Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy :-
Thomas Hardy's last finished novel, Jude the Obscure, is widely considered to be his best. Hardy explore allthe big issues : class, faith, love, hope. In the process, this seemingly simple story of a doomed love affair transcends the Victorian era, in which it is set, making it a timeless classic, a universal tale of longing and despair.
Hardy's strongest point in Jude the Obscure is his female character development. Sue Bridehead and Arabella Donn are completely rounded individuals. It is this that gives the novel its realistic feel as well as a certain depth.
Sue Bridehead :-
In 'Jude the Obscure', a novel in which skilful characterization eventually wins the day over laborious editorializing, Thomas Hardy comes close to genius in the portrayal of Sue Bridehead. Sue was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice int housands every year, the liberated woman of the feminist movement, who defies social norms. She was in other words, 'The new woman'. As Dr. Noorul Hasan observes." In her conscious personality Sue is a product of new conditions 'the slight pale' bachelor girl – the intellectualized, emancipate bundle of nerves that just modern conditions were producing. Her representative role as the new woman consists not just in her sexual independence and fickleness, but in her doctrinal justification of a nomadic and preferably a sexual state of
being."1
Sue is among those women characters of Thomas Hardy whom he has drawn with attentive care and fascination. She can be ranked with Tess and such women characters in whose portrait Hardy's imagination finds its full play. "The character of Sue, at first sight, one of the most innovators aspects of the book, is in some respects only a more extreme, much franker treatment of a type Hardy had portrayed many times before."2
Sue emerges as a more important character even than the hero of the novel Jude, because she is stronger, more complex and more significant. In 'Jude the Obscure, Hardy shows more insight into the female heart than he had ever shown before. In one sense nothing could be finer than the way Hardy had delineated Tess, yet Sue is by far the more complex psychological invention. Sue is a woman of 'tight strained nerves’, an epicure of emotions' and while she hates the Gothic and is inclined to Greek joyousness she constitutionally shrinks from physical contacts.
Sue's representative character as the 'New Woman' is to be found in her two great reservations around which the plot of the novel revolves – first, her denial of sex and second, her strong misgivings sexual intercourse with him. She marries Phillotson but she refuses to have sexual intercourse with him. She is a rebel. She does not surrender her body to her husband, desserts him and goes to live with her lover – Jude , In fact, when she apprehends that he wants to have sex with her. she leaps out of the bedroom window. She says to Phillotson.
Arabella Donn :-
Jude’s first wife, a vain, sensual woman who is the daughter of a pig farmer. She decides to marry Jude and so tricks him into marrying her by pretending to be pregnant. Arabella sees marriage as a kind of entrapment and as a source of financial security, and she uses whatever means necessary to get what she wants. After Jude fails to provide for her, Arabella goes to Australia and takes a new husband there. She is often contrasted with the pure, intellectual Sue, as Arabella is associated with alcohol and sexual pleasure. When she wants Jude back she gets him drunk and forces him to marry her, and when he dies (or even just before) she immediately starts seeking a new husband.
And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.
References :-
Media.neliti.com
https://www.litcharts.com
Word count :- 702
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