convention as only a needless constraint and forgetting that it is a needed support, and hence of failing to recognize that the problem admits of no easy pros or cons. As a social critic Hardy may deplore the rigidity of conventions or the severity of their impact, but as an artist he knows of their ubiquity in human experience and of their inextricability from consciousness. They are always complexly present in the drama. At first Jude thinks that there is "nothing unconventional" in Sue (III, 2); then he decides that "you are as innocent as you are unconventional" (III , 4); still later he accuses her of being "as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know" (IV, 5). The Sue who is devastatingly witty about institutions finds herself constantly acting in terms of traditional patterns. On one occasion she assures Jude that "she despised herself for having been so conventional" (III, 10); on another she has to acknowledge, "I perceive I have said that in mere convention" (IV, 1); and above all she says to Phillotson, "… I, of all people, ought not to have cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care for. But … my theoretic unconventionality broke down" (IV, 3). Then Jude, shocked when she joins him but will not sleep with him, finds relief in the thought that she has "become conventional" rather than unloving, "Much as, under your teaching, I hate convention …" (IV, 5). Here she is not clear herself, and she falls back mainly upon a concept whose conventionality she appears not to recognize, "woman's natural timidity." It is then that Jude accuses her of being "enslaved to the social code" and that she replies, "Not mentally. But I haven't the courage of my views …" Her words betray the split between reason and feeling, between the rational critique of the forms and the emotional reliance upon them. This steady trail of comments, clashes, and partial acknowledgments leads up to the key event: in Christminster, she catches sight of Phillotson on the street, and she tells Jude," … I felt a curious dread of him; an awe, or terror, of conventions I don't believe in" (VI , 1). It is the turning point; her suppressed emotions, her needs, so long harried by her "reason," are seriously rebelling at last. "Reason" can still phrase her assessment of the event: "I am getting as superstitious as a savage!" Jude can lament the days "when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities" (VI , 3) and somewhat complacently attack her for losing her "scorn of convention" (VI , 8). But the defensiveness behind these criticisms soon emerges: as the defender of reason, Jude has also failed to find emotional anchorage, and his new independence of mind has provided him with no sustaining affirmations; and so he must blame Sue for deserting him.

Hardy has faithfully followed the character of Sue and has not let himself be deflected by his own sermonizing impulses. From the beginning he senses the split in her make-up—between rejections made by the mind, and emotional urgencies that she cannot deny or replace. If she is an "epicure in emotions," it may partly be, as she says apologetically, because of a "curiosity to hunt up a new sensation" (III, 7), but mostly it is that a turmoil of emotions will not let the mind, intent on its total freedom, have its own way. Much more than he realizes Jude speaks for both of them when he says "And [our feelings] rule thoughts" (IV, 1). Sue's sensitivity, her liability to be "hurt," is real, but she uses it strategically to cut off Jude's and Phillotson's thoughts when they run counter to those that she freely flings about; understandably Jude exclaims, "You make such a personal matter of everything!" (Ill, 4) Exactly; what appears to be thought is often personal feeling that must not be denied. Answerability, in ordinary as well as special situations, shakes her. On buying the Venus and Apollo she "trembled" and at night "kept waking up" (II, 3). When the school inspector visits, she almost faints, and Phillotson's arm around her in public makes her uncomfortable (II, 5). Repeatedly her feelings are very conventional: her embarrassment when Jude comes into the room where her wet clothes are hanging (III , 3), her discomfort after rebelling at school (III , 5), her jealousy of Arabella (III, 6; V, 2, 3). She is "evidently touched" by the hymn that moves Jude, she finds it "odd … that I should care about" it, and she continues to play it (IV, 1). She is "rather frightened" at leaving Phillotson (IV , 5). When she refuses to sleep with Jude, it is less that she is "epicene" and "boyish as a Ganymede" (III, 4) or that her "nature is not so passionate as [his]" (IV, 5) than that joining Jude is an act of mind, of principled freedom, that does not have emotional support. Hence her singular scruple that "my freedom has been obtained under false pretences!" (V, 1)—a rationalizing of feelings that, for all of her liking of Jude, run counter to their mode of life. Hardy rightly saw that only some very powerful emotional urgency could get her over the barrier between Jude and herself, and he supplies that in her jealousy of Arabella. It is a common emotion that her mind would want to reject: and it is notable that after giving in to Jude she give voice to another conventional feeling—assuring him, and herself, that she is "not a cold-natured, sexless creature" (V, 2).

In a series of penetrating episodes whose cumulative effect is massive. Hardy shows that her emotions cannot transcend the community which her mind endeavors to reject. With a deficiency of the feeling needed to sustain the courses laid out by the detached critical intellect, she would predictably return under pressure, to whatever form of support were available, to those indeed to which, while professing other codes, she has regularly been drawn. Though it would not take too much pressure, Hardy serves several ends at once by introducing the violent trauma of the death of the children. From here on he has only to trace, as he does with devastating thoroughness and fidelity, the revenge of the feelings that, albeit with admirable intellectual aspirations, Sue has persistently endeavored to thwart. They now counter-attack with such force mat they make her a sick woman. Although her self-judgments take the superficial form of tragic recognition, what we see is less the recovery that accompanies the tragic anagnorisis than the disaster of a personality distorted by the efforts to bear excessive burdens and now blindly seeking, in its misery, excessive punishments. Illness is something other than tragic.

Whatever Hardy may have felt about the course ultimately taken by Sue, he was utterly faithful to the personality as he imagined and slowly constructed it. That is his triumph. His triumph, however, is not only his fidelity to the nature of Sue, but the perception of human reality that permitted him to constitute her as he did. We could say that he envisaged her, a bright but ordinary person, attempting the career that would be possible only to the solitary creative intellect, the artist, the saint, whose emotional safety does lie in a vision somewhere beyond that of the ordinary community. Sue does not have that vision; she is everyman. She is everyman entirely familiar to us: her sense of the imperfections around her leads her into habitual rational analysis that tends to destroy the forms of feeling developed by the historical community and to be unable to find a replacement for them. The insistence on the life of reason has become increasingly emphatic in each century of modern life, and Sue as the relentless critic of institutions incarnates the ideal usually held up to us in abstract terms. On the other hand, as if in defiance of rationalist aspirations, the twentieth century has seen destructive outbreaks of irrational force that would have been supposed incredible in the nineteenth. But a still more impressive modern phenomenon, since it entirely lacks the air of aberration, is a growing concern with the threat of intellect to the life of feelings and emotions. From some of the most respected guides of modern thought come warnings against arid rationality, and visions of a reconstructed emotional life essential to human safety and well-being. The present relevance of such cultural history is that it contributes to our understanding of Hardy: in Jude the Obscure, and primarily in the portrayal of Sue, he went to the heart of a modern problem long before it was understood as a problem. Yet the "modern" is not topical, for the problem is rooted in the permanent reality of human nature. Neurotic Sue gives us, in dramatic terms, an essential revelation about human well-being.