Thomas Hardy

First published as a novel in 1895, Jude the Obscure is Thomas Hardy's tragedy of defeated intellect and impossible passion.

Jude the Obscure

atlantisli

Yazıldığı dönemde büyük eleştiri almış bir kitap ve kitabı bitirdiğinizde bunun sebebini anlıyorsunuz. Çağının çok ötesinde bir kitap. Aile ve evlilik kavramını dönem şartları içinde o kadar etkileyici anlatmış ki yazar, 1895 İngiltere'si günümüzle fazlasıyla benzermiş onu anlıyorsunuz. Okunması gereken bir eser olduğunu düşünüyorum, 435 sayfa olmasına rağmen 1.5 günde bitirdim.

Detaylı yorumu bloguma gireceğim!

However infuriatingly self destructive and complicated the characters are it's still almost impossible to not feel heartbroken by their misfortune. Devastating book. Left me feeling deeply sad and reflective which is the mark of a good novel.  

Janice Hopper

Holy carp, this story was dark. 

I was a little surprised at how relatively modern the main characters' attitudes sometimes were. The whole "getting married kills love" was a thing young people said sometimes when I was young.

It's easy to get frustrated with the characters in this book too. Sue is especially annoying, Arabella is a horror, and Jude is just a mess. 

My rating is more of a reflection on how sad the book made me than on the quality of the writing, I guess. Though honestly, no rating of mine will make much difference to a classic like this.

Read for the Victorian Book Club, summer 2021.

ETA: I listened to the Audible version narrated by Brian Hall as I read. I like to do this because I think it helps my reading comprehension. This narrator was fine in most respects, but he missed or mispronounced a whole lot of words. It's not really something you might notice if you weren't following along in the text. But I noticed them. :/ #picky

Meriem💫

An equally frustrating and beautiful read.

Victorian novel of Jude Fawley, who dreams of life and knowledge beyond his birthright. Ultimately, his own family and ideals are destroyed from within.

Jude the obscure

Kevin Bertolero

Holy shit! Everybody kept telling me how dark and depressing this book was, and for the first ~300 pages I thought they were messing with me... but then I got to part VI. This book gets REALLY dark REALLY fast. This is definitely the winner of the misery olympics.

Melody Izard

Monday morning you sure look fine
Friday I got travelin' on my mind
First you love me and then you fade away
I can't go on believin' this way
I got nothing but love for you
Tell me what you really want to do
First you love me, then you get on down the line
But I don't mind, I don't mind, yeah
I'll be there if you want me to
No one else that could ever do
Got to get some peace in my mind
Monday morning you sure look fine
Friday I got travelin' on my mind
First you love me and then you say it's wrong
You know I can't go on believing for long
But you know it's true
You only want me when I get over you
First you love me, then you get on down the line
But I don't mind, no, I don't mind, yeah
I'll be there if you want me to
No one else that could ever do
Got to get some peace in my mind
But you know it's true
You know you only want me when I get over you
First you love me, then you get on down the line
But I don't mind, no, I don't mind, yeah
I'll be there if you want me to
No one else that could ever do
Got to get some peace in my mind

Jude Fawley, a young stonemason, aspires to an education and a life in the ministry but finds society indifferent to his goals.

Devin Ware

As someone born and raised in a particularly Baptist part of the Bible Belt, something I heard preached on a lot was the absolute truth of the Bible; basically, you cannot pick and choose which parts of the Bible you think are true, and instead must believe it as a whole or not at all. "The Bible is not trail mix" was a common meme I saw in my early days using Facebook. This was often used against people who were tolerant of queer culture while still proclaiming their Christian faith.

As I grew up and began struggling with own views on faith as well as my sexuality, I became disillusioned with these ideas, and then grew resentful of them. I think this primed me to love this book far more than I might otherwise have. The epigraph to Jude the Obscure is simply: "The letter killeth." This comes from 2 Corinthians 3:6 which says "Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."

Essentially, both Thomas Hardy and I take this as a refutation of the idea that devotion to God, or morality, or whatever ideal you may hold worthy of devotion, does not require a literal submission to every word of its rules, whatever those rules may be. Rather, it is the spirit in which those laws are made (or for those who are religious, the spirit that created the laws) that is essential. To focus on literal devotion to the law, to "the letter," is deadly. That is the focus of this novel.

Though I connect it largely to religious beliefs, that is only because of my own life experience. Though it does touch on God and spirituality with the sort of fervent depth you would expect from a novelist of the late 19th century, there is also much to say about class and social standing, and how the laws, both written and unwritten, of those things may also ruin people. It especially focuses on the paradoxes and cruelties of the way that marriages were handled in the social system of the time; the importance placed on the letter of the law in regards to them, as well as to the outcasts that were made from people who dared to bend or break those laws.

The fact that I am able to write so much on the theme of this book without mentioning the plot at all might frighten one into thinking this is a book that is didactic to the point of being patronizing. While Hardy definitely uses this story to put forth a point, it is not in a way that is intended solely for education. This is an angry book, in the same way that Howl is an angry poem or Salo is an angry film. This book does not want to scare you with its criticism of the institution of marriage, religion, and social class... it wants to brutalize you with it. This is a book that hurts to read. 

A young man named Jude Fawley grows up with a wish to travel to the nearby town of Christminster and become a scholar in a college. Almost from the beginning, his ambitions are thwarted when a young girl named Arabella tricks him into marrying her by using a false pregnancy scare. It is from that foundation that the arbitrary rules by which we govern ourselves begin to work on the lives of Jude and his cousin, Sue Bridehead. 

Sue is one of my favorite characters I have yet encountered in classic literature. Hopelessly chaotic, driven by ideals, and seemingly immune to the same expectations of society which Jude is forced to follow, her story is interwoven with Jude's as they fall in love. Though this is confined (for now) to my own personal canon, I believe that Sue is genderfluid, and perhaps even asexual (though her tendencies in that way could also be explained by how the consummation of a marriage was seen in an almost contractual sense; she may have had a different view of sexuality had she lived today). During a scene where she must wear Jude's clothes after swimming in a freezing river, she talks about not being particularly comfortable with the idea of gender, and how she must vex everyone around her, including Jude, by failing to act like a "proper woman." I use "she" and "her" because it is a part of her character that she is forced into this role as a woman, and more often than not tries to accept it in her own way. Everything about the way her character acts and speaks reinforces this idea in my mind, and though I would need to put forth a lot more effort, evidence, and an essay to try and prove it to others, to my own mind, at least, the case is well-founded. I would love to see a story written involving Sue exploring gender further, though I don't believe myself qualified to write it. Someone get on that. 

This book is fantastic. Seven paragraphs of my ramblings can be summed up in those four words. The only thing that prevents me giving it a full five stars are a few scenes that feel too didactic, especially early in the book when Jude is bemoaning his forced marriage to Arabella and talks about how the laws of the land makes little sense. There are many parts where subtlety is thrown out the window, but most of them are made up for by the story's incredible atmosphere and gloomy poetry. Nonetheless, this is a brilliant book, and as I have not yet read any other works by Hardy, I suppose I can also recommend it to anyone else getting into this author for the first time. I know I shall be seeking out more.

Анастасия Розова

*Read for class.

Why do I lately have to read only boring books? Especially long ones. 

I had to choose two books for my banned literature class for my exam and I thought this one sounded kind of interesting, but it was dull and tideous and could've been three times shorter - wouldn't lose anything. Reading it felt like working. Ugh.

Characters were boring, live story was boring, even the shocking parts were boring! I'm just glad to be done with it.

I guess im not giving it a 1 star cause I saw why it was banned and that was kind of interesting to notice, just not to read about it.

Greta V. 

On 8 December 1895, in the American journal The New York World, Jannette L. Gilder wrote: “Jude the Obscure is almost the worst book I have read...aside from its immorality, there is its coarseness which is beyond belief...when I finished the story I opened the window and let in the fresh air.”

Jude The Obscure: The Letter Killeth by Thomas Hardy
"Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." - 2 Corinthians 3:6
What a peculiar little journey. I began my trip with very little knowledge as to where I would end up, but now that I have finished I am left alone, pondering over the tale I've just read. It is, as the synopsis of my copy claims, a bleak story. Cut into six separate parts, I never knew what was to come once any one of those parts ended or began. The last selection in particular was quite a shock for me! I hadn't a clue as to the events that would unfold, I almost feel as though it still hasn't fully sunk in. Jude The Obscure begins and ends with our dear protagonist. We dream of Christminster with him, we feel our hearts drop as his ambitions die away. We are loved and lost and pained together. From the moment I opened this book I have followed closely behind Jude Fawley, watching as he aged and matured during a period of about 18 years (forgive me if my quick math is incorrect). Much like Tess of The D'urbervilles, I will carry the story of our hero with me. I will continue to wish and hope for his sake, though it will make no difference. Thomas Hardy manages to make his characters feel so entirely realistic that I almost doubt my own sense. How can Jude, the Jude I watched and loved, how can he be nothing more than the imaginings of a dead man? But I suppose he is real in the minds of those who have read his story.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (5/5)

Raya 

But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small."

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is a narrative which signifies the power of the author's bleak discontent at the social prejudices prevalent in Victorian England. 
The novel begins with little Jude as he assists in the packing of essentials of the village schoolmaster who is leaving to become a university graduate in Christminster (a thinly disguised Oxford). This kickstarts Jude's academic ambitions. While growing up as an impoverished orphan, Jude reads anything and everything he gets his hands on; from the Latin texts to the early classics. Sadly for Jude, his aspirations get crushed once he reaches Christminster and then the sole opportunity of fulfillment he finds at his disposal is to get close to his cousin Sue Bridehead. Sue is an independent-minded , unconventional, impulsive and complex young woman whose thinking is way ahead of her times. Tragedy befalls upon these two social outcasts, and what follows is a trail of mishappenings and shocking events. 

Hardy poured all the scorn he possessed towards the social morals of the then society in his final novel. He brings about the themes of marriage and divorce, the smirk of destiny, class distinction, position of women and social criticism through a novel which can arguably be called his saddest piece of fiction. His protofeminism shines through his words and his sharp and incisive character development deserves applause. The novel is allusive, evocative, and the conversations taking place between the main characters are rich and high flown. The people in the book involve in every action that was seen as a taboo in those days, which makes this book stand out to me. A tragic drama of pain, the book upholds hopelessness and injustice in the social and cosmic order. It's the story of Jude and his perished dreams, of the harrowing scream of afflicted love, of the deep sigh of defeat and of the trenchant sense of human desolation. 

[ I sobbed while reading the final few pages. I'd recommend getting a reliable edition for this book since it's dense in allusions and you'd need annotations to understand most of the dialogues and references. ]

Jude the Obscure

Reviews