It isn’t just the scholars and academics policing Jude: even the people of the same class resent him for trying to make “better” of himself. Yet his fellow tradespeople look down on him, mock him, or pity him, for aspiring to more than his class would let him be. He definitely isn’t a scholar there is no way he can hold any respectable scholarly position with what little he has studied so far. Specifically, I see now how his failure to obtain the education and position he originally desired isn’t just a disappointment to himself: he is literally trapped between two worlds.
Jude’s presence in the liminal space between tradesperson and scholar also jumped out at me more. It doesn’t work, of course, because Hardy’s whole point is that once a group of people have taken against you and picked you as their morality whipping couple, they aren’t going to let up because you pretended to get married. Sue and Jude essentially fake getting married because they can’t stand the thought of actually marrying, yet they crave the respectability that the appearance of legitimate marriage might bring to them in these rural towns they inhabit. Sue begs Phillotson to let her leave him, despite the hit he will take professionally for allowing that to happen.
So much of this is wrapped up in respectability politics. Whichever one isn’t living with Jude as his wife is automatically more attractive and desirable, because, of course, the grass is always greener. Yet theirs isn’t so much a competition for Jude’s affection as it is an alternating of roles. Certainly they are wary of one another, and neither is really all that happy to have the other in Jude’s life. It’s fascinating because there isn’t that much of a rivalry between the two women. So I paid a lot of attention to the way Jude conducts his relationships with Arabella and Sue, and in particular, to the way Sue vacillates in her desires for a relationship-and the nature of that relationship-with Jude. This past year saw me move into my own house, and while I’m not married (and that is not on the horizon for me), I’ve definitely been adulting more and forming some of the first adult friendships of my life. Obviously I’m in a different place in my life right now, and so slightly different things resonated for me. I quite like my original review, if I do say so myself, so this is just a short update based on what I thought this time around. This was not my first Hardy (I had read The Mayor of Casterbridge for my first year of university), but obviously as his last novel, Jude the Obscure has a special place in Hardy’s canon. Nine years ago I listened to Jude the Obscure as a free LibriVox audiobook (I love LibriVox!), mostly while cycling to and from my summer job at an art gallery.
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