Thomas Hardy’s final novel scandalized England for its views on divorce, but there’s something more shocking at work in its dreary prose. Jude Fawley — the hardscrabble protagonist who dreams of an autodidactic escape from rural poverty — constantly undoes himself by tragic flaws that are ambiguously ingrained and external. Is he brought down by his animal love for two impossible women? (Conniving Arabelle tricks him into marriage in a plot device that would be familiar to viewers of Glee, while his cousin Sue Bridehead is a queer concoction of asexual coquettishness.) The events of the plot certainly point to women ruining his life, but it’s hard to figure whether this is the fault of the women or Jude’s own crazy devotions. There’s also a question as to whether Jude’s lack of academic success is entirely the fault of external forces — rigid 19th century British classism — or limitations in his own talent. We’re given scant evidence of Jude’s prowess in study, and there are subtle hints dropped throughout that he might not be as smart as he thinks. Then again, how smart must one be? Hardy’s close narration, which ventures only occasionally into the mindsets of cunning Arabelle and addled Sue, reveals the crippling nature of self-doubt. More than once, the reader will want to shake Jude out of a torpor and tell him to fight against all odds. That’s what heroes do, right? By painting the portrait of a failure, Hardy did something far more shocking than his nominal support of divorce (yes, the books suggests that divorce is necessary, but the characters are ill-served by it): he told the story of an ordinary person who struggles against mediocrity to wind up in obscurity. In other words, he narrates a life most of us are destined to, whether we care to face it or not. In an American society conditioned to think of all of its constituents as superheroes, this book might properly be classified as horror.
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