Anything to do with Hardy and I simply can’t resist. This post was born of some hastily scribbled notes for an unappreciative, fledgling. but short-lived book club many years ago. After a spit and polish, the result is as follows. Enjoy.
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is a novel that takes you on a journey through the murky waters of ambition, love, and existential dread. Hardy, never one to shy away from tragedy, crafts a story so soaked in misery that one might need a towel after reading it – or perhaps an emotional support group.
The characters present a symphony of sadness. Our hero, Jude Fawley, is the quintessential underdog. Born with aspirations as high as a cathedral spire, Jude’s dreams of scholarly glory are repeatedly crushed by the unrelenting forces of fate, society, and his own poor decision-making skills. Hardy paints Jude as a tragic figure, but one can’t help but wonder if he’s simply the most obtuse character in literary history. Time and again, Jude is presented with choices, and time and again, he chooses the path marked “THIS WAY TO DOOM.”
Then we have Sue Bridehead, Jude’s ethereal cousin and intellectual soulmate, who is as complex as she is infuriating. Sue is the kind of character who would have thrived in a modern-day counsellor’s office, where she could unpack her issues with authority, religion, and physical affection. She is a mass of contradictions, oscillating between passionate defiance and crippling guilt, leaving readers wondering if she might be a pioneer of the ‘hot-and-cold’ relationship game.
Arabella Donn, Jude’s first wife, is a delightful caricature of pragmatism gone rogue. She is everything that Jude and Sue are not: earthy, manipulative, and unapologetically selfish. If Hardy had a sense of humour about her, he might have turned her into the antihero of a 19th-century soap opera. One imagines Arabella surviving just fine in the modern world, possibly running a successful chain of questionable matchmaking services.
The plot of Jude the Obscure is a relentless march towards despair, punctuated by brief, flickering moments of hope that Hardy crushes with the enthusiasm of a child stamping on sandcastles. Jude’s dream of attending Christminster (a fictional stand-in for Oxford) is thwarted by class barriers, personal failings, and the novel’s general atmosphere of cosmic indifference. His romantic entanglements with Sue and Arabella are similarly doomed, leading to a series of catastrophic decisions that culminate in an ending so bleak that it makes King Lear (oh, I love this play) look like a light comedy.
Hardy’s narrative is like watching a slow-motion train wreck: you know it’s going to end badly, but you can’t look away. And just when you think things can’t get any worse, Hardy proves you wrong. The novel’s infamous little Father Time incident – where a child decides that life is simply too miserable for everyone involved – is a masterclass in over-the-top tragedy. It’s as if Hardy wanted to see just how much sorrow he could pack into one book before his readers started throwing it across the room.
Jude the Obscure is a novel that tackles Big Themes: the oppressive nature of social institutions, the conflict between flesh and spirit, the cruelty of unfulfilled dreams. Hardy is like a Victorian Eeyore, wandering through the bleak landscape of human existence with a resigned sigh.
Religion and academia come under particularly harsh scrutiny, with Hardy depicting them as distant, unattainable ideals that crush the spirits of those who dare to aspire to them. Christminster is less a city of dreams and more a gothic horror setting where hope goes to die. And then there’s marriage, which Hardy portrays as a trap from which there is no escape, a sentiment that may have led to a few nervous glances between spouses in the novel’s first readers.
Prepare for a bracing dip in the melancholy pool. Hardy’s prose is, as always, beautifully crafted, with descriptions so vivid that you can almost feel the cold, damp fog of Wessex wrapping around you. But in Jude the Obscure, that beauty is in the service of a narrative so relentlessly pessimistic that it’s almost comical. Hardy’s talent for rendering the bleakest of scenes in the most poetic language gives the novel a peculiar charm, like a gothic horror story written in iambic pentameter.
Reading Jude the Obscure is like signing up for a marathon and discovering halfway through that the finish line is actually a brick wall. It’s a brilliant novel, but it’s also a punishing one. Hardy seems to delight in piling misery upon his characters, and by extension, upon his readers. But perhaps there is a method to this madness. By the end of the novel, one is left with a strange sense of catharsis, as if surviving Jude’s trials and tribulations has given us some profound insight into the human condition – at least into Hardy’s worldview, which can be summed up as: “Life is suffering. Good luck with that.”
In the end, Jude the Obscure is a masterwork of tragedy, but it’s also an inadvertent comedy of errors, a darkly humorous look at the futility of human ambition. It’s a novel that demands respect, even as it drives you to despair. Or perhaps to drink. Either way, it’s an experience you won’t soon forget – no matter how hard you try.
Hope you enjoyed this critique as much as Hardy enjoyed torturing his characters!
Wording 