How
Jude the Obscure Reveals Thomas
Hardy’s Attitude to Marriage
Thomas Hardy’s Jude
the Obscure, the last of his novels, first published in 1895, reflects
sharply its background of industrial change and shifting attitudes towards
women in society. It reveals Hardy’s
pessimism about the marriage institution following his own two unhappy
marriages. As a novel, it supplies the
added dimension of omniscient authorial intervention. Hardy’s views are clearly represented through
his characters, whose opinions also reflect the contemporary
preoccupations. As an anti-marriage
polemic, Hardy’s work enables him to not merely analyse the barbarities of the
marriage contract, but also to advocate the modern solution of divorce. In Victorian society, a woman’s main purpose
in life was to marry and bear children, a view challenged by Hardy.
A woman’s life should not end with matrimony, as is
the suggestion Jude Fawley makes to Sue after only a few weeks as a wife:
‘Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom
which has no further individuality’.
Hardy is cynical about marriage as the tone of his commentary on Jude
and Arabella’s wedding shows:
…the
two swore that at every other time in their lives till death took them, they
would assuredly believe, feel and desire precisely as they had believed, felt
and desired during the few preceding weeks.
What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that
nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.
Following their respective marriages, both Jude and
Sue come very rapidly to a realization of their mistakes. Jude likens marriage to Arabella to being
‘caught in a gin which would cripple him…for the rest of his lifetime’. The fundamental error Jude and
Arabella made was in considering their temporary sexual attraction as a basis
for a permanent marriage contract.
Sexual feelings, as Jude soon realizes, have ‘no necessary connection
with affinities that alone render a life-long comradeship tolerable’. If, at best, marriage can only
be rendered ‘tolerable’, then clearly Hardy believes that it has little to
recommend it.
The misery of Jude and Sue’s respective marriages
shows Hardy’s unrelenting antagonism to the institution. Arabella depicts it as legalised bondage in
advising Phillotson about Sue:
I should have kept her chained on – her
spirit for kicking would have broke soon enough! There’s nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf
taskmaster for taming us women. Besides,
you’ve got the laws on your side.
And following the success of her scheme to re-marry
Jude, she refers to her wedding ring as a ‘padlock’. Indictments of marriage come from all sides
as well as from the voice of the author.
Widow Edlin equates weddings with funerals; the landlord of
Jude’s Christminster lodgings ‘recognized the note of genuine wedlock’ only
after overhearing verbal and physical abuse; but the most damning accusations
come repeatedly from Sue after she has begun to distinguish between the
religious meaning of the marriage ceremony and its sordid, secular laws. Sue’s views suggest that the laws of marriage
go against the laws of human nature:
‘I
think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted
to cherish me under a Government stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the
premises by you.’
Sue views marriage as a trap, ‘a sordid contract,
based on material convenience’ (p. 230) that has little to do with spontaneous
good feeling between two people, but instead is ‘a tragedy artificially
manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in parting’.
Sue is a creation ahead of her time and her struggle
is doomed from the outset. Undermined by
a kind of neurotic superstition, Sue’s peculiar, emotionally-based rationale
leads her not to freedom but into deeper entrenchment in those artificial laws
against which her true nature rebelled for so long. Her remarriage to Phillotson is an admission
of defeat. Hardy depicted a New Woman
and thwarted her development at every turn.
In the end, his thwarted and demoralised heroine seals her hopeless fate
in her subdued re-entry through the schoolhouse door at Marygreen.
Sue and Phillotson’s enlightened attitude to divorce
is also ahead of its time, for Phillotson’s act of ‘charity’ in releasing and
later divorcing Sue, has dire repercussions on his career. When Phillotson remarks to his friend,
Gillingham, on the ‘daily continuous tragedy’ of his marriage, he is
uttering Hardy’s own views as expressed in his Preface to the 1912 edition of Jude the Obscure which maintains his
belief that ‘a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty
to either of the parties.’
Although Jude and Sue both remarry their original
partners, the dissatisfaction of all parties in their miserable marriages
contrasts pointedly with the period of happiness in Sue and Jude’s unmarried
union; suggesting that not only does Hardy advocate divorce, but he also puts
forward a case for dispensing with the legally-binding contract of marriage
altogether.
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