Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

A prominent characteristic of literary naturalism is perhaps the one that pertains most crucially to Jude the Obscure. Sexual reproduction in literary naturalism, and especially in Jude the Obscure, has a firmly Schopenhauerian slant. Arthur Schopenhauer’s best-known and most influential work,
The World as Will and Idea
( 18 18, 1844) exerted a tremendous pull over late-nineteenth-century European literary culture, although it exerted very little influence over professional philosophy. According to Schopenhauer, the universe is a cruel, hostile, and even wicked place, and any attempt through our own will—be that the will to exist or the will to know—to improve the world will inevitably increase our suffering; to Schopenhauer, suffering is the intrinsic fact about human life.

As a result of this condition, what a person can do is try to reduce his or her will to almost nothing; he advocates doing this through fasting, voluntary poverty, and chastity. He defines the good person as someone who has recognized the universal quality of suffering and who, in withdrawing his or her will, refuses to participate in the perpetuation of that suffering. The crucial consequence of this thesis is that chastity is the ideal, for sexual procreation introduces into the world another suffering creature. Schopenhauer goes on, however, to acknowledge the difficulty of chastity because of what he sees as nature’s trap: Nature, which he sees as cleverer than any individual person, devised a trap so that life will be perpetuated, and that trap is sexual desire. In Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, sexual intimacy is nature’s way of tricking or trapping the individual into reproducing, perhaps even against his will. One can see the relevance of Schopenhauer’s ideas to Hardy’s novel, where sexual desire entraps various characters into actions or circumstance that will turn out badly for everyone. If Hardy’s novel is deeply sensuous, it is a sensuality riddled with a Schopenhauerian pessimism.

The final characteristic element of the naturalist narrative bespeaks the influence of perhaps the most towering intellectual influence of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin. Literary naturalism often represents its characters through evolutionary types; it brings the Darwinian concepts of natural selection, the struggle for existence, instinct, variability, and inheritance into play as potentially negative and positive features of human existence. Here we might think again of Arabella, with the preponderance of detail supplied about her physical traits as indices of sexual selection; she is not spoken of through human, psychologized traits, but through her animalistic qualities. In
Jude
, Sue Bridehead is also critiqued by evolutionary type, for she personifies the anxiety that existed in the wake of Darwin that it was possible to produce (through overevolution and social coddling) creatures unfit for the evolutionary struggle.

Hardy’s Darwinian view of nature is a departure from the Romantic “pathetic fallacy,” the concept of nature as a mirror of human emotions. For Hardy, nature is not a reflection of the human, but a site of contestation over resources (generally understood as sustenance and sexual outlets) that produces winners and losers. This is not to say that Hardy admiringly endorses evolutionary winners, for Arabella, certainly among the most distasteful of Hardy’s creations, is the consummate evolutionary winner. Jude’s tragedy is in part the result of a temperament that makes him too sensitive to compete. From Jude’s earliest childhood, when he loses his job as a human scarecrow because he feels sorry for the hungry birds, his sympathy makes him unfit to trample upon others. This quality is literal as well as metaphorical:

Hardy’s depiction of Jude here needs to be understood as more than just the fancies of a sensitive child or as a “weakness of character,” for it self-consciously portends the unhappiness that Jude will experience as a result of his inability to trample upon—or, put another way, compete for existence with—another creature.

The intellectual figure, however, whom Hardy most clearly cites in the text is Thomas Malthus, the economist whose
Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798) introduced a key idea for nineteenth-century narrative : the competition for resources. Malthus postulated that the geometric progression of population in relation to food would result in widespread famine and suffering. Human rationality, which Malthus believed was not all that powerful in the face of human reproduction, had no part in the most important social facts. The nineteenth-century novel became interested in describing and plotting the repercussions of Malthusian thought; Charles Dickens, with Oliver Twist’s famous request for a second bowl of gruel—“Please, sir, I want some more”—not only critiques the Poor Laws but distills Malthus’s ideas into a single, sentimental image. In Jude the Obscure Malthus is invoked in the act Little Father Time performs and the note he leaves behind. His line has sometimes become a shorthand for what the novel represents: “
Done because we are too menny
” indirectly cites Malthus’s anxiety about overpopulation (p. 345). Hardy’s novel is palpably that strangest of things within the tradition of the English novel, a novel of ideas—Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Malthus, and several others circulate in its pages, offering to the English tradition a Continental openness to fictional philosophizing.

One of the qualities of Jude the Obscure that is hard to fix, but which is nevertheless palpable in reading it, is the sense that it is written at a moment experienced as “late in time.” That
Jude
was, at the time it was written, an end-of-the-century production is evident from both its publication date of 1895 and the millennialism that haunts its pages. The sensation that everything is about to change because the century is about to turn over is a sensation with which we should be able to empathize. Our own issues about the change from the twentieth to the twenty-first century were routed through anxieties about a computer bug (Y2K) that was rumored would cause systemic chaos and anarchy throughout the modern world. Hardy’s novel likewise reflects an anxious millennialism: a culture in which order as they knew it was in eopardy. Sue’s disenchantment with marriage makes her see in a bride leaving the church the “heifers of sacrifice in old times” (p. 293), while Little Father Time looks at a bunch of flowers and does not see beauty, but rather their imminent death (p. 303). Jude’s appraisal that their ideas were fifty years premature reflects his awareness that the fin de siècle had not brought change quickly enough for his own happiness. In general, however, Jude is rarely so self-conscious, instead reflecting Hardy’s sense that a momentous change is upon them as the century turns; Jude says: “I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am” (p. 335). We might think profitably of Hardy’s Russian contemporary Anton Chekhov, whose character Vershinin, in act 2 of the play Three Sisters (1901), expresses a compatible sentiment:

The modern moment in which Hardy is writing indirectly produces one of the text’s most difficult questions: What kind of person is created by modernity? The novel answers it in a number of different ways, though most powerfully in its creation of the characters of Little Father Time, Sue Bridehead, and Jude Fawley. When Jude decides to give up working as a restorer of churches because his un-sanctified union with Sue has led them to be ostracized, Sue advises him to find work as a stonemason on “railway stations, bridges, theatres, music-halls, hotels—everything that has no connection with conduct” (p. 312). Note the following about Sue’s seemingly random list: railways and hotels are places of transience, theatres and music halls are places of performance, while a bridge also implies a place of transition from one place to another. The novel invites us to think about the kind of person formed by these social facts. What kind of person is more comfortable with railway stations and hotels than with Gothic churches? Hardy’s novel implies, though typically never states, that this would be a modern person who is suffering, as Chekhov suggested, to create the modern world.

The most negative version of modernity in
Jude the Obscure
is the uncanny Little Father Time; more a cipher, symbol, or abstraction than a real person, the child who is the product of Jude’s and Arabella’s unhappy marriage tests the boundaries of realism. The end that Father Time comes to—almost an experiment in the grotesque extremes of the novel’s philosophies—suggests but never fully affirms a set of terrifying consequences of the modern. It is unclear, for instance, if the doctor’s appraisal of the boy’s profound pessimism—“it was in his nature to do it.... There are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life.... It is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live”—is validated by the text, or if his diagnosis is but part of the oppressive social forms that Jude and Sue have tried to rebel against (p. 345).

Jude, whose philosophical affiliations at the start of his life consisted of traditional faith in education and religion, and Sue, who personified skepticism when Jude met her for the first time, are not consistent in their philosophies. Jude, who becomes increasingly un-tethered to traditional morality, at a certain point in the novel metaphorically switches places with Sue: “He was mentally approaching the position which Sue had occupied when he first met her” (p. 316). Because of the central horror that she experiences, Sue ultimately repudiates the modern position she has staked out for herself, even though she has fervently believed and convinced Jude that the trappings of modern social forms—social candor, the repudiation of hypocritical social forms, loss of family control, decay of religion, gender emancipation, as well as trains and hotels—would bring them happiness.

Before the act of penitence at the end of the novel, Sue Bridehead embodies the “New Woman,” a character type identified in popular culture as well as in the novel in the late nineteenth century. Sue’s modernity is tied to her unconventional approach to gender; as a new woman, she is educated and emancipated, and, the novel implies, as a result nervous and oddly free of sexual interest; her description of her friendship with a young man in London captures her curious unconsciousness about sex. We are meant to understand that one of the most obvious facts about Sue—her palpable horror about sex—makes her peculiarly modern in that it gestures to the modern category of the neurosis: As Freud would later suggest, one of the primary characteristics of a neurotic personality is its incapacity for understanding erotic demands. A neurosis might be described as the self that is split between the social self and the desiring self, often producing lacerating submissions—of the kind, for instance, that Sue endures and even courts eventually by returning to Phillotson—to what society says we should want.

Sue’s neurosis marks an innovation in the field of the novel, for the subtle psychologization of intimacy between two individuals and the bringing of neurosis into its depiction of sex makes
Jude the Obscure
a watershed novel. The novel, more than any other before it, depicts the minute-by-minute processes of married life, including sexual dysfunction, a neurotic relation to the sexual drive, and the depiction of unconscious desires. One need only think of Sue’s elaborate rigging of the closet that she sleeps in so that she can sense the approach of her husband, or her flinging herself from the bedroom window when Phillotson unadvisedly approaches her for sex, to realize the extent to which the novel opens up new frontiers for the twentieth-century novel. Up to this time the English novel had not only generally ended with marriage, but even when it continued past the fact of it having taken place it had never attempted to capture what it was like to be intimate with a spouse—let alone what it feels like to be intimate with someone for whom one feels physical repulsion. In this way
Jude the Obscure
leads to an enormous opening up of the field of novelistic representation, which would include what the novelist is allowed to describe, including the most intimate disclosures possible: what, for instance, in James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
Leopold Bloom reads as he defecates or Molly Bloom fantasizes about with her lover.