Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

partly expanded by the narrator in his comment on Arabella’s and
Jude’s 
first marriage vow ‘to believe, feel, and desire’ for the rest of
their lives precisely as they had done for the preceding weeks: ‘What
was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody
seemed at all surprised at what they swore’. Sue, looking closer, sees
her loveless marriage to Phillotson as part of ‘the barbarous customs
and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live
in’, because ‘for a man and woman to live on intimate terms when
one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances’. This is the mar-
riage of ‘the letter’ which she and Jude, sickened by Arabella, reject.
Yet, once freed by divorce, what they propose instead is not an
Owenite sexual freedom where only passion justi
fies the act, but a
marriage-like monogamy. There is already a joint inconsistency here.
The horror of being licensed to love and be loved on the premises is
powerfully evoked for the reader, and yet the narrative implies the
very promise that the couple and the narrator shudder at: that they
will always think and feel precisely as they do now.
Desire cannot be added to this narrational promise, because what
is meant by a natural marriage is further complicated by Sue. Para-
doxically, when breaking free from her husband she claims with Jude
a right to a totally non-sexual bond and to a non-marital sexual
relationship. Given women’s position at the time it is easy to see why
both claims needed to be made; and in a lesser novel the claims
would refer to di
fferent men. Here the contradiction produces an
individual dilemma which captures the complications of the wom-
an’s position most forcibly.
5
This is presumably why the text is
ambivalent about whether Sue feels desire even for Jude. There are
passages which encourage the reader to think that she does not.
Locked into this most feminist of all Victorian novels is a strange
fragment of the orthodoxy exalting female chastity or at least virgin-
ity: ‘ “I seduced you . . . You were a distinct type––a re
fined creature,
intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn’t leave you alone!” ’
On the other hand, the 
 edition contains carefully inserted
5
P. Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women (Sussex, 
), .
Introduction
xviii

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references to suggest warmth in Sue: they kiss ‘long and close’, she
admits that she ‘didn’t dislike’ him to kiss her, tells him ‘I do love
you’, and just before going to Phillotson’s bed admits to having
‘loved’ Jude ‘grossly’. Arabella, closing the novel, suggests that Sue
never found peace except in Jude’s arms, but how reliable a witness is
she? Like Lockwood at the end of Wuthering Heights, she is the last
person to read relationships aright. The novel can be read as showing
that Sue felt desire or as showing that she did not, since at the very
end she says: ‘ “I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as mere
lovers . . . Women could: men can’t . . . we ought to have lived in
mental communion, and no more.” ’
On Jude’s side a further contradiction appears. Although he is a
victim of legalistic marriage and speaks violently against it, he
behaves 
finally in their version of ‘Nature’s own marriage’ as the law
told a nineteenth-century husband he might do: he enforces his
‘conjugal rights’, not by force, but by blackmail. Having agreed to
live celibately with Sue he uses Arabella’s return to force her into
sexual relations:
‘If she were yours it would be di
fferent!’
‘Or if you were.’
‘Very well then––if I must I must. Since you will have it so, I agree!
I will be. Only I didn’t mean to.’
The slide into the orthodox view which makes male desire para-
mount passes unnoticed and by the narrator’s sleight-of-hand it is
next morning and Jude is arranging to marry her. Such shifts charac-
terize Hardy’s attempts to break free of the orthodoxies of the day,
attempts backed by passionate feelings, cutting across rational argu-
ments, and in which an apparent success is always followed by
regression. The novel enacts the struggle with all its inconsistencies.
The pains of a ‘natural marriage’ in a society that goes in for the
other kind are felt; the pleasures are not so easily grasped. Like the
fruits of learning they prove evasive. The joyless pain evoked by Sue
and Jude’s relationship is not cancelled or even dented by Sue’s
strained assertion at the Great Wessex Agricultural Show as they
saunter around the 
flowers, unable to evoke even a spark of pleasure
in Little Father Time: ‘ “We have returned to a Greek joyousness, and
have blinded ourselves to sickness and sorrow, and have forgotten
what twenty-
five centuries have taught the race since their time . . .”’