Posted by Guillermo Maynez
on 5/2/2009, 11:37:07, in reply to "jude the obscure"
201.103.29.205
This is my review in Amazon:
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Some guys have all the luck (only bad), March 2, 2007
By Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Jude the Obscure (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
This is one of the bleakest books you can ever read. When it came out in the late XIX Century, it was received with so much rejection and disapproval, that Hardy stopped writing novels and dedicated to poetry. Also, his wife thought the book was autobiographical, and since the portrait of the main character's wife was so unfavorable, she was mad at him. The novel raises some topics which were, and up to a point still are, socially controversial. Hardy seems to paint a negative portrait of all social conventions which undermine or irrationally restrict human freedom. Hard moral issues are faced by the characters, always with sad results.
Jude is an orphan who grows up with a great-aunt in a backwards town in England. Early in his life he is inspired by his teacher Phillotson, who moves to Christminster (Oxford) to pursue an academic career. Jude wants to go there too and become an illustrated priest. He works hard in his aunt's bakery, and meanwhile gets books and starts learning the humanities all by himself. Later on, he moves to a nearby town and learns the craft of stone carver. One day, as he comes back, he meets a girl, Arabella, who will seduce and deceive him, telling him she's expecting a child. Thus Jude is forced to get married, but soon he discovers he has been cheated. The marriage, of course, is a disaster and Arabella leaves with her parents for Australia. Then Jude is finally free to pursue his dream, and he moves to Christminster. There he meets his cousin Sue, one of the strangest characters in literature, with whom he falls madly in love. But Sue is very weird: she is against all social conventions, while Jude abides by religion and traditional morality. Although he desperately wants Sue, he is convinced he has been married forever, as religion prescripts, and so he agonizes over his past mistake. Sue is also asexual, unstable, and erratic in her behavior, causing much sorrow to Jude. Years later she accepts to marry Phillotson (on the condition that no sexual intercourse is to be had), a further blow to Jude, who even dellivers the bride at church. But of course this marriage is also a failure, and Sue goes back to Jude, with whom she lives as a wife. But this is no happily ever after conclusion. Tragedy will still follow Jude.
This is an important novel, both for its literary merit, since Hardy is a very talented writer, and for the difficult issues it touches. Should one remain forever with a person one doesn't love, just because there is an oath about it? Are those kind of mistakes not redeemable? We all make mistakes, don't we? Though finally together, in love, with children and behaving in a socially acceptable manner, Jude and Sue are permanently harrassed and rejected for not being properly married. To make things worse, Arabella reappears to make trouble.
One thing that strikes the reader is the fact that, hard as you try, you can find no self-inflicted defeat in Jude. He is a decent fellow, hard-working and devoted to study, but his dream just never comes true, through no fault of his own. He's just maybe a little too uptight about morals, and emotionally weak. It's easy to say: "Well, dude, why don't you just dump the two crazy gals and go ahead", but if you read the book you'll see that was never an option for him.
One other, and very important, literary merit of this book is the excellent character-development. Jude is a person you may know, a sad guy with bad luck. Sue would be today the delight of therapists, especially her problem with having sex. Arabella is a wonderful character, a cynical and outright wicked woman, resourceful in her multiple predicaments. She's nasty and irresponsible, a happy-go-lucky bird of destruction.
So why then do I take a star off my review? Because the chain of tragedies and unlucky situations stretches to the point of hilarious preposterousness. Or maybe it's my sense of humor. But at many points I started to guess what would happen to Jude next, imagining unvelievable tragedies, and then Hardy came up with a worse one. Melodrama raises to the levels of black humor. Nevertheless, it's a good book if you can stomach all of Jude's bad luck.
--Previous Message--
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: Hey Lale,
:
: I'm reading Jude the Obscure right now and wondered
: if there was any way I could read the discussion of
: it. If it's a lot of trouble to post it, don't bother.
:
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