Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

particularly Jude, has grasped only strands from his reading. He
once thought that in order to learn Greek and Latin he had only to
master a code; the same weakness is evident in his control over what
he has read. It has not become his own; its fullness can be withheld
from him by others who will not pass on its secrets; for a tutor he has
only marginal glosses. In the end he possesses only the letter, and
‘the letter killeth’ here too in a sense that seems not intended by the
novel’s epigraph. Through the narrator Hardy presents Jude as the
true scholar, but the text tells a di
fferent and probably truer story of
the ‘Self-taught’ among whom Jude consciously numbers himself.
Hardy intended ‘the letter killeth’, to refer explicitly to marriage,
4
in particular Sue’s return to legal marriage with Phillotson. Many
unorthodox views on women and marriage had already been
expressed in the New Woman 
fiction: the nobility of upper-class
women o
ffering a free union in place of marriage to respectable
suitors; the horrors of sexual relationships without love; the syphil-
itic consequences of the double standard; the appalling e
ffects of
girls’ ignorance of marriage. Hardy’s treatment stands to this as
Hamlet
to the revenge play. Sue and Jude’s relationship springs into
complex life because they are both victims of contemporary oppres-
sion: Jude through class, Sue through sex. They have other a
ffinities
but this goes deepest and is the reason why their claims to two-in-
oneness are not absurd, despite the strong hostility that threads
through the relationship on both sides. Hardy denied the novel was
an attack on marriage laws and was right to discard this super
ficial
reading; but his assertion in the 
 postscript that ‘the general
drift’ in relation to such laws was that ‘the civil law should only be
the enunciation of the law of nature’ is more problematic. It is at
least a strange remark to make of a novel which begins with a
painful demonstration of the cruelty and irrationality of that law as
4
W. R. Goetz, ‘The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
, 
 (), –.
Introduction
xvii

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demonstrated by the boy and the earthworms. Nor did Hardy 
find
the morality simpler when handling the natural law in relation to
man and woman.
The idea of a contrast between legalistic and natural marriage is