Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella

"I—I can't help liking her—just a little bit!"

—Jude the Obscure (337)

Rebellious Identification

Sue Bridehead, along with other characters in and some readers of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, finds something about Arabella irresistibly attractive, even though both Sue and the readers have every reason to dislike Jude's coarse, selfish, troublesome wife. Arabella is responsible for much of Jude's and Sue's troubles, preventing their marriage multiple times and interrupting their lives repeatedly. She is crass and lewd and has no sympathy whatsoever for Jude's higher goals and ambitions; as Jude puts it, there is "something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream" (84). Readers are invited—by Jude, Sue, and Hardy himself—to resent Arabella's disruptions and unruly presence. Why might a reader resist this invitation to condemn Arabella? What could readers possibly find attractive about Arabella?

If we are initially disgusted, along with Jude, at Arabella's false hair, practiced dimples, and readiness to entrap Jude into marriage, we might next react with exasperation at Jude's oversensitivity and refusal to acknowledge his own agency in courting and marrying Arabella. Similarly, we may initially admire Jude's sensitivity in killing the pig, but we may later—or instead—admire Arabella's pragmatism: "Poor folks must live" (111). While the text is clear that Jude should make better decisions and that it is tragic that he finds himself "tricked" into marriage with Arabella, it also asks us to credit the genuineness of Jude's attraction to Arabella. Likewise, the novel suggests that this attraction is "against his intention—almost against his will" (83), later comparing it to the violent yank of a schoolboy by a schoolmaster who cared "little for his reason and his will" (87)—but it also acknowledges his emotional presence in their courtship. Jude's agency is present but variously glossed over or portrayed as an object of a reader's pity. Instead of focusing on the damage that Arabella seems to cause, a reader might consider Hardy's blaming her excessive and unfair.

This reaction to Arabella typifies a particular readerly experience that I explore here and call rebellious identification. Rebellious identification is probably a familiar feeling to many readers: we read or contemplate a novel, we begin to feel that the author is somehow "unfair" in her treatment of one of the characters, and we begin to take that character's side—emotionally, imaginatively, rhetorically—against the author. Rebellious identification consists of two facets: an emotional logic that exists outside of fiction, the logic by which one emotionally comes to the defense of someone in reaction to a perceived injustice, even if that defense can have no possible effect; and a relationship, unique to fictional texts, between reader, character, and author.¹ "Sometimes the reader feels that the author is unfairly running down one of her own characters," writes a nineteenth-century critic of George Eliot's Middlemarch in terms similar to those readers today might use to describe their responses to fictional characters: "Celia Brooke and Rosamond Vincy are, to use an expressive, though rude, schoolboy phrase, 'always catching it' from the authoress, till we feel decidedly disposed to take their sides" (Hutton 295).² As a direct result of this authorial injustice, Hutton emphasizes, as do I, that the reader feels more affection and interest for these characters. The reader's willingness to affiliate with a character results from the sense that such sympathy is illicit, that this mis-identification is an act of rebellion against an author (or an implied author) who has certain designs upon our feelings.³

In what follows, I will offer an explanation of rebellious identification and will locate it within philosophical, cognitive, and narrative theories of fiction, arguing that the existence of a phenomenon like rebellious identification calls for a re-evaluation of many of these theories. I will then examine the relationship between ethics and affect in the response of rebellious identification, and finally...