Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (65 page)

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(p. 39) “Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I’ll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased”: Jude is echoing a passage from the Bible, Matthew 3:17: “And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This is one of several places in the novel where Hardy draws a parallel between Jude and Christ, though Jude is imagining himself as the son not of God the Father but of Christminster University, his future “Alma Mater.”

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(p. 39) a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig: The reference is to the pig’s penis, or pizzle. In the edition of Jude the Obscure that was serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine as The Simpletons and Hearts Insurgent, Hardy was forced to change this phrase to “piece of flesh, portion of a recently killed pig.” The more explicit version is laden with symbolism: Jude is suddenly hit unawares by a sexual part, or sexuality itself However, it is important to note that the barrow pig is a castrated boar and would have no scrotum, so the penis cannot fulfill its sexual function. Therefore, flinging the penis is more of a challenge than an act of sexual suggestiveness.

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(p. 47) the picture of Samson and Delilah: The relevance of Samson and Delilah to Jude and Arabella is obvious, for in the Bible, Judges 16, Delilah is responsible for Samson’s loss of power. There’s another hint of the biblical story in the fact that, while Delilah betrays Samson after making him drunk, Arabella suggests that Jude order beer.

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(p. 56) an egg―a cochin’s egg: Arabella is flirtatiously keeping the chicken egg between her breasts to hatch it; the game in which she engages Jude leads to their first sexual encounter. The serialized magazine edition of the novel censored sexual references, and in it the object Arabella conceals in her dress is a letter in which, she tells Jude, she is accepting a proposal of marriage, motivating him to act. In the uncensored version, Arabella’s story about hatching an egg between her breasts better reflects Hardy’s interest in the ways of the natural world, as examined by Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century naturalist who promoted the idea of natural selection and adaptation.

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(p. 58) she met the itinerant Vilbert.... she began telling him of her experiences: Vilbert is the quack doctor who, we learned on page 28, sells “female pills” (probably ones that induce abortion) as well as other dubious cures for such ailments as asthma and digestive disorders. Arabella may be consulting with Vilbert about a pregnancy, and after seeing him she is less gloomy, as if her dissatisfaction with Jude’s failure to propose marriage is resolved by the consultation.

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(p. 59) who had drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done: This obvious reference to Jude and Arabella’s premarital sexual relationship was, at the time the novel was published, shockingly direct.

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(p. 5 9) the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as ... during the few preceding weeks: The irony here is pointed. By echoing the language of the Anglican Church’s marriage service, in which the couple promises to live, love, and honor each other “till death us do part,” Hardy is casting strong doubt on the possibility of living up to the vow.

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(p. 63) he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him ... for the rest of a lifetime: Jude realizes Arabella has trapped him into marrying her and compares marriage literally to being caught in a gin, or trap. Hardy uses the image again later in the novel when Jude and Sue listen to a rabbit squeal as it is caught in a trap (see p. 220).

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(p. 79) gothic free-stone work for the restoration of churches: Jude has been trained as a restorer of stone work used in Gothic Revival buildings, a style derived from medieval architecture. However, the Gothic Revival style was just going out of fashion at this time. So, at the cusp of a new age, Jude is trained to restore a brand of architecture that is not only a reprisal of an earlier style but is itself going out of style. The question of whether Jude was born fifty years too soon, which he eventually believes, or fifty years too late is an ongoing concern of the novel.

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(p. 81) a bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes had sounded: The Tom Tower bell at Christ Church College in Oxford University tolls 101 times when the college gates are closed just past nine in the evening. The bell symbolically marks Jude’s exclusion from these venerable walls: As an outsider he counts the tolls and thinks he has miscounted because of the odd number.

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(p. 82) eulogist of Shakespeare ... still among us: The “eulogist of Shakespeare” is English playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637); “him who has recently passed into silence” is English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889); “one of the tribe who is still among us” is English poet A. C. Swinburne (1837-1909).

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(p. 82) the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist: Leaders of the nineteenth-century Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement—respectively, John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey. The movement attempted to reform the Anglican Church by returning it to its pre-Reformation roots and by creating distance theologically and liturgically between the Anglican Church and newer, competing Protestant sects such as Methodism.

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(p. 98) the Venus and the Apollo—the largest figures on the tray: Sue purchases reproductions of classical statuary. She has the choice of Venus, Diana, Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars—respectively, the goddesses and gods of love, chastity, light or rationality, revelry, and war. In choosing large statues of Venus and Apollo, Sue is aligning herself with classical values rather than Christian ones and showing that she respects love and reason.

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(p. 99) “St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen”: When Sue returns to Christminster she must hide the Venus and Apollo statues from her pious landlady. Since her room is already bedecked with Christian statuary, she lies and says the statues are of Saints Peter and Mary Magdalen, figures of Christian iconography.

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(p. 100) “Kai heis Kurios Iesous ... di autou!”: Jude is repeating, from the Greek New Testament, lines from 1 Corinthians 8:6. The translation is: “But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.” It’s not clear whether the fervent pleasure Jude takes in the lines derives from the religious content or the sound of the Greek.

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(p. 102) “it is not altogether an erotolepsy that is the matter with me.... it is partly a wish for intellectual sympathy, and a craving for loving-kindness in my solitude”: Hardy created the term “erotolepsy,” and it literally means “love seizure.” He uses the term to distinguish the emotions Jude is having for Sue as not physical or erotic, but rather the result of a “craving for loving-kindness,” which imbues love with kindness. Hardy uses the term “loving-kindness” again when Phillotson allows Sue to return to him after she abandons him (see p. 368).

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(p. 103) the spot of the Martyrdoms: The reference is to Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer; forces loyal to the Roman Catholic Queen Mary burned them at the stake in the mid-sixteenth century for their Anglican beliefs.

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(p. 116) “‘the City of Light’” ... “It is a unique centre of thought and religion―the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country”: Jude idealized Christminster as the “city of light” when he was a young boy (see p. 26) and the fact that he still thinks of it as a “unique center of thought and religion” suggests that he has not yet become embittered. However, this scene prepares us for the rejection he receives from the master of Biblioll College later in the chapter.

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(p. 122) “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you”: Jude writes this passage from the Bible, Job 12:3, on the wall of Biblioll College with stonemason’s chalk, a tool from the sphere and trade in which a college master has advised him to remain (see p. 121). Job figures throughout the novel, and it is significant that here Jude uses a relevant passage from Job to deface the walls of the college that keeps him out because of his class status. Passages like these render the novel in part a social critique.

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(p. 123) two devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates: Undergraduates were required to wear their academic gowns after dark so police could identify them as students, but the “devil-may-care young men” have removed their gowns to travel incognito to an unsavory place. The wearing of academic gowns gave rise to the expression “town and gown,” still in use today to describe the dichotomy between ordinary citizens and students.

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(p. 134) There was a Theological College at Melchester: In Hardy’s fictional world, Melchester corresponds to Sahsbury, a cathedral city in the south of England. Sue is going to enter a training college there to prepare to become a teacher, just as Hardy’s sisters had trained at the Salisbury school. Sue proposes that Jude switch his study from classics and enter the theological college at Melchester, a change that would mean he would become a preacher rather than a scholar. Hardy introduces the notion in this chapter’s first line: “It was a new idea—the ecclesiastical and altruistic life as distinct from the intellectual and emulative life.”

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(p. 143) “Be you a married couple?”: This indelicate question brings to the surface the changing nature of Sue and Jude’s feelings, even though their relationship remains chaste. The seeming impropriety of the outing prompts Sue’s punishment by the Training College in the next chapter, and her subsequent flight and expulsion. The serialized edition of the novel omitted the question.

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(p. 156) “You are in the Tractarian stage”: Sue is being flippant here, as the narrative explains, because she has revealed her strongly positive feelings for Jude, calling him “good and dear.” The Tractarian Movement, also known as the Oxford Movement, was powerful in England in the 1830s through the mid-1840s. The movement was an attempt to reform the Anglican Church by returning it to its pre-Reformation roots and to create distance between the Anglican Church and newer Protestant sects. Detractors of the movement considered it to be too close to Roman Catholicism, and their fears were confirmed when the movement’s leader, John Newman, converted to that religion. Jude makes references to Newman, as well as to its other main figures, Edward Pusey and John Keble, throughout the novel.

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(p. 165) labour for a National schoolmaster: A national schoolmaster was in charge of one of the schools established in the early nineteenth century to promote the education of the poor.

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(p. 188) “we shall be quite free to act as we choose”: Arabella is arranging the situation so she and Jude will spend the night together in a hotel in Aldbrickham and return to their sexual relationship. In the serialized version of the novel Hardy was much more circumspect about this reference to their sexual encounter; in that version, Arabella simply proposes that she and Jude meet again the next day.

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. (p. 188) half-hour’s journey to Aldbrickham: The fictional Aldbrickham corresponds to the city of Reading.

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(p. 195) Sebastiano’s Lazarus: The reference is to The Raising of Lazarus, an altar-piece by the sixteenth-century Italian painter Sebastiano del Piombo. The work was the first to enter the collections of the National Gallery in London, where Hardy saw and admired it.

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(p. 205) Shaston, the ancient British Palladour: Hardy is using fictitious names for Shaftesbury, a pretty village in the county of Dorset, just west of Salisbury.

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(p. 224) “or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?”: Jude is overtly articulating one of the larger implied questions of the novel: Does nature lay a trap—“gins and springes”—for people through the sexual instinct? The theme of sexuality and marriage as a gin, or trap, is repeated on several occasions. For a discussion of this and other Schopenhauerian themes articulated in the novel, see the Introduction, page xxix].

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(p. 228) made a little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet afforded: Sue carves out a room in which she can have some autonomy from her husband and rigs it with a string to alert her to her “nest” being disturbed. Her “nest” brings to mind the animal world.

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(p. 229) “for a man and woman to live on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery” : At the time Hardy wrote Jude, Sue’s claim would have been scandalous. In the serialized edition of the novel he substituted “wrong-doing” for adultery

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(p. 244) “Aldbrickham is a much bigger town―sixty or seventy thousand inhabitants—and nobody knows anything about us there”: Jude intends to take Sue to the same place where he had his sexual encounter with Arabella. His intentions are to shield her from exposure, though he also assumes, wrongly, that they will share a single room—that is, that their relationship will become sexual.

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(p. 256) “Where are her lover and she living?”: This is another example of the more explicit language that Hardy used when Jude appeared as a book. In the serialized edition he substituted the word “cousin” or “guardian” for lover; in the serial version he also had Jude and Sue live in rooms next to one another, rather than together.