6-9 pages (not including works cited) due 5/1
Answer one question
Jude the Obscure longer paper topics
Professor Norman Page defines Jude as “the most restless of all Hardy’s heros” (367). What does the novel say about this restlessness in Jude (and/or in Sue)?
Howells claims that it is “wretched Sue who spoils [Jude’s] life and her own, helplessly, inevitably, [and] is the kind of fool who finds the fool in the poet and prophet so often, and brings him to naught” (377). D.H. Lawrence also wrote that “One of the supremest products of our civilisation is Sue, and a product that well frightens us” (393). Does the blame for Jude’s failed life land soundly on Sue? Why or why not?
Margaret Oliphant calls Arabella “a woman so completely animal that it is at once too little and too much to call her vicious. She is a human pig […] quite without shame or consciousness of any occasion for shame…” (380). Oliphant later refers to Jude as “always the puppet, always acted upon by the others…” (380). Are these comparisons to pig and puppet accurate? Why or why not?
“[Four] unnecessary lives” critic Edmund Gosse says the novel centers on: “the poor village lad, with his longing for the intellectual career; the crude village beauty, like a dahlia in a cottage-garden; the neurotic, semi-educated girl of hyper-sensitive instincts; and the dull, earthy, but not ungenerous schoolmaster. On these four failures, inextricably tied together and dragging one another down, our attention is riveted” (384). Are Jude, Arabella, Sue, and Pillotson entangled “unnecessary failures” as Gosse characterizes them?
Critic Penny Boumelha focuses on Phillotson’s statement that Jude and Sue “seem to be one person split in two!” (188). Boumelha elaborates on this idea: “their lives follow a very similar course” beginning with “a mistaken marriage as a result of sexual vulnerability,” and then they “escape these first marriages, become parents, lose their jobs, their children, and their lover” (399-400). Do you find that Sue and Jude are “one person split in two”? Explain.
Writer and critic Elaine Showalter describes Little Father Time “a victim of spoiled heredity like his parents before, a ‘preternaturally old boy’ [227] who pays with his sanity and his life for the intolerance, cruelty, and narrowness of his society. He is the mad child whose breakdown is the signifier of the conflicts, lies, and hypocrisies of the sexual system. He becomes, as Hardy says, ‘the whole tale of their situation’” (418-19). Is Little Father Time a symbol of what happens to Jude and Sue? How so?
In his introduction to the ‘65 Riverside edition of Jude, Irving Howe argues that “The sense Jude leaves one with, the quality of the pain it inflicts, has mostly to do with the sheer difficulty of human beings living elbow to elbow and heart to heart; the difficulty of being unable to bear prolonged isolation or closeness; the difficulty . . . of getting through the unspoken miseries of daily life” (xiv). In relation to Howe’s view, how is Jude still relevant to today’s readers?
Examples modeling works cited entries
Hardy, Thomas. Jude The Obscure, Edited by Ralph Pite, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2016. pp. 9-332.
Howe, Irving, Preface. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, Riverside Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1965. pp. v-xxvi.
Howells, William Dean. “From Harper’s Weekly,” Jude The Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, edited by Ralph Pite, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2016. pp. 377-379.
Lawrence, D.H. “Male and Female,” Jude The Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, edited by Ralph Pite, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2016. pp. 393-394.
