Online-literature.com on Hardy’s 'Jude the Obscure'

On http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/jude_obscure/ Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is called “an almost unbearably sad story about love and sexual desire”.

Jude the Obscure is not about sexual desires. It is about social conventions and traditions which force human beings into conditions in which they are unhappy and can not live lives according to their individual wants and needs.

Sue, for instance, is a rather asexual person. This is revealed by Jude referring to her as ‘aphantasmal, bodiless creature’ several times throughout the text. She keeps him at distance for a long time; as long as she can resist her love for him, at least. When she finally gives in to her feelings, she does not do so out of animal instincts or lust, but out of deeply felt affection towards her cousin. In the later part of the novel, it is the social realities during that time which pressure her into abandoning her lover and returning to her loathed first husband; to the point where she even forces herself to share the same bed with the latter out of repentance for loving someone else.

Even Jude’s coarse first wife, Arabella, despite showing a casual attitude towards sexuality on several occasions, does so primarily to achieve her goal, i.e. to catch a husband. This was the primary purpose of women at the time of writing and Arabella uses every means available to her to achieve it lest not to be left alone and in opposition to prevailing social codes. Consequently, she uses sexuality as a means to an end instead of taking pure pleasure in the act as such.

Jude himself shows all the restraint regarding so-called lower instincts which can be possibly attributed to a male individual. He obeys Sue’s wishes continuously and never makes any advances to merely satisfy his urges. He, too, acts out of overwhelming emotions which collide with existing social concepts and this way suffers from, as repeatedly mentioned, afflictions.