Jude, Sue and ‘Social Moulds’

Abstract

Beneath Sue’s window, unable to get at her, stands Jude, perpetual supplicant of the unattainable. This often-to-be repeated tableau vivant, in which Jude is to remain shut out, and Sue irrevocably shut away, seems at first glance, perhaps, to echo George Eliot’s ‘troubadour strains’. Hardy’s Lady of Shalott is subject to an analysis more troubled and searching, however, than is the inaccessible lady of Will Ladislaw’s (and George Eliot’s) romantic imaginings. The emblematic lady is, of course, a recurring figure in Hardy’s novels and in his poems — an expression of complex, compelling feelings about the nature of ‘womankind’.¹

‘ … I can talk to you better like this than when you were inside.… It was so kind and tender of you to give half a day’s work to come to see me! … You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And Sometimes you are St Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. O my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!’

Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had feared at close quarters. ‘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.…’

(Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, pp. 265–6)