“She was opposed to marriage, from the first to the last,
you say?” murmured Sue.
“Yes. Particularly from members of our family.”
Her eyes met his and remained on him awhile.
“We are a rather sad family. Don’t you think Jude?”
“She said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we
make unhappy ones. At all events, I do, for one!”
Pg. 166 (Norton edition) Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure
“Before I married him I never thought out fully what marriage meant, even
though I knew. It was idiotic of me – there is no excuse. I was old enough and
I though I was very experienced…When people of a later age look back on the
barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness
to live in.”
Pg. 168 (Norton edition Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure
The aforementioned quotes strike and deep cord with me as marriage is one topic
I know well. Though I have never been married, I have been through numerous
divorces. Both of my parents were married twice, and both times their second
marriages failed. Marriage is a dominant theme throughout Jude the Obscure as
it was something that deeply troubled Thomas Hardy.
After finishing Jude, I sat the book down on my nightstand and thought about
the parallels between Jude’s life and my own. I spent a short while researching
Hardy’s personal life in the internet and discovered
that Jude’s fictitious life is simply representation of Hardy’s
experience. I found that Hardy taught himself Greek and Latin. He wanted, for a
long time, to become a member of the clergy but could not gain admission as his education was not advanced enough. He never
attended a university in his life and the only semi-formal training he received
was from a student at Cambridge.Most importantly,
Hardy had some marital problems and struggled with the Victorian conception of
the institution of marriage.
(Thomas Hardy at 65, probably ruminating over his first
marriage)
Hardy met his wife, Emma, in 1870, and remained married to
her throughout his life. Hardy’s family, who felt Emma was beneath their son, disapproved of the marriage
completely. The love between Emma and Hardy was gone but they stayed married
until Emma’s death in 1912. Hardy was infatuated with numerous other women
throughout his life, though he was unable to pursue any of these attractions
due to his commitment to his wife.
In the first quote above, Sue implies that perhaps their family is predisposed
to be “bad” at marriages. Well, Sue, I think you might be on to something
special here as my family is also infected with the
marital discord gene.
When my biological Mom and Dad split up, I was about 11. Though I did
understand the technicalities of the split, I did not fully comprehend the
emotional nuances that would follow. For the most part, in my 11-year-old mind,
that meant that I would be playing Nintendo on Dad’s black
leather couch on the big TV instead of on my mother’s flowered duvet on the 13
inch. Unfortunately, the second marriages they would endure would hit me
much harder.
(My coping mechanism at 11 was playing Nintendo, usually
for 24 consecutive hours)
When my parents remarried, I was in high school. On top of the insane hormonal
changes I was going through, I had to try to integrate a new Mom and Dad into
my family. Paraphrasing Sue in the second quote listed above: Both my parents
knew fully what marriage meant. It was idiotic of them – there is no excuse.
They were old enough and were very experienced. Like rearranging the deck
chairs on the R.M.S. Titanic, getting a new mate was
a complete disaster for both of my parents.
I remember the pain my parents went through because I went through it with
them. On several occasions, my father and his new wife would stop speaking for
days at a time. I would come home from school and feel the suffocating silence
enveloping the house. The hate was tangibly thick; you feel it floating around
you like a dense fog.
(OK, it was never this bad, but it felt rough at times)
My mother, who prides herself
as a “good communicator”, took the opposite approach with her new husband. She
felt that bottling emotions up was what ruined her first marriage so in the
second she let them breath. Well, I guess scream would be the best verbiage to
use here. Mom hated fighting in front of us, so she usually took arguments to
the other room. My Sister and I would sit in the living room and listen to the
screaming.
Perhaps the saddest thing about Jude the Obscure for Thomas Hardy is the
devastating effect that it had on his first marriage. After Emma, Hardy’s first wife, read the novel she lost respect for her
husband as she felt that he did not share the devote feelings and strict
opinions of marriage. So in essence, Hardy wrote novel questioning the
Victorian conception of marriage and destroyed his own marriage in the process.
He dealt with the broken pieces of this union for 42 years.
(anybody up for banning
marriages all together? Anyone? Hello...?)
When I look at Jude the Obscure through the lenses of Hardy’s troubled marital life, a new level of anguish
unveils itself. Jude and Sue never marry, partly because they understand the
emotional consequences of their previous marriages and both believe that they
are genetically predisposed to suffer marital discord. Sue’s loveless union to Phillotson and Jude’s mistake with Arabella
permeate the novel with a stinging pain. A pain that Hardy
understood all to well.
While fiction is merely a form of symbolic action, a mere game of hypothetical
situations, it has great potential for effecting change. Thomas Hardy used his
troubling marital life to write a story that changed the Victorian perception
of marriage. Now, almost one hundred years later, people can get as many
divorces as they want. A troubled Sue, standing over the grave of her dead
marriage-hating prophetic aunt, looks at Jude and utters this brief maxim:
“When people of a later age look back on the barbarous customs and
superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in.”
Well, I am looking back at the institution of marriage and it was clearly
problematic. Then again looking forward, I also know that I will be a bachelor
forever. For I believe that marriage is not for some people. Some of us are
genetically predisposed to suffer. And some of us,
like Kramer on Seinfeld, understand that the institution of marriage, with or
without the option of divorce, is a inescapable man made prison. Here’s to dying alone!
<object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pSWTVXh_Yns&rel=1"><param name="wmode"
value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pSWTVXh_Yns&rel=1"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"
height="355" width="425"></embed></object>