Character study of Jude and Sue Bridehead
Hello Beautiful People,
Today we discuss about “Jude The Obscure” . This blog is also part of my Thinking Activity assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavangar University (MKBU).
First, we discuss about character study of
Jude and Sue Bridehead. After we will see that some interesting fact and also
why I am agree with her & my point of view of this concept.
Jude The Obscure
Story Line :
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. It is Hardy's last
completed novel. Its protagonist, Jude Pawley, 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.
Jude the Obscure takes place in Wessex, England in the Victorian era. Jude Pawley is a poor orphan raised by his great-aunt, but he dreams of studying at the university in Christ minster, a nearby town. He is inspired in this dream by his old teacher, Richard Phillipson, who left with similar ambitions when Jude was a child. Jude starts teaching himself classical languages and learning stonemasonry work, but he is distracted from his studies by Arabella Donn, a vain, sensual young woman. Arabella pretends she is pregnant and tricks the honorable Jude into marrying her, but the marriage soon falls apart. Arabella moves to Australia and Jude finally makes his way to Christminster. At first he is enthralled by the place but he soon finds he cannot enter the university without wealth and social stature.
While in Christminster Jude meets his intelligent, religiously agnostic cousin Sue Bridehead. He immediately falls in love with her, though he tries to resist his feelings. He gets Sue a job with Phillotson, who has also failed to be accepted at a university and is a schoolteacher again. Sue soon gets engaged to Phillotson, but her relationship with Jude also grows stronger and the two cousins become very close. Jude loves Sue passionately but Sue’s own feelings are less clear. Sue is stung to learn about Jude’s previous marriage, however, so she goes through with her marriage to Phillotson.
Jude gets
depressed and turns to alcohol, and he is reunited with Arabella (who has returned
from Australia) for one night. Jude and Sue keep meeting and Sue reveals that
she is unhappy in her marriage, as she is repulsed by Phillotson’s physical
presence. Soon afterward Sue admits her feelings for Jude to Phillotson, and
asks him if they can live apart. Phillotson agrees to let Sue leave him for
Jude, but he suffers for this decision, which seems morally right to him, by
losing his job and his social respectability.
Sue
Bridehead
Sue Bridehead remains a pretty tough nut to crack: even her creator, Thomas Hardy himself questions what, exactly, her deal is.
In Hardy's "Postscript" to the first novel of Jude the Obscure, he quotes a German critic describing Sue as the 'first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in the thousands every year – the woman of the Feminist movement…the "bachelor' girl."' In other words, this German critic claims that Sue is the first representation of a new social type of woman becoming more and more common: the unmarried feminist.n response, here is what Hardy had to say: 'No doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously puts there.' (Hardy, "Preface to the First Edition")
In other words, it is not that Hardy disagrees with the German critic exactly. Hardy just wasn't intending to present Sue as the first representation in fiction of a feminist. There is more to Sue than even Hardy quite expected—which is a good thing, right? Sue takes on a life of her own in the novel, beyond the strict intentions of her author.
Wait, Never
Mind About Who—What is Sue Bridehead, Exactly?
One of the most intriguing things about Sue is that she is often described as being like something other than a woman: 'She was not exactly a tomboy, you know, but she could do things that only boys could do, as a rule' (2.6.22). Already, we get the sense that Sue is supposed to stand out among the other women in the novel, that there is something not stereotypically feminine about her.
A Woman
Ahead of Her Time:
In other words, Sue believes that women should be allowed to undo marriages that are clearly mistakes. She's also sure that lots of women feel this way, only they don't say so and Sue does. Unfortunately for Sue, she lives in the late nineteenth century, and the rules of her social environment won't let her live as she wants.
And here's where the social criticism comes in: Hardy clearly sees it as a problem that Sue isn't supposed to get a divorce, and once she does, that she isn't supposed to be happy again with another man outside the bonds of marriage. Jude the Obscure presents a strong argument against the waste and heartbreak that bad marriages can cause, in both women and me(By the way, when it comes to bad marriages, Hardy was no peach: his first wife Emma actually kept a diary about all of his flaws as the two of them grew further and further apart.)
We could argue that Sue's tragedy goes beyond the horrifying death of her children. The true tragedy comes in the end, when she entirely changes who she is. Sue embraces the same rigid religious views that she criticized when she was younger and trying to build her life with Jude. She chooses to pursue a sexual relationship with Phillotson, even though she absolutely does not want to and he does not ask it of her. In the end, guilt forces Sue to transform herself into all of the things she most seemed to hate in her earlier life. Even though she may survive the end of the novel, she's no longer the Sue Bridehead we have come to know and Jude has come to love—and if that's not tragedy, we don't know what is.
Jude Fawley
They Say I'm a
Dreamer (And Maybe I Am the Only One)
In the
beginning, Jude's tale has the makings of a real rags-to-riches story. Jude is
a classic small-town kid with big dreams and he has the drive to achieve what
he wants. It is no accident that at one point Sue compares him to two of the
biggest dreamers ever, Joseph of Biblical and musical theatre fame and Don
Quixote of literary and, oddly, also of musical theatre fame:
You are Joseph
the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote.' (4.1.68)
When we first meet Jude, he's only eleven years old, but we can tell there's something special about him: after all, how many eleven-year-olds do you know who watch their teachers go off to pursue higher education and resolve, right then and there, to follow in their footsteps? Once Jude's schoolmaster Richard Phillotson heads off to the university town of Christminster to pursue his scholarly dreams, Jude resolves that he will study and learn and someday go to Christminster, too.
Tragedy Almost Seems Too Positive a Word For What Happens to Jude
Hardy isn't content to leave poor Jude as a simple, naive dreamer. He has to give him tragedy. Sure, Jude might not be a tragic hero on the scale of, say, the famous Greek antihero Oedipus. (That's the guy who unknowingly kills his father and marries his own mother, which comes as such a shock to him when he finds out that he tears out his own eyes. Yeah. Now that's tragedy.)
The Ages of
Man :
When we meet
Jude, he is eleven. When Jude dies, he is thirty. In the grand scheme of
things, this is not a very long time—after all, the sun is about 4.5 billion
years old. Jude's lifespan is barely even a blink of an eye when you consider
the (really) big picture. However, in those nineteen years, Jude leads quite a
life (by human standards, if not by sun standards). His love affair with Sue is
one for the ages, with its many twists, unspoken words, rebellious choices, and
marriages to other people,.
Hardy makes us
root for these two, all the while clearly showing us why their romance can't
work out in the social climate of 1896. The cruelty of this book is that it
makes us want what we know is impossible: Jude is no Hollywood romantic hero,
ready to succeed against all odds. He is a sensitive man whose (quite
reasonable) desires in life get squashed by the social prejudices of the people
around him—and that's the real tragedy.
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