Course Instructor- Dr. Usha Mudiganti
“The Woman Question”: Response Paper on Presentation
MA English (3rd Sem)
31 March 2017 Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, serialized in 1894, was published in book form in 1895. The novel is believed to be Hardy’s last novel as he had stopped writing novels thereafter because of the appalling backlash it had received at the times. The novel is a bleak tragedy of one Jude Fawley of Marygreen, who as a boy of eleven and as a young man had high hopes for his future to be a scholar at Christminster but with time was deceived into an adolescent marriage and thus, his journey of social prejudice begins. The novel criticizes the institution of marriage, religion, education, which is a hard hitting reality even in the contemporary times, which makes the novel in retrospect one of the brilliant examples of timelessness and universality. The main line of the plot is definitely the endless oscillation between loveless marriages that is, of Arabella and Jude and the unattainable yet desired union between Jude and his cousin Sue Bridehead. The book hinges on a number of deaths such as the deaths of Jude’s three children and also his own …show more content…
The superstition is brought out to fulfillment not by the providence of the cosmos but by the characters or the human fallacy to bind themselves to the ancient superstitions, which retrogresses both Sue and Jude from their modern and progressive mindset. Thus, the obscurity of Jude shifts to other levels, to those of social and psychic life than the initial frets and struggles to materialize the haunting ambition of