Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and just make it sadder…

I can’t remember the last time I was this frustrated by a book. I found myself holding onto the poor little paperback in an absolute death grip, scanning the page frantically for any sign of logic or reason. None, absolutely none was to be found. If there was, it would not be a Thomas Hardy novel. 

I should know by now, I have been abused by this man before. I read Tess of the D’Ubervilles when I was in high school. I was lucky enough to have a fitting landscape for the novel, as my family trekked in a van along the southern Irish coast. Ebbing green hills, thick cut mist, and rocky soil perfectly framed the novel. I could almost see Tess milking a cow in the horizon if I squinted hard enough. The physical atmosphere and mood of the book was a match made in heaven because this one is, well, depressing. I couldn’t help but stamp my little foot and declare it was not fair for poor Tess. Why did women always get such a bad lot? I resented Hardy for making me feel such deep feelings for a person who was no more than words on a page. 

After a long hiatus, I returned to Hardy with Far From the Madding Crowd in 2022, a decidedly more optimistic novel. While the novel ends placidly, as opposed to tragically, it still did not completely satisfy our wish for a neat, happy story. I still found myself almost screaming at the characters. “BATHSHEEBA, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THAT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA” a direct quote from me while reading this book. Spoiler: Bathsheeba didn’t listen to me, they never do.

And now we’ve come to Jude the Obscure. The title of this novel always put me off. I think for a long time I thought this was a Dostoyevsky novel and it was going to be incredibly dense and so thick with religious over and undertones that it would bore me to tears. You have to be some sort of fucked up to say to yourself, “Oh good, this isn’t Dostoyevsky, it’s Hardy!” like that’s going to be any kind of upgrade to your mood.

While there are certainly religious over and under tones, it certainly focuses on plot rather than abstract theory. In short: Jude Fawley is an “everyman,” a stone mason in the English countryside who is dreaming of something greater. He is always yearning for Christminster (the equivalent of Oxford in Hardy’s fictional “Wessex” region of England), and longs to lead a distinguished life in academia or the clergy, if he has to settle. Jude sees his lofty dreams dashed when he is not able to lift himself from poverty to afford tuition and he is trapped into marrying Arabella Don, a pigfarmer’s daughter who is hell bent on doing what she wants and the devil may care (this is the worst human being on the planet, I hate her like I actually know her). Once she leaves him for Australia, Jude again begins his scholarly pursuits, but meets his estranged (first) cousin Sue Bridehead and falls in love. Sue finds herself in a brief, loveless marriage to an aging schoolteacher, Phillotson, who eventually agrees to let her leave him. Sue and Jude play a bit of cat and mouse with each other, until they finally decide to live together, unmarried. With the opinions and morals of the surrounding rural societies closing in on the free-spirited couple, Jude and Sue find themselves encountering tragedy after tragedy, which ends in a final, fatal, conclusion.

In short of that short: don’t get married. Also do not pursue your cousin, that’s gross in any time period.

This ain’t Hardy’s first rodeo when it comes to critiquing Victorian marriage. It’s a big open secret that he hated the whole mess of it, and his characters are the poster children for the reasons why. Hardy’s characters are always big minded people trapped in unfortunate, or at best limiting, circumstances. Jude wants to be a scholar but has no money. Bathsheeba Everdeen is a land-owning heiress, but is expected to marry since she’s, well, a woman, but she’d rather do it all on her own. Tess is forced to appeal to her wealthy cousins to help her desperate family, which unfortunately resets the course of her life. The class circumstances and, some could argue on a symbolic scale, the landscape of the rural countryside, keep these characters bound to their stations. While people in his novels die, often the hardest deaths to swallow are the character’s dreams.

And what better way to kill your dreams than getting married to someone you absolutely do not know, but you’re expected to be chained to them, financially, emotionally, and physically  forever and if you even so much as hint at wanting something or someone else, you are shunned and labelled as “odd.” At worst, you die. 

Wow, I’m getting bummed out just writing this review. 

Honestly, I would prefer to die an old maid who wrote suggestive poetry and sold flowers in the street and was overall regarded as an absolute freak by society rather than be required to sleep with a man more than twice my age that I (maybe) met twice and who could do anything to me without any reproach.

But what if you try to live apart from society? What is so crushing is that Sue and Jude decide to live outside the rules, and thus outside of society but they truly cannot escape. They become a bit nomadic, working freelance and weaving in and out of different English country towns where no one knows them. They only participate in society on the periphery. Those two years doing so are described by Sue as some of the happiest in their lives. They felt like they were living for only each other and their young family. The turning point is the agricultural fair they attend. Hold onto your knickers, this is the event of the year in rural Victorian England, so they are bound to see people that they know. They’re described by those onlookers (Jude’s god awful ex-wife included) as being almost disgustingly happy and in love. It’s from then on that people become more curious about this couple, and that becomes their undoing. 

But I couldn’t help but think as I read this amazing chapter about the fair, that all the onlookers were just plain old jealous. Arabella and her new husband, a bland pub owner, are described as being like every other married couple at the fair: respectable, but a husband and wife who hardly acknowledge one another and probably don’t even touch each other in private. Sue and Jude, on the other hand, are seen as physically engaging each other (holding hands, a soft kiss on the cheek) and seem to truly enjoy each other’s company. Arabella stalks the couple and brings in other people to observe them and she can’t help but notice how they are engaging each other is just so much. She’s just a jealous, small minded woman who is in a respectable but loveless marriage. She did not have the balls to pursue a loving relationship out of wedlock because she was so set on the convention of marriage, so she invites everyone around her to see how strange these people are, knowing full well the destruction this would bring to them.

The rest of the society cannot contemplate that kind of happiness with another person chosen freely, since many felt they had to marry for economic and religious reasons. So how do they deal with this discomfort and jealousy? They revert to staunchly standing behind tradition because they cannot, or do not want to, imagine that others are happier than them (wow, Victorian society was SO uptight, we NEVER see ANYONE or any groups acting like this today towards people different from them)... 

The result of this is absolute destruction - if these two can’t be unhappy in society’s rules like everyone else, then they deserve to be punished. Jude can’t find work, they can’t find housing, every small town has people with smaller minds who are ready to turn away these absolute freaks of nature. Yes, what a good Christian nation.

Conform or die, is really the motto with Hardy. The environment and class structures are so tight as to not let your body or your mind fully breathe. And so many times, those who are more intelligent than their counterparts are punished for not conforming. Two young, bright stars who could have contributed meaningfully to their communities (academically in Jude’s case and artistically in Sue’s) are snuffed out by dogmatic tradition. And thus the landscape of rural England never changes because the dreamers are shoved back into the dirt. 

And perhaps this is why I was so frustrated. I am the light at the end of the tunnel for Sue and Jude’s vision: I live as an unmarried woman with my romantic partner of three years, and we keep steady employment and housing. We don’t have to pretend we’re married, we can openly choose to not marry and not be penalized for it. I want to scream because these characters see that light of modernity but are kept from it, and in the process make the most insane decisions. 

I’m sure there are those who will be too frustrated to continue with the story, and I am sure there are many who would blame Sue for many of the events of the book. But that frustration is what makes this book so incredible. Good. Fucking. Job. Hardy. These really did feel like flesh and blood people making human decisions, in all of its inconsistent glory. Jude’s sensitivity and his determination. Sue’s guilty conscience in the wake of extreme impulsivity. Their struggles were painted with such depth because these were real minds and bodies trying to make peace with their ideals and their reality. This made the dreams, and the tragic death of those dreams, all the more crushing. 

I wanted to throw this book, I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry at almost every juncture. I bemoaned the fate of women who came before me and I cursed the institution of (Victorian) marriage. And if there’s any book that makes me feel like this, it gets a permanent place on my bookshelf. It’ll sit right next to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and the two can sit in their own little literary raincloud. 

God, I love sad books. Five stars, I’m willing to get hurt again for books this good.