Professional Documents
Culture Documents
George wrote, "was not yet ripe for his gospel and he bowed to
the novel. To Mrs. Edlin he says, " ... the time was not
ripe for us ! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any
good to us."
6
SUE BRIDEHEAD
moral code not through Jude, but through Sue. His delineation
382
the conventional religion, the strict ethical code of the
into the works of the major authors. Hardy was one of them.
domestic animal."
8
off his wife like cattle. But Sue is not Susan. She is a
383
Hardy's women refuse to be mere types. They are both types
worlds : the old and the new; the older women clinging to the
is that at the end of the novel, she accepts the very marriage
... You know what I have thought for many years - that
marriage should not thwart nature and that when it does
thwart nature it is no real marriage and the legal
contract should therefore be as speedily cancelled as
possible.
9
lovers, and only meeting by day". She tells Jude, "I think I
10
should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had
384
licenced to be loved on the premises by you." She is an
11
admirer of J.S. Mill and protests as Mill had done in
Hardy wrote -
385
A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as
they love each other? any law which should bind them to
cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their
affection would be most intolerable tyranny, and the most
unworthy of tolerations,
17
386
She nevertheless lives with Jude and bears him three children
yet "... her intimacies with Jude have never been more than
She does not want earthly love, she does not want to be loved
as a' woman, she wants to be loved as a comrade, as a friend.
Her tragedy is that all three men in her life want her as a
woman, a woman who is generally meant by men to be taken and
None of the men in her life understands the real Sue. Her
387
between Sue's subdued manner and Jude's happy contentment?
he apparently has not noticed that the night has not been
quite so delightful for her.
23
388
Freud has diagnosed such characters through psychoanalysis.
His account was written in 1917 whereas Jude the Obscure was
389
see Jude again she says,
"I love him ~ 0, grossly." Even as a
35
mother she has never felt what Lawrence's Miriam felt for her
parents has visited upon her children, and that they have died
390
herself a life of severest mortification that she can imagine.
She wants to 'prick' herself "all over with pins and bleed out
in her "conceit" but now she can "see the light at last". She
further says, "This pretty body of mine has been the ruin of
391
struggles that preceded it. She rises from the spiritual
She cuts new channels in her mind and violently closes up the
scrubbing the stairs "since eight." The act shows that Sue is
for her own sins. But once this awareness dawns in her mind,
392
she imbibes some kind of moral vision that redeems her of all
all mingle in a way that throws these men and women off the
too heavy for her feeble spirit. Lady Macbeth - once the deed
she drifted far away from her husband for whose sake she had
393
nightmare he walks alive into a grave with Tess in his arms.
children are dead; but from the ashes of that old Sue there
rises a new, more sober, more practical Sue whom we pity and
she says, "It is my duty. I will drink my cup to the dregs !"
45
L.S.J.Butler sees in her a Christ figure -
could live. For whom did Sue rise and where ? On what cross ?
394
transformed that bondage into duty. At worst it was a
compromise and not crucifixion. At best it was moral
She was nearly redeemed of the past. Here was a new Sue
connotations.
church of
Meichester." Sue clearly seems to be remembering
50
the marriage vows. She must be remembering what the Bible
395
c^se she does separate she must either stay single or make
up with her husband.
52
The Bible also says after marriage man and woman are -
Not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined
together, let no man put asunder.
53
Sue also voices the Bible when she talks about adultery. The
Bible says -
And if the wife shall put away her husband, and be married
to another she committeth adultry.
54
It further says -
the Sue that has returned to Phillotson is not the Sue that
396
She was no longer the same as in the independent days,
when her intellect played like lambent lightning over
conventions and formalities which he at that time
respected though he did not now.
58
chapters there has emerged a new Sue who has accepted God and
inside. Sue has as R.B. Heilman puts it, "many of the makings
397
marriage keeping in the centre Sue's expression about women's
agree with Mrs. Qliphant When she says Hardy has joined the
his only fear had been that the book would be perceived
not as hostile to morality but as too supportive of the
Christian exhortation to mercy and as downright sHigh
Churchy' in its emphasis upon Sue's final return to
orthodoxy.
61
his time, brings Sue back to her husband as he did with Grace
her marital life. If Sue does not die like Eustacia Vye of
during our life span while changing from youth into middle age
398
and from middle age into later maturity. Sue that returns to
Can this be the girl who brought the Pagan deities into
this most Christian city ? - Who mimicked Miss Fontover
when she crushed them with her heel ? quoted Gibbon and
Shelley and Mill ? Where are dear Apollo and dear Venus
now!
62
force with them which turn them impulsive. Their dream - world
and emotions.
accepts the very ideals she used to rebel against. At the end
of the story we see her turning into a dutiful, devoted and
with Hardy's heroines. These are Hardy's good types; who are
400
treatment of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer
his poem
not love but adultery. That she rises out of her passion for
Jude and returns home brings her wheel of life full circle.
401
from anarchy but it is coming to terms with the realities of
ARABELLA
shabbiness.
402