Reading Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure

	Kate Flint Chair and Professor of English, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Kate Flint is Chair and Professor of English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her areas of specialization include Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural and literary history, visual culture, women's writing, gender studies, and transatlantic studies. Professor Flint's research spans the 19th and 20th centuries, and is both interdisciplinary and transatlantic in focus. Most recently, Professor Flint published The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Jude the Obscure is a troubling text, and not just because of its representation of resolute bleakness, missed opportunities, failures of will, timorousness, class impediments, the perils of idealism, and general despair. Hardy's novel sets up challenges in terms of how we read late nineteenth-century fiction, since it employs the directness that we associate with late-century realism and naturalism, yet also demands to be understood in terms of allegory and symbolism. It is a novel of ideas, and its language and concepts borrow from contemporary intellectual debate, yet Hardy fully deploys other registers, including vernacular speech and Wessex dialect. It mingles direct description, philosophical, biblical, and scientific allusion, and irony. Jude is, in other words, a novel that continually refuses to let the reader settle.

It would be hard to read Jude the Obscure without considering it in connection to the social debates of the 1890s—about sexual and marital relations (including the phenomenon of the New Woman, often invoked in contemporary reviews of Hardy's novel); the state of rural England, agricultural and migrant labor; access to education; the place of religion, doubt, and secularism; theories of degeneration and pessimism; and heated discussion about the role of the novelist. But rather than looking at other forms of contemporary writing (including Hardy's poetry, non fictional prose, and correspondence) in terms of an explanatory context for this strange novel, we will be exploring how this discourse finds its way into the text, to shape and modify the affects of reading.

Our close study of Jude will emphasize, too, the instability of the nineteenth-century fictional form—even in relation to one work. We will consider the implications for the critical reader of the different publishing and editorial phases that have created different texts of the novel, from its first appearance, in illustrated serial form in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, through the first volume publication in 1895, to its appearance in Macmillan's "definitive" "Wessex Edition." This publication history, when considered together with the 1894-95 manuscript, have offered more recent editors a number of choices when it comes to putting forward their preferred text.

Two themes in particular emerge from these concerns. First, when we engage in the close reading of a novel, where do we see the boundaries of that novel as lying, and how does our interpretation of these affect our understanding of the practice of reading? And second, when we think of Jude as being a text very much of its mid-1890s moment, what does an intensive study of the text reveal about the forms, the language, and the ideas of fictional modernity?

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