Monday, April 26, 2004
Summaries of some articles
For those working on Jude the Obscure, here are the summaries I wrote for the articles I... summarized. I thought it might be helpful if we post them, so that we can get an idea of what's out there that we might not have read because the title didn't convey it. If you want to use any of the articles I've written on, talk to me/email me and we can do some photocopying stuff one way or another.
Doheny, John R. “Characterization in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: The Function of
Arabella.” Reading Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 57-82
Doheny begins with the idea that “by its very nature, the novel is too large and contains too much life, to function effectively as polemic.” He proposes that Hardy “is so thoroughly engaged with his characters as representations of people, [that] his characters overcome his engagement, and…take on a life of their own” in Jude the Obscure. In the rest of his essay, he discusses specifically the characterization of Arabella in the novel, and how she functions to illuminate the attitudes of both Jude and Hardy. Interestingly, he convincingly portrays Arabella as something of a wronged possible protagonist, claiming that Jude is “a desperate snob who insists that Arabella is beneath him in sensitivity, intelligence, and sophistication”. He seems at many points to feel that the character of Jude himself is unworthy of attention, and that the novel ought to have focused on the more practical and worldly Arabella.
But though I expected Doheny to try to establish a complex characterization for Arabella, based on his grandiose opening ideas about the nature of novels, he never does so in this article. Instead, he eventually admits that “Arabella is a developed but comparatively uncomplicated character”. I think that this essay can be very useful in my paper because of the issues of development and complication of characterization that it raises, especially since, though Doheny would clearly very much like to, he is unable to actually propose Arabella as a fully realized female character.
Dutta, Shanta. “Sue’s “Obscure” Sisters”. Thomas Hardy Journal 12 (1996) 60-71.
In this essay, Shanta Dutta compares Hardy to Olive Schreiner, who wrote The Story of an African Farm, and George Egerton (penname of Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), with whom Hardy apparently had direct correspondence as he was finishing Jude. Dutta discusses the ways in which all three authors wrote about the “New Woman”, focusing particularly on the similarities of the heroine’s feelings about love, sex and the institution of marriage. The article never makes a strong argument, but rather makes observations and shows that Hardy may have been influenced by the two female authors, since he owned a book by the one and corresponded through letters with the other.
Of greatest interest to me was a short comparison in which Dutta observes that “[o]ne image common to [all three authors] is that of the captive/caged bird which represents woman’s sense of entrapment within the narrow role assigned to her by patriarchal society.” It is suggested that this image evokes “claustrophobia, a passionate yearning for liberty, a frustrated chafing against the oppressive rigidity of the iron bars.” In light of the images of Sue as a bird that I observed in my own earlier paper, I feel that this section of the article has particular relevance.
Larson, Jil. “Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers.”
Rereading Victorian Fiction. Houndmills, England: Palgrave, 2002. 159-72.
This article discusses Hardy’s commonalities with women writers, specifically Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand. Larson established early in her text that “[i]n contrast to earlier Victorian novelists, these writers critique a sexual ideology that punishes women for acting on their emotions and desires.” She claims that they do this by associating “emotion with women but no longer diminish women’s power by doing so” and that they “arm” their female characters with “intellect and education” instead of causing them to rely on “emotions and desires that lead them to indirect forms of influence and manipulation.” Her main argument is that Hardy is, in fact, one of these “New Woman” writers, and that he “shares both the feminist concerns” and the “ethically complex treatment of emotion, reason and gender.” She attempts to establish this by showing the similarities between Sue’s behavior and that of the characters of Schreiner and Grand. After a long section of such comparison, she sums up by noting “[a]ll three of the women in these novels evade commitment and seek to gain emotional satisfaction from their relationships with men in daring, unpredictable, intellectually self-conscious ways.”
Larson then discusses how the characterization of these women and what happens to them in the novels is affected by external influences. She claims that the depressing endings reveal “not the author’s beliefs about what the New Woman’s fate should be, but his or her recognition of what it most often was.” She wraps up her essay with the assertion that all three authors “delineate a subtle, complex and ethically promising relationship between emotion and reason in the lives of these early feminists.”
Renner, Stanley. “Mary Teller and Sue Bridehead: Birds of a Feather in “The White
Quail” and Jude the Obscure.” Steinbeck Quarterly 18 (1985) 35-45.
Stanley Renner compares similarities between the main female characters in Jude and a short story by Steinbeck. He discusses in detail their physical similarities (both women are invariably described as “pretty”) and their similarities in attitudes towards marriage, love and sex. After concretely establishing that the authors are writing about similar themes through extremely similar female characters, he goes on to propose that both authors are establishing “the incompatibility between the spiritualization of love and the natural sexual instincts of the male”, telling “a larger story of the trouble in marriage caused by the spiritualization of love.”
Of particular interest to me in this article is the way in which Renner discusses the physical attributes of the two heroines. It is interesting that he shows the similarities between them exhaustively, comparing their prettiness (the “insistent epithet”), showing that both women are described at some point as somehow fey, and so on. However, though he describes how Mary Teller is equated with the symbol of the white quail, he apparently has not picked up on the imagery of Sue as a bird in Jude, and leaves that parallel unremarked. He does, however, discuss in detail what the symbolism of the bird in “The White Quail” might be, and I think that this will be helpful in my own paper. Though it was published in the Steinbeck Quarterly, I really found this article to be the most helpful of those I’ve had a chance to review extensively so far.
Simpson, Anne B. “Sue Bridehead Revisited.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19
(1991) 55-66
Anne Simpson opens with a brief gesture towards traditional interpretations of Sue Bridehead’s role within Jude the Obscure, summing up with “Sue has been positioned by generations of critics at varying intervals along a continuum of liberation.” She discusses some of these positions, and the essential (and often conflicting) characteristics that Sue has often been reduced to. She states that “[e]vident in most of the criticism is the wish to establish Sue as a signifying element which on scrutiny will yield a comprehensible signified”, and then continues in the rest of her article to show that this is not possible. Simpson argues that Sue seems “undefinable” because she actually is, at least within the world of the novel, and of masculine discourse. Sue “occupies a liminal space that cannot be articulated even by herself in standardized conceptions and words as they have been formulated by men.” She argues that Sue, therefore, is an exhortation to readers to “think beyond the confines” of the text, rather than an intellectual problem that can actually be solved. She concludes by saying that “[r]evisiting Sue Bridehead affords an opportunity for the creative investigation of strategies of knowing.”
Doheny, John R. “Characterization in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: The Function of
Arabella.” Reading Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 57-82
Doheny begins with the idea that “by its very nature, the novel is too large and contains too much life, to function effectively as polemic.” He proposes that Hardy “is so thoroughly engaged with his characters as representations of people, [that] his characters overcome his engagement, and…take on a life of their own” in Jude the Obscure. In the rest of his essay, he discusses specifically the characterization of Arabella in the novel, and how she functions to illuminate the attitudes of both Jude and Hardy. Interestingly, he convincingly portrays Arabella as something of a wronged possible protagonist, claiming that Jude is “a desperate snob who insists that Arabella is beneath him in sensitivity, intelligence, and sophistication”. He seems at many points to feel that the character of Jude himself is unworthy of attention, and that the novel ought to have focused on the more practical and worldly Arabella.
But though I expected Doheny to try to establish a complex characterization for Arabella, based on his grandiose opening ideas about the nature of novels, he never does so in this article. Instead, he eventually admits that “Arabella is a developed but comparatively uncomplicated character”. I think that this essay can be very useful in my paper because of the issues of development and complication of characterization that it raises, especially since, though Doheny would clearly very much like to, he is unable to actually propose Arabella as a fully realized female character.
Dutta, Shanta. “Sue’s “Obscure” Sisters”. Thomas Hardy Journal 12 (1996) 60-71.
In this essay, Shanta Dutta compares Hardy to Olive Schreiner, who wrote The Story of an African Farm, and George Egerton (penname of Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), with whom Hardy apparently had direct correspondence as he was finishing Jude. Dutta discusses the ways in which all three authors wrote about the “New Woman”, focusing particularly on the similarities of the heroine’s feelings about love, sex and the institution of marriage. The article never makes a strong argument, but rather makes observations and shows that Hardy may have been influenced by the two female authors, since he owned a book by the one and corresponded through letters with the other.
Of greatest interest to me was a short comparison in which Dutta observes that “[o]ne image common to [all three authors] is that of the captive/caged bird which represents woman’s sense of entrapment within the narrow role assigned to her by patriarchal society.” It is suggested that this image evokes “claustrophobia, a passionate yearning for liberty, a frustrated chafing against the oppressive rigidity of the iron bars.” In light of the images of Sue as a bird that I observed in my own earlier paper, I feel that this section of the article has particular relevance.
Larson, Jil. “Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers.”
Rereading Victorian Fiction. Houndmills, England: Palgrave, 2002. 159-72.
This article discusses Hardy’s commonalities with women writers, specifically Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand. Larson established early in her text that “[i]n contrast to earlier Victorian novelists, these writers critique a sexual ideology that punishes women for acting on their emotions and desires.” She claims that they do this by associating “emotion with women but no longer diminish women’s power by doing so” and that they “arm” their female characters with “intellect and education” instead of causing them to rely on “emotions and desires that lead them to indirect forms of influence and manipulation.” Her main argument is that Hardy is, in fact, one of these “New Woman” writers, and that he “shares both the feminist concerns” and the “ethically complex treatment of emotion, reason and gender.” She attempts to establish this by showing the similarities between Sue’s behavior and that of the characters of Schreiner and Grand. After a long section of such comparison, she sums up by noting “[a]ll three of the women in these novels evade commitment and seek to gain emotional satisfaction from their relationships with men in daring, unpredictable, intellectually self-conscious ways.”
Larson then discusses how the characterization of these women and what happens to them in the novels is affected by external influences. She claims that the depressing endings reveal “not the author’s beliefs about what the New Woman’s fate should be, but his or her recognition of what it most often was.” She wraps up her essay with the assertion that all three authors “delineate a subtle, complex and ethically promising relationship between emotion and reason in the lives of these early feminists.”
Renner, Stanley. “Mary Teller and Sue Bridehead: Birds of a Feather in “The White
Quail” and Jude the Obscure.” Steinbeck Quarterly 18 (1985) 35-45.
Stanley Renner compares similarities between the main female characters in Jude and a short story by Steinbeck. He discusses in detail their physical similarities (both women are invariably described as “pretty”) and their similarities in attitudes towards marriage, love and sex. After concretely establishing that the authors are writing about similar themes through extremely similar female characters, he goes on to propose that both authors are establishing “the incompatibility between the spiritualization of love and the natural sexual instincts of the male”, telling “a larger story of the trouble in marriage caused by the spiritualization of love.”
Of particular interest to me in this article is the way in which Renner discusses the physical attributes of the two heroines. It is interesting that he shows the similarities between them exhaustively, comparing their prettiness (the “insistent epithet”), showing that both women are described at some point as somehow fey, and so on. However, though he describes how Mary Teller is equated with the symbol of the white quail, he apparently has not picked up on the imagery of Sue as a bird in Jude, and leaves that parallel unremarked. He does, however, discuss in detail what the symbolism of the bird in “The White Quail” might be, and I think that this will be helpful in my own paper. Though it was published in the Steinbeck Quarterly, I really found this article to be the most helpful of those I’ve had a chance to review extensively so far.
Simpson, Anne B. “Sue Bridehead Revisited.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19
(1991) 55-66
Anne Simpson opens with a brief gesture towards traditional interpretations of Sue Bridehead’s role within Jude the Obscure, summing up with “Sue has been positioned by generations of critics at varying intervals along a continuum of liberation.” She discusses some of these positions, and the essential (and often conflicting) characteristics that Sue has often been reduced to. She states that “[e]vident in most of the criticism is the wish to establish Sue as a signifying element which on scrutiny will yield a comprehensible signified”, and then continues in the rest of her article to show that this is not possible. Simpson argues that Sue seems “undefinable” because she actually is, at least within the world of the novel, and of masculine discourse. Sue “occupies a liminal space that cannot be articulated even by herself in standardized conceptions and words as they have been formulated by men.” She argues that Sue, therefore, is an exhortation to readers to “think beyond the confines” of the text, rather than an intellectual problem that can actually be solved. She concludes by saying that “[r]evisiting Sue Bridehead affords an opportunity for the creative investigation of strategies of knowing.”
