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.
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• 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?