Name : Anjali Madhavjibhai Rathod
Enrollment No. : 4069206420220024
Roll No. : 2
Batch : M.A. Sem. 1 (2022-24)
Subject Code & Paper No. : 22394 - Paper 104 : Literature of the Victorian
Email Address : rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com
Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English - Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University - Bhavnagar - 364001
Characters in ‘Jude the Obscure’
About the Author
Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in England and died on November 27, 1912. He was an English poet and novelist . He was the eldest son of his parents. He got the passion for book reading from his mother. He grew up in a countryside area. Thomas Hardy was the son of Thomas Hardy, a master mason or building contractor, and Jemima Hand, a woman of some literary interests.
Hardy's formal education consisted of only some eight years in local schools, but by the end of this period he had on his own read a good deal in English, French, and Latin, just as later in London he made his own rather careful study of painting and English poetry. He was also interested in music and learned to play the violin. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an architect in Dorchester and remained in that profession, later in London and then again in Dorchester, for almost twenty years.
His literary works
Thomas Hardy started writing for a Magazine . He also wrote short stories for the magazine.
Some of his famous novels are :
Hardy is famous for his tragic heroes and heroines and the grave, socially critical tone of his narratives. His best known works are Tess of the d'Urbervilles,The Return of the Native,Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. All his novels are set in Wessex.
About the Novel
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. Jude the Obscure is Hardy's last work of fiction and is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster.
Thomas Hardy's last finished novel, Jude the Obscure, is widely considered to be his best. Hardy explores all the big issues: class, faith, hope, love, sex. In the process, this seemingly simple story of a doomed love affair transcends the Victorian era in which it is set, making it a timeless classic, a universal tale of longing and despair.
Ultimately, Jude's namesake, his son with Arabella, known as Little Father Time because of his grave manner, hangs the younger children and himself, leaving behind a note which says only, 'Done because we are too meeny (many).'
Devastated, Sue returns to Phillotson and a life of religious devotion. They remarry, as do Jude and Arabella. After one more attempt to reconcile with Sue, Jude falls ill and ultimately dies at the age of 30. Arabella immediately moves on in search of her next husband, while Sue lives out the rest of her dreary life with Phillotson.
Jude Fawley
A young man from Marygreen who dreams of studying at Christminster but becomes a stone mason instead. He is a skilled stonemason and a kindly soul who cannot hurt any living thing. Jude’s “fatal flaw” is his weakness regarding alcohol and women, and he allows his marriage to Arabella, even though it is unhappy, to distract himself from his dream.
Jude shares a deep connection with his cousin Sue, but their relationship is doomed by their earlier marriages, society’s disapproval, and bad luck. Jude starts out pious and religious, but by the end of his life he has grown agnostic and bitter.
He is obsessed with ideals. Very early he makes Christminster into an ideal of intellectual life, and his admitted failure there does not dim the luster with which it shines in his imagination to the very end of his life. He searches for the ideal woman who will be both lover and companion, and though he finds passion without intellectual interests in Arabella and wide interests but frigidity in Sue he maintains the latter as his ideal to his deathbed.
Susanna Bridehead
Jude's cousin. She is unconventional in her beliefs and education, but marries the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson. Sue Bridehead is something less than the ideal Jude sees in her; like him she is human. She is also a nineteenth-century woman who has given herself more freedom than she knows how to handle. She wants to believe that she is free to establish a new sort of relationship with men, even as she demands freedom to examine new ideas. But at the end she finds herself in the role of sinner performing penance for her misconduct. As Jude says, they were perhaps ahead of their time.
If she is not an ideal, she is the means by which J tide encounters a different view of life, one which he comes to adopt even as she flees from it. She is also one of the means by which Jude's hopes are frustrated and he is made to undergo suffering and defeat. But it is a frustration which he invites or which is given him by a power neither he nor Sue understands or seems to control.
Arabella Donn
Jude's first wife. She enjoys spending time in bars and in the company of men. Arabella is a piece of work. She is so selfish, thoughtless, and manipulative that it's hard to take her seriously as a character in some ways—she's like a cartoon villain or something. Like, if this were a romantic comedy, she'd be Rachael McAdams from Mean Girls. Of course, this isn't a romantic comedy (again, it doesn't get much less funny than Jude the Obscure), so Arabella's behavior gets a lot worse than backstabbing and prom antics.
Arabella plays an enormous role in Jude's and Sue's downfall. She cares nothing about the consequences of her actions, and she cares about no one other than herself. As Jude lies dying, Arabella is already hitting on another man to take his place, and when she finds Jude dead she just leaves him there so she can go to a boat race.
Arabella is the least complex of the main characters; she is also the least ambitious, though what she wants she pursues with determination and enterprise. What she is after is simple enough: a man who will satisfy her and who will provide the comforts and some of the luxuries of life.
Aunt Drusilla
The relative who raised Jude. Miss Drusilla Fawley is an elderly spinster great aunt of Jude who takes care of the orphan boy. According to Jude, she is "crusty and queer". Though somewhat cynical with a poor opinion about many persons in the neighbourhood, Miss Drusilla Fawley cannot be called a bad woman. She does not exert any great influence on anyone.
Drusilla advises Jude and Sue against marriage but both of them do not pay heed to her advice and suggestion. Except for the fact that it is she who brings up Jude when he lost his parents and her casual remarks dissuading people from marrying, Aunt Drusilla does not play any vital role in the development of the plot of this novel. Of course, the reader gets prepared for the disastrous consequences of the matrimonial adventure of Jude and Sue. Aunt Drusilla disapproves of the marriage of Jude to Arabella, Sue to Phillotson, and finally the marriage of Jude and Sue.
Drusilla’s opinion about the various people in the novel. During the childhood of Jude, the aunt used to rebuke him for being a poor useless boy. She gets him a job of scaring away the birds from the fields of a Farmer but Jude gets dismissed from it for being over sympathetic with the hungry birds.
Richard Phillotson
The schoolmaster who first introduces Jude to the idea of studying at the university. He later marries Sue. Phillotson is an eminently respectable man. Though he fails to achieve the same goals Jude pursues, his bearing and view of things do not change much.
Even when Arabella encounters him on the road to Alfredston, now down on his luck and teaching at Marygreen because it's the only place that will have him, this air of respectability remains. It must be this which Sue can't stand about him, the respectability plus the legal right to make love to her. Phillotson is a man whom it is easy neither to like nor to dislike; he goes largely unnoticed.
Little Father Time (Little Jude)
Jude and Arabella's son, raised in Australia by Arabella's parents. He is said to have the mind of an old man, though he is a young child. Little Father Time doesn't show up until really late in the novel, but boy does he make his role count. From the moment we meet the child of Jude and Arabella, we know something is a little off. He gets his nickname because he is "Age masquerading as Juvenility" in other words, Little Father Time may be biologically a child, but spiritually, the kid is as old as Jiroemon Kimura.
Little Father Time carries an unshakeable sadness with him that seems totally out of keeping with his young age.
To sum up
We can see that, Really, Ends with Jude's lonely funeral, only attended by two people his horrible wife Arabella and the old widow Mrs. Edlin. Before Jude's tragic death, he goes to see Sue one last time. They express their love for each other, but they agree that they will never see each other again. Jude is obscure in that he comes from uncertain origins, struggles largely unnoticed to realize his aspirations, and dies without having made any mark on the world.
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