Making His World a Little Colder

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
New York : Signet Classic, [1999]
xv, 428 p. : map ; 18 cm.   

I have a soft spot in my heart for Hardy, and I've wanted to re-read Jude the Obscure for a long time - for over thirty years in fact! With some time off this winter break and a bit of travelling to do, I took Jude along with me and read it. It is a masterful novel, but incredibly bleak and depressing.  Did I mention that it is really depressing?

The plot revolves around the tragedies that strike two individuals who dare to break with the conventions of marriage and class in 19th century England. Jude of the title is a young man who is seduced by and marries a woman to whom he is physically attracted, but with whom he has nothing in common, and then falls desperately in love with a cousin who shares his passions for learning, thinking, and defying convention.  Jude is also in love with the intellectual life of the university, but finds it closed to him because of his rural, working-class status.  Throw in another marriage, an unwanted child, another lifeless marriage, and the censure of community and you have all the elements for a disastrous tragedy - and that is what Hardy gives us.

As bleak as the novel is, it really is stunningly modern, and is considered by many to be one of the great novels in the English canon.  Though Hardy is very circumspect about sexual matters - sometimes you have to re-read a section to realize that two people have been intimate with each other - he is ruthless in his dissection of the hypocrisies of religion and marriage.  They are both shown as institutions that offer little but constraint and unhappiness to individuals.

I enjoyed reading Jude again after all these years, but I'm not sure high school students would enjoy it so much, unless they are already fans of Hardy - like me!

Hardy with Heart

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
New York : Signet Classics, c2006.
xxi, 407 p. : map ; 18 cm.

It had been quite awhile since I read a Thomas Hardy novel, but I have such fond memories of reading his Jude the Obscure during a summer when I was in college. Hardy's writing style is a bit florid at times (after all he was writing in the late Victorian period) but the payoff is that his writing is poignant, lush and very attuned to the beauty of the English countryside and the complicated texture of human relationships.

Tess was no exception and did not disappoint me.  The novel shocked his contemporaries with its frank treatment of the double standards of sexual morality experienced by the main character, Tess.  Tess is clearly the heroine of this novel, and the tragedies she suffers expose the hypocrisies of social attitudes toward sexuality, class, marriage and gender.

One of the things that makes a Hardy novel so enjoyable is its lively and riveting plot.  There are many scenes where the dramatic impact of the plot hinges on one circumstance that - if slightly different - could have dramatically changed the outcome of the novel and the fortunes of its characters.  In that sense it is sometimes like reading good history where the reader is always thinking, "If only...."

Tess is a very readable, engaging novel and should appeal to any high school student who is looking for something readable, but "literary."