Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Introduction
xiii

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Not only this, but Sue continues to assert rather melodramatically
that Jude is one of the very men with a passion for learning that
‘Christminster was intended for . . . But you were elbowed o
ff the
pavements by millionaires’ sons.’ Long after his academic e
fforts have
become nominal, both of them cling to this idea. He even still hopes
for acceptance before they return to the city for the last time: ‘I love
the place––although I know how it hates all men like me––the so-
called Self-taught,––how it scorns our laboured acquisitions . . .
Perhaps it will soon wake up, and be generous . . .’. So Jude is seen
equally forcefully as being and as not being the pure seeker after
learning.
Despite his delusions about Christminster, both Jude and the
narrator are seized of the desirability of the learning that the uni-
versity o
ffers, and even Sue speaks of some qualified ‘respect’ for
the place ‘on the intellectual side’. What Christminster o
ffers mani-
fests itself in the web of allusion and quotation that enmeshes the
novel: in the epigraphs, in the Christminster voices, and everywhere
in the text.
Comments on this material that spell out references have over-
looked its overriding importance as a cruel and varying witness to its
own alienation from the lives with which it is interwoven. The very
epigraphs relating to Sue and Jude, those bland emblems (at 
first
reading) of the action in each section, dissolve before the reader’s
eyes into something di
fferent. Jude’s dealings with Arabella at
Marygreen seem aptly summarized by the quotation from Esdras:
‘Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women . . .’.
But the point of the original context of the passage is that, though
this may be true, truth is stronger than wine, the king, or women––a
passionate assertion forlornly unrelated to the story of Jude’s life.
The two quotations introducing the Christminster section seem to
capture the emergent optimism of Jude now embarking on his aca-
demic course––‘Save his own soul he hath no star’––and the joy of
his incipient love for Sue––‘Nearness led to awareness . . . love grew
with time’. Both fragments are torn out of context: Swinburne’s
eulogy on self-reliance is woefully inapt for Jude; and Ovid is begin-
ning not a joyous love-a
ffair but the tragic story of the doomed
lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe.
Even more cruelly irrelevant are the snatches from Sappho and
the Book of Esther. ‘There was no other girl, O bridegroom, like
Introduction
xiv

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her!’ 
fixes Jude’s growing delight in Sue at Melchester; but what
Sappho in context was promising the bridegroom was that erotic joy,
the gift of Aphrodite, that Sue, for all her formal worship of the
goddess whose image she buys, painfully fails to deliver. Similarly,
her 
final collapse into abject religiosity seems epitomized by the
sentence describing Esther: ‘And she humbled her body greatly, and
all the places of her joy she 
filled with her torn hair’. But in the
original account Esther’s penitence is part of a calculated plan which
triumphantly achieves the salvation of the Jews from slaughter, while
Sue’s brings nothing but su
ffering and death. The epigraphs are
mockeries of what they appear to be: not formal and precise sum-
maries linking neatly to each section but statements in an ambiguous
and hostile relationship to the text.
Within the novel other allusions relate in the same oblique way.
The most extended attempt to annex Christminster learning appears
in the voices of the spectres haunting the city that Jude imagines on
his 
first night there. The emptiness of assumed appropriation is
evidenced by the fact that many of them are merely indirectly
described and remain lifelessly unevocative; those quoted are not
named but periphrastically alluded to also. The reader as well as Jude
is assumed to be an initiate who can supply the names: Peel as he
makes a passionate plea for the repeal of the Corn Laws; Gibbon
ironically wondering at the pagan indi
fference to Christian miracles;
Arnold eulogizing Oxford; Newman de
fining faith; Addison lament-
ing mortality. The reader encounters, despite the coherence of indi-
vidual passages, an incoherent totality: a boy’s anthology of purple
passages, ‘learning’ perhaps in a literal sense, ‘touchstones’, a
kaleidoscope.
For the rest, as the traditional learning reaches the reader through
Jude and the narrator it is even more fragmented, useless, and irrele-
vant to his dilemmas. Jude as a boy innocently misapplies allusions,
which rebound ironically. He imagines in the distant glow of
Christminster the form of Phillotson (originally Sue) like one of the
three in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace; but the story’s hope of salvation
by God is not ful
filled for either the schoolteacher or the two who
join him in that furnace. Later the boy prays to Phoebus and Diana
for the happiness and prosperity he is never to know in what was
originally a children’s joyous festival prayer. He sees Christminster
as a ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, to which he goes full of the hope he derives
Introduction
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from an optimistic phrase taken from Spinoza, whose pervading
belief was in an indi
fferent Providence.
Later Jude deliberately misapplies quotations in a perverse way,
wrenching them to appropriateness. Exulting in the prospect of
Christminster, he claims to be her beloved son, using the words
describing God’s manifestation at Christ’s baptism. For the biblical
injunction to persist in patience unto seventy times seven, he substi-
tutes his desire to persist in being tempted by Sue, and it is from her
love that he refuses to be divided, in the words St Paul used for
separation from God. As he grows disillusioned the perverseness
becomes more conscious: exiled by society’s condemnation of their
unmarried state, he twists St Paul’s words about ‘wronging no man’
and makes this the reason for their being persecuted; when Sue
leaves his bed he deliberately invokes the rending of the veil of the
temple at Christ’s death. What is irrelevant he will make apt by
perverting it.
What Jude only learns of life’s cruelty the narrator knows from
the start; he is already aware of the ironic irrelevance of the literary
text. The boy Jude’s hopeful radiance illustrates ‘the 
flattering fancy
that heaven lies about them in their infancy!’ Just before the shatter-
ing of Jude’s academic hopes, he spells out the ‘inexplicable’ Greek
sounds which translated give St Paul’s passionate declaration of faith
in a loving and sustaining God. When Jude, already married, raptur-
ously watches Sue in the cathedral, the narrator quotes only the
apparently taunting opening of the Psalm that is being sung, ‘Where
withal shall a young man cleanse his way’, not its context of trusting
faith. The trick is repeated when the organist of the chapel next to
the children’s death-house is heard playing the Psalm ‘Truly God is
loving unto Israel’.
But it is not only the irrelevance and ironic futility of Christian
belief which is the point; frequently secular allusions do no more in
their fragmented form than encapsulate what Jude and the narrator
already know––that pain, injustice, and disillusionment are com-
monplace. When Jude’s scheme for entry to Christminster bursts
like an ‘iridescent soap-bubble’ his thought ‘was akin to Heine’s’:
Above the youth’s inspired and 
flashing eyes
I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise.
When he abandons principles for Sue he sees himself rejecting
Introduction
xvi

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Browning’s ‘soldier-saints’. His views on the chains of marriage are
expressed by the trite lines from Thomas Campbell about ‘fetter’d
love’. There is a laboured and inexplicit comparison between the
Fawley family and the houses of Atreus and Jeroboam. A quotation
from the Agamemnon appropriate to the children’s death, ‘Things
are as they are . . .’, is given the same embarrassingly super
ficial and
applied quality by Sue’s question ‘Who said that?’ Each of them, but