SOURCE: "Hardy's Jude: The Pursuit of the Ideal as Tragedy," in The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic-Epic-Tragic, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984, pp. 307-18.

[In the following essay, Abdoo maintains that Jude the Obscure is a tragic novel in the classical tradition.]

All tragedy is grotesque. (Thomas Hardy, Life, August 13, 1898)

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf's tribute to Thomas Hardy was written shortly after his death on January 11, 1928. In it she said: "if we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists." She goes on to assert that although it is "the most painful" and "pessimistic" of his novels, Jude the Obscure "is not tragic." Hardy, himself, in the 1895 Preface to the First Edition of the novel referred to Jude as "simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions … not of the first moment." Superseding, however, is his later statement, which under the stimulus of the early critical attacks on Jude, identifies the novel's central interest for him:

the greater part of the story—that which presented the shattered ideals of the two chief characters, and had been more especially, and indeed most exclusively, the part of interest to myself—practically ignored by the adverse press.

The purpose of this paper is exegesis, a critical analysis of Thomas Hardy's last and greatest novel. My aim is a comprehensive interpretation of the novel, a look into its heart—to the origins—of Hardy's view of the human situation: the inevitable defeat of the human spirit by a powerful force which allows no redemption, whether in this life or elsewhere.

In Jude, Hardy recapitulates and interweaves the major themes of his prior novels: idealization of the beloved; man's alienation from himself and isolation from others; God as unknowable; that man's fate—puppet-like—is controlled by a capricious hand; that life, particularly marriage, is a trap from which death is the only escape; the self-proclaimed believers are among the most impious members of the human community, wherein modern religion is itself an hypocrisy; the injustice of a social order favoring a privileged class—while, others, the working classes most especially, must strictly adhere to conventional propriety in order to retain even an aura of respectability; the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the grotesque; Pride, the dominant human character trait of Hardy's protagonists, as major contributor to their tragic ends; and finally, the immense living presence of Nature as She provides both a backdrop to and a reflection of, the unredemptive human tragedy, which is simply, being alive.

The primary issues this paper addresses and tries to resolve are the following: (1) whether Jude the Obscure is, in fact, a tragic novel; (2) the ways that the novel's tragedy is supported by Hardy's antecedent prose writings and extant biographical materials, including Florence Emily Hardy's Life of Thomas Hardy (which we now know he wrote himself), and the recently published Personal Notebooks and Letters; (3) how Hardy's preoccupation with the heroic man and the idealistic feminine became objects of his intellectual pursuit; (4) the degree to which Thomas Hardy, as poet/novelist, pursued the elusive, ideal woman of his dreams (much to the distress of his two wives) in his novels and poetry—and, in so doing, he became his own hero; (5) the alliance in Hardy's novels between Evil and the grotesque; (6) the metaphor for Life itself in Hardy's novels is the Greek "web," the inexorable pattern that binds his characters to their doom; and finally (7) "tragedoia," the "goat-song"—as the primary factor in the origin of tragic genre—is, at its most primitive, raw, excruciating, halfmad sense, the mimetic impulse that Hardy's dramas were created to express.

This paper's position is based on the premise that with Jude Hardy had ultimately fulfilled his purpose as a novelist; he had given full expression to his understanding of the tragic in the human condition; and that his abandonment of novel-writing for poetry, therefore, was an artistic necessity. As A. Alvarez comments: "After Jude the Obscure there was no other direction in which he could go."

Many have tried since Aristotle's Poetics to explain what the tragic experience is. At best, we can expect only to receive a second- or third-hand description. However, what we can hope to gain in understanding through art, is a moment's glimpse—an approximation—of individual suffering which may help us bear our own loneliness and fear.

To begin at the beginning necessitates a return to the Greek origins of tragedy, in this case primarily to the understanding of Hardy's sources as he was an avid, life-long student of Greek tragedy. But first let's consider some of his own thoughts on tragedy and identify those aspects of his earlier novels which are particularly relevant to Jude's tragedy. His early note (November, 1885) that: "tragedy exhibits a state of things in the life of an individual which unavoidably causes some natural aim or desire of his to end in a catastrophe when carried out" (Life, p. 176), became, just three years before Jude (October, 1892) more specific: "The best tragedy—highest tragedy in short—is that of the WORTHY encompassed by the INEVITABLE" (Life, p. 251).

Jude's tragedy is bound to his two failures: (1) failure to achieve admittance to Balliol College, Christminster, and the education he desires, and (2) failure to achieve complete possession of Sue Bridehead, the woman he successively idealizes, loves, pursues, loses, regains, lives with, has children by and finally loses again, forever. Throughout the course of the novel Jude is psychially sustained by his concurrent struggles to achieve education and to win Sue's love. His efforts with these involvements provide both the impetus and the reasons for his continuing to live. Jude's ineligibility for a university education, when he is finally rejected, is due not to his lack of scholarly ability, but to his low social status; he is, after-all, a laborer, a restorer of churches. And while he finally loses Sue altogether because of her overwhelming guilt after the hangings of their children, Jude never derived full satisfaction from their sexual life together. Sue was incapable of completely giving herself to him. To do so would have made her totally dependent on Jude for her identity, a state of being that her already too fragile self-image could not tolerate. In short, Sue Bridehead is terrified of losing her self-identity in Jude—of becoming a non-existent personality.

Jude's frustration remains unabated while he has hope of realizing his goals and he doggedly struggles to achieve them. But when his idealizations are denied him Jude's will to live evaporates and he dies. Obtaining a university education and possessing Sue Bridehead are identified here as idealizations in the Platonic sense. For Jude education represents knowledge, the ultimate achievement that will open the door to worldly success; possessing Sue is the possession of something especially fine, a quality above his rough experience. To claim Sue for his own is for Júde equivalent to touching the ethereal or other-worldly—similar in fact to experiencing a transcendent religious experience. In Sue's case, her lack of sexual desire and her inability to love Jude completely creates a barrier beween them. Jude is forced to live out his Platonic idealization of the feminine, while Sue's denial keeps "his passion as hot at the end as at the beginning, and helps to break his heart" (Life, p. 272). On the other hand, Jude's struggles to educate himself in preparation for the university are, in the face of his desperate situation, only keeping alive his hope for a better time. Had it been more than a dream, would he have waited so long to find out the truth? Was it not then the struggle against adversity, the struggle towards education, towards possession of the most beautiful, wonderful woman he knew that keeps Jude alive?

Hardy's original idea for Jude's story was as follows: "A short story of a young man—'who could not go to Oxford'—His struggles and ultimate failure. Suicide" (Life, pp. 207-8). And in a letter to an unidentified friend after its publication, Hardy comments on the novel's reviews and tries, retrospectively, to clarify his original thesis:

It is curious that some of the papers should look upon the novel as a manifesto on "the marriage question" (although, of course, it involves it), seeing that it is concerned first with the labours of a poor student to get a University degree, and secondly with the tragic issues of two bad marriages, owing in the main to a doom or curse of hereditary temperament peculiar to the family of the parties. (Life, p. 271)

Now that we are closer to Hardy's purpose, let's consider the actual sequence of events. The boy Jude lives with his maiden aunt and is inspired by his teacher, Phillotson, to advance himself by studying so that he will eventually be accepted to the university at Christminster. Suffering the rough indifference of his aunt, Jude grows up to become a stone mason—all the while teaching himself Latin and Greek and looking towards a brighter future, a time when he would be in Christminster—the "heavenly Jerusalem" (JO, p. 18). [all page references are to the Wessex editions of Hardy's novels]. Along the way he becomes temporarily distracted by his awakened sexuality and marries Arabella Donn. But she soon tires of Jude and leaves him. When he finally does reach Christminster it is to meet his cousin, Sue Bridehead, the woman he fell in love with when he saw her photo at his aunt's house. But he also again meets Phillotson, his old teacher, and introduces him to Sue. Sue becomes attracted to Phillotson when he offers her a job as pupil teacher if she will attend a teacher's college to become qualified. Instead Sue runs away from the college and shortly there-after Phillotson marries her, nonetheless. The marriage is an altogether excruciating event for Jude who is forced, by virtue of the fact that he is Sue's only living relative besides Aunt Drusilla who is against marriage, to give her away at the ceremony. Sue goes off with Phillotson, but their marriage is never consummated. Meanwhile Aunt Drusilla dies, Jude meets Arabella again and in his despair has a brief affair with her, becomes inspired by religious music and begins ecclesiastical studies. Sue, having met Jude at Aunt Drusilla's funeral and knowing she cannot stay with Phillotson, who is getting impatient with her excuses, declares her love for Jude and runs away to live with him. At this point Jude abandons his religious studies. Eventually Jude and Arabella divorce as do Sue and Phillotson; Phillotson's teaching career is, meanwhile, ruined by the results of his disastrous liaison with Sue. But it is Sue's fear that Arabella will win Jude back that compells her to agree to marry Jude for convention's sake. Circumstances arise, however, which cause postponement until they abandon the idea. At this time Jude learns of the existence of his child by Arabella—Little Jude, nicknamed "Little Father Time … because [he] looked so aged" (JO, p. 221). The child arrives to live with Sue and Jude and three years pass. Sue by this time has succumbed to Jude's physical desire, has borne him two children and is pregnant with a third. When Little Father Time learns of Sue's pregnancy he is horrified with what seems to him her irresponsible fecundity. He chides her remorselessly and in a fit of despair hangs the two infants and himself. Sue's remorse and guilt drives her away from Jude and back to Phillotson who she has convinced herself is her only true husband. Arabella now a widow, seduces the ill, distraught Jude and tricks him into marrying her for the second time. Jude's last unsuccessful attempt to get Sue back is preceded and followed by a suicidal walk in the freezing rain. He dies reciting Job while Sue lives in self-punishment, submitting to Phillotson's lust.

The connective thread running between Jude, Sue and his educational pursuits is Phillotson. Jude's initial desire for university education is stimulated by Phillotson's early interest in him as his boyhood teacher and friend. Ironically, it is the same Phillotson—the only male figure who takes an interest in him—that frustrates the boy Jude by promising but not immediately sending the Latin text-books, who marries the woman he loves and then after Jude has won Sue back and they have produced several children, takes her away from him again. Thus, Phillotson is the menacing, powerful father figure who must prevent the threatening son from replacing him. It is Phillotson's inner weakness, though, that keeps him, like Sue and Jude, isolated and dependent on others for his own sense of personal identity. Phillotson's role (whether or not consciously known to Hardy) is that of the castrating father in competition with the son. Similarly, Sue's relationship with Phillotson is an Oedipal one; for her he also at first becomes a father figure by virtue of his age (he is forty-five when they marry, "old enough to be the girl's father" [JO, p. 86]). Her instinctive revulsion for his physical person is a self-protecting act against incest.

The novel's structure is largely constructed around the tensions of the couplings and separations that take place among the participants of two sets of love triangles: Jude-Sue-Phillotson, and Arabella-Jude-Sue. But this pattern is an already familiar one to Hardy; he used it in virtually all his prior novels. In fact, we can state that in Hardy's case the love triangle is a compulsive, repetitive literary device. But this device is more than a convenient structure. It is the portrayal of Hardy's own inner neurotic state, whether or not he ever realized it. The similarities between Hardy and Jude, despite his disclaimer that "no book he had ever written contained less of his own life" (Life, p. 274), must be considered before the central problem can be revealed and resolved.

To move on to this paper's central premise that Jude the Obscure is a tragic novel, we must recognize that Jude is also St. Jude, martyr and patron saint of hopeless causes; his goal is Christminster, "the home of lost causes" (JO, p. 66). Jude is the sacrificial scapegoat of both the pagan and Christian ethos. The novel's progression travels historically from the pagan sacrifice to the Christian sacrifice, but in neither case is redemption achieved. The first sacrifice comes with the discontent and break-up of Jude's first marriage to Arabella. It is the death of erotic love that is so vividly portrayed in the pig-killing scene. Arabella, after-all, threw the pig's pizzle that first captured Jude's attention. So it is the agonized death of the dumb creature, so clearly representing their earthy, natural coupling, that appropriately joins Jude's fate to the pig's: "the white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal" (JO, p. 55). And later, when he and Sue discover their two children hanging on garment hooks and "little Jude … in a similar manner" (JO, p. 265), Jude cries out in recognition: "O my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-oneness—is now stained with blood" (JO, p. 267)! The children's deaths are virtual sacrifices; the three little bodies a crude emulation of the crucifixion and the result is Sue's final desertion of Jude for Phillotson in an attempt she says, to "mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam" (JO, p. 272)! The pagan sacrifice of the pig marks the death of Jude's marital relation to Arabella and the physical expression of his nature; the Christian sacrifice of the children marks the death of Jude's relation to Sue and the spiritual/redemptive hope that he lives for. He dies finally neither pagan nor Christian, but identifying totally with the suffering Job:

Let the day perish wherein I was born, the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived.… Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? … For now should I have lain still and been quiet. I should have slept: then had I been at rest!

… Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? {JO, p. 320)

Hardy's juxtaposition of the pagan, Christian and Old Testament sources as only briefly noted here, reveals his ambivalence about religion. The issue at hand is basically to identify those elements of Greek tragedy beginning with Aristotle's definition in the Poetics that Jude incorporates, and to show that despite the later consequences of Christianity vis-à-vis Darwin's Origin of Species, Jude the Obscure is nonetheless a tragedy following in the classical tradition.

From Plato who identified the tragedian as "an imitator, whose product is at least three removes from nature … and the truth," we can consider first Aristotle's initial statement towards a definition of tragedy:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action not of narratives; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

Jude's tragedy, then, arising from Hardy's imagination, is an imitation twice removed from the experiences of his personal life and three times removed from the experiences of friends, relatives and strangers as related to him second- or third-hand, and common hearsay embellished and altered to fit the situation. The dramatic agents of the tragedy are principally Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead. Their actions reveal the arrangement of incidents—in short, the plot. The novel's action is certainly "serious, complete and of a certain magnitude," if by "serious" we mean that it deals with issues or events that can alter the course of a life, result in poverty, physical disability, or death, "complete" because it relates a single story or statement with a beginning, middle and end, and "of a certain magnitude" because of the powerful emotional effects it has on the reader—due to reversal (or turn of the plot) and recognition by the hero/protagonist of his true situation and the consequences thereof. In Jude, the elements of surprise triggering the plot's reversal are several. First of all Arabella tricks Jude into marrying her with a false claim of pregnancy; second, Sue Bridehead's sudden decision to marry Phillotson when she discovers that Jude is already married; third, the appearance of Little Father Time; and fourth, the grotesque hangings of Jude's and Sue's children. Jude's recognitions dealing with his erotic nature are two; in each case he sees the human failings of the two women in his life and realizes that they do not measure up to his original idea of them. In Arabella's case: "He knew well, too well, in the secret center of his brain, that Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind." But, in an effort to repress the true state of his feelings he "kept up a fictitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he sometimes said laconically" {JO, p. 48). And later, Jude accuses Sue in a moment of revelation: "Sue sometimes … I think you are incapable of real love" {JO, p. 192). He recants almost immediately though, accepting in place of the passion and warmth that he craves, the Sue he imagines her to be: "you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom—hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air!" {JO, p. 195).

Just as important is Jude's recognition of the value of his work as a stone-cutter in light of his ambition for obtaining a university education:

For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he lost it under stress of his old idea. {JO, p. 69)

To continue, Hardy identified the tragic hero as one who was the "WORTHY encompassed by the INEVITABLE" {Life, p. 251)—one whose misfortunes and suffering inspired in the reader not only feelings of fear and pity, but by association to one's own situation, results in a therapeutic purgation of the emotions. We may question why our feelings of fear and pity are aroused? We feel fear because of the closeness of the protagonists' situation to our own and pity because of the undeserved misfortunes that plague a decent man. Purgation is a temporary cleansing of our emotions through weeping and lamentation. It is precisely because of this temporary relief to our emotional tensions that the entire process of purgation must be repeated again and again. Hence, the significance of repetitious or cyclical ritual sacrifice. It is the spectacle of watching someone else suffer, the sadistic satisfaction (sometimes amounting to lust) we feel in knowing that it is not us doing the suffering, and the exhilaration of having survived yet another test of time that we enjoy. Again, a public display of grief allows the spectator to empathize with the slain or suffering hero and expiates the guilt he feels. The realization that death is so close to the living experience intimately joins us to the pathos of the victim's plight. It is the survival of the fittest that counts, or perhaps more accurately, the struggle between the will-to-live undermined by the sub-conscious death-wish. Here again, the idea of a sinless hero is an important distinction; for, while a despicable, worthless hero would inspire neither feelings of fear or pity, nor can we share our most profound experiences with a perfect man/god who has the power to control his own destiny. Rather, he must be like us, a human man with feelings and flaws.

Hardy's concept of nature and man's place in the universe obviously deviated from the traditional acceptance of a Christian God who offered redemption from sin in an afterlife beginning only with death. Darwin's Origin of Species appeared when Hardy was a young man; its impact when he read it was immediate and so affected his beliefs that when Darwin died Hardy attended his funeral. Though his family was long a church-going one, Hardy nevertheless found it difficult to continue believing in a Christian God who could allow good people so much earthly suffering. Of God's existence he says: "I have been looking for God 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him" (Life, p. 224).

In addition, his early and continued study of Greek literature introduced him to an alternate view of the universe and man's relation to its nature. His search for a cosmological order led him, an avowed agnostic, to devise a plausible answer to the question of what force, if not God, determined the natural order of things?

His search carried him through the writing of fifteen novels, two volumes of poetry and one volume of short stories (Wessex Tales) before he could offer the explanation he finally gives in The Dynasts. In The Dynasts Hardy creates the Immanent Will or the Prime Cause as the force in nature which determines the course of events. Humanity for Hardy was an immense creature, "a monster whose body had four million eyes and eight million heads" (Life, p. 136). It is a "collective personality" (Life, p. 416), "one great network or tissue which quivers in every part when one point is shaken, like a spider's web if touched" (Life, p. 177). And man, compelled by his own nature, marches his path blindly until he is woven so tightly into his fate as the threads of a carpet, that he becomes trapped like the fly in a spider's web. No amount of struggling will undo or dislodge him from the pattern that the Immanent Will has created by pulling the strings of the men/puppets to weave the tapestry of its universe.

The structure, then, of Hardy's universe, this giant tapestry of humanity and nature, allows no deviation. Once Jude has chosen his path, he is compelled to follow it to the end of his life, which he does. It is no accident that Hardy had a cobweb phobia. He would search the corners of his house every night before retiring so that he wouldn't sleep in the vicinity of them. The importance of the web image in Greek tragedy is the symbol of entanglement; it is what binds Agamemnon to his fate—it is the carpet that Clytemnestra uses to capture and disable him with. In trying to understand the workings of a universe in which the Christian God's existence was for him unknowable, Hardy borrowed from Aeschylus a metaphor, the web or net, which he then translated into a whole fabric of nature into which each man weaves his own destiny.

To return at last to the original mimetic impulse that Hardy was trying to express in his tragedies, we must consider "tragedoia," the Greek word for tragedy, meaning "goat-song." As we know the goat was used as a sacrificial animal in primitive ritual to represent the slain god Dionysus and helped promote the theory that the cult of Dionysus lamenting over its ritual slaying of its dead god was the root of tragic drama. Here I am concerned with the 'song' aspect of "goat-song," the threnody, the lamentation, the agonized inhuman scream of Oedipus when he puts his eyes out. In Jude the Obscure there are at least two instances when Hardy connects Jude's suffering to this primitive expression of tragic song, the vocal expression of pain and grief.

The first example is found in the well-known pig-killing scene early in the novel. As Arabella ties the pig down in preparation, its "repeated cries of rage … changed.… It was … now … the cry of despair; longdrawn, slow and hopeless." After Jude stabs the pig in its neck, "The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony" (JO, p. 54). An d secondly, after Jude's marriage to Arabella failed and he is then discouraged from applying to the university, his mental suffering caused by these two failures is compared to the agony of Virgil's Laocoön when he is squeezed to death by serpents in punishment for violating the sacred wood:

And twice about his gasping throat they fold.
The priest thus doubly chok'd, their crests divide,
And tow'ring o'er his head in triumph ride.
With both his hands he labors at the knots;
His holy fillets the blue venom blots;
His roaring fills the flitting air around.

The parallel passage in Jude is:

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, burying lines about his mouth like those in the Laocoön, and corrugations between his brows. (JO, p. 152)

Jude the Obscure is a tragedy not because Hardy created it for the purpose of giving "shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions … not of the first moment." It is a tragedy because he has offered a post-Darwinian cosmological structure in which humanity is a "collective conscious"; he offers an unChristian, unredemptive conclusion to his novel, in fact an ending totally without hope; he borrows the Greek/pagan metaphor of the web or net of entrapment to express his idea of the human situation; and finally, he gives us, through first the pig-scream and second the suffering Laocoön, an imitation only of Jude's agony. For these reasons I must disagree with Virginia Woolf's statement that Jude the Obscure "is not tragic," and declare that it is most definitely a tragedy, particular to and coincident with Hardy's own life experience.