When Thomas Hardy finished his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), this son of a provincial stone-mason had already attained the status of a literary lion. At his death some thirty years later, his ashes were placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. In fact, the macabre details of Hardy's interment dramatize the persistent division in his identity as a self-made man of letters. Fellow literary men J. M. Barrie and Sydney Cockerell quickly arranged for the Abbey ceremony, but Hardy's own instructions and the feelings of his family directed that he be laid in the churchyard at Stinsford, the parish of his birth, with his parents, grandparents, and first wife. The compromise reached was that his heart should be removed from his body and buried at Stinsford and the rest of him cremated and placed in the Abbey. This queasy division of the spoils epitomizes the conflict between origins and attainments that haunted Hardy throughout his career. The struggle between his widow, Florence Dugdale Hardy, and Sydney Cockerell, first over his physical and then over his literary remains, inflects that division with a further distinction of gender.¹ Florence Hardy seems to embody claims of domesticity and blood kinship, while Cockerell and Barrie represent a masculine, public literary eminence. This schema tellingly links femininity to the foregone realm of origins, masculinity to the triumphant realm of becoming, but it does not fully capture the complexity of the gender and class identifications of the self-made man of letters whose position Hardy exemplifies.

A conventionally Victorian opposition between the domestic and social demands of women and the intellectual development of the male protagonist does recur in Hardy's novels; for example, Jude the Obscure imagines as one explanation for Jude's failure the financial, sexual and emotional claims made on him by Arabella and Sue: “Strange that his first aspiration toward academical proficiency had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—toward apostleship—had also been checked by a woman,” Jude muses (228). But intellectual leanings are not restricted to Hardy's male protagonists: Elfride Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and the eponymous heroine of The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) are both storytellers; other Hardy heroines, including Bathsheba Everdene, Grace Melbury, and Sue Bridehead, have educational attainments that set them apart from, and have the potential to raise them above, their immediate surroundings. Indeed, specifically artistic and aesthetic impulses—Ethelberta's storytelling, Elfride's novel, Felice Charmond's brief acting career in The Woodlanders (1887)—are generally associated with women. When we consider the circumstances of Hardy's own career, it is clear that these heroines represent not an antithesis to the ambitions of the author, but an expression of them.

The autobiographical Life of Thomas Hardy (1928), with its notorious evasiveness about Hardy's antecedents and thorough chronicling of his later society connections, reveals that Hardy's own literary aspirations were embedded as much in the social restlessness of Eustacia Vye or Grace Melbury as in the reforming intellectual zeal of Clym Yeobright or Angel Clare. Hardy's position resembles that of his heroines to the extent that their intellectual development often becomes the means of improving their social standing. Unlike his heroines, Hardy had for the achievement of his ambitions, social and financial as well as intellectual, vehicles other than the traditionally feminine one of prudent marriage. His assault on the fiction market after his first marriage is a reminder that the image of the novelist as engaged primarily in self-expression, and only latterly in professional negotiation, has always been an idealization of a profession whose relationship to profit was covert almost from its inception.² As Peter Widdowson writes, “Hardy, in deciding to become a writer, had a careful eye on the market and its requirements. This is borne out by his response to the earliest criticisms from publishers' readers, editors, and reviewers of his first works” (134). In the pursuit of publication, Hardy was willing to alter plot elements and prose to placate nervous journal editors, and he was typical rather than exceptional in his attention—shared by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, among others—to the financial details of publication, reproduction, and copyright.

Hardy's oblique identification with the ambitions of his heroines is not idiosyncratic but revealing of the feminized structure of the literary market-place, and particularly the production of fiction. The novel was considered the most feminized Victorian literary genre, partly because of its alleged intellectual informality. George Eliot's mid-century pronouncement was typical: “No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements” (Eliot, “Silly Novels” 162). Whether or not this openness actually existed, the emphasis on the femininity of fiction obscured the fact that it was not only women of all classes who were excluded by their gender from the elite institutions (prep schools and universities) which controlled access to cultural capital and authority: men of the working and lower-middle classes suffered “educational restrictions” too. As Mary Poovey writes,

Even though literacy was increasingly available to members of the lower classes, access to the world of professional letters was still determined in the first instance by one's ability to write in a certain way, with an acceptable breadth of allusion, and according to recognized paradigms, genres and modes of address.

(107)

That access was determined by both class and gender. Once the man of letters achieved some success, however, an antecedent exclusion from elite institutions might be ideologically recuperated as a benign seclusion. Like the discourse of separate spheres which apotheosized the domestic angel as above the capitalist fray, “literary discourse … acquir[ed] its moral authority by its (putative) distance from the ‘masculine’ sphere of alienation and market relations” (Poovey 125).³ The price of this recuperation was thus the borrowing of a feminine model, and to some extent a devaluation of the very activity—novel-writing—being redeemed. That devaluation, partly a consequence of feminization, no doubt contributed to the disdain that Hardy always expressed for his novel-writing career, and his insistence that poetry was his true métier.

Social advancement subjected the successful man of letters to another feminizing structure. Although the designation of genius might be under the control of a largely male literary elite, it was women who conferred the respectability and status without which genius could not be fully publicized and enjoyed. “Cultivated” society was putatively a sphere of female power, whose norms were determined by feminine sensibility and judgments and administered by upper-class women. A nostalgic novelistic tradition—in evidence, for example, in Great Expectations—suspects upward mobility as emasculating in itself, representing working-class masculinity as more virile, because subject to physical and material rather than mental and emotional laws, than its upper-class counterpart. (The same tradition, of course, codes working-class femininity as deficient: even cleaned up and elevated from drudge to domestic influence, Biddy remains unacceptable for Pip.) Unfortunately for the working-class hero, intellectual and social achievement can be registered fully only within a sphere defined not only by its distance from physical labor but also by the prominence of feminine judgments codified as domesticity in the middle class, and “society” among the elite. From Dickens to Hardy to Lawrence and beyond, therefore, the aspiring male protagonist who is educated out of his provincial, working-class background suffers the loss of his original conceptions of masculine identity and social reality. No longer able to share the masculinity of his father—the blacksmith, the builder, the coal miner—he must find new standards for the creation of his adult masculine identity.⁴ One such standard seems to be the ability to attract women of observable social and intellectual worth (Estella for Pip; Elfride for Stephen Smith; Ursula Brangwen for Rupert Birkin) over whom the male protagonist attempts to display his new dominance.

On a continuum with Dickens as the exemplary Victorian male novelist, Lawrence the representative Modern, and Hardy the hinge of late-Victorian/proto-Modern sensibility, it is not surprising that Hardy's representation of the anxiety of feminization at the heart of Victorian intellectual masculinity is the most divided. The suspicion of the feminine exemplified in the early A Pair of Blue Eyes gives way to the temptation of androgyny in Jude the Obscure. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, the attraction between the literarily-inclined, working-class male protagonist and the clever middle-class heroine eventuates in her death and is rerouted into an alliance between the hero and an older, middle-class man whose values he shares; the novel is partly structured by the misogyny of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed “male homosocial desire.” In Jude the Obscure, an attraction between Jude Fawley, of similarly humble antecedents, and Sue Bridehead, somewhat arbitrarily rendered as possessing middle-class, feminine refinement, also suggests that heterosexual alliances, particularly across real or apparent class lines, are fatal. Jude the Obscure, however, is much more reflective than the earlier novel in its estimation of the shaping pressure of gender on intellectual aspiration. In its lack of interest in masculine solidarity, its insistence on the similarities between its male and female protagonists, and, most important, its tentative exploration of the attractions of androgyny, Jude [Jude the Obscure] is the most radical as well as the most pessimistic of Hardy's novels. The excessive and finally irresolute force of Hardy's representations of gender conflict illuminates a more general late-Victorian struggle to construct an acceptable literary masculinity. Indeed, if Hardy, despite the frequent misogyny of his narrative voice and plotting, remains a compelling figure for feminist criticism, it is precisely because of his recognition of the pyrrhic quality, and frequent failure, of patriarchal resolutions.

I. “HE COMES BETWEEN ME AND YOU”: MODELS OF MENTORSHIP IN A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

A Pair of Blue Eyes is partly a jeu d'esprit along the lines of many of Hardy's poems, an ironical but pastoral quadrille. Its rigid formal structure is matched by a stark division between male friendship and mentorship on the one hand, and heterosexual attraction and romantic love on the other. The plot turns on the class difference between Stephen Smith, a young, self-educated architectural clerk who is the son of a master-mason and a dairy-woman, and Elfride Swancourt, the daughter of a snobbish rector, who sings prettily, rides well, and often writes her father's sermons. When Stephen is dispatched by his employer to Swancourt's parish to restore the church, he and Elfride fall in love, encouraged by Swancourt, who does not know that Stephen's parents are among the lower ranks of his own parishioners. On Swancourt's outraged discovery of Stephen's antecedents, the lovers attempt to elope, but Elfride gets cold feet, and Stephen goes to work in India while she promises to wait for him. Meanwhile, Elfride writes and publishes, anonymously, a medieval romance that is reviewed, anonymously (and scathingly), by Henry Knight, a man of letters who has been Stephen's mentor. Knight and Elfride become acquainted; he makes light of Elfride's intellectual pretensions; naturally, she falls in love with him and abandons her secret engagement to Stephen. The triangle ends tragically, as Stephen, upon his return, silently yields Elfride to Knight; Knight, however, discovers the history of the abortive elopement and casts her off. Despairing, Elfride marries the local lord of the manor, miscarries, and dies. Stephen and Knight, each of whom has independently decided to ask for her hand again, find themselves on the same train to what turns out to be her funeral; having arrived as bitter rivals, they depart united in grief.

From the outset, the mentor/ephebe relationship between Stephen and Knight conflicts with the romance between Stephen and Elfride. When Stephen first mentions Knight to Elfride, she protests, “‘I don't care how good he is; I don't want to know him, because he comes between me and you. You think of him night and day, ever so much more than of anybody else; and when you are thinking of him I am shut out of your mind’” (64). The novel posits an exclusive relationship between gender and kind of companionship: women like the capricious Elfride possess emotional and sexual attractions, but only men can provide intellectual support and act as role models. “‘I shall try to become [Knight's] intimate friend some day,’” Stephen tells Elfride, “‘… he came originally from the same place as I, and taught me things; but I am not intimate with him. Shan't I be glad when I get richer and better known, and hob and nob with him!’ Stephen's eyes sparkled” (64). It is difficult to tell whether intellectual, social, or quasi-romantic aspirations put the sparkle in Stephen's eyes. But without distinguishing among these possibilities, Elfride intuits that mentorship is an alternative to marriage, a funnel for ambition that will leave her, despite her graces, out in the cold.

The notion that the companionship of women—even, or perhaps especially, intelligent ones—threatened the communal retention of male privilege found its ideological application in the latter part of the century in the debate over the higher education of women. In her study of women novelists of Somerville College (Oxford), Susan Leonardi identifies fear as the prime motivation for nineteenth-century opposition to women's establishment at Oxford: “First … fears that the character of Oxford as a haven for the intellectual life and a ground for the establishment of male relationships would be diluted by the presence of women; second, fears that women themselves would change in various ways to the detriment of men and society” (20). In a complementary analysis, Linda Dowling has demonstrated that the Victorian construction of masculinity at Oxford appropriated the language of “Hellenism,” or identification with the Greek republican ideal, to give value to male homosexual desire and homosocial community. Using the Greek ideal to associate heterosexuality with effeminacy, this appropriation, in Dowling's brilliantly paradoxical account, also played on fears of social disintegration. Although A Pair of Blue Eyes is not concerned with institutional developments, it certainly dramatizes a masculine fear of the dilution of male relationships and “intellectual life” by the distraction of heterosexual desire, even borrowing from a Hellenistic vocabulary of masculine ardor, as when Stephen muses over the fact “that his rival should be Knight, whom once upon a time he had adored as a man is very rarely adored by another in modern times” (238). At the same time, however, Stephen Smith is not a member of the Oxford elite for whom homosocial community might enshrine real privileges. On the contrary, responding to his mother's suspicions of Elfride, he exclaims, “Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my life—socially and practically, as well as in other respects” (89).

One of Hardy's own letters gives some clue to what a Stephen Smith (or a Jude Fawley) might find both appealing and frightening about such a heterosexual alliance; he complained to one of his early female correspondents of “having been denied by circumstances until very lately the society of educated womankind, which teaches men what cannot be acquired from books, and is indeed the only antidote to that bearishness which one gets into who lives much alone” (Millgate 149). The terms of this apparently self-denigrating compliment echo a passage from George Eliot's Middlemarch, published a few years before, in which the infatuated and doomed Lydgate tells Rosamond Vincy: “‘An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between us’” (131). Eliot's deeply ironic formulation—Lydgate is later forced to reflect, “It seemed that [Rosamond] no more identified herself with him than if they had been creatures of different species” (487)—makes plainer than Hardy's the compensatory structure and dangerous ignorance of such obeisances to feminine cultivation. Intended to foster the skills to palliate or complement masculine intellect without interfering with its privileges, the distinction between accomplishments and learning establishes a heterosexual economy that circulates opposing and unfulfillable desires.

The triangulated, rivalrous relations among Stephen, Elfride, and Knight partly exemplify the narrative structure of male homosociality identified by Sedgwick. In a defining moment of that structure, according to Sedgwick, masculine bonds are strengthened across class distinctions by the destruction of a woman. Central to this outcome is “the scene wherein male rivals unite, refreshed in mutual support and definition, over the ruined carcase of a woman. … The spectacle of the ruin of a woman … is just the right lubricant for an adjustment of differentials of power” between men (Sedgwick 76). A Pair of Blue Eyes concludes with such a moment, as Knight and Stephen, previously unable to respond to each other outside of a frame of condescension/adulation defined by their relative class positions, “side by side … retrac[e] their steps down the grey still valley to Castle Boterel” (371). Yet the elegiac mood of this conclusion makes it difficult to see its protagonists as “refreshed”; and the scene before them emphasizes not only the ruin of Elfride, but also the distance of both men from the class position of her aristocratic widower. The triangle in A Pair of Blue Eyes, in other words, points less to the recuperation than to the failure of masculinity—particularly intellectual masculinity—in its encounter with heterosexuality and the feminine.

Furthermore, the novel's triangle can be viewed as emblematic of individual psychology rather than social relations: that is, Stephen and Henry are younger and older, less and more successful, versions of the same self—united by their resemblance to their creator. Hardy claimed that if any character in A Pair of Blue Eyes was autobiographical, it was Henry Knight rather than Stephen Smith (Life [Life of Thomas Hardy] 76), but one might equally say that the resemblance is divided between them: Stephen is the eager young architect's apprentice that Hardy was, Knight the man of letters he might have imagined himself becoming. In this developmental model, male maturity depends on the nature of a man's relationship to a woman: homosocially directed desire is routed through heterosexual attraction even when its object is a projection of the self. Immature men, such as Stephen, are patronized by, feel inferior to, or actually are the social or intellectual inferiors of the women to whom they are attracted; mature, successful men neutralize that inferiority by reversing it. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, however, no men actually attain such maturity. Both Stephen Smith and Henry Knight remain notably effeminate. On first meeting Stephen, Elfride reports to her father: “‘His face is—well—pretty; just like mine’” (16). In a paragraph of extraordinarily tortured prose, we are told that Stephen shares with Elfride an “inflammable disposition”: “Elfride's emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least of woman's lesser infirmities—love of admiration—caused an inflammable disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her own, to appear as meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem culpable in her” (24). The sense of the passage is that Stephen has a responsiveness that Elfride approves because it flatters her vanity; but the syntax emphasizes the likeness between Stephen and Elfride (“so exactly similar to her own”) and even, briefly, suggests that “woman's … infirmities” are being attributed to Stephen. Again, after the two reach an understanding, Elfride tells Stephen she loves him “‘because [he is] so docile and gentle.’” Stephen is conscious that something is amiss in Elfride's admiration: “‘Those are not quite the correct qualities for a man to be loved for,’ said Stephen, in a rather dissatisfied tone of self-criticism” (63). Hardy seems ambivalent about not only his hero's possession of feminine qualities, but also the significance of those qualities:

[Stephen's] constitution was made up of very simple particulars; was one which, rare in the springtime of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone.

(92-93)

On the individual level, progress up the social ladder from physical to mental labor is not necessarily amenable to traditionally masculine methods (forcible or adversarial) of self-advancement but may call upon the dubious and perhaps degenerate social skills—artifice, adaptability—by which women, in the history of the novel at least, more frequently rise. At the same time, Stephen's effeminacy is generalized to English culture as a whole by its association with the effeteness of an aging civilization.

The transfer of Elfride's affections to Henry Knight, however, and the resulting narrative attention to him, raise the possibility that Stephen's effeminacy may be a function of his youth rather than his constitution. In Stephen's eyes, certainly, Knight represents a more virile model of the man of letters, particularly because he is not associated with fiction. To Elfride's query, “‘Is [Knight] only a reviewer?’” Stephen replies with ardent pomposity that his position is “‘finer than being a novelist considerably. … He really is a literary man of some eminence. … He writes things of a higher class than reviews. … His ordinary productions are social and ethical essays’” (64). But Hardy does not share Stephen's naïveté: if he identified with Knight, then the debacle of Knight's romantic career (which shatters, at least temporarily, his literary one) has the character of a self-admonishment. Hardy speculates that Knight is a “bachelor by nature” (186), and rapidly demonstrates that Stephen and Knight himself are mistaken in thinking that intellectual power and achievement amount to virility. Once Knight falls in love, his man-of-the-world pose collapses. Elfride's charms play upon an “imagination … fed up to a preternatural size by lonely study and silent observation of his kind—[and] emotions … drawn out long and delicate by his seclusion, like plants in a cellar,” while “several years of poetic study, and, if the truth must be told, poetic efforts, had tended to develope [sic] the affective side of his constitution still further, in proportion to his active faculties” (298). In other words, like a woman (and like Stephen), he is sensitive, receptive, and imaginative. He is also less sexually experienced than Elfride, who has been kissed before, so that at the moment when he seems to have arrived at the fulfillment of masculine sexual triumph, he can experience only its humiliating absence: “How childishly blind he must have seemed to this mere girl! How she must have laughed at him inwardly!” (297). Knight is wrong in imagining that Elfride has been mocking him for his lack of sexual experience—she has, rather, been fearing his discovery of her own—but his extreme reaction demonstrates the tenuousness of sexual superiority: his ability to dominate her verbally becomes irrelevant in the light of the single kiss she has shared with Stephen.⁵

The idea of male maturity as—tenuously—invested in the ability to demonstrate intellectual and sexual superiority to women who are themselves of a superior class marks not only Hardy's novels but also the progress of his career, which is punctuated by relationships with literarily-inclined women of varied class backgrounds. These begin with the middle-class respectability of his first wife, Emma Gifford (like Elfride Swancourt, a rector's daughter), attain a social peak with friendships with socialites such as Florence Henniker and Agnes Grove, and culminate in his marriage to Florence Dugdale, whose antecedents and ambitions closely resembled his own. That final marriage might seem socially anti-climactic, but Hardy's marriages and his society friendships represent different negotiations of sexual, social, and intellectual standing.

Both sets of relationships are structured by a tension between reciprocity and disavowal. The marriages, at least at the outset, seem to have been imagined as working partnerships, in which both partners invested their ambitions and abilities in a single product—Hardy's intellect. Robert Gittings, for example, provides an account of the joint educational effort early in Hardy's first marriage:

Under Hardy's direction, [Emma] had set herself to copy into a stout ruled notebook the extracts from books and newspapers he had made in previous years, and to bring them up to date with quotations from his recent reading. The raw material for a self-taught and self-improving novelist was laid out neatly in her still-schoolgirl hand, and by the beginning of April 1876, she had provided him with over 200 entries. … Emma's labour was clearly designed to provide fodder for his future productions.

(2)

Florence Dugdale, who married Hardy after his career as a novelist had ended, served as his amanuensis in a more direct project of self-making. She had been a journalist and children's book author: after the marriage, her greatest literary contribution was the hoax of the autobiographical Life of Thomas Hardy, written in the third person by Hardy, collated and typed by Florence, and published under her name. This fiction, which might seem to publicize Florence Hardy as a writer, paradoxically serves to obscure her: though the name is hers, the voice that it circulates is his. The Life simultaneously advertises the feminine, in its attribution and its celebration of Hardy's connections with society women; exploits it, in the harnessing of Florence's name and labor; and erases it, in its general reticence about both Florence and Emma. Hardy's literary career, then, can be viewed as the single product of triple labor and ambitions. Since there is no evidence that either Emma or Florence Hardy possessed great literary talent, the allocation of resources was no doubt efficient, but it was also clearly determined by, and representative of, prevailing gender arrangements. The marriage of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, for example, displays a similar structure, including the subsuming of Jane's literary ambitions, the division caused by Carlyle's attraction to the society hostess Lady Harriet Ashburton, and his regret for his neglect after Jane's death.⁶ In their self-representation as men of letters, Hardy and Carlyle typify a complex pattern, disavowing the feminizing labor and ambition in which their middle-class wives had participated and which they had witnessed, but displaying associations with upper-class women as the sign of their achievement.

If Hardy's relationships with socialites tended less to subsume the women, they nevertheless suggest a functionalist and formalized model of heterosexual reciprocity. Women such as Florence Henniker, daughter of Lord Houghton, “one of the best-known hosts in Europe,” who was “from her earliest years … accustomed to high society, cosmopolitan and literary” (Gittings 72), were not dependent on Hardy for the fulfillment of their social aspirations. But if their attentions assured and signified his achievement, his in turn ratified their intellectual seriousness. This reciprocal structure is largely static, a minuet in which each partner must perform a single step, male intellect guiding female accomplishment, female accomplishment emulating—from an admiring distance—male intellect. When Hardy met Florence Henniker in 1893, she had already published three novels; Hardy nevertheless approached her as raw material, offering himself as her literary mentor. He collaborated with her on a short story, “The Spectre of the Real,” edited her prose, advised her on publication, and wrote to agents and publishers on her behalf. “‘Speaking very generally,’” he wrote to her on one occasion, “‘I think you are not likely to be treated very badly: one reason is that you being a friend of mine would make a publisher remember that you are likely to know the tricks of the trade’” (Hardy and Pinion 32). Similarly, he wrote to her in 1896: “Many thanks for your little ‘Brand of Discord’ which I have read; and like everything about it except the title. It is as good as anything you have done, and resembles rather the work of an experienced writer than of a novice” (Hardy and Pinion 58); in that same year, Florence Henniker was elected President of the Society of Women Journalists. Henniker may indeed have benefited by Hardy's greater fame, experience, and aesthetic judgment; nevertheless, he seems as much to be constructing a fantasy of a woman in need of his mentorship as assisting one who actually was. J. M. Barrie wrote after Hardy's death: “I have read the letters to Mrs. Henniker. … I rather grudge her being a writer at all, and indeed I believe [Hardy] did also. … She was delightful and cultured and could take him on holiday from himself (for which I bless her). …” (qtd. in Hardy and Pinion xxviii). Considering the degree to which Hardy strove to aid Florence Henniker's literary career, we might conclude that Barrie, as he half admits, is simply projecting his own unselfconsciously “grudging” response to female intellect. But the diminutives Hardy consistently applied to her work (“your little ‘Brand of Discord’”) and his condescension accord with Barrie's interpretation.⁷ Hardy's interest in Florence Henniker's literary work appears to be largely an occasion for him to demonstrate his intellectual superiority in a relationship whose social benefits were controlled by her.

II. JUDE THE OBSCURE: THE APPEAL OF ANDROGYNY

The foregoing analysis suggests that while on the one hand, the masculinity of the man of letters is threatened by his proximity to the position of middle-class women in noticeable exclusion from cultural capital, on the other, he is dependent upon women both for practical aid and for the ratification of his social standing. In this context heterosexual reciprocity is essentially hostile, since it is based on the granting or withholding of social and intellectual, as well as (or under cover of) sexual, favors. While Jude Fawley's relationship with Sue Bridehead is certainly represented as a dizzying succession of intellectual advances and sexual withdrawals on her part, Jude the Obscure nevertheless attempts to replace this combative reciprocity with something closer to mutuality or alliance. Jude's marriage to Arabella exaggerates the convention according to which women represent the undertow of sexual desire and financial thralldom. Jude and Sue, by contrast, grope toward a model of mutual fulfillment.

The nineteenth-century reception of Hardy's novels generally exemplifies the condescension that a male author of Hardy's class and educational background might expect from reviewers. Victorian women writers, also excluded from elite educational institutions, were famously castigated for not conforming to the expectation that they would write about emotional or romantic situations, rather than intellectual or political ideas; but women were by no means alone in being patronized or dictated to about their proper style and subject-matter. Even as Hardy became the preeminent living English novelist, reviewers continued to object to his choices of vocabulary and setting when they departed from the pastoral. However consciously or ironically he might take as a theme inequities of access to language and erudition, Hardy's tendency to put in the mouths of his characters the same range of allusions that he himself had acquired annoyed his critics and gave them frequent opportunities to put him in his place—which, they felt, was in the country. For example, the Quarterly Review's reader, Mowbray Morris, pronounced of Tess [Tess of the d'Urbervilles]:

[Hardy] is too apt to affect a certain preciosity of phrase which has a somewhat incongruous effect in a tale of rustic life; he is too fond—and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books—of … making experiments in a form of language which he does not seem clearly to understand, and in a style for which he was assuredly not born. It is a pity, for Mr. Hardy had a very good style of his own once, and one moreover excellently suited to the subjects he knew and was then content to deal with.

(qtd. in Lerner 86-87)

The Fortnightly's reviewer, too, objected that Hardy “will make [Tess] talk sometimes as the author of Far from the Madding Crowd is often wont to write” (qtd. in Lerner 87). The two objections are not identical: the first is that Hardy expresses himself incongruously, the second that he makes his characters do so as well. But as the second criticism makes clear, the two are essentially one: rural, lower-class and sometimes female speakers, including Hardy himself, are grasping after “a style for which [they were] … not born”—they are, in other words, transgressing class and (in Tess's case) gender boundaries. Perhaps accidentally, the criticism also points to the gender transgression in Hardy's authorial identification: despite his notorious specular objectification of Tess, they share that “ache of modernism” that incorporates both the ambition to transgress boundaries and the fear of their dissolution.

This standard criticism of Hardy's language, in fact, ignores the degree to which Hardy's conscious subject is the use of language and intellect as a means and sign of such transgression. Linguistic pedantry occurs with remarkable frequency in moments of flirtation or jockeying for position between male and female characters. Crucial moments in The Woodlanders (1887), for example, display this structure. Grace Melbury, meeting Fitzpiers in the woods as she searches for a purse she has lost, invokes Robinson Crusoe. “‘Indeed, money is of little more use at Hintock than on Crusoe's island; there's hardly any way of spending it.’” Fitzpiers interrupts his speculation about who gave her the purse in order to pay her a pompous compliment: “‘You unconsciously practice [the cardinal virtues], Miss Melbury. … According to Schleiermacher they are Self-control, Perseverance, Wisdom, and Love; and his is the best list that I know’” (107-08). Here, the intention of the lovers seems to be merely to impress each other with their cultivation; but such exchanges can be more sinister. At the end of the novel, Fitzpiers, having married Grace and then been extravagantly unfaithful to her, attempts to win her back by persuading her that his feelings have matured:

“It is a different kind of love altogether … less passionate; more profound. It has nothing to do with the material conditions of the object at all; much to do with her character and goodness, as revealed by closer observation. ‘Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.’”

“That's out of Measure for Measure,” said [Grace] slily.

“O yes—I meant it as a citation,” blandly replied Fitzpiers.

(256)

The adverbs—“blandly” and “slily”—suggest that the speakers are consciously using “citation” as a form of manipulation. Fitzpiers attempts to impress Grace with a relatively esoteric reference; when she recognizes its source, he must claim that he was intending not to impress her but simply to refer to a mutual fund of knowledge. In either case, he is under the imputation of rhetorical calculation that is not entirely consistent with the expression of unabashed admiration. Erudition, in other words, is a social and romantic weapon or medium of exchange, not simply a result or sign of “intellect.”

The reception of Jude the Obscure, though by no means unanimously negative, certainly occasioned some of the most spectacular attacks on both Hardy's narrative and his moral practices. In addition to criticizing its moral dubiousness, reviewers on the whole found Jude the Obscure a markedly divided narrative, because they were unable (or unwilling) to recognize the similarities between Jude's situation and Sue's. Thus the Saturday Review essay celebrates the centrality of the “working man” and chastises other journals for their attention to “the peculiar matrimonial difficulties of Jude's cousin Sue” (qtd. in Lerner 136). “After you have read Jude the Obscure,” wrote another reviewer, “your thoughts run in two separate channels cut by Mr. Hardy's two nearly separate purposes. Your opinion of the book will largely depend on which you regard as the main one. These purposes are wound in with the history of Jude and history of Sue” (qtd. in Lerner 130). Jude's story is regarded, on the whole, as that of “a man of the people with the native instincts of the scholar” (qtd. in Lerner 130), whereas in the words of Edmund Gosse, who finds (contra the Saturday Review) that “the vita sexualis of Sue is the central interest of the book,” her story is “a terrible study in pathology” (qtd. in Lerner 120, 121).

Reviewers could overlook the fact that Sue's story was one of intellectual ambition, and Jude's one of sexual weakness, partly because tradition assigns the woman the sexual, and the man the intellectual, role in narratives of the Fall. In fact, Jude the Obscure challenges precisely such distinctions between character as socially contingent and character as inherently constituted and, most fundamentally, between masculine and feminine fulfillment. If the novel is explicitly concerned with Jude's intellectual aspirations and their failure, it is equally explicitly concerned with Sue's intellect,⁸ while, despite the fascination exerted by Sue's sexual peculiarities, it is Jude whose sexual appetite precipitates the tragic action. It is not clear whether Jude's failure to attain even the smallest of his academic and theological ambitions proceeds from a social injustice (the lack of access to Oxford for those without money) or a constitutional failing (his weaknesses for women and liquor): he himself gestures toward both explanations (344-45). Similarly, we can never be sure whether Sue Bridehead owes her undoubted capriciousness to her individual constitution, or to some flaw inherent in femininity itself: both explanations are advanced at different times.⁹

As his preface to the 1912 Wessex edition of Jude reveals, Hardy himself had mixed feelings about the novel's topical appeal and contribution to narratives of gender conflict and class struggle, as well as its protagonists' degree of representativeness. It is certainly the novel that most consistently and overtly represents its protagonists' struggle for, and self-conscious use of, a mastery of the culture of humane letters, but it is not narrowly autobiographical, any more than Eliot's Mill on the Floss is. For one thing, Hardy—like Eliot—withheld from his fictional characters his own successes. It is, however, as the reader for the Saturday Review observed, “The first time in English literature [that] the almost intolerable difficulties that beset an ambitious man of the working class—the snares, the obstacles, the countless rejections and humiliations by which our society eludes the services of these volunteers—receive adequate treatment” (qtd. in Lerner 136). In that sense it does give voice to the forming consciousness of a class to which its author certainly belonged, much as Jane Eyre was understood to give voice to a kind of female experience shared by its author. In both cases, reviewers were inserting the novels into a cultural narrative rather than considering how they might complicate that narrative: just as Jane Eyre is hardly credible in the role of revolutionary “mouthpiece … to plead the cause of governesses” (Rigby 176), so too Jude is an unlikely “ambitious man of the working class,” with all the industrial, urban resonances that such a description would have had in the 1890s. His rattling of the gates of Christminster has a distinctly modern quality, but he is an artisan, a product of rural rather than urban disintegration.

Hardy, in any case, resisted his own implication in the narrative of “intolerable difficulties,” protesting perhaps too much against any connection between Jude's academic struggles and his own. In the Life he asserted that he “was not altogether hindered going [to University], at least to Cambridge, and could have gone up easily at five-and-twenty” and gave a number of different reasons for his failure to do so (216, 296-97, 467). In the preface to Jude, he asserts that both the state of marriage law and the “difficulties down to twenty or thirty years back of acquiring knowledge in letters without pecuniary means” (xxxviii) were simply part of the story's “tragic machinery” (xxxvii); at the same time he notes, with a detachment behind which it seems possible to detect some pride, that he “was informed that some readers thought … that when Ruskin College was subsequently founded it should have been called the College of Jude the Obscure” (xxxviii). He similarly both asserts and distances himself from Sue's centrality as a contemporary type, coyly attributing to an unidentified “experienced reviewer of [Germany]” the opinion that “Sue Bridehead … was the first delineation in fiction of the … woman of the feminist movement—the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet” (xxxviii).

Hardy's desire both to claim and to disavow topicality reflects not only his own reluctance to identify with the struggles of the class from which he had risen, but also the position of the novel as a genre in the late-Victorian period. Topicality and particularity—the detail of lived life—are the realist novel's distinguishing motivation; but its distinguishing justification, particularly in the nineteenth century, is human and temporal universality. The role of art, according to a bourgeois and essentially conservative aesthetic, is to encourage not specific, or political, action, but general, or moral, contemplation. The novel, that is, properly engages topical themes in order to resolve them by evading topical outcomes. By the 1890s, the almost universally reprobated “New Woman” novel had become the epitome of the potentially scandalous topicality of the novel form. Not only did it focus unabashedly on a (female) particular as opposed to the (male) universal, and on the materiality of sex rather than the abstraction of romance, but it also deformed the relationship between realism and reality by encouraging speculation that the scandalous activities of its protagonists resembled those of its authors. Many critics who disparaged Jude did so by associating it with “New Woman” narratives; it is against this categorization as merely and scandalously topical and personal that Hardy claims, though hesitantly, that Jude is rather “the fable of a tragedy, told for its own sake as a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was universal, and not without a hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein” (xxxvii).

Yet it is not simply out of stubborn incomprehension that reviewers tended to focus on Hardy's representation of Sue's “pathological” sexuality. Although I will argue that he uses it to different ends, the vocabulary that Hardy finds for Sue's physical and emotional peculiarities is, like that of much “New Woman” fiction, clearly drawn from the contemporary scientific controversy over female intellect that I call “gynecological anti-feminism.” The early Victorian discourse of Woman had been couched in the metaphorical vocabularies of literature, religion, and philosophy; the domestic angel who was the subject of debate through the 1860s remained a largely incorporeal figure. She grew more substantial as actual, middle-class women began to demand first social privileges (access to elite forms and institutions of education; employment in the professions) and then political ones (the suffrage). By the 1870s, when colleges for women had been established at both Oxford and Cambridge, it was apparent that the wall of educational disability keeping middle-class women from the exercise of civic and economic power was bound to fall. At that time, the proto-scientific theorizing about women and gender difference of such philosophers as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, emphasizing the separate and specialized roles of women as mothers and nurturers of the race, was joined by more assertively scientific accounts of sexual differentiation such as Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).¹⁰ Evolutionary theory influenced the medical domains of psychiatry and gynecology, which increased their descriptive and prescriptive power over women, in what it is tempting to regard as a direct response to women's encroachments into education, politics, and the regulation of sexual morality.

The focus of conservative anxiety, then, was the spectre of middle-class female power; the contemporaneous educational demands of working-class men—the mechanics' institutes, working-men's colleges, and university extension movement—failed to generate a similarly unified repressive discourse. Indeed, as the reception of Jude suggests, the two large social groups excluded from the educational advantages of middle- and upper-class men—men and women of the laboring classes and women of the middle and upper classes—rarely perceived themselves, and were rarely represented, as sharing either a class interest or a common symbolic significance within the culture. In Jude the Obscure, however, intellectual and educational aspiration form the first link between the male and female protagonists. The novel participates ambivalently in the fin-de-siècle representation of the educated woman as monstrously unsexed, representing that “monstrosity” as intensely attractive. At the same time, it reveals its hero as at least partly feminized, and insists on the similitude between hero and heroine. Thus, although proposing no political alliance between the working-class man and the middle-class woman, the novel nevertheless attempts to rescue the androgynous intellect, figured in Sue Bridehead, from the discourse of gynecological anti-feminism.

An exemplary early text of that discourse, written by a psychiatrist in whose theories of degeneracy Hardy was interested (Dale 207), is Dr. Henry Maudsley's “Sex in Mind and Education” (1873), published in the Fortnightly Review. Maudsley's fundamental concern is the propagation—or extinction—of the race. Scorning to palliate his argument by appeals to maternal instinct or rewards, he asserts that women's education must take into account “their peculiar functions and … their foreordained work as mothers and nurses of children. Whatever aspirations of an intellectual kind they may have, they cannot be relieved from the performance of those [maternal] offices so long as it is thought necessary that mankind should continue on earth” (471). According to Maudsley, the period of menarche that enables these “offices” is so physiologically stressful for women, and the recurrence of the “periodical functions” so disruptive, that the proper development of reproductive capacities is inconsistent with significant intellectual labor. Thus women's intellectual aspirations are absolutely limited by the imperative to reproduce. When women ignore this imperative, the result is a monstrous androgyny that threatens humanity itself:

It may be the plan of evolution to produce at some future period a race of sexless beings who, undistracted and unharassed by the ignoble troubles of reproduction, shall carry on the intellectual work of the world, not otherwise than as the sexless ants do the work and the fighting of the community.

. … Sex is fundamental, lies deeper than culture, cannot be ignored or defied with impunity. You may hide nature, but you cannot extinguish it. Consequently it does not seem impossible that if the attempt to do so be seriously and persistently made, the result may be a monstrosity—something which having ceased to be a woman is not yet a man—“ce quelque chose de monstrueux,” which the Comte A. de Gasparin forebodes, “cet être répugnant, qui déja paraît a notre horizon.”

(477-78)

Although Maudsley does not himself use the word “androgynous,” the figure he envisions comports with the word's Victorian usage: “uniting the (physical) characters of both sexes, at once male and female” (OED). Although Maudsley imagines such a unity only in terms of loss and monstrosity, his futurist pessimism certainly shares an imaginative universe with the Hardy not only of the contemporaneous A Pair of Blue Eyes, but also of the later Jude. Stephen Smith's chameleon-like constitution, “rare in the springtime of civilization,” implies a wintry, effete future; Sue sounds very much like Maudsley when she tells Jude that “‘Everybody is getting to feel as we do [about marriage]. We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred, years the descendants of these two will … see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now … and will be afraid to reproduce them” (301). But Hardy lacks Maudsley's monolithic conviction that the evolution of heterosexual relations can only signal degeneration. Perhaps because of his experience, as a man of letters, of gender ideology as both metastatic (lending its structure, for example, to the class position of the man of letters) and confining, Hardy in Jude fitfully envisions the androgynous future as utopian. For example, Jude muses on his death-bed that his and Sue's “ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us” (422-23), implying that those ideas might become more appropriate in some better future state. Furthermore, rather than invoking “Nature” to ratify the social status quo, as Maudsley does, Hardy represents the conflict of natural and social “law” as a human tragedy against whose effects both men and women must be expected to struggle.

If Hardy's portrait of Sue revises the image of female degeneracy that dominated the anti-feminist discourse of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it does so less by denying Maudsley's vision than by revealing that “something which having ceased to be a woman is not yet a man” can inspire longing as well as repugnance. Sue Bridehead's significant sexual appeal for a number of the novel's male characters is, in fact, inseparable from her cerebral epicenity. Hardy's representation of that appeal draws somewhat haphazardly on conflicting discourses of the feminine. An Hellenic aesthetic, recalling the homosocial structure of A Pair of Blue Eyes, appears in the celebration of Sue's eroticized boyishness at the expense of the blowsy, female animal represented by Arabella: seeing Sue in his own suit, which she puts on after having walked through a river, Jude compares her to a “marine deity” and a “figur[e] in the Parthenon frieze” (149); she looks, to Jude's admiration, “boyish as a Ganymedes” (159). This boyishness, however, blends into an incorporeality itself open to conflicting interpretations. Sometimes the admiration of both the narrator and Jude of Sue as a “phantasmal, bodiless creature” (272) participates in the Victorian mythology of feminine passionlessness. “‘The average woman is in this superior to an average man—that she never instigates [sexual passion], only responds,’” Sue claims (372), echoing various Victorian dicta that “In [women], the desire [for sex] is dormant, if not non-existent, till excited” (W. R. Greg, qtd. in Poovey 5). Sometimes her disembodiment seems more like a Maudsleyesque anomaly, associated with an unusually developed intellect: “‘My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me,’” Sue explains, “‘I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them … almost as one of their own sex’” (152). The confusion of representational strategies suggests that a vocabulary for celebrating the attractions of the androgynous woman eludes Hardy. Nevertheless the coexistence in Sue of androgynous or even masculine traits with more conventionally feminine attractions emerges very clearly.

Visiting his aunt at Marygreen, Jude is presented with a series of verbal snapshots of the child Sue, first reciting poetry, “the smallest of them all, ‘in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink sash’” (114) and then, according to Jude's aunt's neighbor, as “‘not exactly a tomboy … but [a girl who] could do things that only boys do, as a rule’”:

“I've seen her hit in and steer down the long slide on yonder pond, with her little curls blowing. … All boys except herself. …”

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt that day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the school to see the room in which Sue's little figure had so glorified itself; but he checked his desire and went on.

(115)

“Not exactly a tomboy,” Sue is nevertheless able to “do things that only boys do,” whether sliding on the ice or reading advanced literature; and it is the combination of that capacity with her “white frock,” “little curls,” and “little figure” that renders her so desirable. Sue herself is conscious of the appeal of her unconventional combination of gender attributes: Hardy often represents her as attempting to control male demands through demonstrations of erudition. “‘Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley's “Epipsychidion” as if they meant me!’ she solicited, slanting up closer to [Jude] as they stood. ‘Don't you know them?’ ‘I know hardly any poetry,’ he replied mournfully” (257). Sue has just annoyed Jude by informing him that she intends their elopement to be celibate; Hardy's choice of verbs—“solicited” and “slanting”—as well as Sue's pointed question, suggest that her behavior is consciously both sexually stimulating and intellectually diminishing to her partner, who indeed responds with resigned obedience to her wishes. Informing Phillotson that she wishes to leave him for Jude, she quotes Mill in support of her plan, leading her unfortunate husband to exclaim, “‘What do I care about J. S. Mill! … I only want to lead a quiet life!’” (page #). In the first instance, Sue's rather magical, if superficial, access to cultural capital gives her an advantage over Jude that appears as a class advantage; she is the refined lady, he the rustic clown. In the second, an ability—however ludicrous in certain instances—to move fluidly between ideas and feelings gives her an advantage over Phillotson, who is finally persuaded by the combination of emotional appeal and intellectual argument.

Despite the strained quality of the argument between Sue and Phillotson, in fact, the habit of metaphysical discussion—particularly that between Sue and Jude—appears, generally, less anomalous in this novel than elsewhere, precisely because the inseparability of emotional and intellectual aspiration is the novel's actual subject. When Sue, having impulsively run away from her training college, spends the night in Jude's lodgings, dressed in his clothing, they flirt uneasily:

“You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn't you?” she said, breaking a silence. “It was very odd you should have done that.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it.”

“You are very philosophical. ‘A negation’ is profound talking.”

“Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?” she asked, with a touch of raillery.

(201)

Unlike the sparring of Grace and Fitzpiers, or Sue's jarring pedantry when she confronts Phillotson, the exchange has a rhythm of natural banter appropriate to the situation of an unconventional female student and an intellectually ambitious artisan who, isolated by their aspirations, unexpectedly discover in each other kindred spirits. For Jude and Sue are, in fact, both tremendously isolated. They are not entirely cut off from the institutional resources of their class and era: Sue passes a scholarship exam and enters the teacher's Training College at Melchester (which will qualify her for the career pursued by both of Hardy's sisters), and Jude attends public lectures and is briefly the leading light of the “Artizans' Mutual Improvement Society.” But Sue runs away from her college when she is placed in solitary confinement after being out all night with Jude; Jude is forced to resign from the Mutual Improvement Society's committee when the irregularity of his marital status becomes known. The thrust of the novel, then, is to demonstrate the insufficiency of such institutions, which appear to offer their constituents opportunities to develop intellectually, but in fact attempt to confine them to the most conventionally respectable paths, and refuse to acknowledge the depth of their emotional and intellectual hungers.

Sue's piquant manipulation of gender attributes, however, coexists with its opposite: a disdain for the hostile reciprocations of conventional heterosexuality. Jude finds what he terms her “epicene tenderness … harrowing,” but reflects: “If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met” (159). This proximity, or similarity, is emphasized throughout the novel. There is, it is true, a submerged class contrast in their relationship, which, if carried through the novel, would make Sue merely the emblem and prize of Jude's ambition. Although her actual origins are no more exalted than his, she is refined and urbane in contrast to Jude's clownishness: “She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his,” he thinks on his first view of her (90). But this antithesis is overwhelmed by the novel's emphasis on their likeness, which everyone perceives. “‘What counterparts they were!’” Jude reflects when Sue comes to him for refuge (149). They are soon able to read each other's thoughts: “When they talked on an indifferent subject … there was ever a second silent conversation passing between their emotions, so perfect was the reciprocity between them” (213). Phillotson, explaining why he is allowing Sue to elope with Jude, says, “I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into their attachment. … Their supreme desire is to be together—to share each other's emotions, and fancies, and dreams” (242-43). Penny Boumelha has demonstrated that their lives follow very similar patterns (14-42), and Elizabeth Langland argues that “Through kinship and twinship with Sue, Jude seeks an alternative to the frustrating constructions of his masculinity that his culture holds out” (Higonnet 33).

If he seeks such an alternative, however, he does not achieve it: the ability to combine masculine and feminine traits is contained within Sue. Despite their likeness, Jude's gender make-up is more static. He does display conventionally feminine susceptibilities, particularly in his disgust with the cruelties of farm life, which activate the equally conventional association between feminization and social ambition. He feels sorry for animals: he makes common cause with the crows that he is supposed, as a young boy, to be scaring away, and after his marriage, his inability to kill a pig properly causes the practical Arabella to call him a “tender-hearted fool” and Jude to feel “dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done” (65)—not because he has done a bad job of killing the pig, but because he has done it at all. (He owes part of this susceptibility to the early advice of Phillotson to “be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can” [4-5]; and Phillotson, too, is a man of uncertain virility, particularly in his sexual relations.) The young Jude also, like Henry Knight, has an affective relationship to the classics he studies as he labors, impulsively kneeling one moonlit night to recite a poem of Horace to Diana. But if Jude seems feminized in the context of the relatively harsh surroundings of Marygreen, such references drop off after he leaves for Christminster, where the emphasis is rather on his rusticity in contrast to what he imagines as Christminster refinement. Hardy seems to imply that women are more able to achieve and maintain an androgynous ideal partly for that most Victorian of reasons—their lesser sexual impulses. Jude, on the other hand, always finds Sue's sexless androgyny painful as well as attractive.

Jude the Obscure's fantasy of androgyny, then, embodied more fully in its female than in its male protagonist, does not fully erase the “sense of sex.” The novel reveals that it is easier for Hardy to imagine the dissolution of gender than of class boundaries, and to do so by challenging the conventions of femininity rather than those of masculinity. Furthermore, no fantasy of classlessness parallels the yearning for androgyny; the class conflict incipient in Jude's ambition to matriculate at Christminster is subsumed, in the tradition of the domestic novel, by the novel's warped but recognizable marriage plot: social and intellectual conflicts become conflicts, conventionally, over romantic attraction—and less conventionally over its legalities. And both Jude and Hardy fall back on gender-essentialist characterizations to explain the thwarting of Jude's aspirations. “‘Strange difference of sex,’” muses Jude, as he lies dying, “‘that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably’” (422). Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley look toward a future that may never come and that may be terrible if it comes at all. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern in Jude the Obscure the outlines of a critique of the mutual operation of class and gender boundaries in blighting the aspiration of the male and female subjects they define. Early in the novel, Jude lies in bed contemplating the collapse of his Christminster dream. “If he had been a woman,” Hardy writes, “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” (128). Jude the Obscure itself is the long scream of the Victorian man of letters whose social ascendancy remained in nervous tension with his sexual identity.

Notes

1. For the conflicts over Hardy's interment and the literary executorship, see Millgate 574-77 and Gittings 211-13. Millgate writes that “[o]nce Hardy was dead Cockerell and Barrie began to assert their male authority over what Cockerell (in a letter to his wife) had already referred to as ‘the housefull of women’” (574). Gittings emphasizes particularly the contrast between “[Hardy's] humble beginning [and] his exalted ending” (211).

2. For a summary of the tensions in the construction of the literary profession, particularly in the nineteenth century, see Poovey 101-108.

3. In her definition of “literary discourse” Poovey does not distinguish significantly between fiction and non-fiction prose. Carol T. Christ, in her analysis of Carlyle's “The Hero as Man of Letters,” points out that “In Carlyle's construction … the novel['s] … feminization provides the only exception to his heroic masculinization of the world of letters” (20). I am suggesting, like Poovey, that the field of literature in general was structurally feminized (hence the need for heroic masculinization); I am distinguishing the novel, however, as particularly subject to feminization for the reasons discussed below.

4. A succinct twentieth-century summary of this theme is “England versus England,” by Doris Lessing, whose short stories often reduce the class and gender negotiations of the English fictional tradition to their essence.

5. A similar working out of this theme—a man's disappointment at discovering that a woman's intellectual dependency does not guarantee her sexual innocence—occurs, of course, in Tess. Like Elfride's and Knight's, Tess's and Angel's relationship is marked by the woman's intellectual submission to the man. “‘When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am,’” Tess says to Angel at the beginning of their courtship (107). Like Elfride, Tess attempts to conceal within this submission the evidence of what she has seen, and thought—and done; like Knight, Angel enjoys the sense of intellectual superiority—“‘I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like to take up—’” he responds—and when he finds that it is balanced by a superiority of sexual experience on the woman's side, he casts her off.

6. On the marriage of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, see Rose 25-44 and 243-59.

7. Florence Hardy, too, divined an unspoken resentment of her writing: “I have a feeling, deep within me,” she wrote, “‘that my husband rather dislikes my being a scribbling woman’” (qtd. in Gittings 161).

8. Her husband, the schoolmaster Phillotson, says that “[h]er intellect sparkles like diamonds, while mine smoulders like brown paper” (241). The narrator describes her as having “an intellect [that] scintillated like a star” (361), and Jude calls her “a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of” (369) and “a woman whose intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline lamp” (422).

9. On this point, see Langland, who argues that “Sue both is and is not a typical woman depending on Jude's psychosocial investment in her. At those points when he fears he will lose her, he tends to brand her typical of her sex to distance himself from his need for her” (39).

10. For an overview of nineteenth-century socio-biological theories of sexual differentiation as they bear upon the construction of femininity, see Russett. For a more detailed account than I can give here of “the growing medicalisation of sexuality” during the latter half of the nineteenth century, see Boumelha 11-25. For further examples of gynecological anti-feminism and another discussion of Jude the Obscure and late-Victorian constructions of femininity, see Brady.

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