Jude the Obscure (Hardy, 1895)

Overall

Jude's experience as a reader and frustrated intellectual is central here

General

• 9 again deep time and history in the landscape obscured by agriculture partly - also narratorial distance, the reflection on deep time is for the narrator "but this neither Jude nor the rooms around him considered"
• 56

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

• 80-3 patternless set of intellectual statues and quotations from a book prioritizing Jude's experience of them rather than their total meaning - tied to Hardy's method (apparently) of "a series of seemings"?
• 93 wonderful description of the fated feeling of happenstance
• 107 Narrator mentions Phillotson thinking of "HM inspector" of schools when he takes on sue: putting this after the education act in the early 1870s(?) (cf Important Victorian Legislation)
• 124-5 blasphemous (did it cause some of the furor around the book?)
• 139 "I think I'd rather sit in the railway station. That's the center of the town life now: the Cathedral has had its day" - Sue's modernity in Melchester
• 141 beckford's Fonthill -- all the Gothic afterlives in this text (perhaps significantly they go to the classical Wardour Castle instead)
• 156 "[Christminster] is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers." Sue is absolutely marvelous in 3.4

Theme tracking

Reading/Writing

• 23ff the Greek and Latin grammars Jude so desperately wants
• ch I.5 has some interesting passages about Jude's reading
• and ch. 7 on the inverse relationship between Jude's scholarly interests and his attraction to Arabella. All too familiar.
• 80-3 patternless set of intellectual statues and quotations from a book prioritizing Jude's experience of them rather than their total meaning - tied to Hardy's method (apparently) of "a series of seemings"?
• 121 JUde's chalk graffiti on the gate of Bibliol College from Job ("I have understanding as well as you) after the condescending letter from its Master
• 140 Jude starting to read Newman, Pusey and other high church figures in "a different spirit and direction from his former course"
• 148 Jude reading vol 28 of Pusey's library of the father's which he bought for"miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work"
• 152 Sue talking about her reading
• 157 sue asks to make a New Testament for Jude he Way she had one rebound

Materiality

• 6 the overlapping of historical periods and faiths in the material appearance of the churchyard - it's inclusion in the scene with young Jude and Phillotson reminiscent of the scene situating the aunt and uncle's parlor in deep history in Mill on the Floss
• 57 Jude's sickness at Arabella's fake hair: worldliness vs artificiality
• 72 finding his portrait at the pawnbroker's shop when himarriage to Arabella falls apart: "The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife...was the conclusive little stroke required to demolish all sentiment in him" (and he subsequently buys and burns the photograph)
• 96 the statue images of venus and Apollo Sue buys
• 150 "I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this and all my things hanging there? Yet what nonsense! They are only a woman's clothes - sexless cloth and linen"

Shakespeare references

• 137 Sue to Jude "I think it is noble to see a man's hands subdued to what he works in" Sonnet 111 (tho opposite its thrust)
• 152 Sue talking about her reading inc Shakespeare and Beaumont and fletcher
  • but what were the modern eds of b/f? Dyce, certainly
  • Dyce produced an 11 vol edition in the 1840/ (Spevack 47)