Terminal Satire and Jude the Obscure

I. Mostly the Satirists

Two words haunted Thomas Hardy in the years he was plotting and composing Jude the Obscure. The first of these, satire, litters his notebooks and diaries of the era, and it appears with remarkable frequency in the finished novel itself. The earliest example arrives when Jude receives Sue's letter stating her decision to marry his former schoolmaster, Phillotson. The letter is brutally short; Sue is so formal that she signs her complete name. Hardy then shifts to Jude's reaction:

Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast; and kept on drinking tea because his mouth was so dry. Then presently he went back to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so confronted. Everything seemed turning to satire. And yet, what could the poor girl do? he asked himself: and felt worse than shedding tears.¹

The sentence in question seems deliberately vague, as if Jude's paranoid sense of victimhood cannot place the source of the cruel joke to which he has been subjected. The satire is on Jude. But from what or from whom does this satire issue—from Sue, or Phillotson, or God? This question may be simply another useless effort to pursue the elusive riddle of Jude the Obscure, which is the problem of knowing why Jude Fawley must suffer so intensely and relentlessly. The satirist in question must be elusive. If the true cause of Jude's misery were known, he might be in the position of overcoming it, and such a promise is impossible amidst the bleakness of this novel. In this sense the agent of the satire on Jude is like the "President of the Immortals" who concludes his sport with the heroine at the close of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, or the "sinister intelligence bent on punishing" Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge—these abstractions are similarly beyond human reach, and equally cruel.²

But in Jude the Obscure this abstraction consistently takes the same name: Hardy insists on calling it satire. When things go wrong for Jude—when Sue causes him pain, or when he is denied a reprieve from the vicissitudes of Christminster—he routinely imagines his misfortune in the guise of an immense conspiracy of mockery. So when Jude receives a subsequent letter from Sue asking if he would give her away at the wedding, Hardy writes that "if Sue had written that in satire, he could hardly forgive her"; after Jude and Sue overhear two clergymen speaking in hushed tones outside their home, Jude cries, "[W]hat a satire their talk is on our importance to the world!"; and even Sue herself begins to imagine things in the same terms, begging Jude in the midst of their deterioration, "Don't satirize me: it cuts like a knife!" or, pages later, "Don't crush all the life out of me by satire and argument!" (J, 205, 424, 435).³ Satire may not be the word most readers of this novel would expect at such moments; we observe the lashings endured by the blighted couple but struggle to find any humor behind them, as a satire might suggest. But as the peculiar word keeps surfacing, and as we grow strangely accustomed to it, we begin to wonder if it signals a larger pattern in the substructure of Hardy's final novel.

Jude the Obscure was the product of the early 1890s: the germ of the novel can be traced back to 1888, when Hardy recorded in his diary his plan for "a short story of a young man—'who could not go to Oxford'—His struggles and ultimate failure," but he did not set down to write it until the turn of the decade.⁴ The Early Life of Thomas Hardy also testifies that in 1890, after finishing Tess and just before beginning Jude, Hardy immersed himself in a particular course of reading:

In the latter part of the year, having finished adapting Tess...