April 5, 2004

Outsiders, Jude the Obscure

            Thomas Hardy’s story Jude the Obscure is based on historical truth; Hardy exercises verisimilitude in his writing.  Many critics have suggested that “there is much of Hardy himself in the character of Jude, and that Sue Bridehead is modeled on his cousin Tryphena” (417).  The main setting of Jude’s ill-fated story has been based upon Thomas Hardy’s grandmother, Mary Hardy, who lived a hard life in Fawley as an orphan for the first thirteen years of her life. 
 

“Grandmother’s sad memories coloured Hardy’s own view of Fawley and the surrounding countryside” (417) to such a degree that he must have blended the story of his grandmother with his own character mirrored in Jude.  Jude was described to have been a result of a dysfunctional marriage and consequently deemed himself ill-fit for marriage because his parents, like Mary Hardy’s, had split a day following their wedding.  In Hardy’s story, the tragic character of Jude is known to play three roles: a hopeless romantic, a mason, and a scholar.  Jude’s second role as a mason may have been inspired by a Victorian architect named George Edmund Street who constructed the new church at Fawley.
 

         In Jude the Obscure, the school plays a major influence in Jude’s determination to become a scholar.  Let’s compare the likeness based upon knowledge of the schools at that time and Hardy’s description of the school.  Hardy’s description of the demographics of Jude’s school excludes the mention of “children young as twenty-one months” (415).  Perhaps the story of Jude is intended to take place in the 1880s when a “severe report (on the lowest ebb in the school’s efficiency) led to a banning of the babies” (416).  According to descriptions of the schools, head mistresses seemed to be much more common than head misters. 

            Thomas Hardy bestowed names and places in his story based upon historical context.  It is surmised that the settings described by Hardy are inspired by the landscape of the two towns named Fawleys.  Fawley can be interpreted in many ways: “Fawley as the place of the fallow deer” and “Ley- or Leah…meaning a clearing or a clearing in the forest” (412).  Fawley, after 1772, served a gloomy place and its surroundings, based upon Hardy’s grandmother’s own memories, to suit the ill-fated character of Jude as Hardy decided.  He pays tribute to his grandmother, Mary, in naming Jude’s village “Marygreen.”