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Thomas Hardy, Edmund Blunden, London, Macmillan, 1967

Jude is the painful portrayal of a man caught in the thorns of life, trapped in the pits of dangerous

dreams and false marriage, and altogether sent here below to accumulate bitter disasters about him.

An Essay on Hardy, John Bayley, London, Cambridge University

Press, 1978

Hardys attitude to consciousness is totally, even disconcertingly modern. P. 9

Sues inability to commit herself, repelled by the notion of marriage

J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy. Distance and Desire, Cambridge,

Harvard University Press, 1970

The Immanent Will is the secret energy which moves both nature and history in their coursesthrough time preface, p. XIV

Hardy and Decadence, Gillian Beer, Celebrating Thomas Hardy, edited byCharles P. C. Petit, London, Macmillan, 1996

A pervasive theme of Hardys writings is how things decay, yet how fully and abruptly they are

alive 101

In Hs characters there is the withering of hope that exemplifies decay. Hardy puts into the mouth

of the doctor near the end of Jude the view that this is how things must inevitably be, that the race

will degrade through its own loss of energy 94

John Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy toLawrence, London, Macmillan, 1980, chapterHardy A Better World

.

Willfulness for Hardy is the epitome of disembodied consciousness; it springs from self-delusion

and ends in self-destruction. Judes determination to learn is the instrument of self-destruction.

The clearest anticipation of Jude is Henchard, but while Henchard is tamed, Jude is annihilated.

All Hardys leading characters are on a continual pilgrimage. Like Bunyans or Spencers

characters. Hardys protagonists are moving across the landscape. But unlike Bunyans or Dantes,

Hardys pilgrims never arrive, but they do invariably have a goal. Lawrence defined the goal

accurately:

None of the heroes and heroines care very much for money or immediate self-preservation, and

all of them are struggling hard to come into being. Hardys novels are about becoming complete, or

about the failure to become complete (Study, 420)

If the final aim of Hs leading characters is to become complete, their proximate goal is a

negative one: they are all seeking to escape: Eustacia from the country, Clym from the city, Judefrom the uncultured provinces, Tess from lowly social status, Henchard from a bad marriage

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Father Time: suggests the wearying effect of centuries of civilization and its discontents; his

pathetic death is a moment of shocking revelation. He is the product of the neurotic relation

between Jude and Sue. Hes a symbol of modern mans loss of contact with physical reality. He

knows no facts; he knows only abstractions:

Children begin with detail .particulars

Born an old man he represents the death of the special sensuous joy of childhood.

Hardy shifts the emphasis from the determinism of the gods to the determinism of social prejudices.

To the very end, his novels are stories of entrapment. Fate is manifested as cruel caprice; as a plot

technique this caprice is manifested as coincidence. The social attitudes which destroy Tess or Jude

have neither law nor logic to support them. The ultimate cause of human misery is crass casuality

or Hap