Thomas Hardy (19 page)

‘Well – if you put it brutally – it was a little like that,’ says Sue. Her love for Jude began similarly, she said, ‘in a selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you’. But she does admit that eventually she did come to love him truly.

Marriage

Presenting matters from the male standpoint, Jude tells Sue: ‘People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces [presumably, sexual attraction], although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.’

And he expresses his impatience to marry Sue by telling her: ‘I’ve wanted you to be [my wife], and I’ve waited with the patience of Job, and I don’t see that I’ve got anything by my self-denial.’

This can only be interpreted in one way – that their relationship is, at Sue’s insistence, a platonic one. Sue, for her part, feels that she rushed into her marriage to Phillotson without proper consideration. Says she: ‘Before I married him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me – there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed on.’

And when she left Phillotson for Jude, she was extremely nervous at the prospect of remarriage, having a ‘dread’, as she told him, ‘lest an iron contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for you, as it did between our parents’. She goes on to say:

If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing …– which it seems to be – why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it hurts and grieves him or her? [For once one is] contracted to cherish … [the other] under a Government stamp … Ugh, how horrible and sordid.

Instead of being bound by a ‘dreadful’ marriage contract, the whole essence of a relationship, in her view, should be one of ‘voluntariness’. For this reason, having got as far as the registry office with Jude, she declares: ‘An irrevocable oath is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream!’

Sexual Incompatibility

Jude describes Sue as ‘such a phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who – if you’ll allow me to say it – has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can’t’.

As for Sue, when she was married to Phillotson, who was about twenty years her senior, she declared that:

Though I like Mr Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like him – it is a torture to me to – live with him as a husband! I suppose you’d call it – a repugnance on my part. What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally! I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for feeling as I do! But he does nothing.

Phillotson discovers Sue sleeping in a ‘clothes-closet’ under the staircase, instead of sharing the marital bed with him. When he attempts to enter the closet by wrenching open the door, ‘she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and trembling’ and implored him to ‘go away’. Sue requests that she be allowed to leave Phillotson and go to Jude, even though she does not love him. But, ‘if you won’t let me go to him, will you grant me this one request – allow me to live in your house in a separate way?’

Phillotson agrees for the two of them to sleep in separate bedrooms. However, when one evening he enters her bedroom inadvertently, she demonstrates her physical aversion to him once again when she ‘sprang out of her lair and implored him [once again] to go away’. On a third occasion, when Phillotson accidentally enters the room that his wife is occupying, Sue’s reaction is to leap out of the window, even though her bedroom is on the first floor. Said Phillotson:

She jumped out of the window, so strong was her dread of me! Though as a fellow-creature she sympathizes with me, and pities me, and even weeps for me, as a husband she cannot endure me – she loathes me – there’s no use mincing words.

Finally, he speaks of Sue’s ‘unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband. Even though she may like me as a friend, ’tis too much to bear [any] longer.’ He therefore agrees that she may return to Jude.

Sue admits to Jude that she has been ‘so cold’ to Phillotson, but, despite everything, she tells the schoolmaster that she will continue ‘with so much pleasure’ to copy manuscripts for him at any time, should he require it.

The reason that Sue gives for her coldness to Phillotson is a curious one. For her to live on ‘intimate terms’ with him, she declares, would be regarded by herself as ‘adultery, in any circumstances, however legal’. She had said as much on her wedding night when, having been handed a pretty nightgown to wear, she cried, as she tore it to pieces. ‘It is adulterous! It signifies what I don’t feel … It must be destroyed!’ He had told her that her action had hurt him, and reminded her that she (in the marriage ceremony) had ‘vowed to love me’.

Sue becomes introspective, and asks Jude:

Are there many couples, do you think, where one dislikes the other for no definite fault? Wouldn’t the woman be very bad-natured if she didn’t like to live with her husband; merely because she had a personal feeling against it – a physical objection – a fastidiousness, or whatever it may be called – although she might respect and be grateful to him? I am merely putting a case. Ought she to try to overcome her pruderies?

When Jude again professes his love for Sue, she admits that she has kept him at ‘a distance’. Nonetheless, she does not like to be thought of as a ‘coldnatured, sexless creature’.

‘The marriage laws’, said Hardy in a postscript to
Jude the Obscure
, written sixteen years after its publication in April 1912, were ‘used in great part as the tragic machinery of the tale’; his own opinion being that ‘a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties – being then essentially and morally no marriage’.
⁵

In the preface to
Jude the Obscure
, Hardy explains the reasons why he has written the novel. It was, he said, ‘simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings [apparent, but perhaps not real, occurrences], or personal impressions’.
⁶
In other words, he is writing about his personal experiences in an effort to make sense of them. This begs the question, just how much does
Jude the Obscure
reflect the author’s own life?

When Jude’s great-aunt Drusilla warned that the Fawley family ‘was not made for wedlock’, it may be assumed that it was Emma’s family which Hardy had in mind. After all, his own parents had, by all accounts, a harmonious relationship with each other, and as for his siblings, none of them were married. On the other hand, as Hardy was doubtless aware, several of Emma’s relatives had mental health problems (an account of which will be given shortly). Thus, when ‘Sue Bridehead’ acknowledges the fact that ‘a tragic doom’ overhangs her family, this was equally applicable to the family of Emma; at least as far as certain members of it were concerned. Hardy may also have had in mind Emma’s family’s ‘truly horrible home’, her father John Attersoll Gifford’s ‘drunken ravings’, and the fact that he once ‘chased [Emma’s] mother into the street in her nightgown’.
⁷

Only with hindsight, and with a full knowledge and recognition of just how traumatised Hardy was by his marriage to Emma, is it possible to be confident about the following working hypotheses in respect of
Jude the Obscure
.

When Jude first sets eyes on Sue he clearly falls head over heels in love with her, and experiences an ‘unmistakeably … sexual’ attraction to her. However, he feels that he in return has received only a fraction of the love from Sue that he gave to her. Hardy felt exactly the same way about Emma. Just as Sue had behaved in a ‘selfish and cruel’ way by encouraging Phillotson to make advances to her, simply because she had fallen in love with a ‘love of being loved’, so Emma had behaved in a similar way towards Hardy. When Jude became frustrated at having waited ‘with the patience of Job’ for Sue to become his wife, Hardy was deliberately mirroring the fact that the reason why his courtship to Emma lasted for four and a half long years, was that she had feared the marriage contract, just as Sue did.

The following possibilities must also be considered: that Emma felt the same way as Hardy’s fictitious character Sue Bridehead, who confessed that the idea of falling in love held a greater attraction for her than the experience of love itself; that Emma, like Sue, derived a perverse pleasure from seeing her admirers break their hearts over her; that Emma felt the same physical revulsion for Hardy that Sue had felt for Phillotson; and that just as Jude regarded Sue as ‘phantasmal’, ‘bodiless’ and ‘cold’, so Hardy saw Emma in the same light.

What of Sue Bridehead’s belief that to make love to Phillotson, her husband, would, for the reason that she did not love him, be to commit adultery? Did Emma feel the same way towards Hardy, and if so, was this irrational belief of hers a manifestation of a delusion on her part? (Emma’s manuscript
What I Think of My Husband
may have shed more light on the matter, had Hardy not chosen to destroy it.) And finally, as with Phillotson and Sue, did Hardy regard his marriage to Emma as ‘a cruelty’ and ‘morally no marriage’ at all?

Did Hardy simply pluck the notions expressed by Sue and Jude in
Jude the Obscure
out of thin air, or were they based on his own bitter experiences? And was the writing of the novel in reality an attempt on his part to try to understand the differences between himself and Emma, in the desperate hope that these difference might be resolved?

Those who remain sceptical, and regard the similarity between the lives of Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead and those of Hardy and Emma as being purely coincidental, should ask themselves this: why, having been obliged to endure criticism over other works of his, in particular
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, did Hardy risk provoking the critics further by choosing the subject of sex in a relationship, as a primary theme, in a novel which he intended to place before both them and the notoriously prudish Victorian public? And why did he risk finally and irrevocably antagonising Emma, whom he must have guessed would read the novel, and in so doing realise exactly why he wrote it? (Unlike Hardy’s other novels, this was one which she had not previously had access to.)

Sue enquires, in a moment of reflection: ‘Is it wrong, Jude, for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in their marriage?’
⁸
Hardy came very close to doing just that, when, on 20 November 1895 (the very day of the novel’s publication), he wrote to ‘a close friend’ to tell him more about the characters of Jude and Sue; in reality it was of himself and Emma that he spoke.
⁹

Although Hardy’s sympathies lay primarily with Jude and Phillotson, he bent over backwards to present Sue’s (Emma’s) point of view also. And he subsequently elaborated on this in a letter to Edmund Gosse. One of Sue’s reasons for fearing the marriage ceremony, said Hardy, was that she was afraid that it would be:

breaking faith with Jude to withhold herself [from having sexual intercourse with him] at pleasure, or altogether, after it; though while uncontracted, she feels at liberty to yield herself as seldom as she chooses. This has tended to keep his [Jude’s] passion as hot at the end as at the beginning, & helps break his heart. He has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.
¹⁰

This may be seen as an admission by Hardy that he is broken-hearted, after years of frustration, and a confirmation by him that his marriage to Emma was never consummated.

To the above hypotheses a final caveat must be added. Hardy, in
Jude the Obscure
, was voicing his opinion as to why Emma did not love him as he deserved, and why she refused to make love to him. Whether the reasons for this, given vicariously by Jude and Sue, are the correct ones, or whether Emma had different reasons for adopting the attitude towards Hardy that she did, can never be known with certainty, given the fact that the majority of her private writings and correspondence was destroyed. What appears not to be in doubt, however, is that she did
not
love Hardy in a physical and demonstrative sense, and that she did
not
have a sexual relationship with him. However, some further light will be shed shortly on Emma’s attitude in this respect.

What is surprising is that, despite everything, the couple maintained an outward veneer of normality, in that Emma continued to travel with Hardy and to attend social functions with him.