Carte Blanche: Sue the Obscure

As a follow-up to my previous post on Jude the Obscure, here are questions still plaguing us about Sue Bridehead, Jude's second "wife" (they couldn't be legally married, since they'd each married before), who loves Jude but ends up going back to her hated first husband Phillotson as penance when all her children are killed by little "Father Time" -- Jude's first child from his first marriage -- who then offs himself as well.

"One would think that all my questions would have been answered here [in the previous post], but no. The following quotes, and I think there may be one more but I couldn't find it, niggle at my brain. She seems to be referring to something that is never fully revealed in the novel. Of course there must be secrets in novels and the story is not about Sue, but Jude, right?!?!?...

[See quotes in the comments section of the previous blog post...they're too lengthy to quote here.]

Again, Sue seems to hold deep inside her something that is very psychologically unresolved about Phillotson and especially his body.

Another description of Sue as a child, before her father took her to London, pictures her as a bold tomboy who was fearless. That description is contrasted with a post London description of Sue as quivering.

So my question is, 'What is the secret that Hardy was hiding? Was Hardy describing a person that he could not even understand himself, because the secret was too dark even for him to fully admit?'"

Well. Good question.

First, I don't think it's necessarily true that Jude is the main character, or at least not untrue that Sue is the main character. Sue is at least as interesting as Jude, and at least as psychologically complex -- I think more so.

And Sue was probably abused. Let's face it.

But you're right -- Thomas Hardy doesn't seem to face it. He prances around the question like a five-year-old around a maypole. The question of why he does this is an interesting one, though it falls dangerously close to literary theory, psychoanalyzing an author like this.

That's alright. I don't mind literary theory every now and again.

So, in terms of what Hardy meant by all his hinting, I think it bears repeating, first, that the difference between Thomas Hardy and, say, George Eliot, is that Hardy's books (almost) always end with the main character in a pathetic state thanks to social pressures and/or one mistake made early in life that can never be overcome. The inflexibility of Hardy's Victorian England and, I'd say, the inflexibility of his characters, is what causes this.

Dorothea Brooks (Middlemarch, George Eliot -- one of my favorite books ever), for instance, marries a stodgy professor early enough in life, and ends up happy, though impoverished, with her second husband (ooh -- should have put in a spoiler alert. Sorry. It's still worth reading; shockingly, the appeal of Victorian social novels isn't often the "will they/won't they" suspense). Sue Bridehead marries a stodgy professor early in life and ends up with a nervous condition and the murder-suicide of all her kids.

These are obviously vastly different views of life at work here, not only within the characters and scenarios they create, but between Eliot and Hardy. It doesn't hurt to remember who's actually behind the wheel in driving Sue insane.

And in that light, I'd tend more toward believing that Hardy's reticence in telling what happened to Sue as a child, or what Phillotson may have done to her in their marriage, is more related to Hardy's sense of social rules and a damnable urge to follow them, than that Hardy can't take the darkness of his own intimations.

He had Tess raped, after all -- or did he? [Cue dramatic music here.]

Hardy does seem a tough guy to pin down when it comes to sexual abuse. Most scholars agree that Tess of the d'Urbervilles was raped and ended up paying for that with her life (after stabbing that man to death) thanks to the social stigma put on "loose" women. But it isn't crystal clear; the narrative camera pans politely away at the moment we'd expect to see violence and naked misogyny (pardon the pun), leaving Tess tangled up in a roadside bush with a stranger and ambiguity.

Hardy seems either 1. to be suggesting rape without saying it because it would be socially unacceptable to do so for a Victorian audience or 2. to want to leave the question of Tess's "virtue" a mystery, as he likely believes (as do we all) that even if the encounter was consensual, Tess doesn't deserve the shame and opprobrium that she gets; by not specifying whether it was rape or not, Hardy can get the reader to come to that conclusion without coming out and stating it.

Hardy is less ambiguous about other things (like that Tess is all natural and good), and there are other authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter) who deal with these things (consensual sex not being the end of the world, except to Puritans) directly, so it's hard to know what Hardy's intention is.

It's possible that what Hardy lacked was the language of psychology. Freud wasn't around until a decade or so later, and it seems that lounging on couches was the closest anyone in Victorian times had gotten to being psychoanalyzed.

And I refer to my last-year's blog post on evangelicalism, repression and sex: I do think that there's something to be said about repression (such as in Victorian society) making everything sexier. It's possible that everyone in Victorian England knew exactly what Hardy was talking about, but we bikini-models-selling-cars twenty-first-century-ites aren't subtle enough to read between the lines correctly.

Anyway, that's all a matter of debate, what Hardy himself meant by Sue's half-confessions. It's possible he wasn't more specific because he didn't know how to be; it's possible he was purposefully ambiguous to allow the audience to form more personal attachments ("this happened to me, too" -- and fill in the blanks with common experience); it's possible Hardy himself was abused, and it ruined his life and so he doesn't want to talk about it, or that he knew someone who was. It could be that lacking the psychoanalytical tools forged a few decades later, Hardy made some gesture at explaining something he understood only intuitively. Or it's possible that Hardy assumed (probably rightly) that the Victorians would reject his work if it was too specific or "pornographic."

But I would bet, based on his disgusted reaction to society's disgusted reaction to Jude, that Hardy wrote in a way that he intended to almost fit within the social parameters of his times. I suspect Hardy of having the agenda of wanting to be accepted and to make society more open and progressive (by standing right on the edge of what they could handle), and I suspect the inability to be or do both is what frustrated him, post-Jude.

He should have known that society would kick against his goads, and been prepared to deal with being kicked every now and then. Reformers are never popular, and expecting that he should be was a bit of hubris on Hardy's part.

As for poor Sue, she was too brittle to withstand what came later: the failure of her first marriage, which had been guaranteed from the start, secured her inability to love Jude the way she might have otherwise, and the financial difficulties they met with (thanks to society not putting up with an unmarried couple living together) caused the break in Father Time that destroyed the whole family.

It's no mistake that the child who killed the others was Jude's from a first marriage. This is an obvious symbol of how their pasts haunted Sue (who spent all her time with the kids), especially, and couldn't be overcome. Father Time was dour and delightless, not childlike at all, and not a well-developed character.

Casaubon, Dorothea's first husband, was also dour and delightless, and also dies; but the difference between George Eliot's view of life (and the way she lived it; she lived with a lover much of her adult life, creating a life for herself that was outside the social parameters of her times, and yet, apparently, happy) and Thomas Hardy's is that none of Hardy's characters are ever able to just shrug their shoulders and say "huh. Oh well" when life doesn't go as planned -- and then try again.

Instead they end up dying tragic deaths. In the rain. Alone.

Perhaps more than anything else, I find Hardy's insistence that life should be good (independent of how we deal with it or our choices) and people accepted as they are, and his antagonism toward other people who are also, after all, scared and subject to the same social constraints, problematic. He seems to feel that the smarter, more ambitious types like Jude are owed something by the world, something that isn't owed to those who have work they enjoy and follow rules they understand.

He seems to feel that life should be lived idealistically, transcendentally -- beyond social constructs and rules -- and that's fine. But he might have considered actually moving to the woods and becoming a Transcendentalist if that's what he most wanted.

I'm not surprised that he stopped writing after Jude. But I am sad that he stopped bitterly and judgementally, rather than with a recognition that society was no more to blame for its incompatibility with his ideals than he was. That requirement that all things conform to his will sounds suspiciously like the authoritarian mindset he disliked.

And I'm pretty sure Sue suffered for it.