Thinking activity on " Jude the Obscure "

Jude the Obscure ( 1894  )

 Thomas Hardy 

Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. 

 Its protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man, a stonemason, who dreams of becoming a scholar.

The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest.

The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.

Autobiographical element 

               

                             Another parallel between the book's characters and themes and Hardy's actual life experience occurs when Sue becomes obsessed with religion after previously having been indifferent and even hostile towards it. Through this extreme change in the character of Sue, Hardy shows Christianity as an extraordinarily powerful social force that is capable of causing a seemingly independent-minded woman like Sue to be self-immolating and sexually repressed. Like Sue Bridehead, Hardy's first wife, Emma, went from being free-spirited and fairly indifferent to religion in her youth to becoming obsessively religious as she got older. Since Hardy was always highly critical of organised religion, as Emma became more and more religious, their differing views led to a great deal of tension in their marriage, and this tension was a major factor leading to their increased alienation from one another.

Emma was also very disapproving of Jude the Obscure, in part because of the book's criticisms of religion, but also because she worried that the reading public would believe that the relationship between Jude and Sue directly paralleled her strained relationship with Hardy (which, in a figurative sense, it did).

Incident of animal killing.

1- Pig

A minor theme is cruelty to animals. The novel has two incidents of cruelty to animals. In slaughtering the pig which Jude and Arabella had diligently fattened, it was necessary to obtain a better quality of meat that the animal be "well bled, and to do that pig must die slowly." Jude, however, a man of compassion and strong feelings, could not endure hearing the agony of the slow death of the pig; so he plunged the knife into the animal to hasten its death: "The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream Arabella had desired. The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends."

  

2- Rabbit                         

                        Later in the novel, Jude and Sue are appalled at the use of steel traps to catch such small animals as rabbits, which usually died in slow agony when caught in the deadly contraptions. Jude was compelled to kill a trapped rabbit by "breaking its neck to end its suffering." Sue commented, "They ought not to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they?"A reviewer compares the inevitable fate of the rabbit to marriage as "a permanent trap between two people" from which there is no easy escape.

Reading materials

1]  some important themes

2] Some important points

2.1) Hardy and Marriage

2.2) Hardy's view on Divorce and Cohabitation

2.3) Hard and the New women

2.4) The case Against marriage 

For this  click here 

Task of the students after reading this blog is to ponder upon questions given below 

1] Do you think that Sue Bridehead is New women ? 

2] According to you what is different between Sue Bridehead and Arabella Donn.

3] Did we can find any difference between Indian marriage system and Victorian age marriage system ?

4] Make a comparison between this two character on the ground of new women concept .        

   Sue Bridehead  V/S.  Bathsheba Everdene 

5]  Watch this given video and share your views on it..  At what extent you are agree or disagree. Why?

            

               

Citation 

“Jude the Obscure.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Feb. 2020, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_the_Obscure.

An introduction to Jude the Obscure. (2014, April 11). Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-jude-the-obscure

https://youtu.be/7JOBFrsxpeo