'Jude The Obscure'

 I am writing this blog about 'Jude The Obscure '.This assignment is given by Dilip Barad sir. 

Write essay on the themes of the novel 'Jude The Obscure'.

Introduction

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Thematic study of 'Jude The Obscure'.

• Marriage

It could be argued that the rejection of marriage is the central didactic point of this novel. Hardy repeatedly emphasizes that marriage involves making a commitment that many people are emotionally unequipped to fulfill - this sentiment comes from the narrator, but it is also expressed by Sue, Jude, Phillotson, and Widow Edlin at various points in the novel. Whether the institution of marriage can be saved is open to interpretation. Jude and Sue are clearly a good match for each other, so Jude wants to get married. Sue, however, feels that marriage will poison the relationship. The narrator does not seem to favor either side; it is left up to readers to decide how the problems with marriage might be solve.

• Education

Hardy highlights many kinds of education in Jude the Obscure. Most obviously, we have Jude's desire to get a university degree and become an academic. However, Hardy also emphasises the importance of experiential education. Because Jude is inexperienced with women and with social situations more generally, he is especially susceptible to Arabella's seduction. In the novel, the level of traditional education one reaches is closely tied to the class system, and if someone from Jude's class wants to learn, they must teach themselves. Although the narrator seems to admire Jude's willingness to teach himself, he also points out the limits of autodidacticism, noting that despite Jude's near-constant studies, he cannot hope to compete on the university entrance exam against richer men who have hired tutors.

• Social class

In addition to his points about education, Hardy also criticises the rigidity of social class more generally. Jude is limited in his career options because as a working-class man, he cannot hope to be promoted beyond a certain level, even in fields like the clergy that are supposed to be open to all. However, Jude and Sue also benefit from their low social class in that their respective divorces are processed quickly and without inquiry and they can get away with living together unmarried for quite some time. Even this is a mixed blessing - they are caught eventually, and the reason they weren't caught sooner is that they are unimportant to the people around them.

• Religion

As Jude the Obscure can be interpreted as critical of the institution of marriage, Hardy is equally as possessed with the church. Throughout their relationship, Jude and Sue have many conversations concerning religion, the former being initially more devout than his intellectually curious cousin. In a diorama depicting Jerusalem, the major characters' feelings on religion crystalize. Sue wonders why Jerusalem rather than Rome or Athens is deemed important, Phillotson counters that the city is important to the English as a Christian people, and Jude is utterly absorbed by the work - though he also strains to agree with Sue. Later, Sue mentions a friend who was the most irreligious but also the most moral. Hardy points out that these concepts are not mutually exclusive.Jude's faith is tested by Sue. He realizes his sexual attraction to her makes him a hypocrite. Rather than suppress his natural physical desire, he burns his books, marking his break with Christianity. This makes Sue's reversal later in the novel all the more shocking. Jude likens her conversion in the wake of her children's death to his partaking in alcohol during difficult times. Here Hardy calls into question the motivations behind faith. Through Sue's self-punishing adherence to her Christian duties despite her true nature, Hardy suggests those motivations are not always pure.

• Women's rights

SueBridehead is a strikingly modern heroine in many ways - she lives with men without marrying them; she has a rich intellectual life; she works alongside Jude. Hardy criticises the social conventions that prevent her from fulfilling her potential as an intellectual and as a worker. However, he also reinforces some of those social conventions unintentionally; by portraying Sue as anxious and hysterical, Hardy perpetuates a common Victorian stereotype about women being especially emotional. Also, we are expected to accept Sue having lived with the Christminster undergraduate because they were not having sex; despite his professed liberalism, Hardy upholds traditional values by offering this piece of information and  expecting it to color our judgment of the character.

• Old versus new

The narrator of Jude the Obscure often laments the ways that old things are replaced by the new, especially when it comes to urban architecture. Likewise, the Widow Edlin suggests that older, more laid-back attitudes toward marriage are better than prudish Victorian norms. Nineteenth-century British society was, in many ways, more conservative than the historical periods that preceded it, so Hardy's admiration for the older aspects of English culture ties in to his social liberalism and his reverence for intellectual inquiry.

• Disappointment

Disappointment crops up over and over again in this novel: Jude is disappointed by his career; he is disappointed in his marriage to Arabella and then his cohabitation with Sue; he is disappointed by Mr. Phillotson, who never achieved his dream of getting a university degree. Even Time's assertions that he never asked to be born suggest a certain disappointment with life. Since most of the novel's tragedies come as lost opportunities, the ways that the characters deal with disappointment contribute to their characterization. For example, Phillotson takes a relatively mature perspective when he is disappointed in his marriage to Sue, and allows her to be with Jude. Arabella, in contrast, deals with her disappointment in Cartlett by spying on Jude and scheming to get back together with him.

• Itinerancy

Jude the Obscure features many kinds of nomads. Some of these are minor characters, like the travelling labourers in Shaston. However, Jude himself is a kind of nomad, and the novel's structure reflects this. It is not divided into arbitrary chapters or thematic groupings, but rather is divided into sections based on the characters' location. This geographical mobility speaks to the new freedom - but also rootlessness - that came with the advent of rail travel, which revolutionised the lives of working people like Jude, who could now travel long distances affordably.

Write an essay on the symbols like Christminister and Little Father Time in the novel Jude the Obscure.

Christminster

Christminster is, at various times, referred to as 'the city of light' and the 'New Jerusalem' , meaning that it is both (a) beautiful, (b) a symbol for a hopeful future, and (c) a place of huge spiritual significance.

For Jude specifically, the city symbolises not only knowledge, learning, and purity, but also his desire for a new life. After all, Jude grows up in a small town where his choices for the future are extremely limited. Think about his jobs along the way, before he makes the big move to the big city: he is an official, employed bird scarer ; he works for his aunt the baker, and he picks up stonemasonry. These are all fine jobs , but not necessarily ideal for a young man who prizes learning above all else.

As Jude dreams of Christminster and of the example Phillotson set for him by going there to become a scholar, Jude sees the chance at an entirely new kind of life, with opportunities to distinguish himself as something other than a champion bird frightener. He believes that, if he can get to the city, he will be able to shake off his rural roots and pursue learning to its fullest. Christminster will allow Jude a spiritual rebirth.

The Dark Side of This Whole Christminster Business

Unfortunately, the difference between Jude's dream of Christminster and the real thing quickly becomes apparent. And Jude's unchanging pursuit of his dream of Christminster leads to Jude's destruction. To sum up the difference between Jude's fake Christminster and what we actually see in the novel, we have the narrator's brilliant comment: 'What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real'.

That line sets the tone for Christminster's later significance in the novel. Where, for Jude, the city represents hope, opportunity, and professional achievement, we later see the city as a symbol for Jude's failed hopes and dreams. Christminster's "defective real" quality by day indicates the falseness of the promise that the city offers to Jude long before Jude realises that he will never truly be a part of Christminster culture. Indeed, Jude only speaks about his failure to join Christminster in Part Sixth: 'My failure is reflected on me by every one of those young fellows' . Continuing on, Jude comments later, 'It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one" .

Jude is clearly a smart guy who is more than talented enough to go to Christminster. What keeps him out of the university is social convention and prejudice. When Jude looks at the young people getting their degrees, he feels envious. But he also recognizes that his ambition was too much for the people of his time: it will take "two or three generations" for attitudes to change enough for working class students to break into the university establishment, whereas Jude hoped and dreamed that he could find a place for himself right off the bat.

Jude the Obscure strongly emphasises Jude's intelligence, drive, and ambition. And it also strongly emphasises the social forces that unfairly keep Jude out of the university and out of Christminster. As the physical symbol of the wealth and privilege that Jude seeks and fails to get, Christminster stands in for that larger, messed-up world that completely rejects Jude for daring to find ambition and hope while coming from the wrong side of the tracks.

Little Father Time

Little Father Time doesn't show up until really late in the novel, but boy does he make his role count. From the moment we meet the child of Jude and Arabella, we know something is a little off. He gets his nickname because he is "Age masquerading as Juvenility" in other words, Little Father Time may be biologically a child, but spiritually.

Little Father Time carries an unshakeable sadness with him that seems totally out of keeping with his young age. In spite of his love for Sue and his affection for Jude , he just can't seem to find happiness in anything around him:

'I should like the flowers very much, if I didn't keep thinking they'd all be withered in a few days!'

All That and Social Critique Too

Little Father Time works as a plot device to kill Jude and Sue's two babies and himself, therefore starting the downward spiral that ultimately leads to Jude and Sue's deaths. However, he is also in the novel to foreshadow what Hardy sees coming in the future if life in general doesn't start improving:

'It was in [Little Father Time's] nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live' .

In Little Father Time, we see the hints of a boy who is, for all intents and purposes, clinically depressed. He truly believes he never should have been born. But while today we might say that this boy needs some kind of intervention from a doctor, Hardy is writing at a time long before clinical services for mental health had become as varied and sophisticated as they are today. So when the doctor mentioned in this passage hears about Little Father Time, he diagnoses the boy as the symptom of a social rather than a medical problem.

For the doctor, there is a whole generation of boys facing "new views of life"—new, modern ways of living—who have had to confront life in "all its terrors" before they have the emotional or mental resilience to deal with it. Little Father Time is Hardy's grim view of things to come: as life becomes more and more unrelentingly cruel to good people, no one's going to want to go on and there is going to be a "universal wish not to live." You can't get a vision of the future much more dire than this.

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