Carte Blanche: Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure

"How would you describe Sue's pathology? Are there some unresolved references that would lead one to believe that she had experienced some sexual abuse as a child, or am I reading into this?"

It's been a few years since I read Jude the Obscure, but almost all of my lasting impressions from the book come from my personal relationship with Sue Bridehead, so this is a particularly interesting and apt question for me.

It's probably important here, though, before I move on to how I related to Sue and, to a lesser extent, Jude, to explain that I heart Thomas Hardy. I always have, from the first Far from the Madding Crowd required reading in high school. And in Connecticut, being the stalwart, neo-Puritanical New England (albeit southern N.E.) state that we are, we read one Hardy book a year through high school.

Hardy is a fatalist.

(That's how I came to tell the difference between which books were his and which were George Eliot's, actually, as they were from the same era and struck me as having similar writing styles and themes: if the main character died or was otherwise totally mortified by life at the end of the book, it was Thomas Hardy; if the main character learned something and grew as an individual through her trials, coming to accept her lot in life, it was George Eliot. Eliot, for instance, teaches Silas Marner that money isn't everything, and subsequently gives him back his money; Hardy teaches the Mayor of Casterbridge that one major alcohol-induced mistake made years ago can't be escaped no matter how hard you try.)

So the fact that I love fatalism about as much, and in much the same way, as George Eliot's sense of redemption and balance, probably has a lot to do with why I feel such simpatico with Sue Bridehead.

But first, Jude. Jude is a pretty normal guy, like most of Hardy's men, who's ruined by a woman -- first his wife, who fakes a pregnancy to marry him, then really gets pregnant, but eventually leaves him, and then Sue Bridehead, thanks to her deep ambivalence about the validity of their relationship -- and his own lusts. Hardy portrays the social requirement that Jude marry the apparently coarse and unambitious (intellectually, anyway) Arabella as the main negative of Jude's early life, and Jude's attachment to the unfortunately and increasingly unstable Sue Bridehead as a main negative of his later life.

Still, Jude has a certain flexibility, lent apparently by his self-taught intellectualism and his steady convictions. He moves on from his marriage to Arabella and his failure to study at "Christminster" and tries to make a happy life with Sue, who had also married and subsequently rejected her marriage as invalid, since she's in love with Jude and disgusted by her husband, Mr. Phillotson.

I think it's likely that Sue's fatal error came not in leaving Phillotson for Jude, but much earlier -- when she married him without real cause.

Everything after her compulsively "reasonable" marriage to her husband was reactionary, and Sue's tendency toward masochism is only partially resolved in her relationship with Jude -- it can't be totally resolved, as their love has already been marred by her promising herself to another.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet she married a man who repulsed her in order to create a scenario in which being with Jude was painful.

Sue plays at being liberal and enlightened, but deep down, she isn't. She lives with a male friend for two years or so before marrying Phillotson, which was scandelous, though they never had any kind of physical relationship.

Her return to Phillotson after the murder-suicide of her and Jude's children (the child from Jude's first marriage, a symbol of that previous union that probably haunted Sue throughout her relationship with Jude, kills their two kids and himself) is a reversion to her deepest beliefs; if before she had managed to stretch herself enough to believe that it was okay for her to live with and love Jude, now she was suddenly thrown back on her tendency toward harsh, unyielding justice over mercy.

To Sue, justice meant pain and difficulty. There must have been a fundamental part of her that believed she deserved everything she got, despite her initial rebellions against the social prescriptions of marriage (living with a man, then living with Jude unmarried, later) and sex (not having a physical relationship with her roommate, nor with her husband, where it was allowed, but only with Jude, when it was certainly adultery), and that fundamental belief was what ultimately led to her return to her soul-sucking, loveless marriage.

This does hint at childhood sexual abuse to me, this brand of masochism, and the deeply ingrained belief that she didn't deserve happiness. Her tendency to behave in socially inappropriate ways -- live with a man, not sleep with her husband, have children with another man -- may have been a compulsive reenactment, or confession, of the sexual crimes committed against her as a child. Acting out in these ways is common in victims of sexual abuse, as is the tendency to blame oneself, and Sue has both symptoms in spades.

But this is pre-Freudian literature, and Hardy doesn't say anything incriminating about Sue's father or a creepy uncle or cousin. Hardy's main points seem to be on a larger scale, blaming society, religion, and the repressive values that caused Jude to marry Arabella and Sue to marry Phillotson (supposedly) in the first place.

And here's where my relationship with Sue Bridehead comes in, in my personal interpretation of her pathology.

Sue and I have shared a lot: a tendency to eschew social norms for the slightly more intellectual or weird; a sensitivity to commiting acts against one's own soul (which she does when she marries Phillotson) that can cripple; a general lack of interest in sex brought on likely by trauma in childhood and adolescence, and subsequent repression of normal biological impulses; masochism inspired and encouraged by repressive, traumatic or abusive experiences and sometimes religious beliefs; a malignant perfectionism that causes mistakes to seem fatal rather than a matter of course.

I wasn't sexually abused as a child, that I know of.

But I've also come out of this perfectionist mentality, where Sue never really did. Most of the dealings with myself and malignant perfectionism have meant confronting deeply ingrained fears: that so-and-so was right when she called me that name, that I'll never measure up, that I'm unloveable. I've been able to face them because I have a stellar support system that allows me the safety and freedom to be honest about myself and my views of the world, which can be difficult, frightening and dangerous, considering my past.

Sue may have deeper fears than mine, and if she was sexually abused, she almost certainly does, making it more difficult for her to face them than it was for me -- and she shows no signs of being able to -- but if Hardy's right about society, she may not be ultimately to blame. Sue's social network is shredded by her choices, whatever their source or whatever her motivations, and she's left alone with Jude and the children toward the end; she can't possibly have the emotional capital necessary for dealing with deeper-level breaks in her psyche with no social support system. When three of the four people in her life -- the kids -- all die at once, Sue's thrown back on her old masochistic tendencies, and a flaw that might not have been fatal, or that might have healed naturally over time and with love, becomes her (and Jude's) downfall.

To me, Sue's story reads like a warning, but not necessarily the one Thomas Hardy intended, fatalist that he is. Ultimately I believe in George Eliot's universe, one that keeps going even after apparent tragedies, and I invest myself in fixing the cracks in my own foundation because I believe they can be fixed.

If Sue had turned her masochism and sensitivity inward with a purpose, been honest with herself and others, and worked on repairing what had been damaged, she may have survived the death of her children. If she'd done it before she married Phillotson, she'd have been even better off.

I think it's interesting in this context that Jude became a mason. He would almost certainly understand the need to repair a cracked foundation -- and to do it sooner rather than later.

If Sue had understood that, she might have been okay.