Analysis of the Tragedy of Jude

第VII页裘德悲剧探析Analysis of the Tragedy of Jude摘 要作为跨越十九、二十世纪的伟大作家兼诗人，托马斯·哈代以其名著还乡、卡斯特桥市长、德伯家的苔丝、无名的裘德等为广大读者熟知。他的这些作品也受到了评论界的极大关注。哈代的最出色的作品都列入了“性格与环境小说”,阅读这类小说给人以这样的印象：人类似乎永远都受制于命运，时空的重负压在他们的肩上，而更重要的是人们的生活总被一种神秘的力量控制着。无名的裘德无疑是哈代创作的最高峰。小说通过男主人公范立·裘德的事业和婚姻生活，描述了下层青年裘德孤苦不幸的一生。裘德一生充满痛苦，因为这个世界压抑他的自然本性，他的美好愿望难以实现。它表现了人们理想生活与现实生活之间的巨大反差，从而揭示生活的悲剧性。本文旨在研讨哈代对人类悲剧命运真正原因的探寻。本文除介绍和结尾外，主要分三部分：第一部分：关于裘德悲剧的个人限制，人受自身弱点的束缚。第二部分：分析裘德悲剧的社会原因，人同无情和僵化的社会发生冲突。除此以外，裘德悲剧还在于理想与现实之间的矛盾冲突。这是第三部分的关注之处。基于上述分析本文得出结论：裘德悲剧的原因在于个人条件限制；环境和世俗的影响；理想与现实之间的矛盾。关键词 : 托马斯·哈代; 悲剧；冲突；无名的裘德 AbstractThomas Hardy, the great writer and poet of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been well known to the readers for his masterpiece The Return of the Native，The Mayor of Casterbridge，Tess of the DUrbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The critics have also focused their attention on these books of his.The most outstanding category of Hardys novels belongs to that of “the Novels of Character and Environment”. The reading of these novels gives us the impression that men never seems to be free: the weight of time and place presses heavily on him, and above everything, there are mysterious forces that control his life. Jude the Obscure was no doubt one of the peaks in Hardys artistic creation. It depicts the lonely and miserable life of the lower class youth Jude through the intellectual and marital life of Jude Fawley, the hero in the novel. The life of Jude is filled with pains and sufferings because his natural instinct is suppressed by society and his aspiration stands no chance of fulfillment. It reveals the tragedy of human existence by presenting the great contrast between the ideal life and the actual. The paper treats of Hardys exploration of the real causes of human tragedy in this masterpiece Jude the Obscure. It consists of three major parts besides the introduction and conclusion. Part One is about the personal limitations of Judes tragic life: man is bowed by many fallible elements. Part Two analyzes the environments and the social conventions of Judes tragic life: man is exposed to an uncaring universe and frigid society. Besides the above two reasons Judes tragic life also lies in the conflict between his ideal and the reality. That is the focus of Part Three. Based on the analysis above, this thesis concludes that the causes of Judes tragic life consist in his personal limitations; the environments and the social conventions; and the conflict between his ideal and the reality.Key words: Thomas Hardy; tragedy; conflict; Jude the Obscure Contents. Introduction1. Judes Personal Limitations.3A. His weakness of character3B. His low social status.4. The Environments and the Social Conventions.6 A. The victim of the environments.6 B. The victim of the social conventions.7. The Conflict between the Ideal and the Reality.9A. Conflict between spirit and flesh.9B. Conflicting views between the hero and heroines on love and marriage.10. Conclusion.12. Notes.13. Bibliography .15. Acknowledgements.17. IntroductionThe Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the DUrbervilles, and Jude the Obscure are the four greatest novels of Thomas Hardy. They climax Hardys Wessex epic which almost spans the whole nineteenth century, a period of great social changes. Jude the Obscure is Hardys swan song as a novelist. It contributes no less or even more significance to Hardys Wessex Chronology and it achieves a greater realism as the author completely turns away from an idealized Wessex to a harsher modern world. His humanistic view of both social and individual tragedies reaches a point of mature complexity. And his social criticism is more pungent than ever.No wonder this novel should have brought upon the author a most violent storm of “righteousness”. When he first printed it as a monthly serial in Harpers Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895, Hardy had to cut some of its most vital parts: Arabellas “plan” to catch Jude involved no pretended pregnancy; Sue shared no “sitting-room” with her undergraduate boy-friend, nor did she ever share a house with Jude, but lodged in one just opposite, so that they could “talk across the street”; Jude had no “midnight contiguity” with Arabella after meeting her in the pub; on Judes last visit to Sue there was no kissing; nor did she ever do her conjugal “duty” by Phillotson. No wonder Hardy told a friend: “Please dont read it in the magazine. It will be restored to its original shape in the volume.”1In book form, Hardy published the full novel in defiance of the Victorian censorship. So once the book was published, it received fierce attack. The New York Bookman commented, “It is simply one of the most objectionable books that we ever read in any language whatsoever”2. With a high moral tone, most Victorian reviewers accused the novel of being immoral: typical headlines for these views were “Jude the Obscene”, “Jude the Degenerate”, and “The Anti-Marriage League”. The novel was banned from public libraries; the Bishop of Wakefield, disgusted with the novel s “insolence and indecency”, threw it into the fire; a New York reviewer said she ran to the window for air after reading Jude; and Hardy received a box of ashes, presumably those of his novel, from one of his irate readers.However, twenty thousand copies were sold in three months. Swinburne had been quick to congratulate Hardy on “The tragedy equally beautiful and terrible in its pathos”, calling him what Aristotle called Euripides, “the most tragic of poets; and assuming that”3. The man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise! But Hardy did care. When a literary agent asked for a new serial, Hardy replied, “I am absolutely vague about a serial story. I will let you know if ever I have one to offer.”4 He never did have one. The “howls” at Jude had put him off novel writing for good.So far criticism of Jude had focused its attention on the main character Jude Fawley. He plays more decisive and important role in the plots, compositions and characterizations. Most important of all, his tragedies not only reflect Hardys position as a “pessimistic” writer. Hardys understanding of tragedy is closely associated with his physical and social background and his realistic observation of life.Jude the Obscure is a better attack on Victorian morality, institutionalized religion and social economic injustices, as well as a penetrating study of the subtle and intricate relationship between man and woman. Here what we detect are essentially defected hopes and frustrated aspirations throughout the intellectual and marital life of Jude Fawley. In his work, Hardy had printed as clearly and as truthfully as he could the hopes, the struggles, the disappointments of Jude, the unhappy hero.This thesis is an attempt at a more thorough analysis on Jude the Obscure. It examines the causes of Judes tragic life from three aspects: (a) Judes personal limitations; (b) the environments and the social conventions; (c) the conflict between the ideal and the reality. This choice has been made for the convenient reason that it is generally considered Hardys grimmest novel of the nineteenth century. Whats more, it suits most for my purpose of demonstrating Thomas Hardys tragic vision. Judes Personal LimitationsA. His weakness of characterHardys protagonists, though the universe and society are not benevolent toward, they themselves are largely responsible for their tragic destiny. They are beset by personal defects and cannot free themselves from human weakness. Their fallible qualities never fail to produce catastrophes in certain circumstances.The first introduction of Jude to us takes place in the village of Marygreen. He is a kind-hearted boy of eleven, who has been an orphan since the death of his parents, and now lives with a bad-tempered aunt. We learn of his kind-heartedness and latent spirituality when he suggests that the teacher, who is leaving for Christminster, store his piano in the aunts fuel-house until he is ready to send for it. He bears the teachers words, “Be a good boyand be kind to animals and birds”5, so he has a deep feeling for helpless creatures, “he was a boy who could not himself bear to hurt anything.”6 When Jude is hired to scare away the rooks who come to peck the grain in Farmer Trouthams field “his heart grew sympathetic with the birds thwarted desires”7, and he lets them feed until surprised by his angry employer who beats him. Later we find Jude walking gingerly, virtually on tip toe, across the evening damp of a meadow, so as not to disturb the breeding of earthworms. Always Jude is too loving for the harsh world he inhabits.In fact his kindness goes so far that it becomes one weakness of him. He is always the “puppet” in the hands of others. At no time in the novel is Jude in control of his own destiny, or even of his own situation. In an ironic reversal, Jude is always in the power of some women first Drusilla, then Arabella and Sue, together and separately. Jude has assumed what can be called a feminine personality. As a boy, Jude is under Drusillas complete control. In his marriage to Arabella, she makes the decisions and wields the power. When women desire Jude, he is expected to perform; when they do not desire him, he is expected to be chaste; when he attempts to speak of his own desire, he is chidden for his “gross” nature. He simply cannot win. When he confronts Arabella with the knowledge of the horrible deception that leads to their marriage, she is unapologetic and refuses to rise to the level of his concern, thereby erasing the validity of his outage. Similarly, Jude tolerates Sues constantly shifting the day of their marriage and her endless sexual ambivalence, this in a society in which men were empowered as the sexual aggressors and which assumed that once a man had “possessed” a woman, he had complete control over her. When Arabella decides she wants Jude back, he finds himself drunk in her bed. Virtually the only decision he makes in the novel is to commit suicide, but he is not forceful enough to make the ice break. He refers to himself as a victim, a term that culturally is synonymous with the feminine. In speaking of marriage, he insists that the institution is as destructive to a man as it is to a woman, referring to the man as “the other victim”. However, marriage in Victorian society was in fact far worse for the woman than for the man, since legally the man possessed control not only of the womans body no concept of marital rape existed, since a mans choice of when and how to engage sexually with his wife was seen as his right but also of any marital goods or money that she brought to the marriage. However, Jude consistently identifies with the woman, the underpowered one. Jude is the picture of the passive Victorian “wife” humble, effacing, patient, loving. Jude never exercises the one power that his society allows him as a poor man that of power over poor women, power within the home. B. His low social status The novel is well named because Jude is “obscure” both in that he is a mere workingman of no social position, and in that he does not understand himself or the forces at work in life.As a child of the working class, Jude dreams of attending college at Christminster. With the departure of the schoolmaster to Oxford, Christminster lays its grip upon his soul. He talks of it, questions men on the road about it, above all, dreams of it and its treasury of knowledge. “He was getting so romantically attached to Christminster that, like a young lover alluding to his mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning its name again.”8 He believes that Christminster “The city of light” just suits him.With an ambition to become a student of university, he engages himself in reading whatever books available to him. At day he snatches every moment possible to read and at night he used to read almost to dawn. He becomes so learnt that he is nicknamed as “Tutor of St. Slums”. His rich knowledge manifests itself in his recital of Latin in public house, which even the students from Christminster could not understand. Clearly, he is intellectually superior to those students.But just as his nickname suggests, he is from slums. And his fate is connected only with the hard laborers in the shabby slums. Because he is a workingman, he is kept far from the students as if they had been at the antipodes. Jude realizes finally “how far away from the object of that enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life only a wall but what a wall!”9Although Judes academic effort is hopeless, Hardy indicates the system when Jude fails, receiving a brutal rejection from the master of Biblioll College: Sir I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advice you to do. Yours faithfully, T.Tetuphenay.10His letter might well be translated into the elitist sentiment of Dr. Johnson: “Sir, we permit cows in a meadow but we drive them out of the garden.”11 Jude is rejected because of his low social position.Talent, ambition, and a sound basic preparation are no substitute for social position. Jude discovers, and eventually he gives the appropriately bitter answer to the principal when he says to the crowd standing in the rain waiting for the academic procession. “It was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses affections vices perhaps they should be called were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his countries worthies. ”12. The Environments and the Social ConventionsA. The victim of the environmentsThe unhappy environments can affect ones life. In contrast to Far From the Madding Crowd, and even Tess of the DUrbervilles, Jude the Obscure has no rural idyll to set against the pain of existence. From the very first chapter both the natural world and the social world are alien and hostile. Thus Marygreen is described in the most dismal and even sarcastic terms.Old as it was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many trees felled on the green13It is a picture of decay and neglect and a picture of a new harsh world invading an old quaint one. The decay has been brought about by a migration, presumably to the great cities that grew up with the Industrial Revolution, and the village has been largely abandoned. The old church symbolizes the old way of life.Jude goes to the newly sown cornfield where his job is to scare away the birds. “How ugly it is here!” he murmured. “The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, leading a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse.”14Sensitive, tender-hearted, reluctant to wound even animals, Jude, early in life, shows dissatisfaction with his “ugly” life in Marygreen. Homeless, parentless, and unhappy because of his experiences with Farmer Troutham and his great-aunt, he has a wish not to grow up to a man.An unhappy home environment can affect a childs behavior. Jude is first seen as an orphan being brought up by an aunt who is bitter toward the inherited bad luck in marrying that haunts the Fawley and who warns Jude that his life bears no promise of a brilliant future, Jude nevertheless pursues the object of becoming a learnt man to which he was originally inspired by his schoolmaster, Mr. Philloston. His great aunt regards him as a burden to her and said to him, “It would ha been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, withy mother and father, poor useless boy!”15 Jude is crazy for books, but the people around him don not understand him at all. The only one, who understands him and inspires him has gone away at the beginning of the story. After Trouthan fires Jude, his aunt complains, “Jude, Jude, why didstnt go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere?”16 “If you cant skeer birds, what can ye do?”17 The novel depicts “All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.”18 Jude feels “more than ever his existence to be an undemanded one”.19 Jude has no parents and there are no village traditions to which he can attach himself. He “continued to wish himself out of the world”.20Like all true Hardy heroes, Jude wants to find something greater than himself to which he can give himself totally. He strains himself to the limit in the struggle to be a learned man, who can find a home in Christminster College. But the reality of Christminster, as he finds out when he actually gets there is that of a bigoted, cruel and sordid city. Jude lives pathetic in this “castle, manned by scholarship and religion”.21It has been the yearning of his heart to find a place in this city, “a spot in which, without fear of farmers, or hindrance, or ridicule”.22Circumstance, most specifically an unjust, classiest society, prevent Jude from fulfilling his dream, but unto death Judes heart is where it has always been firmly within the Christian tradition.B. The victim of social conventionsSociety always plays a negative role in the life of Hardys protagonists. In Jude, Hardy vehemently vents his dissatisfaction with society.At the end of the Victorian reign, the old ritual of marriage was strictly observed: the marrying couple had to go to church and to swear before alter. A holy contract could bind forever two people who did not love each other. Marriage was “a sordid contract”. Judes marriage with Arabella teaches him one lesson about the hypocrisy of society: their union is out of necessary rather than of love, yet they have to swear that “they would assuredly believe, feel and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few proceeding weeks.”23 Jude immediately experiences the result of a convenient marriage; he and Arabella are so totally different that they cannot get along at all. He “vaguely and dimly” perceives “something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a canceling of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labor because of a momentary surprise and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness.”24Jude and Sue seek individual happiness by pursuit of love. But both of them display an inability to adjust to the world they live in. They are in constant conflict with the outside world and are always the losers.Jude and Sue frequently take offensive steps to society and are constantly punished. They never wholly grasp what social pressures they are likel