Jude the Obscure: Week 6 - Part Sixth

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.), Founder]

Everyman wrote: "Just happened to run across this blog entry today, and thought of Jude and his monument carving work.

http://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/Me......"

Very neat little story, and some incredible carving on that old headstone. Thanks for "digging" that up for us, Everyman. ;-)

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.), Founder]

I've been spending some time re-reading my copy of Hardy's, Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, and I encountered this tonight. I think this quite neatly wraps up our group read and discussion of "Jude the Obscure"--

"Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to
mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the
moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now
passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the
night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a
shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.
(1896)

This was written not long after Thomas Hardy published "Jude the Obscure". It has to be thought that the reception of the novel may have stimulated this poem.

[MadgeUK]

Thanks Chris - a lovely ending for us all.

There is a sadness for times past there and about his final parting from Emma perhaps? I want to give him a hug!

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.), Founder]

I also meant to add that I think the second from the last stanza (i.e., starting with "As for one rare fair woman...) must be a reference to his long-time female friend, Mrs Florence Henniker. It really is a fascinating poem that almost seems a self-portrait of his own life.

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.), Founder]

Bill wrote: "When she loses what she is capable of loving, she collapses into acceptance that God killed her children because she is a sinner. She is revealed for the mentally incapable person she had always been."

While I agree with your first sentence about Susanna's view of her life; I fundamentally disagree with your second, Bill. Sue is not "mentally incapable"--Sue has issues just like each of us. Psychology is a very difficult proposition--and trying to apply it to our fellow human beings is profoundly difficult--whether it is an Arabella, a Sue, or a Jude. Far be it from me to judge any of them, or apply labels.

Personally, I think Hardy's bringing Sue and Phillotson together again at the end of the novel illustrates his point that it was an abject failure for Phillotson and Sue (especially Sue)--she gave up her "life" when she left Jude--and that was Hardy's point, in my humble opinion.

And Hardy's other point--Arabella is just fine--psychologically and emotionally, the woman is just fine. Her mettle is seriously tougher than that of Jude or Sue.

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.), Founder]

Also, Bill, I'm so glad that you came back to this thread and finished off your thoughts and comments! Awesome!

[MadgeUK]

Yes, thanks for coming back Bill! Good to see you back on form!

I agree with Chris that Sue is not mentally unstable. She is just a product of her time ground down by its rules about what women should or should not be. She did not want children, which was unheard of at this time, and so the death of them had less impact on her psyche than it might have had on a more 'motherly' woman. Also the death of children at this time was commonplace. Hers is a fatalistic approach to death - Que sera sera. Arabella was just an ordinary, uneducated, countrywoman, with no thoughts about love or life but with a need to have a man to support her, just as her parents had taught her when she 'caught' Jude. Jude, like Sue, was eventually ground down and killed by the circumstances in which he found himself as an ordinary working man unable to fulfil his ambition and, fatally, taking to drink.

I find less love in Arabella than I do in Jude and Sue. She acted with animal instincts for survival and would not have regarded love as important - rather as those who believe in arranged marriages do, which is a practical rather than a romantic approach. Both Jude and Sue exhibited deep love for each other in the way they sacrificed aspects of their lives to the other, I feel, and in enduring the condemnation of those around them for love of one another - not an easy thing to do at any time (as I found when I married an Afro-Caribbean).