Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure

The novel Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, was first published unabridged in 1896. It narrates the doomed existence of the protagonist, Jude, from the moment he is still a boy at Marygreen and is inspired by a rural schoolmaster to think of a university education, to the moment in which he dies, alone and unattended. It tells the story of a man whose dreams and ambitions are gradually destroyed, and end up being shattered. Jude lives an enternal cyclical movement, in which he never gets any closer to whaever he is looking for, due to forces which seem to be operating against him all the time. In this essay, I will conduct an analysis of these social forces, in order to show that Hardy did create a realistic depiction of ninteenth century British society. According to Brooks [1], a realistic depiction is similar to the vision we have if go up a high tower and remove the housetops of the houses, to show what is really happening in the rooms exposed. It is a duty of the realistic writer, to dismantle appearances and not to reproduce the façade, and “to give us not only the world viewed, as well as the world comprehended .” Hardy shows us that Jude is making choices at a certain level, referring to his personal life, but there are social and economic forces which operate on him so he does not take decisions, once these circumstances limit his choices. Early on in the novel, we see Jude struggling against the circumstances. The village of Marygreen is set in opposition to the university town of Christminster. The young Jude sees Christminster as an enlightened place of learning, relating it to his dreams of higher education and his vague notions of academic success. Yet while Jude lives quite close to Christminster and knows a man who is going to live there, the city is always only a distant vision in his mind. It is nearly within his reach but at the same time unattainable. This physical distance is a metaphor for the abstract distance between the

Bibliography: Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005. Hardy, Thomas. Jude The Obscure. Penguin Popular Classics, England,1994. Schweik, Robert C. “The Modernity of Hardy in Jude the Obscure”. In: A Spacious Vision: Essays on Hardy. Newmill, The Patten Press, 1994, p. 49-64. Stern, J. P. “On Realism“. In: Concepts of Literature. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Watt, Ian. “ Realism and the Novel“. In: Essays in Criticism II, p. 376-396, 1952. ----------------------- [1] Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005. [2] Schweik, Robert C. “The Modernity of Hardy in Jude the Obscure”. In: A Spacious Vision: Essays on Hardy. Newmill, The Patten Press, 1994, p. 49-64.