Jude the Obscure Theme Analysis of Marriage
Thomas Hardy, the author of Jude the Obscure, focuses on multiple themes throughout his book including social order and higher learning which is mainly seen in the first part of the book. Jude, a working class boy aiming to educate himself, dreams of a high level education at a university, but is pushed away by the cruel and rigid social order. In the second part of the book, Jude abandons his idea of entering Christminster and the focus shifts to Sue. The themes of love, marriage, freedom replace the earlier theme of education and idealism. Hardy pushes each of these themes to his audience and challenges everyday ideology by his audacious story about Jude Hawley.
Hardy begins an argument…show more content… Instead, he is an extremely patient and liberal husband.
Sue's views on marriage should not necessarily be connected with Hardy's. Hardy himself points out her emotional inconsistency, and there are several signs that she is not really cut out for marriage. In Part V, both Jude's and Sue's divorces come through, but Sue avoids their possible marriage. She calls marriage a "sordid contract" and a "hopelessly vulgar" institution, and she fears that an "iron contract should extinguish" all tenderness between them, reinforcing Hardy’s negative view of the nature of marriage.
Most of Sue’s views on marriage are given in parts V and VI. She feels that the contractual nature of it will kill all impulse and romance; "it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be a person's lover," (193). The visit to the unclean registry office in part V, chapter 4 is horrifying for her, and she shows abhorrence to the ordinary church wedding. She sees it in terms of a sacrifice of the bride: "the flowers in the bride's hand are sadly like the garland which decked the heifers of sacrifice in olden times,” (215). Sue's views on marriage are rather extreme, and they represent a push away from the norms of marriage.
Hardy also raises some valid arguments of the overly rigid attitude of society towards the unmarried and the unconventional. Phillotson's
The study investigates the trope of disillusionment in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The paper reveals different struggles that Jude, the eponymous character, passes through. Through Hardy’s explicit portrayal of life in Victorian society, Hardy condemns human institutions which endlessly perpetuate people in suffering, castration of hopes and limit them socio-politically. In spite of his legitimate and lofty dreams, Jude dies like a dog. Moreover, social factor responsible for the abortion of
it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
HAP ANALYSIS
Firstly the word 'hap ' means 'that which happens by chance. ' The poem is a sonnet, although it
http://www.terry.uga.edu/~dawndba/4500compulsoryhet.htm
Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich 's essay constitutes a powerful challenge to some of our least examined sexual assumptions. Rich turns all the familiar arguments on their heads: If the first erotic bond is to the mother, she asks, could not the "natural" sexual orientation of both men and women be toward women?
Rich 's radical questioning has been a major intellectual force