If I had been born in Victorian England, I probably would have been Sue Bridehead. Always moved by my conscious, opposed to convention, and unable to hold my tongue, I surely would have met with the same tragic fate as Thomas Hardy’s unfortunate heroine.In Jude the Obscure, Hardy creates the ultimate anti-Victorian woman who embodies the classical ideas of reason and speculative thought believed to be beyond the powers of her sex. Sadly for Sue, she maintains her independence only as long as she can adhere to her unconventional ideas–vacillating throughout the story between oppression and independence.
When Hardy first turns the narrative to Sue’s perspective, she is enamored with a pair of Greek statuettes. In a nostalgic era when “the Gothic was understood as a style that expressed spiritual goodness, truth, and the properly reverent relationship between humanity and God” (Wilkins 426), Sue’s appreciation for classical art, architecture, and literature is intended to emphasize her rejection of such sensibilities. Sue’s purchase of the statuettes, Apollo and Venus, symbolically represent her personal guiding principles of reason and love. These two values diametrically oppose the prescribed guiding principles of Victorian convention, faith and duty. We can see an example of this in a popular hand book of the period. Sara Stickney Ellis admonishes the women of England: “You have deep responsibilities, you have urgent claims; a nation’s moral wealth is in your keeping” (Ellis 13).
By aligning Sue’s individual nature with “pagan” ideology, Hardy creates a catalyst that allows her to deviate from Victorian conformity and assert her own independence. In 1893, Emile Durkeim originally published The Division of Labor in Society, in which he discusses the idea of internal and external influences on human behavior:
There are in each of us . . . two consciences: one which is common to our group in its entirety, which, consequently, is not ourself, but society living and acting within us; the other, on the contrary, represents that in us which is personal and distinct, that which makes us an individual.
(http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Durkheim/DIVLABOR.HTML)
As Durkeim points out, Sue’s nature has not developed in a social vacuum. She is aware of Victorian codes of conduct, and the consequences of not adhering to them. If her “personal and distinct” nature mirrored or complimented the aspects of “society living and acting within” her, there would be no internal conflict pushing her to seek independence. Instead, Sue is faced with the constant tension of acting as one should act or as one wants to act–the decision to conform and play the role of a submissive dependent or to deviate and act as a self-defining independent woman.
The extent to which an individual identifies with the self or with the group determines the extent to which he/she will conform. When the reader first encounters Sue, she is estranged from her father and living alone in Christminster. Like many Victorian writer’s, Hardy has created a heroine devoid of family ties in order to facilitate her unorthodox independence. As noted by Rodney Stark in his 6th Edition of Sociology, “the causes of conformity are the social bonds between an individual and the group. When bonds are strong, the individual conforms; when these bonds are weak, the individual deviates” (200).
Throughout the novel, Hardy uses imagery as well rhetoric to illustrate Sue’s level of conformity. When Jude first encounters Sue, she is illuminating manuscripts in a shop that “seemed to be kept almost entirely by women” (Hardy 91). The presence of Sue and the other women in a successful shop that sells Christian paraphernalia is an indication of how well they have conformed to social expectations. Unfortunately for Sue, this position is revoked when her true values are discovered, establishing the relationship between oppression and social acceptance.
While attending a training school in Melchester, Sue develops “the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline” (Hardy 136) metaphorically expressing the severe oppression of her individuality. Later, during an excursion with Jude, Sue is temporarily relieved of the school’s oppressive atmosphere and Hardy likens her to “a shepherdess” (142). By mirroring the pagan symbolism of pastoral poetry, Hardy invokes tension between innocence and seduction. We see here that Sue longs to be free, but is still afraid to act, secretly longing for external circumstances that will liberate her from her captivity.
Later, when she escapes from an imposed imprisonment at the training school, Sue arrives at Jude’s door “clammy as a marine deity . . . her clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the Parthenon freezes” (Hardy 149). It is in this ultimate act of defiance that Sue’s external appearance best reflects her internal beliefs. Represented as a classical Goddess, Sue is the antithesis of a demure Christian woman. Her behavior has severe social consequences, however, and she is forced into a marriage with a much older man in order to save her reputation.
Marriage to a man almost two decades her senior was an undesirable arrangement even by Victorian standards:
A considerable disproportion between the ages of the husband and the wife is to be avoided . . . there should not be between three to five years in difference. (Ruddock 112)
The disparity between partners compounds Sue’s marital oppression culminating in the image of the “little nest” of rugs created in the cramped quarters of a closet. This small personal space carved out of a larger living space mirrors the repression of Sue’s personal ideology within the larger influence of social ideology.
When Sue voluntarily returns to Phillotson’s sickbed after he has released her, she uses a swinging mirror to “catch the sunshine, moving the glass till the beams were reflected on Phillotson’s face” (Hardy 257). This image visual repeats the shift in the marital relationship. Just as Sue reflects light into the oppressive atmosphere of the antiquated house, Sue uses the light of reason to obtain her release from an oppressive marriage.
After losing her children in a tragic murder suicide, Sue falls into a deep depression. Believing she is responsible for the death of their children, Sue’s grief alienates her from Jude, the only individual who supports her ideology. Without this bond, Sue reverts to her former habit of conformity. As she admits earlier in the novel, on her own she does not have the “strength of her convictions”. However, this final submission to the oppression of social convention will be a fatal blow to her individuality and therefore her independence.
Hardy illustrates this symbolically when Jude finds her sobbing at the church:
High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge, solidly constructed Latin cross—as large, probably, as the original it was meant to commemorate. It seemed to be suspended in the air by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly glimmered in some weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed to and fro in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath, upon the floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes . . . something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face (Hardy 358).
Finding Sue prostrate beneath a life size cross obviously evokes a sentiment of self sacrifice. The jewels of the cross only faintly reflect the light of reason that Sue once worshipped. Instead, it sways back and forth hypnotically emphasizing the irrationality of faith. Sue’s black garb and white face merge her image with that of death itself.
With the publication The Division of Labor in Society just one year before the serialized version of Jude the Obscure, it appears Hardy was familiar with Durkheim’s theories of social control. By incorporating these ideas into the theme of the novel, Hardy was able to examine and symbolically depict the nature of feminine oppression and independence in Victorian England.
Works Cited
Durkheim, Emile. Trans. By George Simpson. Division of Labor in Society.
New York: Free Press. 1947. 2 September 1999. <http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Durkheim/DIVLABOR.HTML>
Ellis, Sara Stickney. The Women of
England, Their social Duties and
domestic Habits.
London: Fisher, Son & Co. 1839. Indiana University Libraries,
Bloomington, IN. 3 March 2006[PT] <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/ellis/womeneng.html>.
Ruddock M.D., E. H. The Lady’s Manual of Homeopathic Treatment. Ninth
Edition.
London: Homeopathic Publishing Company. 1886.
Stark, Rodney. Sociology. Sixth Ed. New York:
Wadsworth Publishing
Company. 1996
Wilkins, David G, Bernard Schultz and Katheryn M Linduff. Art Past Art
Present. Second Ed.
New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc. 1994.
June 26, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Well done, great blog and great posts!!!