Sunday, March 28, 2004
Jude the Obscure in a chapter or less
When I was taking English 380 from Prof. Epstein, one of the exercises he had us do was to try to take a small excerpt from a story we were analyzing and use it to explain the story as a whole. The trick in using this technique productively is in choosing a paragraph that has all of the major elements of the rest of the short story. I was reminded of that technique when I read chapter ten of the third part of Jude the Obscure. It seems to me that one can use that chapter to illustrate Jude and his story almost as completely as the rest of the book does.
In this chapter, Jude takes up something of a new hobby, and begins pursuing music in a village church. Near Easter, he (and the rest of the church choir) learns a new song, which “grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly” (193). Jude immediately becomes very curious about the song, as he becomes curious about everything which “move[s] him exceedingly”, like Christminster, the idea of going to college, Arabella and eventually Sue. He asks the organist about the music, and learns about the composer, similar to the way in which he gathered background information about how to study for college in Christminster, and how he learned about Sue’s job before he ever met her. The curiosity Jude displays in this chapter is typical of his character throughout the rest of the book so far, and so is his next action. Once he has gathered the barest of surface data – the composer’s name, and the knowledge that he is a local man – Jude begins to create a fantasy about the person who wrote the song, rather than learning anything more about the reality, musing “[w]hat a man of sympathies he must be!” (194) He behaved similarly when he first began to think about living in Christminster, convincing himself that it was a place too perfect to exist in reality. He also displayed this tendency to prefer his internal fantasies to external proofs of reality throughout his short-lived marriage with Arabella, ignoring the warnings of her crude behavior with the pig’s penis, her false hair, and her vagueness about her background working in a bar. He preferred to believe that he was in love, that she was in love, and that they were right for each other and everything would work itself out. Jude has definitely displayed this leaning towards fantasy in his budding relationship with Sue, creating her in his mind as the perfect Christian woman when the reader is aware that she has been harboring Pagan idols and is not a woman of conventional virtues.
The next step he takes in this chapter is also pure Jude, and consistent with his behavior throughout the rest of the novel. Impulsively, he decides to visit the composer, believing that the man will live up to his fantastic imaginings. He is, of course, hugely disappointed, as he is throughout the rest of Jude the Obscure. The composer is not the man that Jude thinks he is, and is more concerned with money than with divinity. But even after suffering this massive disappointment, so similar in ways to his disappointments at Christminster, and the disappointment of his first marriage, Jude doesn’t seem to learn anything from the experience. He arrives home to find a letter from Sue, and realizes that he has missed an opportunity to see her. Instead of looking at his relationship with his cousin with newly opened eyes, Jude is deeply upset that he has missed her, and attempts to see her again as soon as he possibly can, even though it ends up resulting in “the trifling expense of a stoppage of pay” (196). Jude’s behavior in the novel is, indeed, very consistent, and this chapter shows him at his most predictable. He consistently takes very spare information, creates a fantasy from it, is disappointed, and, childlike, refuses to learn from his own history the next time around. In fact, I might be able to take Prof. Epstein’s challenge a little further in this case, and use one sentence to describe a whole novel. The sentence is from the middle of this chapter, on page 194: “In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey, Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge the very next Sunday.”
In this chapter, Jude takes up something of a new hobby, and begins pursuing music in a village church. Near Easter, he (and the rest of the church choir) learns a new song, which “grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly” (193). Jude immediately becomes very curious about the song, as he becomes curious about everything which “move[s] him exceedingly”, like Christminster, the idea of going to college, Arabella and eventually Sue. He asks the organist about the music, and learns about the composer, similar to the way in which he gathered background information about how to study for college in Christminster, and how he learned about Sue’s job before he ever met her. The curiosity Jude displays in this chapter is typical of his character throughout the rest of the book so far, and so is his next action. Once he has gathered the barest of surface data – the composer’s name, and the knowledge that he is a local man – Jude begins to create a fantasy about the person who wrote the song, rather than learning anything more about the reality, musing “[w]hat a man of sympathies he must be!” (194) He behaved similarly when he first began to think about living in Christminster, convincing himself that it was a place too perfect to exist in reality. He also displayed this tendency to prefer his internal fantasies to external proofs of reality throughout his short-lived marriage with Arabella, ignoring the warnings of her crude behavior with the pig’s penis, her false hair, and her vagueness about her background working in a bar. He preferred to believe that he was in love, that she was in love, and that they were right for each other and everything would work itself out. Jude has definitely displayed this leaning towards fantasy in his budding relationship with Sue, creating her in his mind as the perfect Christian woman when the reader is aware that she has been harboring Pagan idols and is not a woman of conventional virtues.
The next step he takes in this chapter is also pure Jude, and consistent with his behavior throughout the rest of the novel. Impulsively, he decides to visit the composer, believing that the man will live up to his fantastic imaginings. He is, of course, hugely disappointed, as he is throughout the rest of Jude the Obscure. The composer is not the man that Jude thinks he is, and is more concerned with money than with divinity. But even after suffering this massive disappointment, so similar in ways to his disappointments at Christminster, and the disappointment of his first marriage, Jude doesn’t seem to learn anything from the experience. He arrives home to find a letter from Sue, and realizes that he has missed an opportunity to see her. Instead of looking at his relationship with his cousin with newly opened eyes, Jude is deeply upset that he has missed her, and attempts to see her again as soon as he possibly can, even though it ends up resulting in “the trifling expense of a stoppage of pay” (196). Jude’s behavior in the novel is, indeed, very consistent, and this chapter shows him at his most predictable. He consistently takes very spare information, creates a fantasy from it, is disappointed, and, childlike, refuses to learn from his own history the next time around. In fact, I might be able to take Prof. Epstein’s challenge a little further in this case, and use one sentence to describe a whole novel. The sentence is from the middle of this chapter, on page 194: “In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey, Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge the very next Sunday.”
