Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Introduction
xix

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Again, it is only Arabella who reads an enduring idyll into this scene.
The joy is looked forward to and back on, but is never actually there.
When Sue returns after the children’s deaths to ‘the letter’ of civil
marriage which kills, what it kills remains unde
finable.
By this time the rejection and oppression that both experience
have taken on gradually a single distinct form. As Jude’s hostility to
the forces of rejection increases it focuses not on Christminster but
on the Church, which has overarched the novel from the time of his
dreams of success as a clergyman:
His . . . sudden antipathy to ecclesiastical work . . . which had risen in him
when su
ffering under a smarting sense of misconception remained . . .
[and] would not allow him to seek a living out of those who would disap-
prove of his ways . . . hardly a shred of the beliefs with which he had 
first
gone up to Christminster now remaining with him.
Christminster, that hothouse which grew clergymen like radishes,
has rejected him; Christians have ostracized him and Sue; the
Church has administered the marriage of the letter. It has gradually
become the symbol of all that oppresses. Jude thinks that he is free of
it after the children’s death; but it is precisely then that its imagina-
tive power grips Sue, the instinctive worshipper whether of Venus or
the Galilean. Her earlier vague sense that the world resembled ‘a
stanza or melody composed in a dream’ was ‘now exchanged for a
sense of Jude and herself 
fleeing from a persecutor’, the God of the
Old Testament––the ‘ancient wrath’. That bass accompaniment in
the references to Job, in the Psalms in the cathedral, and at the
deaths of the children, now becomes dominant. The narrator, like
Jude, is terri
fied by the crippling power of the guilt that the ‘ritual
church’ can induce in Sue, who 
finally stops her ears against Jude’s
human voice and returns to Phillotson’s bed. Christianity in the
form it takes in their lives is the killing letter. Hardy evidently meant
this to be one of the novel’s contrasts which he interwove through
the story between Greek pagan joy and the life-denying force of the
pale Galilean. But by a 
final and confounding contradiction there
also is woven through the text the image of Christ as su
ffering
human being; Jude, Sue, even Phillotson, are seen as His incarna-
tions. The pointless and extreme su
ffering, which in Hardy’s world
is the paradigm experience, is refracted through the many Christ
images. When Phillotson’s pupils desert him as he is leaving
Introduction
xx

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Marygreen, the narrator equates them with the cowardly disciples at
Christ’s trial. Sue sees herself and Jude driven from Kennetbridge to
Christminster as Jesus sent from one hostile judge, Caiaphas, to
another, Pilate. The falseness of Jude’s sense that he is favoured like
God’s ‘beloved son’ is hinted at by the narrator associating him with
Calvary, by his own realization that Sue is able to ‘crucify’ him,
and when she separates herself from him, by a cry for the rending
of the veil of the temple that took place at the time of that other
Cruci
fixion. Finally, the text subverts itself: its attack on the Church
draws power from acceptance of a central Christian image. The
imaginative attraction of the creed is still felt, just as it was by Hardy
himself.
The three strands in the story are really one. The mental and
physical struggles against oppression in all three aspects are the same
in their nature and outcome: Jude’s infatuation for Christminster
reappears long after he has broken free of it; Sue who prided herself
on her rationality embraces irrational guilt and legalistic marriage;
and the hatred of the Church shows as its other face a powerful sense
of a
ffinity with its founder.
Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictions the novel
remains the most powerful indictment of the sexual and class
oppression of its time. The pandemonium it evoked was appropriate.
This focused on the sexual story, but beneath the charges that it was
‘the most indecent novel ever written’ there is a sense of deeper
panic. And rightly: Hardy was struggling towards, and sometimes
momentarily achieved, beliefs subversive of the whole of established
society. He felt a deep desire to ‘break up the present pernicious
conventions in respect of manners, customs, religion, illegitimacy,
the stereotyped household’.
6
Contemporary society recognized a
revolutionary when it saw one.
6
R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, iii. 
.
Introduction
xxi

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NOTE ON THE TEXT
Jude the Obscure
, Hardy’s last novel, 
first appeared in mangled serial
form in the European and American editions of Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine
from December 
 to November . Its first
printed title (presumably describing Sue as well as Jude) was The
Simpletons
, later changed to an earlier idea, Hearts Insurgent. In it
Arabella does not seduce Jude, Jude and Sue never become lovers
nor have children, and Jude does not spend a night with the returned
Arabella. The publishers had insisted on a moral cleaning-up and
Hardy evidently made changes himself, including some of the many
minor ones required by contemporary prudery.
For its 
first appearance in volume form Hardy quickly prepared
the text from the manuscript as part of the 
first complete edition of
his novels to be published by Osgood McIlvaine (the ‘Wessex
Novels’). The Jude volume, published in 
, generally referred to
as the ‘First Edition’, restored the omissions listed above and div-
ided the narrative into six sections, each named for and set in a