Showing posts with label Thomas Hardy. Show all posts

Thursday, September 7, 2023

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy [A Review]

BIOGRAPHY

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

The 100 best novels / No 29 / Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

Jude the Obscure was Thomas Hardy’s final novel. In it you will find all of Hardy’s trademarks – an intelligent, frustrated heroine; encroaching modernity and tragedy in love. Jude, though, is a far darker and more provocative novel from Hardy, inviting scandal for its attacks on social and religious conventions.

BIOGRAPHY

Judith the Obscure

Thomas Hardy, we are told, gained inspiration for his novels from stories in his local paper. So what tales might he have spun from the pages of today's Dorset Echo? By John Mullan

John Mullan
Wednesday 6 August 2003

Where can a writer go for a good story? Shakespeare went to whatever he last read; Thomas Hardy seems to have gone to his local newspaper - the Dorset County Chronicle. In a notebook held by the Dorset county museum in Dorchester, soon to be published, he transcribed dozens of articles under the heading "Facts from Newspapers, Histories, Biographies and Other Chronicles". Among these is the original source of the incident in Tess of the d'Urbevilles when Tess's horse, Prince, is killed in a collision with a mail coach, ruining her family's fledgling business. Another article, against which Hardy has written "Used in The Mayor of Casterbridge", is the basis for Michael Henchard's "sale" of his wife and child to a sailor near the beginning of that novel.

Book Review 029 / Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy

1895

[A Review]

BIOGRAPHY

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 29 / Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

Jason Fernandes

The Curious Symbolism of Dogs in Literature and Myth

Perhaps the two most important and prominent qualities which dogs have symbolised in literature and myth down the ages are vigilance and loyalty. However, there are also some curious and lesser-known aspects of dog-symbolism which are worth probing; we’ll get to these in time. As the vast and informative The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (Penguin dictionaries) notes, the symbolism of the dog in different cultures is ‘extremely complex’, with many religions and myths linking the dog to death, hell, and the Underworld.

Ten of the best / Cathedrals in literature

Ten of the best

Cathedrals in literature

John Mullan
Monday 7 November 2011

Salisbury resident Golding imagined the building of the cathedral whose spire towers over the city. Ignoring the warnings of others, the obsessive Dean Jocelin drives the work on, convinced that an angel is prompting him. As he becomes madder, the miraculous building takes shape out of the dust and chaos.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Dickens's last novel is set in the precincts of the cathedral of Cloisterham. "… a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath." Murderous passions are nursed in the shadow of the great cathedral.

Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

The cathedral is the central character in Hugo's huge historical novel. All his characters gravitate to it. Quasimodo is the bell-ringer and swings down on a rope from the towers of the Cathedral to rescue the Gypsy girl Esmerelda from the gallows. They seek sanctuary in the great church, but violence and death pursue them there.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Housewife Emma Bovary has an assignation with student Léon Dupuis in Rouen cathedral. "In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating …" For Léon, the religious solemnity is fitting: he is a devotee of love. Emma arrives, tries to pray, but is overwhelmed by "the tumult of her heart".

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

The clergymen of Barchester find the pursuit of God's purposes is an often ignoble business. The unworldly Septimus Harding, precentor at the great cathedral, is drawn into a furious dispute about church corruption, his only solace being the sublime sound of the cathedral choir as its songs ascend to heaven.

Old St Paul's by Harrison Ainsworth

Ainsworth's best-selling Victorian romance is set in the 1660s. During the great plague, the old cathedral becomes a hospital. At the climax, the great, dilapidated old building burns down, trapping two of the novel's villains in its vaults where they are drowned in molten lead.

The Choir by Joanna Trollope

Trollope's tale of submerged provincial passions is set in the cathedral city of Aldminster, where the cathedral itself is falling down and the costs of repairs seem likely to be met by abolishing the costly boys' choir. From the worldly dean to the idealistic choirmaster, everybody wants the best for the cathedral, the good of which becomes the justification for whatever they want to do.

"The Cathedral" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke wrote a sequence of six poems inspired by a visit to Chartres cathedral with the sculptor Rodin. In the second, the poet muses on what the influence is of this huge tracery of stone, overwhelming rather than elevating. "And in the towers' quelled ascent, / and sudden spurn of skies, sat Death".

"A Cathedral Facade at Midnight" by Thomas Hardy

The poem recalls a night walk in the cathedral close at Salisbury, where Hardy took the movement of light across the building as a metaphor of ancient belief in the light of modern unbelief. The facade is thick with "the pious figures" of saints and clerics, holy men and women seen "Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress / Of Reason's movement, making meaningless".

The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Huysmans has his alter ego, Durtal, who has converted to Catholicism, explore the elaborate symbolism he discovers in stone in the great gothic edifice of Chartres cathedral. An apparent rejection of modernity, it was a bestseller.

THE GUARDIAN

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Friday, December 4, 2020

Look, don't touch / What great literature can teach us about love with no contact

‘She just wants to pick up his hand’ … Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in the TV adaptation of Normal People.

Look, don't touch: what great literature can teach us about love with no contact

With our increased physical distance from each other, novels about forbidden touch and longing are more seductive than ever

Joanna Briscoe
Fri 22 May 2020 11.00 BST

n our time of social distancing, the desire for physical contact has never been so intense. And yet we are untouchable. This experience has had its more conspicuous consequences, such as the government scientist Neil Ferguson breaking his own rules to meet his lover during lockdown. This notion of forbidden touch, unique and even shocking as it may be to us, has a multitude of echoes in literature. Cultural constraints and taboos on touch are reflected, overturned or used for dramatic purposes by writers throughout history, and our own bookshelves are newly rich with the comfort of identification. Who would have ever guessed that the plague-ridden, the apocalyptic or the edicts of Victorian England would have quite such resonance?

Ten of the best / Mirrors in literature

Ten of the best

Mirrors in literature

John Mullan looks in the glass

John Mullan

Saturdad 30 October 2010

Richard II, by William Shakespeare

A weak king but a consummate drama queen, Richard II sends for a looking glass when he finds himself about to be deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. "Give me the glass, and therein will I read. / No deeper wrinkles yet?" Pronouncing his regal glory "brittle", he smashes the mirror on the ground, "For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers."

"Snow White", by the Brothers Grimm

Those famous lines addressed by the evil, vain queen to her magic mirror were originally in German: "Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?" "You are," is always the mirror's answer, until one day the mirror tells her that her beauty has been surpassed by that of her step-daughter, Snow White . . .

"The Lady of Shalott", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The eponymous lady is condemned to watch the world indirectly, via a mirror that exhibits to her the shifting scenes of Camelot. "A curse is on her" if she look directly from her casement. But then Sir Lancelot rides by, and she cannot resist a gander. Oh dear. "The mirror crack'd from side to side; / 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of Shalott."

Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

Alice is playing with her kittens in front of a large mirror. "How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?" she asks. Before you know it, she is up on the mantelpiece. "Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through."

Dracula, by Bram Stoker A mirror shows Jonathan Harker that he really is in a fix. "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!" Gulp!

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Dorian is in the habit of taking a mirror up to the locked room containing his portrait and comparing his reflection with the increasingly horrid image on the canvas. When he realises what a monster he has become, he becomes another mirror-smasher. "He loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel."

"I Look into My Glass", by Thomas Hardy

For the ageing poet, a mirror is a cruel thing. "I look into my glass, / And view my wasting skin, / And say, 'Would God it came to pass / My heart had shrunk as thin!'"Hardy sees his wasting frame but feels the old "throbbings of noontide".

"Mirror", by Sylvia Plath

Plath finds a mirror thoroughly uncanny. "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike." A woman gazes intro this glass, which is as unpitying as Hardy's. "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish".

"The Mirrror", by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon's poem in memory of his father imagines another malign mirror, taking his father's "breath away" when he took it down from the wall. Now the dead man's life has gone into the glass. "When I took hold of the mirror / I had a fright. I imagined him breathing through it." Father and son seem to replace the mirror together.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

The most overtly supernatural event in Waters's novel involves a mirror. Rod, heir to spooky Hundreds Hall, tells the narrator that he has just seen a mirror on a stand walk its way across his bedroom. Is he cracking up? Or is there a poltergeist? Hauntingly (in every sense) the novel ends with the narrator catching his own reflection in a mirror.

THE GUARDIAN

Monday, April 7, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 29 / Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

The 100 best novels: No 29 – Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

BIOGRAPHY

Hardy exposed his deepest feelings in this bleak, angry novel and, stung by the hostile response, he never wrote another

Robert McCrum
Monday 7 April 2014

he publication of Jude the Obscure is both an end and a beginning. In hindsight, it signals the transition to a modern literary sensibility while also painting a picture of a profoundly Victorian rural society. It was another kind of turning-point, too, because Thomas Hardy, shaken by the hostility aroused by the novel dubbed "Jude the Obscene", would never write fiction again. And it was a new beginning because henceforth he would become one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century.

When the novel opens, we seem to be in Hardy's Wessex, the world of Far From the Madding Crowd or Tess of the d'Urbervilles. But Jude Fawley, who talks to the crows he is supposed to be scaring away, is a modern English boy, with his eye on Christminster (Oxford). He wants an education. With brilliant economy, Hardy opens up three themes: the struggle of the poor and disadvantaged to make their way in a bourgeois world; the tyranny of marriage in the lives of women oppressed by a patriarchal society; and the stranglehold on English life inflicted by an established church, defensively circling its wagons in the aftermath of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

These themes lie below the waterline, but they are perhaps the more menacing for being submerged. As the untutored folkteller of "Wessex", Hardy narrates Jude's tragedy inside-out through a sequence of failed relationships – with Arabella, his wife; with Sue Bridehead, his cousin and true love; and even with himself. The heart of the story will examine the humiliation of Jude's failure as a social animal, a profound and crippling obscurity ending in death.

The strangest and most moving moments in a novel many readers find harrowingly bleak concern Jude's thwarted love for Sue, their two children perforce born out of wedlock, and the belated appearance in their midst of "Little Father Time", the son that Jude has had with Arabella. Hardy's brilliant portrait of a disturbed teenager tearing a family apart culminates in the famous scene in which, having murdered his half-siblings, the boy hangs himself with the note "Done because we are too menny".

Jude the Obscure is an angry book, and a deeply radical one. To write it, Hardy went further into himself than ever before, exposed his deepest feelings and was creatively wounded by the hostility of the response to what one critic called "the most indecent book ever written".

A note on the text

The text of Hardy's last novel went through at least three stages of evolution, and became every bit as troubled as its subsequent publishing history.

The first version appeared as a serialin Harper's New Monthly Magazinefrom December 1894 to November 1895, under the title The Simpletons, subsequently altered to Hearts Insurgent. Many of the changes to a much-edited text were dictated by concerns about public taste, for instance Jude (originally Jack) and Sue Bridehead never become lovers, and Arabella Donn does not seduce Jude.

Next came the first edition in volume form in 1895 published by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co, as part of a complete set of Hardy's fiction, the Wessex novels. This version continued the bowdlerising of all references to sex and religion begun at the serial stage. This first edition would eventually become replaced in 1912 by the third, and now definitive, version of the novel, published by his principal publisher, Macmillan.

That was not the end of the matter. Hardy continued to tinker with the text for the rest of his life. There's a copy in the Dorset County museum which contains many of Hardy's second and third thoughts about the 1912 edition. Plainly the furore aroused by first publication, in which the bishop of Wakefield was said to have burned his copy of the book, affected him deeply.