In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, It Tolls for Thee
If a muse were invoked to call Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure into being, the muse might look a little like the gargoyle on the side of a gothic church: Ugly, ignoble, goofy, bespoke, something that mirrors the grim, grinning irony that runs through the text like a vein of ore in ordinary rock. The variegated novel, like a Medieval church’s grotesquerie, is a mashup of unlike genres, forms, allusions, and styles, and it perversely harnesses the devilish to celebrate the sacred—or perhaps reminds us, in a forbidding memento mori, that these are one and the same. Neither Jude’s noble characteristics nor his coarse ones—neither the world’s abundant beauty nor its innate cruelty—fully steer the ship of the novel or really even warrant our evaluation. They just are. They are natural phenomena as inexorable as a sunset or a famine (or an act of compassion; or a child’s murder-suicide), and critics who drove Hardy from novel-writing after its publication with their cry of Smut! (I’m looking at you, Ms. Oliphant) miss the novel’s nuanced read of a life’s meaning and consequence. But this is unsurprising, given the way the novel’s syntax is ever at odds with its semantics. Hardy uses sleight of hand to pull the rug out from beneath unsuspecting readers, and the book will alienate those who are affronted by such manipulation. Masks slip across the novel’s face, revealing new layers: Is it modernist realism? Classical melodrama? Bildungsroman? Religious allegory? Medieval morality theater? Biting satire? The answer is “yes/and”: Jude the Obscure fuses genres to speak not to its characters but directly to its readers, generating a sort of connective tissue between past and future, in the manner of Gothic cathedrals—structures that took hundreds of years and generations of artisans to build.
Jude changes nothing. His every ambition is thwarted. He is not a holy man or a political martyr or a leader of men. He is hardly even a husband or father. Like the narrative itself, Hardy’s characters have trouble deciding what they are. Jude works with his hands but longs to work with his mind—by the time of his death the books in his collection are as pieces of masonry, “roughened with stone dust where he had been in the habit of catching them up for a few minutes between his labours” (Hardy 332); his love interest, Sue Bridehead, vacillates between dynamic individuality and staid cultural normativity, perversely refusing to marry the man she loves but marrying a man whom she finds physically repellant not once but twice; and looking down on this pair from an ironical position is the diminutive but grotesquely powerful figure of Jude-the-Younger, aptly nicknamed “Little Father Time” (a bit on the nose, that), a child who is not really a child but a changeling that rips their lives asunder with an act so senselessly violent—to characters and readers alike—that, after the lavish set-piece of its enactment, it causes the entire novel to veer off the tracks of realism into the more ambiguous realm of fairy tale, allegory, or psychomachic morality play, so that the characters begin to feel more like symbols (or perhaps hieroglyphs) festooning a building’s edifice than human beings. The entire structure of the story begins to feel… architectural.
The conflict of the genres, I argue, is undertaken with intent. Hardy’s methodology is prescient, anticipating high modernity and linking ancient modes to modern ones. Like Medieval theater, modernism turns its focus on the flawed, overlooked, “obscure” Everyman. Jude the Obscure crafts a deliberate through-line between distant past and literary future, building them into a kind of Gothic cathedral of language. Hardy does not seem to see the past as a unilinear bridge between then and now, orchestrated by “Great Men” toward some idea of progress, but as an aggregate of individuals, all of them lost to obscurity, who built that past stone by stone, themselves only present now in the crumbling material vestiges of their labor. In Jude and Sue, he builds a kind of temple to the Everyman, giving life, longing, frustration, and dimension to those whom history obscures, bypassing the acts and philosophies of Great Men. More blasphemous still, the dogma that undergirds Hardy’s rhetoric is larger, wilder, more emergent, more nihilistic than religion or liberal nationalism (both of which are blasphemously dry and petty in the story—causes of sorrow and social ostracism but devoid of wisdom or even coherence). God and country are the purview of Great Men, and here they are rendered hollow and ridiculous. No wonder the Victorians took issue with the novel. But Jude’s small and insignificant life is memorialized as synecdoche for all the forgotten men who, the novel argues, are history’s true architects. The story seems to look beyond its characters to wink at future readers, the Everymen of our time and beyond.
A Cathedral of Words: Generic Semantics and Syntax
In “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” Frederic Jameson proposes two approaches to genre: a “semantic” read of genre concerns the essence, or core, of that genre, which proposes to reconstruct an “imaginary entity—the ‘spirit’ of comedy or tragedy, the melodramatic epic or ‘worldview,’ the pastoral ‘sensibility’ or the satiric ‘vision’—which is something like the generalized existential experience behind the individual texts” (Jameson 168). A novel, in this schema, is identifiable as tragic because it feels tragic. Alternatively, a “syntactic” read of genre concerns the surface trappings, the bells and whistles that signal to readers what kind of orientation we should have to the story we are reading, conventions to which we are highly, if unconsciously, attuned. Syntactic genre asks us to “analyze the mechanisms and structure of a genre… and to determine its laws and limits” (169). A novel is tragic because it’s hero dies. Hardy’s prose creates confusion between the text’s semantics and its syntax. His prose is sometimes funny and bijou; sometimes philosophically speculative; sometimes realist almost to the point of Marxist; sometimes deeply, heartrendingly tragic; and yet other times melodramatic to the point of maudlin. To examine the continuum of tone in the novel, we might contrast the humor in the moment Arabella seduces Jude by throwing “the characteristic part of a barrow-pig” (its penis) at him with the moment Jude finds the dead bodies of his infant children at the hands of Little Father Time, along with a note that reads, in a fierce critique of Malthusian rhetoric, “Done because we are too menny” (Hardy 34, 272). They hardly seem to belong to the same story. The reader experiences a true shock at the turn of the book’s core philosophy, a shock that these wildly different syntactic tones exist in the same text—or the same universe.
But a precedent might be found in earlier generic forms, which correspond to Hardy’s interest in Gothic architecture. In “Theory and Genres of Medieval Literature,” an exploration of Medieval generic tropes—many of which feel foreign and inscrutable today—Hans Robert Jauss notes that genre blending and genre slippage occur throughout the centuries of Medieval texts. We might also note a parallel with the public reaction to Hardy’s text and a corresponding Medieval anxiety that with each instance of slippage, profane writing would borrow and semantically pervert the syntax of sacred writing. Jauss contends that when a work is “ripped out of the context of the given literary system and transposed into another one [it] receives another coloring, clothes itself with other characteristics, enters into another genre, loses its genre; in other words, its function is shifted,” and the shift in function was often met with public alarm (Jauss 141). Moreover, when we examine Medieval work we begin to see the seismic shifts that occur as the cultural role of literature evolves. Hardy was writing at a time of paradigm shift in literature that accompanied paradigm shifts in science and technology. At key inflection points in Jude, Hardy’s text flees the scientific/technological, borrowing Medieval syntax. By the end of the book, it feels semantically Medieval as well, albeit retroactively. It is easy to imagine Little Father Time as a kind of memento mori in the corner of a medieval woodcut, a grinning skeleton holding the hourglass—just like his sobriquet. In the same woodcut, we could imagine Jude, fossilized on his deathbed (while, if you’ll indulge the visual fancy, in another room Sue gazes at a mirror, enthralled by her fatal indecision). At the moment of Jude’s death, Hardy renders the scene like a work of visual art or a theatrical tableau or masque; Jude’s body and books, in their respective death and obsolescence, have become stone:
there seemed to be a smile of some sort upon the marble features of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and Horace, and the dog-eared Greek Testament on the neigbouring shelf, and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted with, roughened with stone-dust… seemed to pale to a sickly cast… The bells struck out joyously; and their reverberations travelled around the bedroom (Hardy 331-2).
In this passage, the “joyous” auditory intrudes upon the grisly visual in a way that is disconcerting—full of a noisy energy that is downright menacing. We really feel those bells careening around Jude’s beatific body. We feel, in this final moment, that they ring for us. Jude, after all, cannot hear them, being dead. Beyond that, even, there is something metatextual in those intruding bells that exposes the story’s artificiality, rendering Jude a character, a creation. The sound is paradiegetic: It intrudes upon the scene from the outside, making us uncomfortably aware of our status as voyeurs. The reader (this reader anyway) feels suddenly that she is looking into the little tableau inside a snow globe: An arrangement of material objects that is significant enough to warrant a concluding mise-en-scène. In “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays,” Natalie Crohn Schmitt comments on the tropes of morality plays: “the events which occur in the course of a morality play,” she says, are “not mimetic representations of life, but analogical demonstrations of what life is about” (24). Because we cannot see what life is about, she goes on to say, we must rely on artistic analogy to make “manifest the otherwise invisible and only reality of God” (Schmitt 24). Jude, in our final moments with his smiling corpse, feels like an analogy of this sort, but Hardy’s “invisible reality” is entirely decoupled from God’s mysterious logic. The sacred geometry of this story is the cold, indifferent, inscrutable pattern of Darwinian/Malthusian nature. The irony is so thick it tips toward funny.
In similar ways, Medieval conceptions of life and death bound the macabre, the ironic, and the playful together in the same sackcloth. The focus of Medieval morality plays was the Everyman, like Jude, who lives out his days in the glare of an anonymous death that could strike at any moment from any direction. But the dead were chatty in Medieval literature and art, and not without a certain severe humor, evidenced by the common grave-carving reminding passers-by that “ego quondam fui quod es, eris quod sum” (“what I am, so will you be; what you are, so I once was”), or the delighted/horrified reel of the Rota Fortunae, elevating men or casting them low on the wheel of the capricious (pagan) goddess Fortuna according to her unseen logic. Medieval genres, according to Jauss, lay bare the “elementary structure in which the socially formative and communicative power of literature has manifested itself”; and this power is evident in the building blocks of current forms (144). In Jude, Hardy exposes the inner scaffold that buttresses his literary edifice, revealing them as part of a literary (and architectural) continuum. His text urges us to search among the ruins… not for life but for what life is about. Originally an architect by trade, he advocated as well for the preservation—not the mechanical restoration—of Gothic buildings, according to Benjamin Cannon’s “The True Meaning of the Word Restoration,” which remarks that the books surroundings Jude’s body at the novel’s closing scene
materially embody the central irony of Jude’s life, being both the objects of his desire and the means of his infinitely deferred escape from work in stone. Yet here they are… finally reduced to material objects that can be marked by this same labor, their covers ‘roughened with stone dust’ (220).
Thus Hardy shores up his prose with the symbolic masonry of the previous genres in a process that preserves, not restores. To restore a building—one of Jude’s jobs in the book and a subject about which Hardy wrote extensively—is to mechanically systematize a process that, in its original construction, was collaborative, haphazard, and emergent. Over the course of sometimes three centuries, anonymous artisans added their unique flavor to the stones they hand-carved and set. Buildings restored using machine-tooling might look the same, but they do not mean the same. To preserve a building is to repair its original stonework, letting it age out of respect for the past—honoring the nameless artisans who built it. Similarly, Cannon argues, Hardy does with words what he argues we should do with buildings: In the final scene, he “inverts [the] rhetoric” of the printing press (another mechanically systematized process), “imagining printed text as a surface whose real significance lies not in the letterpress but on and around it, in the marks of stone dust and lard that damage and dirty the material text” (221). Ultimately his project suggests Jude’s books—and by extension, Jude the Obscure itself—are “material objects to which Hardy accords a status preservationist theory reserves for historical buildings” (221). Engaging varied genres to build this word-cathedral serves as a template for his preservationist philosophy. Hardy invokes the ancient as a kind of fortification against a dehumanizing future that, in his time, was already underway. He does what his modernist descendant, T. S. Eliot, explicitly says in “The Waste Land”: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
New Wine in Old Bottles: A Text Both Dated and Premature
Peggy Blin-Cordon attributes Hardy’s genre-hopping to his preoccupation with the social space he occupied: In “Hardy and Generic Liminality,” she notes that he was ever “wavering between two worlds, between the would-be image of the respectable author and the oft-categorized regionalist” and that “during most of his career as a novelist his way of exploring the centre was to remain the master, first of all, of its periphery” (44). He is definitely preoccupied with the periphery of culture, with characters who must curtail their expansive ambitions and dynamic minds to fit the demands of their social and material realities. Early in the novel, Jude expresses a sentiment similar to the one Blin-Cordon attributes to his creator:
As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. 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. If he would only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man (Hardy 17).
The boy is out of step with his context, and therein lies his sorrow. He is born into the wrong family, circumstances, time, and vocation. He is a sensitive soul in a boorish world—literally boorish, given what wooing gesture will be hurled at him a few pages later—as evidenced from the beginning of the narrative, when he refuses to step on earthworms, and feeds the crows he is paid to chase away from a field. Like the novel, and maybe Hardy himself, Jude is an anachronism. Sue is likewise preoccupied with the tension between her soul’s yearning and her circumstances. In a telling metaphor, she refers to the intellectual life at Christminster, the Medieval university town in Hardy’s Wessex (modelled, of course, on Oxford), as “new wine in old bottles,” later commenting that the “new wine” at Christminster “is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other” (124-5). We never know if she is correct in her assessment of Christminster, but she would certainly be correct if she were describing herself, for Sue cannot make up her mind, and in her muddled character, the reader is never sure which is new, which old—the vessel or the essence.
Sue’s intellect pushes her toward her own passions—one of which is fulfillment with Jude and the family they’ve made—while her impulse to conformity pushes her in the opposite direction. After her children die, she foregoes happiness entirely and re-marries her first husband in a kind of mortification of the flesh, a “re-enactment by the ghosts of their former selves of the similar scene which had taken place… years before” (Hardy 300). By this time all the characters are ghosts, circling the drain of their own obsolescence, waiting to shuffle off the mortal coil. Sue began the novel as a wild and spirited pagan, but, In Cannon’s words, her “religious conversion after the death of her children transforms her from a rebellious freethinker to an orthodox High Church Anglican” (213). Hardy does not, by any means, intend Sue’s religious conversion to signal her spiritual growth or for us to detect in it a moral to the story. While we might recognize the syntax of the religious bildungsroman in her final flight to the Church, we see the irony with which this generic nod is infused. Jude, too, evokes the genre in his scholarly ambitions and autodidactic impulses, which ultimately come to nothing. Frank R. Giordano Jr., in “Jude the Obscure and the Bildungsroman,” observes that these characters are archetypes of Victorian unrest for whom the Church offers few insights and the meagerest solace, victims “unable to find comfort and support in the medieval Church and equally powerless to discover outside [themselves] or create a personal, existential authority for [their] moral being” (585). In Jude, religion is not the opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment it might once have been for the population of England. If we expand “religion” to encompass all the stifling pressures of Victorian mores—their mechanizing, dehumanizing processes and compulsions—the same could be said of the novel in toto: Its harsh geometry is as a ram butting against the organic shapes of the characters in beautiful, heartbreaking cacophony—and nothing fits together neatly or even fully legibly.
The novel itself is a kind of new wine in old bottles. Blin-Cordon notes that the narrative displays “an original generic pattern, essentially based on the cohabitation of tragedy and the Sensation Novel” but also on “the unusual association of the Gothic with the realist genre” (45). Thus Jude is a kind of palimpsest, though the pits and grooves beneath the surface of the text are deliberate: We are meant to read different messages, forms, purposes, and takeaways from the faint traces of what came before. Cannon puts it best when he observes that “Instead of restoration, Jude may be understood as being guided by an aesthetic of preservation that approaches both history and story as material processes, the significance of which lies in their essential unrepeatability” (Cannon 203). The Medieval morality play was often performed, gratis, on the steps of cathedrals, to an assemblage of locals. They provided templates for life that spoke directly to citizens that were common, unknown, yet still a crucial part of God’s design. By bestowing the honor of heroism on Jude and Sue, Hardy plucks the Everyman from this earlier form and gives him pride of place within our shared literary patrimony. While in many ways the novel resembles a bildungsroman, the text doesn’t quite reveal the shape that salvation takes after the death of God. Science and technology are no substitute. Though a revelation feels close at hand at the novel’s denouement, its outlines remain half-hidden. It is a tesseract, an object with dimension that the culture does not yet have the ability to see. I submit that Jude’s spiritual brethren—those that will come after him in the procession of modernist antiheroes—may aid in the archeology (perhaps Prufrock will measure out the insights with coffee spoons). I suspect, too, that Jude has more interred revelations for future generations to exhume.
It Tolls for Thee: Little Father Time and the Beauty in Ugliness
The most brutal scene in the book is also the most ravishing. Circumstances are dire for Jude and Sue. The scandal of their unmarried status means Jude cannot find work. Sue cannot find lodging for the same reason. They have three children. They are brought low by their choices. In the tiny rooming house that they will be forced to vacate in the morning, Jude stands cooking until “a shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round.” He pushes into the room to find a scene of senseless death, precipitated by a misunderstanding on the part of Little Father Time. Sue has collapsed. He does not see his children:
He looked in bewilderment around the room. At the back of the door were two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed (Hardy 272).
Like the tableau of Jude in stony death the novel has in store, this “triplet of little corpses” as they are called, is rendered artistically, like a woodcut or a still-life. Their bodies have become forms. But Little Father Time’s note left at the scene, “Done because we are too menny,” contrasts syntactically with the artful array of aesthetic elements. His reasoning is not pretty: Religion no longer celebrates the value of “the meek” based on their proximity to God’s love. Little Father Time echoes the newer religion of the sciences, in this case Thomas Robert Malthus’ hypothesis of overpopulation. In An Essay on the Theory of Population, Malthus argues that charity to the poor will “diminish both the power and the will to save among the common people, and thus to weaken one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry…” He goes even further, framing altruism as a waste of resources “that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more wealthy members” (Malthus). His argument had been taken up in Hardy’s day by social Darwinists who argued, like Malthus, that charity worsens social problems once population exceeds food supply. Hardy seems to be making a point about the replacement of religion with this kind of science: Religion might traumatize a child, sure, but no one will ever convince a child that “evolution loves you.” There is no succor in such theories. In “Hardy’s Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus,” Emily Steinlight speaks to the barbarity that his note reveals about the context in which these characters suffer: In Little Father Time’s note, she sees a “subjectless passive construction (‘done because’)” which “offers a chillingly dull syntax of a logical predicate of cause and effect: The risk of population exceeding its means of subsistence and the sacrifice of life to check this threat of scarcity” (Steinlight 224). The act is barbarous, but, within Malthusian logic, it is a selfless act of sacrifice. The irony of this—the way it is both a horrific crime and an act of generosity, depending on the vantage—dramatizes the novel’s various “butting” philosophies (the mechanical against the organic, for instance), exposing the rhetoric of the machine as incompatible with the lived experience of human beings.
Suzanne Edwards meditates on the murderous son in “A Shadow from the Past: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure,” casting him as a symbol, a corporeal manifestation of Jude’s mistakes. She notes that the similarities between father and son are “physical, situational, and psychological,” remarking that “In his essential loneliness and isolation, his hyper-sensitivity, his pessimistic outlook, and his suicidal bent, Father Time is clearly Jude Fawley’s child” (Edwards 32). The “glaring, garish, rattling” noises from Jude’s childhood that “hit upon the little cell called… life” cause in his son even greater chaos. Little Father Time is the apotheosis of Jude’s ironic habit of making decisions that will make him miserable because he doesn’t want others to suffer (not even earthworms or pigs he must slaughter). “Little Father Time sacrifices himself and his siblings,” says Steinlight, “thinking he can thereby alleviate the sufferings of his parents” (36). His gesture is like the other occurrences of sacrifice, self-denial, and adherence to social mores that make things worse over the course of the narrative. Like the others, Father Time’s attempt to alleviate suffering ensures that the suffering will never end. But this brutal death and Hardy’s skeptical stance on the Church doesn’t mean he sees nothing of value in seeking wisdom from ancient religious art forms. Little Father Time reads like a psychomachic character from a morality play, a little imp that represents an aspect of human experience, reminding the Everyman that death comes for us all. The death of the children is shocking—and, especially shocking, is the very real Malthusian pretext the boy gives for his actions. But mercifully, after the deaths, the novel begins to read more like allegory than realism. Schmitt discusses the didactic function of morality plays, the way they suggest that the purpose of life is to search for paradise, but, if we do not look for paradise within ourselves, we will not find it (31). She notes that a spiritual paradise is “every place where the soul is in a state of well-being or grace,” the capacity for which exists in all people of all epochs. In Everyman, for instance, the titular character, on his deathbed, undergoes “progressive abandonment by money, friend, and kinsmen—and then by beauty, strength, discretion, and five wits.” This, she says, “is a natural progression inward…” for “change can be not only developmental but transformational” (Schmitt 31). If we see the events of the novel in this light, then the smile on Jude’s face might take on a different hue. Hardy has created for us a different kind of bildungsroman. As the bells toll joyously through his room there is the merest hint, in that smile, that he might have followed the internal spiral toward salvation, finding, in the winnowing down, a small fragment of “well-being or grace.”
Of course in this grace there is also a tinge of the melodramatic. Richard Nemesvari discusses the way Hardy weaponizes genres, both the serious and the amusing, by fusing them. He is especially attuned to the weaponization of melodrama for rhetorical effect rather than sensationalism in Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode. He notes that Jude’s is a narrative that includes all the hallmarks of melodrama, “fornication, adultery, bigamy, divorce, child abandonment, two murders, two divorces, religious hysteria, and masochistic sexual self-immolation… [events that] might be expected to produce strong reactions” (Nemesvari 180). To him, the murder-suicide is “the culmination of a pattern crucial to Hardy’s rhetorical purpose, and not an incongruity,” one that speaks directly to the reader and is designed to produce an actionable response in her (Nemesvari 181). It needs must serve “as a searing commentary on the failed ethics of the Victorian world that surrounds [Jude]” (Nemesvari 207). The novel thus serves as a potent critique of Victorian social ills, and a call to action to change them. Nemesvari contends that in the murder-suicide, Hardy engages in a “relentless assault on the reader’s affective responses,” using the contrast between it and the rest of the novel to prompt readers to compassion and social reform. “The goal,” he says,
is not an abstract catharsis, but rather a very specific pity and fear laced with anger and a sense of waste, producing a desire to change the materialist structures that the novel presents as destructively oppressive, [for Little Father Time’s] act of horrific annihilation [is] an excessive response to a system in which, as the novel’s epigraph declares, “The letter killeth” (182).
Overall, I argue that the set piece of the murder-suicide forces the novel in a new direction, as the rest of its generic restlessness does. The novel’s ending, moreover, speaks directly to the reader, likening the reader to Jude and serving as a kind of memento mori that speaks both of our collective responsibility for the suffering of others and need to look for salvation not in our institutions but inside ourselves and the ones we love. Hardy does not tell us how to perform this “looking,” but he invites us to consider a new mode of seeing.
An Obscure Object; an Object of Obscurity
In one sense it is no wonder that readers were offended by Jude. The skeletal hand that, like Fortuna, metes out a random, indifferent kind of cosmic retribution for invisible or nonexistent crimes points its bony finger, ultimately, at us. It is difficult to be in the hot seat. The novel denies us the meaning for which we often go to literature, the neat and tidy wrap-up that suspends the characters forever in their denouement, and in so doing suggests the possibility of a kind of immortality. The skull and empty eye sockets that grin and gape at Jude’s obscurity, Sue’s paralysis, are manifest in our own lives. Had Jude and Sue been born into the sorrow of modernism a few decades later, rather than the sorrow of Victorianism’s last gasp, the 20th century might have invited him in to rest his weary bones next to his spiritual brethren, all the defeated Everymen of our century’s literary antiheroes. Now we feel that, in Beckett’s words, “We give birth astride the grave”; and there is no sweet hereafter in a universe of staggering size and emptiness, within which we are mere floating specks. But Hardy’s novel can also be seen as strangely uplifting: By showing us his hand—combining multiple literary modes, built in the way Gothic cathedrals were once built—he lets us see our small lives as part of a sublime patchwork whose meaning none of us will ever know. He connects us to a past that is over but not gone, and a future which is certain, but obscured.
Works Cited
Blin-Cordon, Peggy. “Hardy and Generic Liminality: The Case of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure.” The Hardy Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 44-52.
Cannon, Benjamin. “The True Meaning of the Word Restoration.” Victorian Studies, Vol.56, No. 2, Winter 2014, pp. 201-24.
Edwards, Suzanne. “A Shadow from the Past: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure.” Colby Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1, Mar 1987, pp. 23-38.
Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation, Accessed May 20 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure, Third Norton Critical Edition. W. W. Norton Company, 2016.
Jameson, Frederick. “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism.” Modern Genre Theory, Pearson Education Limited, 2000, pp. 167-93.
Jauss, Hans Robert. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” Modern Genre Theory, Pearson Education Limited, 2000, pp. 127-66.
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1. 6th Edition, John Murray, 1826, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4239/4239-h/4239-h.htm.
Nemesvari, Richard. Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode. Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, pp. 179-211.
Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays.” Comparative Drama, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1978, pp. 23-34.
Steinlight, Emily. “Hardy’s Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer 2014, pp. 224-41.