Oliver in Charlottesville

Oliver Twist was our other road-trip book-on-tape. My mom and I started listening to this somewhere in Virginia, and when we picked my dad up in Charlottesville he started listening to it, too. I was right about it being a crowd-pleaser with a lot of hilarious voices and jokes: we all got really into it and were laughing a lot, and my dad was sad he was going to miss the end, and my mom was sad when she realized I accidentally kept the last CD in my laptop bag (I let her take the CDs back to RI with her, since once I was out of the car I could read the book.) But we were also confused: all the delightful stuff we remembered from the musical (in which I starred as the title character my sophomore year in high school, in the school play) had happened by the time we were about a third of the way through the CDs. "What else could possibly happen before the big climax?" we asked each other as we pulled into a Comfort Inn in Charlottesville (this time on our way home.) We found out that what could possibly happen was a bunch of what I suppose is early-Dickensian filler: after having introduced a variety of delightful characters, and having made us feel very bad for poor little unjustly-persecuted Oliver, and having set up a variety of conflicts (will Oliver escape from the criminals? Will Nancy betray Bill for Oliver's sake? Will Mr Brownlow keep his faith in Oliver's innate goodness even though Mr Grimsby seems to be right that Oliver is untrustworthy?), Dickens just adds a bunch of dumb extra scenes of the Artful Dodger and Master Bates (I snickered at his name through the entire trip, but only because some other kid I went to elementary school with had told me about how someone read her a story with a character named Master Bates in it, could I believe it) playing cards, and Mr Bumble's stupid courting of the stupid workhouse matron (well, they were OK), and then the horrible part where Oliver falls in with the family Bill tries to rob oh my God is that family boring and who cares about the possibly illegitimate niece and her stupid boring romance with a boring guy who shows up like two-thirds of the way through.


I guess this is only Dickens's second novel so I should cut him some slack. But this book was pretty stupid, you guys. Everyone told me I should read The Pickwick Papers instead, but apparently that only has a couple of good parts too. The beginning is delightful, and interesting because it's the part that makes Oliver Twist a social novel--the muckraking is very obvious and very convincing. We were all up in arms about the injustices to Oliver, and we laughed and laughed at all Dickens's funny sarcastic remarks about how unfortunate it was that the guy's horse died just when he had proved a horse could live on one straw a day, and had almost proved it could live on no straws, and how that was related to trying to get the paupers to live on more and more watered-down gruel (and one onion a week), and we felt indignant and proud of ourselves much as we feel when we watch The Daily Show, and probably that's exactly how these newly-created Victorians felt when they read those early installments of Oliver Twist. There was a "waif problem" in London, just as there was, or would be, a "woman problem." And an Irish problem! All those problems. Anyway obviously the workhouse stuff was great, and as was the case in David Copperfield, as well as in Jane Eyre, you're so relieved when anyone is nice to these pathetic little children because you've been so convinced that the world is void of compassion, but you need to believe there can be nice people (and maybe that you could be one of those nice, reasonable people someday). In all those books you're also super relieved when the poor urchin has a big fit and fights back, which Oliver does at the Sowerberrys'; I wonder how much that tendency is a revision of some kind of sentimental reform literature that might be contemporary with these texts? You know, where the kids might be long-suffering saints? Those kids exist in Dickens, right--I guess Dick, Oliver's friend from the parish, is an example.


It was also interesting to note the way in which the bad characters seem aware of the reform movements, and of built-in systems for regulation of public welfare institutions. Mr Bumble, for example, complains to Sowerberry about reformers, and the bad magistrate (Mr. Fang?) is in a bad mood when Oliver's case comes before him because of some muckraking journalist "adverting to some recent decision of his, and commending him, for the three hundred and fiftieth time, to the special and particular notice of the Secretary of State for the Home Department." I don't know why I'm surprised by this; I guess because when Dickens is complaining about Chancery, for example, it seems like it's him (and John Jarndyce) against the world--there isn't much of a sense in Bleak House that people are actively trying to reform Chancery, although there is that reference to people suggesting reform in Parliament and getting shot down with "What would happen to Mr Vholes?" I guess I'm interested in the difference between a text that either is or pretends to be raising awareness of a problem you haven't heard about, and a text that is explicitly engaging in a political debate, or even siding with the established institutions to enforce reform that individual bureaucrats and middle managers or whatever are ignoring. Like maybe Parliament in 1837 agrees with Dickens that orphans shouldn't get fed very thin gruel, but they're letting too many Mr Bumbles get away with it?


Among all Dickens's funny sarcasm is this passage about why we should admire the Dodger & Charlie Bates leaving Oliver in the lurch when he gets accused of pickpocketing: 

and forasmuch as the freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman, so, I need hardly beg the reader to observe, that this action should tend to exalt them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid down as the main-springs of all Nature's deeds and actions

I think it's interesting for its little jibes at both English patriotism and at pre-Darwinian theories of natural law; it's also interesting as a critique of both nature and culture, especially since I've been reading Hardy lately, an author who seems saddened by both nature and culture (and maybe the conflict between them) but doesn't seem to think there's anything to do about it. Dickens is making fun of the attitude that we can't do anything about it, that we might explain away bad behavior on the grounds of either nature and culture; as a reformer, he seems to imply that we can either go beyond nature and progress as a culture, or that such pat explanations of nature and culture are lazy excuses.

More hilarious sophistry includes this little piece of moral relativism: 

Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and you may take any means which the end to be attained, will justify; the amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive, and impartial view of his own particular case.




I'm also interested in Oliver as a kind of proto-David Copperfield, both because it's a novel with a boy's name for the title, which follows the life and (to some extent) development of the title character (I'd have to read Nicholas Nickleby to really figure this out, of course!), and because there are these weird little references to Oliver's developing literacy, and the possibility that he might be a writer one day (mostly just Mr Brownlow being like, "You'd like to write books some day, right?"). The Oliver-as-a-writer amounts to nothing, but it's possible that Dickens stuck it in just in case he did want to make Oliver into a little embryonic novelist; you never know with these crazy serials. Also, the focus on Oliver could have potentially created some of the problems I noticed in David Copperfield, where the field for Dickensian expansiveness and Dickensian/Game of Thrones-style seriality & simultenaiety was limited a little bit by the first-person POV. Because Oliver Twist is in the third person, that doesn't have to happen, but for the first (and best) third of the book the action pretty much follows Oliver along on his adventures; it isn't until we start doing the Mr Bumble sections and then lose track of Oliver for a while after the robbery that we start to follow the simultaneous adventures of a lot of different characters. It really does feel like Dickens is just beginning to feel out this many-wacky-characters technique that seems so effortless in Our Mutual Friend: when he introduces the first Mr Bumble digression, for example, he feels like he has to preface it with this long explanation of why sometimes it's a good idea to interrupt the story with some humor or whatever, while by the end he's just throwing new characters and scenes and situations at you, and suddenly realizing everyone is related and so on, and it's very awkward, and he kind of seems to forget about the Artful Dodger after his big courtroom scene (maybe he was transported? but there are very specific wrap-ups for all these other kind of minor characters), and the revelations are kind of muddy and confusing, while in the later novels I think you're better able to follow along with all the clever twists and turns the narrative takes. The fact that Monks shows up so late in the novel is a real problem, as is the fact that most of the end of the novel is about the stupid family with the stupid romance plot that shows up so late in the novel. Maybe Dickens was like, "Yikes, the only ingenue in this novel is an alcoholic fallen-woman/thief, maybe I'd better put in a young woman who is not destined to be murdered."

And what a murder! My mom listened to it on the CD and called me and was horrified. Bloody hair sizzling in the fire, pretty gross! Also, it's interesting to see how mad Bill is driven by his horrible crime, and how resistant Monks is to killing Oliver because murder will out, and then to read The Woman in White and hear the scary Italian guy being like, "that is all nonsense!" Well, the Italian guy gets punished in Woman in White, but only because he left his secret society.

Finally, Fagin! For some reason I did not expect the anti-semitism to be so palpable. He is so greasy and hateable and also they just call him "The Jew" all the time. Also, his getting caught is kind of an anticlimax (as I think a lot of the major plot points seem to be--why did they need Nancy to come to the bridge if they could just scoop all these people up as easy as pie?) and his death is just kind of weird. Dickens adds in a rabbi, whom Fagin refuses to see, to show that not every Jew is bad--Fagin just happens to be a nasty, evil, cowardly Jew. It's interesting to think about Fagin alongside that kind of mystic, saintly Jewish character in Our Mutual Friend, the one who gets along so well with Jenny Wren, and who gets exploited by that terrible guy who makes use of all those terrible Jewish stereotypes that Dickens uses himself in Oliver Twist.

I feel like I should say something about Nancy and women in this novel, but it's pretty classic saintly girls vs fallen girls, but the fallen girls aren't so bad, but also they can't really be redeemed. Right? I mean I don't think too much is getting subverted in Oliver Twist but who knows. It was pretty fun to listen to in the car.


PS: I'm reminded by the subtitle, A Parish Boy's Progress, to think about how much Oliver Twist has in common with Pilgrim's Progress or Hogarth's Rake's Progress. How much do you think? At the beginning it seems to be very much a progress, through a series of trials and tribulations; then it's like Oliver just sits in Celestial City and waits for God and Jesus to sort things out with various devils and worldly jerks for a super long time, and he's not really part of it anymore. Does that happen in Pilgrim's Progress? Someday I will have to read it.

Return of the Soldier to the New Jersey Turnpike

I was going on a really long road trip with my parents (see "Tess in the Blue Ridge Mountains") and since I was behind on my reading, and my mom likes books on tape, I bought a trial membership to audible.com and downloaded two books from my list--one, The Return of the Soldier, that my mom thought it sounded good, and one, Oliver Twist, that my mom didn't feel as sanguine about, but which was super long and was likely, in my opinion, to be full of funny voices that would entertain any number of family members. Incidentally, they're both books that one of my committee members suggested I add to my major list: Oliver Twist because he thought I had plenty of mid-career Dickens and needed to add some early Dickens, and Return of the Soldier because he thought I should have a WWI-era novel that wasn't modernist (although some people seem to consider it a modernist text, maybe on the basis of its historical context rather than on style.)
I didn't know anything about Return of the Soldier before listening to it, and I knew next to nothing about Rebecca West--my mom and I both associate her with Daphne DuMaurier for some reason. I figured she was a popular but respectable sardonic English novelist, maybe one of those writers that people who admire the Craft of Fiction also admire; Wikipedia says she was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century, which isn't inconsistent with my vague assumptions. She wrote essays and journalism and worked for women's suffrage, which is interesting--you don't necessarily get a clear sense of her politics or what kind of feminist she might be from Return of the Soldier, although she's talking about women's lives and writing about the war from a very female, domestic perspective.
I'm not sure that listening to a CD on the NJ Turnpike quite counts as reading a book, especially since I didn't take any notes or write any blog entries immediately after listening, so I'm pretty likely to read it for real, especially since it's 1) super good and 2) super short (it only takes about 2 hours to read it out loud.) But, two-and-a-half weeks later, here are some of the thoughts I (and my mom) had while listening to it in the car:

• Unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator! The Return of the Soldier is narrated by Jenny, the soldier’s cousin. It’s hard to tell initially what her relationship is to Chris (the soldier who’s gone to the front) and to his wife Kitty, with whom Jenny lives in the ancestral home (aside: here’s the classic Victorian* threesome, carried through into 1918. At a rest stop, over a fishwich and a diet coke, I told my mom about the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act!) There’s a nursery that Chris has insisted on keeping intact even though the baby has died, and Jenny doesn’t like to go in there but Kitty seems to have no problem with it—in the first scene she’s there drying her hair. Jenny’s initial portrait of their family’s life before the war is rosy—she and Kitty did everything they could to make Chris’s life beautiful and delightful—but the dead baby, combined with Jenny’s creepy fixation on Chris and a kind of lady-doth-protest-too-much overemphasis on their happiness, make you pretty suspicious of Jenny’s reliability. Also Jenny seems to be pretty awful—critical of Kitty (who turns out in the end to be pretty awful) and especially nasty in her snobby descriptions of Margaret, a middle-to-lower-class visitor who shows up with some bad news about Chris. Which brings us to . . .
• Hilariously nasty class issues. Jenny’s hilarious nastiness as a narrator includes repeated references to Margaret’s "creased skin," "cheap stays," and "pigskin handbag." Early on, when you’re not quite sure what to make of Jenny, and not quite sure how sympathetic she’s meant to be, you’re not quite sure whether West subscribes to this same snotty upper-class attitude. By the end of the novel you don’t think she does, and it’s clear she sympathizes with Margaret and thinks Jenny and Kitty are (to different degrees) stuck-up entitled overprotected weirdoes, but! It’s always interesting when you’re reading English people talking about class, because even if they think these class distinctions are unfortunate, they really seem to believe in them in a way American writers of the same era can’t quite achieve? Like even Edith Wharton. Could she really have been as nasty about class as Rebecca West is here? Certainly Dorothy Parker couldn’t. Mom and I kept commenting that Paul would enjoy all the class nastiness, it was so over-the-top.
• Modernist or not? I’m interested in thinking more about why my professor described this novel as outside of or separate from modernism. What counts as a modernist novel? Feeling bleak about WWI? Check. Interest in psychology? Check. Experimental style? I think most people would say that West’s prose style and narrative technique is much less experimental than Woolf’s or Joyce’s—it’s a novel that can be followed even when you’re listening to it in the car with your mom in New Jersey, which may not be the case with Ulysses or To the Lighthouse (but who knows?)—but the unreliable narrator, as well as some other narrative moves that I’d like to examine more carefully in the print edition of the book, including Chris’s recollections retold by the narrator and embedded in the middle of the novel & the narrator’s strange reverie when she’s lying in the woods or whatever, suggest that West is looking for new forms, that she thinks this is a story that can’t be told using conventional narrative methods—which is a pretty modernist position. But on the other hand every interesting novel is experimental in some way—is doing something differently from its predecessors. I guess one distinction people might try to make is whether the author’s trying to make a traditional form serve a new purpose, or whether he or she is trying to scrap all traditional forms and start from scratch (and which one, really, does Pound’s “make it new” refer to? Obviously no forms get totally scrapped, but it’s interesting to think about what the referent for that “it” is—does the “it” refer to an old form that Pound wants the writer to renovate or refurbish for the future? Or to a new thing being made from scratch before our eyes?) Anyway, West’s sentences are pretty conventional narrative sentences, which makes them different from some of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness utterances and half-thoughts and associations. West’s prose style, incidentally, is pretty sweet.
• WWI from the Home Front. As I said earlier, this novel tells a story of the First World War from a very specific perspective: domestic, female, rural, upper-class. Jenny and Kitty are completely protected from the war, which means they’re pampered and sheltered, but which also means that Jenny suffers tremendously from her ignorance—she keeps having these nightmares about Chris running through the trenches or No Man’s land or something, blood and explosions everywhere. It’s not quite that lower-class women, or any women at all, would have had more information about what was happening to their husbands than Jenny and Kitty do, but there seems to be some correlation between their pampered and protected social position and their total ignorance and helplessness when it comes to Chris at the front and Chris as a wounded soldier. Kitty’s life is comfortable and nice, and so she’s not worried about Chris, and that also seems related to the fact that she doesn’t find out a long time that Chris has shellshock and is in a hospital. It turns out that she doesn’t know because Chris forgot to file an address with the War Office or something (I find this improbable—surely someone would have harassed him until he did, but maybe all those WWI bureaucrats were incompetent), but anyway, the women’s sheltered impotence seems important and interesting—especially given the fact that after the war, women had to take on a lot more responsibility in English life, not only because like half the men died, but because of this crazy emasculating shellshock phenomenon, which is What This Novel Is About.
• WWI in Real Time. Also super interesting is the fact that this novel was published in 1918, while the war was still going on. I’ve read a lot of novels about World War I written after the war, in retrospect, but it’s fascinating to read a novel that doesn’t have the benefit—or the dulling power?—of retrospect, a novel written when people were still waiting for many of these soldiers to come home, and when coming home sometimes meant only a brief respite before going back to the horrors of the front. It seems to me that WWI generated an unusual amount of real-time literature, actually—there’s this novel, and there’s all those war poets. Did other wars get this kind of up-to-the-minute literary coverage? Maybe during WW2 it was mostly movies. The Civil War had Walt Whitman. But maybe the horrors of WWI were so fresh and surprising that they kind of shocked these writers into needing to write about it immediately?
• Let's judge ladies by their maternal instinct! Here’s another novel where the most saintly, magical person you can be is a mom, and the most horrible person you can be is a mom who doesn’t care about her baby. Then there’s the loving spinster who is kind of a mom manquée—that’s a respectable kind of lady to be, too. Kitty really doesn’t seem fazed at all by her baby’s death, although she’s super upset that her husband doesn’t recognize her; anecdotal evidence that we still think this is the worst thing ever is the fact that Mom and I kept saying to each other, “Does she really not care about the baby? Maybe she’s just so deeply traumatized she can’t really talk about the baby? I hope it’s that she’s traumatized and not that she really really doesn’t care about the baby!” I kind of think that a lot of these authors who depict these monstrously bad moms aren’t necessarily criticizing the moms as much as they’re criticizing a society that creates these kind of helpless frivolous women who can’t be good moms or compassionate people (I’m thinking of Becky Sharp, who is terrible-but-amusing but also maybe doing what she thinks she needs to do to stay alive; David Copperfield’s first wife, who was pretty nice but was also incapable of being serious) but at the same time it seems kind of misogynist to write a character like Kitty: a baby-hating, husband-destroying, narcissistic, shallow, status-obsessed beauty. Like, are people really like that? And if they are like that, shouldn’t we have some sympathy for them beyond being like, “oh, society has made these terrible women whose helplessness has made them amoral”? Is pitting a good kind of woman against a bad kind of woman ever a legitimate feminist project?
• Fate! There seems to be some kind of conflict in the novel between people’s natural propensities/true selves/true destinies and the perversities of society and the war and whatever, which artificially alter these true destinies. I wonder if I can relate any of this to Hardy! I will think about it. Anyway, the worst part is where the two babies each only had half a life. They were supposed to be ONE BABY. What does it mean to have all this magic stuff in a book that also seems really interested in psychology? Maybe people who are interested in psychology are actually also very interested in magic?
• Psychology! This novel is chock full of Freudian theories about the unconscious and frustrated urges and stuff but they never mention Freud. I am curious about how much research West did about shellshock and psychoanalysis and stuff (and is the psychology she is drawing on entirely Freud? Or are there some weird other English versions of psychoanalysis floating around?) and how much of this is just fantasy. Like, when you get shellshocked can you really get a kind of amnesia that transports you to the precise year 1903? That seems bizarre. They can’t have known that much about shellshock in 1918, right? So maybe she’s just going for it. Also, hilarious that the psychologist is like, “Oh, I never thought of trying to make people happy! I just make them normal again.” Also, interesting that Margaret’s maternal/true-wifely intuition is smarter than scientific psychological training. Also, the psychologist’s explanation of Chris’s amnesia is extremely domestic and personal—he must not have been happy at home, because he forgot to register an address—and weirdly seems not to take into account the extreme trauma of the war. I guess the war trauma is the immediate cause, but he’s explaining the specific form Chris’s PTSD takes, or whatever. But it also points to the ways in which this novel is not really that much about the war, until the end, when we realize if Chris gets cured he’s going to have to go back to the front!
• PRETTY SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN:
• The tricky title! You think it's because the soldier has come back from the war, but it's also that they are trying to get his personality to come back. And then at the end when he does it's the worst! and it makes him be a soldier again! It really gets you thinking about who and what a soldier is. Is it the man who goes off to war--the man his family loves, the man who's ready to make sacrifices for his country? Is it the role of soldier itself? Does that role change the man? And this novel not only raises the question of whether being a soldier changes the man you sent away to war--a question that becomes pretty common in literature about World War I--but also the question of whether we really know who these men are when they leave, and why. Like, Chris's shell-shock is presented as something that helps him escape the literal nightmare of being a British soldier--the trenches, the gas, the tanks--but also maybe the class expectations that are also tied up in being the kind of British subject who becomes a British officer, privileging money and family expectations over some kind of authentic self, a kind of natural self that seems to emerge in Chris's madness.
• What was the right thing to do? The novel makes a pretty good case for it being a good idea to leave Chris in the happy place he’s in, but then Margaret and Jenny both independently decide they have to bring him back (through showing him the kid’s shirt, or a stuffed tiger or something). It seems inevitable, because novels don’t usually end with people choosing blissful ignorance, but why is it inevitable? Jenny’s explanation seems to be that in the end Chris will be humiliated, made a figure of public mockery by his amnesia, especially as he ages. I need to read the ending again, but I think Margaret just kind of feels like it’s wrong to withhold the truth. The Wikipedia summary of the novel is like, “they have to decide whether to let him remain safe in his amnesia or make him recover and go back to the war”—the use of the word “safe” kind of implies that it’s a Matrix-y red-pill-vs-blue-pill choice, and keeping him in “safe” ignorance is ignoble and weak and easy, but on the other hand the “safe” amnesiac self is also very clearly presented as Chris’s authentic self, one that hasn’t been tortured into neurosis by social conventions and the war. I guess it’s one of those novels that affirms the social order while regretting the social order. It is mad depressing when Kitty is all triumphant that he’s come back, but also (as I have said before) I feel bad for Kitty getting portrayed as an evil proponent of Society because it is rough that this always happens to girls in novels.

*not that the lovers + confidant system originated with the Victorians. It totally happens in Julie, for example. French people! And is a staple of the epistolary novel in general, but usually in those the dude has a confidant too, and there is more sex. So by the 19^th century the extramarital sex dropped out, as well as the male confidant?

Jude by the Pool

Here are some notes about Jude the Obscure, which maybe someday I will clean up and make into a nice neat blog post! I went to a pool party when I was about halfway through Jude, so I read the most horrifying famously horrifying part while surrounded by people in swimsuits drinking Mike's Hard Limeade. Also beforehand we were in the pool and I was like, "What is wrong with Jude and Sue? Why can't they just be conventional and get married? It would solve everything" and they were like, "Hardy would not agree with you!" and also I was like, "this is so lame" and they were like, "It's going to get a lot, lot, lot worse" and they were right.

• history all ground up and redistributed, or completely ignored: Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood . . . The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years. 
• What is a place? Christminster is neither its architecture, nor its itinerant population of students. Working people? Deep-earth history? "The floating population of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at all."
• fate and cursed families and prophecies. Jude, my child, don't you ever marry. 'Tisn't for the Fawleys to take that step any more.
• Heredity: Can you take a kid and raise it up differently? Sue on Father Time: "The beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom."
• And then: Arabella's child killing mine was a judgement—the right slaying the wrong.
• girls get you good if they marry em. and boys get you good if you can't get em to marry you. Under the hedge which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining.
• Jude loves animals. The birds when he's feeding them; the pig. Arabella hatching that egg in her boobs: she's more in touch with the natural world than Sue, but she also is fine with killing the pig.
• Studying! Jude's initial idea that once you have a grammar you just learn some magic rules for turning everything into Latin; Christminster as a magical city; later disillusionment, but he's also into it and works hard. 
• Class location and fate. "He feared that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial product of civilization." I kind of expect Hardy to have some kind of specific, prescriptive, progressive message, and when he doesn't I'm confused. But I'm especially confused about Jude and his scholarship: does Hardy think he was made to be a scholar, but he just didn't have the right opportunities? Or does he agree with that dean who told Jude to give up and do something more class-appropriate? I guess he's just showing us that sometimes you're made for something that isn't appropriate to the circumstances of your birth, and there's nothing you can do about it.
• On the artificiality of society, Sue says ""I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, "that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies…"
• Jude on his own failure: whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays—I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes.
• Nature and society. Are they in conflict or the same? Phillotson says “"Yes," said Phillotson, with biting sadness. "Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would!"”
• Kindness. Can you be kind? Not really! Phillotson tries to and is ruined. Can’t be kind to the pig, etc. Nature red in tooth and claw.
• Classical vs Christian scholarship. Kind of seems to be making the point that the whole system of education is weird--if you're meant to be a thinker, that doesn't mean you're meant to be a minister, necessarily. See Angel Clare in Tess as well. Also, Sue and her classical figures; Sue's comment that "intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The mediævalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go."
• Jude as scholar and stonemason: "The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally, less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually executed those forms." He's a new kind of scholar, potentially. There's also this all-roundedness to Jude's scholarship, which is similar to his well-rounded skills as a country stonemason--he doesn't have to specialize.
• Jobs for women. You do a job where you can help your husband; compare to my thoughts about how you marry your husband for his job. Jude becoming a pig farmer because Arabella can help with that; Sue learning to help with the gravestones: " it was the only arrangement under which Sue, who particularly wished to be no burden on him, could render any assistance." Also the gingerbread-selling and the model of the cathedral they make together.
• Sue sounding like Matthew Arnold: "I fancy we have had enough of Jerusalem," she said, "considering we are not descended from the Jews. There was nothing first-rate about the place, or people, after all—as there was about Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and other old cities."
• Jude and Ruskin: "They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray"; Jude as out of touch: "He did not at that time see that mediævalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to him." How serious is Hardy here? Morris would super disagree with him. Are the other developments some crappy modernism that Morris would hate? Does Hardy hate it? Darkling thrush!
• See doctor on modern children: “"No," said Jude. "It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.
• Sue is anti-medievalist: ""Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I'd rather sit in the railway station," she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. "That's the centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!" "How modern you are!""; "Wardour is Gothic ruins—and I hate Gothic!"
• Arabella as one of those bad sexy girls I'm sympathetic with. I think Hardy is a little bit sympathetic with the bad sexy girls, too--they're a product of their culture, and it's hard to negotiate your healthy sexual urges with Christian morality and a Victorian double standard, so they do what they can, but doing what you can ends up ruining ambitious young men like Jude! Hardy seems to prefer people who have some kind of code of honor, but since he's constantly showing us that it's impossible to have a consistent code of honor when you're living within contradictory systems, it seems like it's better to kind of compromise, like Arabella does! Also her weird adaptability to the modern world: the electro-plated bar, her knowledge of spirits. If Jude and Sue could be more like Arabella everything would be better for them, I say.
• The old lady: Matrimony have growed to be that serious in these days that one really do feel afeard to move in it at all. In my time we took it more careless; and I don't know that we was any the worse for it!
• The wrong grounds for marriage: "Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable." This sounds like Hardy, but Dickens and Patmore would agree about this, too. They just wouldn't agree about all the craziness that follows.
• Significant objects: the shocking statues Sue buys; her "women's clothes, sexless cloth and linen";the veil Jude buys for Sue; Sue’s “adulterous” nightgown she purchased to please Jude, which she replaces with a plainer one when she returns to Phillotson. Jude’s body like marble among the marble-dusted classical books in his room: 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 neighbouring shelf, and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted with, roughened with stone-dust where he had been in the habit of catching them up for a few minutes between his labours, seemed to pale to a sickly cast at the sounds.
•  
• Sue's sexual coldness as sexual scandal: "My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them—one or two of them particularly—almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel—to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man—no man short of a sensual savage—will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him." Her friend from Christminster surprised that she won't sleep with him (their relationship is very Dorothy Vane with her first lover in some respects, but not others: "He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. ")
• Sue's sexuality (and sex, passion, and art): 
• "People say I must be cold-natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." 
• Everyone saying Sue has no body, is more like a spirit. Sue trying to bring her “body into complete subjection” but old lady says she’s more like a sperrit. For Sue complete subjection is allowing people to have sex with her.
• women want to be desired, rather than experiencing straight-ahead desire (see Patmore?): But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all." Also related to Sue marrying Jude because of her own sexual jealousy of Arabella, rather than an uncomplicated sexual desire of her own?
• Sue being able to "get over the sense of . . . sex," which Jude can't do. His desire for Sue is there, and Sue kind of wants to be in a friendly intellectual relationship without desire.
• Sue as a "phantasmal, bodiless creature" who can resist natural forces (according to Jude)
• Jude's intellectual ambitions often ruined by sex: "Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—towards apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?""
• Also Sue's "fastidiousness" and desire for sexual freedom: "What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!"
• Sue as a kind of mentor for Jude but maybe only because this upper-class guy was a mentor for her. Women having more class mobility in a certain way, through sex?
• Sue’s exceptionality: That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of, if they could have known you—should degrade herself like this!
• The several marriages in the novel are like Four Weddings and a Funeral!
• Questions throughout Hardy of who is your true spouse: Is it sex, love, companionship, or legal marriage? "His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney husband till afterwards." Then Sue on how sacred is confidentiality between husband and wife: "If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known—which it seems to be—why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it hurts and grieves him or her?""
• "But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this world? Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!" "But not Heaven's. Another was made for me there, and ratified eternally in the church at Melchester."
• "Yes I must—I am his already!" "Pshoo! You be t' other man's. If you didn't like to commit yourselves to the binding vow again, just at first, 'twas all the more credit to your consciences, considering your reasons, and you med ha' lived on, and made it all right at last. After all, it concerned nobody but your own two selves
• And what seems lawful can be unlawful, or from unlawful motives; Phillotson saying “He did not care to admit clearly that his taking Sue to him again had at bottom nothing to do with repentance of letting her go, but was, primarily, a human instinct flying in the face of custom and profession”; the idea that Sue doesn’t think the divorce was legit; Phillotson doesn’t think their marriage or reunion is legit. Legitimacy in this novel keeps switching back and forth.
• Proof of marriage being that you don’t get along: had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and ultimately flinging a shoe at his head, he recognized the note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more.
• Weird gaps in narrative, especially the one in which Jude and Sue may or may not have gotten married (and certainly have decided to live together as married and have kids, which they hadn’t decided on beforehand.) Our ignorance about their marriage I guess puts us in the place of their neighbors—but also kind of implies their own doubts about whether it’s a real marriage or not. If they feel married, maybe they are married? And maybe not!
• Sue’s explanation: Sue hesitated; and then impulsively told the woman that her husband and herself had each been unhappy in their first marriages, after which, terrified at the thought of a second irrevocable union, and lest the conditions of the contract should kill their love, yet wishing to be together, they had literally not found the courage to repeat it, though they had attempted it two or three times. Therefore, though in her own sense of the words she was a married woman, in the landlady's sense she was not.
• Sue and Jude switching places re: religious doctrine. Sort of happens in Tess, too, right?
• I have sometimes thought, since your marrying Phillotson because of a stupid scandal, that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!"(oh the scandal was her staying out all night with Jude that one time)
• "And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think. Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages it gains them sometimes—a dignity and an advantage that I am quite willing to do without."
• One thing troubled him more than any other; that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue's.
• What I can't understand in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
•  Progress.
• Hope for progress: "Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred, years the descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we.
• Who’s to blame/feminism: "Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That's what some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him."
• Anti-progress of Father Time.
• Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!"
• Progress as something that people can’t effect. But change may come naturally or through some weird fate.
• But I felt I could do one thing if I had the opportunity. I could accumulate ideas, and impart them to others. I wonder if the founders had such as I in their minds—a fellow good for nothing else but that particular thing? … I hear that soon there is going to be a better chance for such helpless students as I was.
• As for Sue and me when we were at our own best, long ago—when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless—the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us. And so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her, and recklessness and ruin on me!
• The narrator: The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given. That the twain were happy—between their times of sadness—was indubitable. And when the unexpected apparition of Jude's child in the house had shown itself to be no such disturbing event as it had looked, but one that brought into their lives a new and tender interest of an ennobling and unselfish kind, it rather helped than injured their happiness.
• Horrible children stuff
• The terrible conversation with Father Time: "It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?" "It would almost, dear." "'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a good lodging?" "Well—people do object to children sometimes." "Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?" "Oh—because it is a law of nature." "But we don't ask to be born?" "No indeed." . . . "I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!"
• Hardy’s dry, restrained narrative: Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene he let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary handling seemed to say that they were dead.
• Moreover a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written, in the boy's hand, with the bit of lead pencil that he carried:   Done because we are too menny.
• Doctor’s crazy diagnosis of the children as a herald of a universal wish not to live. Science? Heredity? Fate? WHAT.
• Sue’s reasoning: It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn't bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn't truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely. Half-truths as a great danger—see Tess?