Thomas Hardy (18 page)

On 20 July 1892 Hardy’s father died. Like Horatio in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, he had in his lifetime taken suffering and fortune ‘with equal thanks’. His last request had been for a drink of water from the well, which led him, when he had tasted it, to say: ‘Now I know I am at home.’ He was buried in Stinsford churchyard, and it was Hardy himself who designed his tombstone. From then on, the family business was continued by Hardy’s brother, Henry.

That October also saw the death of Tennyson, whose funeral in Westminster Abbey Hardy attended.

The following May, in 1893, Hardy and Emma visited Ireland, where in Dublin they met Florence Henniker (sister of Lord Houghton, the Lord Lieutenant, and wife of Arthur Henniker-Major, an army officer). Although Florence was fifteen years Hardy’s junior, the pair were to strike up a long friendship and correspondence. The Hardys were also present in the Irish capital for Queen Victoria’s Birthday Review, held on the 24th of that month.

June 1893 found Hardy in Oxford, at a time when commemoration proceedings were taking place to honour the university’s founders and benefactors; the purpose of the visit was to gather material for his next novel, which would be entitled
Jude the Obscure
. In August Hardy and Emma spent some time in Wales. In November he wrote two poems, and on Christmas Eve at Max Gate he and Emma received carol singers who, with their lanterns, stood under the trees and sang to the accompaniment of a harmonium.

In February 1894 a collection of Hardy’s short stories was published by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. under the title
Life’s Little Ironies
. The Hardys again rented accommodation in London, taking their servants with them and spending the spring in their customary way, viz. attending dinners, plays and the theatre.

At this time Hardy was still engaged in his never-ending quest to understand women; Emma in particular. This much is clear from certain annotations which he made in the margins of a book of short stories entitled
Keynotes
, by George Egerton, given to him by Florence Henniker. Beside a passage in the book which describes ‘the eternal wilderness, the untamed, primitive, savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman’, Hardy remarked: ‘This if fairly stated is decidedly the UGLY side of a woman’s nature.’ And where
Keynotes
refers to man’s ‘chivalrous, conservative devotion to the female idea he has created, [which] blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problem of her complex nature’, Hardy asks if the conclusion is that ‘REAL woman is abhorrent to man? hence the failure of matrimony?’ If so, this is a desperately negative view of the female sex on Hardy’s part, but it should be remembered that he was a man of limited experience where women were concerned, and his conclusions were based almost entirely on his relationship with Emma.
¹
Meanwhile, an idea was developing in his mind for a novel in which the problem of male/female relationships would be explored in full.

Hardy had ‘jotted down’ the plot for what was to become
Jude the Obscure
in 1890.
²
Two years later, he visited the village of Great Fawley in Berkshire, from where his maternal grandmother, Mary Head, who had experienced a miserable life as an orphan, had originated. The hero of the story, Jude Fawley, would derive his name from this village. The novel was to be serialised, commencing in November 1894 in
Harper’s Magazine
, but only after certain changes were made at the insistence of the publisher. Hardy then restored the work to its original version – an exhausting process – before its publication in book form a year later, in November 1895, again by Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co.

In
Jude the Obscure
, the plot develops in Hardy’s characteristic style, taking innumerable twists and turns as he throws not one, but a sackful of proverbial spanners into the works (or paths) of his ‘characters’.

Following the death of his parents, Jude Fawley is brought up in the village of Marygreen by his great-aunt, Miss Drusilla Fawley. Drusilla urges Jude to persuade his schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson (who had advised Jude to ‘read all you can’), ‘to take ’ee [Jude] to Christminster [Oxford] wi’ un [him], and make a scholar of ’ee’. With this suggestion Jude is entirely in accord; Christminster, in his eyes, being a romanticised world where scholars work in the rarefied atmosphere of high academia. Here, Hardy the author is fully in tune with his hero: a sound education is something they both value. Before Jude has the opportunity to fulfil his dream, however, he is tricked into marrying Arabella Donn, the daughter of a pig breeder.

Jude had been taught by his schoolmaster to ‘be kind to animals and birds’, and when his and Arabella’s pig has to be slaughtered, he is broken-hearted. After the pig’s death he mourns the creature: a scene in which Hardy manages to convey, simultaneously, a sense of both pathos and humour – even though it is obvious that the author’s sympathies are entirely with Jude and the pig. This, Hardy makes clear when he admits to having deliberately introduced this episode into the novel, in order for it to ‘serve a humane end in showing people the cruelty that goes on unheeded under the barbarous
régime
we call civilization’.
³

Arabella deserts Jude and goes to live in Australia. Jude now moves from Marygreen to Christminster, where he obtains employment as a stonemason, continuing with his studies in his spare time. Here, he meets his cousin, Sue Bridehead.

Jude longs to use his talents and to have them recognised, whereas Sue prefers to be unconventional – a free spirit. Sceptical of religion, Sue sees the saints as the stuff of legend rather than reality, and sees Christminster as a place where intellect is pushing one way and religion the other, ‘like two rams butting each other. The medievalism of Christminster must be sloughed off,’she declares, ‘or Christminster itself will have to go.’ This statement reflects Hardy’s own inner struggle to reconcile what his intellect is telling him on the one hand, with Christian dogma on the other.

Jude’s ambition at Christminster is to study at the university, but he finds himself thwarted by the university authorities. He is a stonemason, therefore he cannot be a scholar; not officially at any rate. In this, Hardy was not writing from personal experience (he appears not to have made any serious attempt to enter university, despite the encouragement of Horace Moule), but was making the general point that university was a ‘closed shop’ for all but the privileged few.

Jude introduces Sue to Phillotson, whom she subsequently marries. However, the marriage ends acrimoniously, and Phillotson, seeing how unhappy she is, and out of ‘natural, straightforward humanity’, agrees to give her freedom and a divorce. She returns to Jude. For his act of compassion, Phillotson is dismissed from his post as schoolmaster.

Jude receives a letter from Arabella to say that she has remarried. She also tells him that, unbeknown to him, she has borne his child; a son, ‘little Jude’ – or ‘Juey’ – to whom she wishes Jude to give a home, a proposal to which both he and Sue agree. Jude finds himself falling in love with Sue, but there are problems here also, for she has a natural aversion to marriage. At one point, the couple get as far as the registrar’s office, before Sue says to Jude: ‘Let us go home, without killing our dream.’

There comes an event which brings Jude and Sue’s failure to marry into sharp relief. He is employed by the church to inscribe a stone tablet with words from the Ten Commandments, which include: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’When he is recognised as one who is committing this very sin himself, he is told that his services are no longer required. Subsequently, for the very reason that he and Sue are unmarried and therefore ‘living in sin’, the couple, along with their children, now three in number including Juey, are turned out of the lodgings which they occupy in Christminster.

When Commemoration Day (which Hardy calls ‘Remembrance Day’) dawns, and the university remembers its former founders and benefactors, Jude sees it more as ‘humiliation day’, for despite all his knowledge, gained from long years of study, he is still regarded as an outsider.

The ultimate tragedy occurs when Juey, Jude’s son by Arabella, hangs Jude’s two children by Sue and then hangs himself; which Sue regards as a judgement from God. She returns to Phillotson, remarries him, and finally submits to his desires because ‘it is my duty’.Meanwhile, Jude is tricked into marrying Arabella for a second time, shortly after which he becomes seriously ill and dies.

Jude the Obscure
contains an important clue as to the real reason why Hardy chose not to become a clergyman. The reason he gave at the time was that it would have involved him in a prolonged period of study, but surely, for a scholar such as he, this would have presented no problem. In this novel, however, when Jude Fawley kisses Sue Bridehead, he experiences all the pleasure of that moment of intimacy. He realises how ‘glaringly inconsistent’ it would be for him to pursue ‘the idea of becoming … a servant of religion’, when that religion (in this case Christianity) regards sexual love ‘at its best as a frailty, and at its worst a damnation’.

In the book’s preface, Hardy describes
Jude the Obscure
as a ‘tragedy of unfulfilled aims’. Intended for men and women of ‘full [adult] age’, it was an attempt, he said, to confront the issue of:

the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity [physical attraction and sexual desire]; to tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit.
⁴

Hardy begins the novel with a quotation from the book of Esdras in the Apocrypha:

Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women.

Those who read
Jude the Obscure
at the time it was published may be forgiven if they failed to realise that in reality, the problematical male/female interpersonal relationships discussed therein relate to Hardy himself and Emma. However (as will be seen), when the full story of the Hardys’ marriage finally emerges, it becomes clear that this was absolutely the case.

It would be a mistake for the reader to assume that in the novel it is the hero, Jude Fawley, who invariably voices the true thoughts of Hardy, for sometimes his thoughts are expressed by Sue Bridehead, or even by one of the more minor characters. It is therefore interesting to ‘unscramble’ the story in an effort to discover the meaning, of the plot within the plot. Firstly, however, it is important to note that the novel begins with a caveat, namely Jude’s great-aunt Drusilla’s dire warning to him about the consequences of matrimony. Said she:

Jude, my child, don’t
you
ever marry. Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any more. The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound.

Drusilla subsequently apprises Jude of the various tragedies that have befallen his forebears, including his own parents. And after Drusilla’s death, Jude tells Sue that his great-aunt had once told him that the Fawleys ‘particularly … members of our family … made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we made unhappy ones.’ Drusilla’s friend, Mrs Edlin, reinforces this idea when she tells cousins Jude and Sue about certain mishaps which their common ancestors had experienced. ‘They was always good-hearted people … wouldn’t kill a fly if they knowed it, but things happened to thwart ’em.’ This leads Sue to say, despairingly: ‘It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus [a tragic family from Greek mythology].’

Of Love

When Jude first sets eyes on Sue:

the emotion which had been accumulating in his breast as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized locality he dwelt in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this half-visionary form; and he perceived that for whatever his obedient wish in a contrary direction, he would soon be unable to resist the desire to make himself known to her.

Subsequently, instead of regarding Sue as a cousin, he comes to admit that his interest in her is ‘unmistakably of a sexual kind’. Yet, as far as love is concerned, he feels that his relationship with her is one-sided, for, referring to himself, he declares: ‘I, who love you better than my own self, – better – O far better than you have loved me!’ If only she would say that she loved him ‘a quarter, a tenth, as much as I do you’ then he would ‘be content’.

‘Sue, you are not worth a man’s love!’ he tells her, in exasperation. ‘Sue, sometimes when I am vexed with you, I think you’re incapable of real love.’

Sue, nevertheless, sees matters entirely differently. In respect of Phillotson, she explains to Jude that ‘sometimes a woman’s
love of being loved
gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn’t love him at all’. To which the horrified Jude replies: ‘You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it?’