Of all genres of creative writing, psychological fiction appears to be the most demanding one
MUCH was written on Thomas Hardy in the first half of the 20th century and continues to be written in modern times. This piece is intended neither to present something new about Hardy nor to offer a critique of his major novels, but merely to comment briefly on the psychological aspect of one of them, Jude the Obscure.
Jude is Hardy’s most noble work of fiction; it also happens to be his last novel. Writing about Hardy’s last two novels, a critic said: “Hardy’s motive in writing Jude was to present the truth and to evoke pity in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”
Human relationship is the main subject of Hardy’s novels. He was one of the first creative people to dilate on this theme philosophically in his novel Tess, first by questioning, “Where was the providence of the simple faith?” And then by probing: “Why so often the coarse appropriate the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man?”
One may indeed accept the possibility of a retribution lurking in life. But, in some people’s opinion, Hardy doesn’t give any explanation for a particular catastrophe. For instance, some of Tess’s male ancestors deal ruthlessly with her for no rhyme or reason.
Hardy adds the factor of moral justice to his creative pursuits. “... Though to visit the sins of the fathers for children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature and, therefore, it does not mend the matter.”
The theme of Jude the Obscure, however, goes beyond “the morality good enough for divinities” and in a rather preliminary way discusses the vicissitudes of a couple’s emotional relationship and their evolving ‘interactions’.
In psychological fiction it is believed that characterization is the main factor. The plot, of course, provides the base around which the story is woven, but in a psychological novel the recording of events which make the plot is not an end in itself. It must show how those events act on the mind and soul of the characters; how they affect their thinking or behaviour which naturally evolve with the occurrence of these events; how the evolving behaviour reveals their sensitivities and leads ultimately to tragedy. This is what Hardy set out to project in Jude the Obscure.
The centre of interest in Jude are the two main characters, Jude and Sue. Somehow women’s emotions always moved Hardy. He perhaps harboured the notion that ‘women are less in control of their emotions and are physically weak’. That’s what “invites the rebuke of their fellow beings”.’
Nature, too, acts against women and brings to light their mistakes even though the responsibility party lies with men. What makes women more vulnerable is that they cannot bear any encroachment upon their lives when it comes to being in love, while men may accept the inevitable. Sue’s worries are best expressed when she says to Jude: “Your weakness was only the man’s natural desire to possess the woman. Mine was not the reciprocal wish till envy stimulated me to oust Arabella. I had thought I ought in charity to let you approach me. But I should not have given way if you had not broken me down by making me fear you would go back to her.”
A contrasting picture is presented by Arabella who “had lost all human feelings for Jude but in course of time when she saw how things were gong and how little Sue had to fear from Sue’s rivalry, she had a fit of generosity”. She is an intellectual but she is a woman too and shows the same weakness which other women do.
She tells Phillotson she “had met Jude”. She says she did not know he was coming; and they had even kissed each other. “How many times?” he asks.
“A good many. I don’t know. I am horrified to look back at it and the least I can do after it is to come back to you like this.” She surrenders totally to her impulse and equally impulsively regrets this submission and rushes to make up for it. For her love was a constant “ecstasy girdled with pain”.
As for Jude, Hardy is very fatalistic. On receiving books from Phillotson, both of which were 30 years old while Jude wishes that he had never been born, Hardy adds his observation: “Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were far advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does.”
With the same cynical view he writes elsewhere: “People could not bear Jude to combine work and play (such they considered his reading to be) and some resident of an adjoining place insisted that it was the constable’s duty to catch him in the act and get him sentenced for dangerous practices on the highway.”
For the Victorians, as for many of their successors, morality was a matter of highest importance. But Hardy does not seem to consider conventional morality as moral enough, except when it accompanies emotional loyalty. In this matter, he takes an extremist position and based it on what would be seen as extraneous logic to some people. “No one could suffer Jude and Sue to live as man and wife anywhere because of a cloud that had gathered over them, though they had wronged no one, corrupted no one, and had perhaps done what was right in their own eyes.”
Sue voices Hardy’s opinion about marriage when she says to Jude: “I cannot tell you the truth. I should shock you by letting you know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I feel that I should not have been provided with attractiveness unless it were meant to be exercised. Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so often is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they cannot give it continuously to the chamber officer appointed by the Bishop’s licence to receive it.”
From Hardy’s point of view, there are so many shades of morality. There is no doubt that he’s weary of the social and moral environment in which he found himself and resented being “forced for the adaptation of his instincts to rusty and irksome moulds that did not fit them.”
The problem with Sue and Jude is that they were “intellectual in a world of hard reality”. Sue’s character is further doomed because not only does she know she’s an intellectual, she also trusts her intellect. At the same time she was highly sensitive and extremely nervous by disposition. The couple is as sincere as it is sensitive.
Their tragedy is best summed up by Jude himself. He tells Mrs Edlin after Arabella remarries him: “She (Sue) was a woman whose intellect was like a star to a Benzoline camp. Bitter affliction came to us, her intellect broke and she veered round to darkness. Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarged the views of most men, narrow the view of women almost invariably. And now the ultimate hour has come — her giving herself like this to what she loathed. She, so sensitive so shrinking that the very wind seemed to blow on her with a touch of deference. As for Sue and me, when we were at our own best, long ago — when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless — the time was not ripe for us. Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us and so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her and recklessness and ruin on me.”
It is said that Hardy had anticipated Freudian ideas. But Victorian England, even in its last decade, was not yet ready for them. The adverse reaction to his ideas proved too much. Freud once said about Hardy: “Cure him of all further interest in fiction writing. Jude was his last novel. But he struck a path which was followed by many fiction writers after him.”
