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Definition of Motif
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the central themes of a book... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Rain:
Imagery related to rain appears over and over again as a motif in Jude the Obscure, emphasizing the way the world around Jude tries to cast him down, dampen his spirit, and subvert his efforts. In Part 1, Chapter 3, the young Jude feels downcast by the rain in Marygreen and considers that it can’t possibly be as bad in the “City of Colleges”:
In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too, he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there.
Rain is always depressing and heavy in Wessex. When Jude is a child he can't imagine that it ever rains in Christminster—or, if it does, he can't imagine it'd rain as “drearily” as at home. Even the rain, to his naive imagination, must be different when one is a university student.
As Jude grows up, the sensory language of heavy rain in the "sad wet season" of his life shows up more and more frequently. He gets soaked upon first trying to get to Christminster, the rain continually interrupts his work and makes the stone slick and dangerous, and it eventually even portends the downfall of his family. In Part 6, Chapter 1 Little Father Time says the dolorous rain makes their arrival at Christminster seem like "Judgement Day”:
The sky had grown overcast and livid, and thunder rumbled now and then. Father Time shuddered. ‘It do seem like the Judgment Day!’ he whispered. ‘They are only learned Doctors, ’ said Sue. While they waited big drops of rain fell on their heads and shoulders, and the delay grew tedious.
Although it isn’t actually the biblical day of “Judgement,” this rain does signal a time in which the Fawleys are thoroughly judged and found wanting by everyone in Christminster. Nobody will give them lodging. They are forced to wander the city in the torrent, passing colleges and churches glowing with warmth and safety as the “delay” in finding a place to stay gets more and more “tedious.”
This cruel rain is always associated with the sense of touch: it soaks Jude's clothes, stings his eyes, and makes the stone he works with slippery and unmanageable. It is hard for Jude to get a grip on things in general in this novel: the rain makes it harder. The reader feels the horrible hopelessness of being wet and never seeming to get dry, as Hardy describes Jude's clothes soaking and sticking to him. The motif of rain is also regularly associated with the visual: rain obscures things, blurs Jude’s vision, and makes writing hard to read for the scholar-in-training. Rain plays a role in Jude's death, too, as he eventually dies of exposure after he gets soaked with rain and chilled during his final conversation with Sue.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Nobody :
Hardy uses the motif of "nobody" throughout the book (the word occurs 78 times!) to emphasize Jude's loneliness and isolation, as well as the cruelty of his surrounding society. In Part 1, Chapter 4, Jude feels helpless and frustrated with the difficulty of learning anything from the books Mr. Phillotson has sent him:
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does, and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
This quote comes from a passage of Jude the Obscure describing Jude's unhappy childhood. Nobody comes to help the young boy, as "nobody" comes to help him as an adult at many other points. Jude is hit by this realization as a "crushing recognition," and it continues to weigh on him until he dies. Jude is therefore constantly accompanied by "nobody."
“Nobody” also appears in other guises, as part of Hardy's social commentary about the grim limitations on people set by the Victorian British class divide. Jude wants to make something of himself and not be a "nobody," but his social position and the circumstances of his birth mean that he will always be "nobody" no matter how hard he tries. The word "obscure" in the title also refers to this. When someone is "obscure," people don't know them. They are a "nobody." As Jude Fawley loses his last name in the title, becoming “Jude the Obscure,” he is perhaps the most “nobody” of any character in Hardy’s novels.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Hard Stone:
Hardy uses the motif of Jude’s relationship with stone—heavy, hard, and solid—to illustrate the difficulty the protagonist experiences in changing his life and his career. In Part 1, Chapter 5, Jude feels frustrated with the difficulty of learning Greek from a primer and muses that:
Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Jude wants to work with intangible, “precious” things like philosophy, the Classics, and religion as a Christminster student, but he is stuck in the work he was trained in. That career is the total opposite of a life of religious study. There are not many jobs more manual and less abstractly theoretical than stonemasonry. Jude wants to devote himself to the "mediæval colleges" of Christminster, the beauty of their “romance in stone,” and to a spiritual life, but he cannot. He is weighed down by the real stones involved in his obligation to work and provide for his family.
Like his hours cutting stone, Jude's work to better himself is hard, dangerous, and arduous. He can cut through granite, sandstone and marble more easily than he can make headway as a prospective student in 19th-century England. His efforts come to nothing, no matter how much he tries. Regardless of how much he studies, he's always thrown back into stonemasonry.
The stones he cuts so expertly are painfully and literally the building-blocks of the institutions he can't be a part of. Churches do not welcome him because of his scandalous personal life, and the universities built of glowing stone that he aspires to work in instead of on turn him away. In Part 6, Chapter 1, the statues decorating the stone buildings are so opposed to Jude’s desired life of study that they become personified, threateningly staring down his family as they pass:
[...] the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous persons who had no business there.
The stones of the buildings and the statues on them come alive and turn on the Fawleys as they look for lodging, judging Jude and Sue's family as unworthy, poor, and "bedraggled." Being in Christminster surrounded by students makes Jude feel he must be a "frightful example of what not to do," as he says to Sue just after this. Even though Jude helps to build the city of Christminster, he and his family are “seen” by the statues and then by the landlords who turn them away as “ludicrous persons who had no business there.”
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Gin Traps:
Hardy uses the nasty image of a "gin" (a cruel metal trap activated by pressure) as a metaphor for Jude's rushed and early marriage to Arabella Donn. This image also recurs as a motif. In Part 1, Chapter 9, Jude compares the situation he finds himself in to being caught in one of these devices:
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes [...] because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a lifetime?
In this passage, Jude tries to understand how something as comparatively small and quick as sleeping with Arabella should mean that both their lives are ruined. He has been conditioned by his upbringing to believe that men have a duty to marry women they impregnate, which is surely why he feels “vaguely and dimly” that it was wrong for him to sleep with Arabella. Still, he doesn't draw a direct connection between this social conditioning and his sense of remorse or guilt, instead wondering why their passing act of intimacy should make it necessary for them to get married. This is one of the first instances in the novel in which Hardy questions the conventions of unbreakable, “eternal” Christian marriage. This later becomes a central theme of Jude the Obscure.
A gin is a metal trap with jaws that spring suddenly shut. Even the slightest weight will trigger it, and it’s often used to catch animals by being hidden in leaves or grass. The jaws are strong and sharp, designed to tear flesh and break bone. Jude and Arabella sleeping together means they're bound for life, as even their brief affair was enough to trigger the "trap." Jude feels that his life has been broken, torn, and “crippled” by the societal and religious expectations of marriage.
Another gin appears when Jude and Sue find an ensnared rabbit in Part 4, Chapter 2. Hardy describes the scene in gory detail:
If it were a ‘bad catch’ by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it to escape, it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb. If it were a ‘good catch, ’ namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken, and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape.
This horrible description points to Sue's own entrapment in her unhappy marriage with Phillotson. Anyone with real passions and a desire to grow and learn in Jude the Obscure is “crippled” by marriage. They either slowly die while trapped in wedlock or they try to escape it and end up being "nearly torn in two." People without both passion and curiosity (like Arabella and Phillotson) are inconvenienced by the gin, too, but are not destroyed like Jude and Sue are.
Related Themes:
Part 2, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Flesh and Spirit:
Hardy regularly implies that "flesh" (the desires of the body) and "spirit" (the life of the mind) are at war. This motif is tied strongly to Jude’s desire for learning, as his “flesh” gets in the way. Hardy describes this explicitly in Part 3, Chapter 10:
[Jude] perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might not always be victorious.
Jude’s desire for comfort and sexual satisfaction often outweighs his desire to learn, and so the book also wages its “warfare” between flesh and spirit in discussions of Jude’s marriages. Jude and Arabella Donn have a marriage of “flesh.” They get married because Jude can't resist sleeping with her, and because she tells him she is pregnant. They separate when Jude tries to pursue his education, and they only come back together when he gives up on a spiritual life and sinks into despair.
Jude and Sue have a marriage of “spirit,” where sex takes a less important role than compatibility and companionship. These two are intellectually compatible but aren't allowed to be married for several important reasons; other marriages being the most pertinent. Because of this, in deciding to be together and have children, they can only be married "in spirit," and so when their children die, they separate and return to their original relationships.
Jude also wages his “internal warfare” alone, setting the needs of his body (safety, sex, food, shelter) and the needs of his mind (betterment, education, social advancement) against one another. For example, when he is trying to resist seeking out Sue in Part 2, Chapter 4, he thinks to himself that:
It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when your heart’s desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.
Even when he is not with one of his “wives,” Jude cannot prioritize "spirit" over "flesh" completely. He cannot even ask God to stop him from feeling desire, as he wants to be tempted “unto seventy times seven.” Though flesh is not “always victorious,” it is certainly often quite “victorious” in Jude the Obscure.
Related Themes:
Part 3, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Troubling Incest:
Hardy incorporates the motif of incest throughout the novel. This troubles Sue’s relationship with Jude and adds another dimension of impossibility to their happiness and progress. The other girls at Sue's "training-school" imply that her and Jude's relationship is inappropriate in Part 3, Chapter 3:
‘She said he was her cousin,’ observed a youthful new girl.
‘That excuse has been made a little too often in this school to be effectual in saving our souls,’ said the head girl of the year, drily.
It is implied here that other girls at the school have behaved inappropriately with young men and have used the excuse of being "family" to do so. The “youthful” girl doesn’t understand this, but the “head girl of the year” has suspicions about the moral character of Sue’s meetings with her handsome "cousin" Jude. Hardy implies that Sue is already the subject of dangerous gossip through this interaction—and, indeed, she is soon expelled for inappropriate behavior. Sue is Jude's first cousin, which was not illegally incestuous in Britain at the time (nor is it technically illegal now). However, although they’re family, their relationship is both too distant and too close to be considered appropriate. Sue still can’t be alone with Jude as an unmarried woman without causing scandal.
Sue herself is uncomfortable with the idea of marrying her cousin even after her expulsion, though it’s by no means her only qualm, as she explains in Part 3, Chapter 6:
‘And then we are cousins, and it is bad for cousins to marry. And – I am engaged to somebody else. As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school.'
Sue sticks to doctrine in some ways and not others. This inconsistency is central to her characterization by Hardy. She’s so ethereal and so hungry to learn, that things she "realizes" often totally change and divert her stance. Hardy notes this tendency in Part 6, calling moments like this Sue's "mental volte-face" (a phrase meaning an abrupt or complete reversal). Being Jude's cousin seems important to her sometimes, and utterly irrelevant at others. She's reluctant to marry Jude because he’s already married and she’s engaged; the incest also implied here is an important afterthought. Later, when their children die, she implies that it’s partially because of the incestuous nature of their relationship—the Fawley "curse" of unhappy marriages. She returns to Phillotson even though they have a deeply unhappy union. Thus, although marrying one's first cousin is not illegal and not condemned by the church in Jude the Obscure, Sue's life is completely disrupted by her union with Jude, and she is regularly troubled by the moral gray area of familial intermarriage.
Related Themes:
Part 3, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Troubling Incest:
Hardy incorporates the motif of incest throughout the novel. This troubles Sue’s relationship with Jude and adds another dimension of impossibility to their happiness and progress. The other girls at Sue's "training-school" imply that her and Jude's relationship is inappropriate in Part 3, Chapter 3:
‘She said he was her cousin,’ observed a youthful new girl.
‘That excuse has been made a little too often in this school to be effectual in saving our souls,’ said the head girl of the year, drily.
It is implied here that other girls at the school have behaved inappropriately with young men and have used the excuse of being "family" to do so. The “youthful” girl doesn’t understand this, but the “head girl of the year” has suspicions about the moral character of Sue’s meetings with her handsome "cousin" Jude. Hardy implies that Sue is already the subject of dangerous gossip through this interaction—and, indeed, she is soon expelled for inappropriate behavior. Sue is Jude's first cousin, which was not illegally incestuous in Britain at the time (nor is it technically illegal now). However, although they’re family, their relationship is both too distant and too close to be considered appropriate. Sue still can’t be alone with Jude as an unmarried woman without causing scandal.
Sue herself is uncomfortable with the idea of marrying her cousin even after her expulsion, though it’s by no means her only qualm, as she explains in Part 3, Chapter 6:
‘And then we are cousins, and it is bad for cousins to marry. And – I am engaged to somebody else. As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school.'
Sue sticks to doctrine in some ways and not others. This inconsistency is central to her characterization by Hardy. She’s so ethereal and so hungry to learn, that things she "realizes" often totally change and divert her stance. Hardy notes this tendency in Part 6, calling moments like this Sue's "mental volte-face" (a phrase meaning an abrupt or complete reversal). Being Jude's cousin seems important to her sometimes, and utterly irrelevant at others. She's reluctant to marry Jude because he’s already married and she’s engaged; the incest also implied here is an important afterthought. Later, when their children die, she implies that it’s partially because of the incestuous nature of their relationship—the Fawley "curse" of unhappy marriages. She returns to Phillotson even though they have a deeply unhappy union. Thus, although marrying one's first cousin is not illegal and not condemned by the church in Jude the Obscure, Sue's life is completely disrupted by her union with Jude, and she is regularly troubled by the moral gray area of familial intermarriage.
Related Themes:
Part 3, Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Flesh and Spirit:
Hardy regularly implies that "flesh" (the desires of the body) and "spirit" (the life of the mind) are at war. This motif is tied strongly to Jude’s desire for learning, as his “flesh” gets in the way. Hardy describes this explicitly in Part 3, Chapter 10:
[Jude] perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might not always be victorious.
Jude’s desire for comfort and sexual satisfaction often outweighs his desire to learn, and so the book also wages its “warfare” between flesh and spirit in discussions of Jude’s marriages. Jude and Arabella Donn have a marriage of “flesh.” They get married because Jude can't resist sleeping with her, and because she tells him she is pregnant. They separate when Jude tries to pursue his education, and they only come back together when he gives up on a spiritual life and sinks into despair.
Jude and Sue have a marriage of “spirit,” where sex takes a less important role than compatibility and companionship. These two are intellectually compatible but aren't allowed to be married for several important reasons; other marriages being the most pertinent. Because of this, in deciding to be together and have children, they can only be married "in spirit," and so when their children die, they separate and return to their original relationships.
Jude also wages his “internal warfare” alone, setting the needs of his body (safety, sex, food, shelter) and the needs of his mind (betterment, education, social advancement) against one another. For example, when he is trying to resist seeking out Sue in Part 2, Chapter 4, he thinks to himself that:
It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when your heart’s desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.
Even when he is not with one of his “wives,” Jude cannot prioritize "spirit" over "flesh" completely. He cannot even ask God to stop him from feeling desire, as he wants to be tempted “unto seventy times seven.” Though flesh is not “always victorious,” it is certainly often quite “victorious” in Jude the Obscure.
Related Themes:
Part 4, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Gin Traps:
Hardy uses the nasty image of a "gin" (a cruel metal trap activated by pressure) as a metaphor for Jude's rushed and early marriage to Arabella Donn. This image also recurs as a motif. In Part 1, Chapter 9, Jude compares the situation he finds himself in to being caught in one of these devices:
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes [...] because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a lifetime?
In this passage, Jude tries to understand how something as comparatively small and quick as sleeping with Arabella should mean that both their lives are ruined. He has been conditioned by his upbringing to believe that men have a duty to marry women they impregnate, which is surely why he feels “vaguely and dimly” that it was wrong for him to sleep with Arabella. Still, he doesn't draw a direct connection between this social conditioning and his sense of remorse or guilt, instead wondering why their passing act of intimacy should make it necessary for them to get married. This is one of the first instances in the novel in which Hardy questions the conventions of unbreakable, “eternal” Christian marriage. This later becomes a central theme of Jude the Obscure.
A gin is a metal trap with jaws that spring suddenly shut. Even the slightest weight will trigger it, and it’s often used to catch animals by being hidden in leaves or grass. The jaws are strong and sharp, designed to tear flesh and break bone. Jude and Arabella sleeping together means they're bound for life, as even their brief affair was enough to trigger the "trap." Jude feels that his life has been broken, torn, and “crippled” by the societal and religious expectations of marriage.
Another gin appears when Jude and Sue find an ensnared rabbit in Part 4, Chapter 2. Hardy describes the scene in gory detail:
If it were a ‘bad catch’ by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it to escape, it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb. If it were a ‘good catch, ’ namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken, and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape.
This horrible description points to Sue's own entrapment in her unhappy marriage with Phillotson. Anyone with real passions and a desire to grow and learn in Jude the Obscure is “crippled” by marriage. They either slowly die while trapped in wedlock or they try to escape it and end up being "nearly torn in two." People without both passion and curiosity (like Arabella and Phillotson) are inconvenienced by the gin, too, but are not destroyed like Jude and Sue are.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Birds:
Hardy regularly associates the ethereal Sue Bridehead with the motif of birds in this novel. Jude often refers to her as a bird or speaks of her as birdlike when he is frustrated with their their horrible luck, as he does in this fragment from Part 4, Chapter 2:
‘It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue – horrible!’ he said abruptly, with his eyes bent to the floor. [...] Your part is that you ought not to have married him. I saw it before you had done it, but I thought I mustn’t interfere. I was wrong. I ought to have!’
‘But what makes you assume all this, dear?’
‘Because – I can see you through your feathers, my poor little bird!’
In this passage, Jude refers to both their mutual emotional strain and his own dissatisfaction. Although Sue is safely married to a man with a regular job, Jude still thinks he can can "see her" through her “feathers.” This refers to the metaphorical idea that she looks thin and weary, as if she is a bird molting from stress and neglect. It’s also a suggestion by Jude that Sue's husband Phillotson doesn't really know her character but just wants her beauty. Jude believes he himself does more than this, thinking he can see "her" through her "feathers." In the same way as her counterpart Arabella Donn is linked to pigs, Sue is described by Hardy as being light, small, and delicate like a bird.
Sue is also associated with birds through her own choices. She memorizes Poe's poem "The Raven" as a child, an early instance of her desire to learn and exceed her circumstances. Although that poem is quite well-known now, it was relatively new and exciting for Victorian readers at the time in which Jude the Obscure is set. It would also have been considered an unusual choice for a young girl to learn, as it is full of grim and Gothic imagery. In this moment, Hardy makes a real-world reference to emphasize an early example of Sue’s free-thinking ways to his reader. Later in the book, Sue also releases birds from their cage, as if in sympathy for her own entrapment.
When Phillotson is considering reuniting with Sue in Part 6, Chapter 5, he is chastised through a metaphor by his friend Gillingham for "letting the bird go” in the first place:
‘Well – if you’ve got any sound reason for marrying her again, do it now in God’s name! I was always against your opening the cage-door and letting the bird go in such an obviously suicidal way.
Sue is described metaphorically here as a bird in a cage, as Hardy again refers to marriage as a cage or a trap from which she can be “released.”
Related Themes:
Part 5, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Old Children:
Children who look and act older than their age because their circumstances demand maturity appear as a motif in Jude the Obscure. These figures represent the unfair demands of an uncaring world on the innocent; they also illustrate the impartiality of fate. The most evident example of this is Little Father Time, Jude's son. This creepy child not only acts older than he is but actually looks older. He is "quaint" and "weird" and is later described as also being "old" in his mannerisms in Part 5, Chapter 4:
Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint and weird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see in the substantial world. ‘His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene, ’ said Sue.
‘What is your name, dear? Did you tell us?’
‘Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a nickname; because I look so aged, they say.’
This child is so strange and unchildlike that he is nicknamed after the folkloric character "Father Time." As an unwanted child until the Fawleys take him from Arabella, this little boy is prone to fending for himself and entertaining himself with imaginings "not in the substantial world." Earlier in the same chapter Hardy describes him as "Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices." Little Father Time has very specific ideas about morality and correct behavior, and he exhibits symptoms of despair and aggression uncommon to children in novels from the 1800s. When he eventually kills himself and his siblings, he accompanies it with a horrifyingly astute explanation: "Done because we are too menny." Rather than acting selfishly and childishly, Little Father Time actually commits murder-suicide because he can see that his family is starving and feels that children are a burden. His "maturity" is warped and destructive, as it doesn't come with wisdom.
Interestingly, Jude Fawley himself was a child forced into maturity too early. He, too, was considered unusual by those around him because of his "trick of seeming to see things in the air," and he also did things that the society he lived in couldn't understand. Though there is a moment at the beginning of the novel where he speaks in the "melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy," other people speak to him like an adult and treat him like one. He is forced to do the chores an adult man would carry out, and in Part 1, Chapter 2 he even receives the following wisdom from his Great-Aunt Drusilla:
'Jude, my chile, don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any more.'
Although Jude is a young boy at this point, he's already considering celibacy and working himself to the bone "without resting." He's forced to make a decision about how his educational future will pan out as little more than a child. When the adult Jude is entrusted with Little Father Time by his ex-wife, Jude sees himself as a child clearly again. He tellingly says to Sue that they will solve his oddnesses by raising him with the ambition of attending university, figuring that perhaps Little Father Time will be able to achieve the academic dreams Jude himself failed to accomplish. This motif is another example of the cycles of social repetition in Jude the Obscure. Old-seeming children grow up into odd adults, who have old-seeming children themselves because of their own deficiencies.
Related Themes:
Part 6, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Rain:
Imagery related to rain appears over and over again as a motif in Jude the Obscure, emphasizing the way the world around Jude tries to cast him down, dampen his spirit, and subvert his efforts. In Part 1, Chapter 3, the young Jude feels downcast by the rain in Marygreen and considers that it can’t possibly be as bad in the “City of Colleges”:
In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too, he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there.
Rain is always depressing and heavy in Wessex. When Jude is a child he can't imagine that it ever rains in Christminster—or, if it does, he can't imagine it'd rain as “drearily” as at home. Even the rain, to his naive imagination, must be different when one is a university student.
As Jude grows up, the sensory language of heavy rain in the "sad wet season" of his life shows up more and more frequently. He gets soaked upon first trying to get to Christminster, the rain continually interrupts his work and makes the stone slick and dangerous, and it eventually even portends the downfall of his family. In Part 6, Chapter 1 Little Father Time says the dolorous rain makes their arrival at Christminster seem like "Judgement Day”:
The sky had grown overcast and livid, and thunder rumbled now and then. Father Time shuddered. ‘It do seem like the Judgment Day!’ he whispered. ‘They are only learned Doctors, ’ said Sue. While they waited big drops of rain fell on their heads and shoulders, and the delay grew tedious.
Although it isn’t actually the biblical day of “Judgement,” this rain does signal a time in which the Fawleys are thoroughly judged and found wanting by everyone in Christminster. Nobody will give them lodging. They are forced to wander the city in the torrent, passing colleges and churches glowing with warmth and safety as the “delay” in finding a place to stay gets more and more “tedious.”
This cruel rain is always associated with the sense of touch: it soaks Jude's clothes, stings his eyes, and makes the stone he works with slippery and unmanageable. It is hard for Jude to get a grip on things in general in this novel: the rain makes it harder. The reader feels the horrible hopelessness of being wet and never seeming to get dry, as Hardy describes Jude's clothes soaking and sticking to him. The motif of rain is also regularly associated with the visual: rain obscures things, blurs Jude’s vision, and makes writing hard to read for the scholar-in-training. Rain plays a role in Jude's death, too, as he eventually dies of exposure after he gets soaked with rain and chilled during his final conversation with Sue.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Hard Stone:
Hardy uses the motif of Jude’s relationship with stone—heavy, hard, and solid—to illustrate the difficulty the protagonist experiences in changing his life and his career. In Part 1, Chapter 5, Jude feels frustrated with the difficulty of learning Greek from a primer and muses that:
Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Jude wants to work with intangible, “precious” things like philosophy, the Classics, and religion as a Christminster student, but he is stuck in the work he was trained in. That career is the total opposite of a life of religious study. There are not many jobs more manual and less abstractly theoretical than stonemasonry. Jude wants to devote himself to the "mediæval colleges" of Christminster, the beauty of their “romance in stone,” and to a spiritual life, but he cannot. He is weighed down by the real stones involved in his obligation to work and provide for his family.
Like his hours cutting stone, Jude's work to better himself is hard, dangerous, and arduous. He can cut through granite, sandstone and marble more easily than he can make headway as a prospective student in 19th-century England. His efforts come to nothing, no matter how much he tries. Regardless of how much he studies, he's always thrown back into stonemasonry.
The stones he cuts so expertly are painfully and literally the building-blocks of the institutions he can't be a part of. Churches do not welcome him because of his scandalous personal life, and the universities built of glowing stone that he aspires to work in instead of on turn him away. In Part 6, Chapter 1, the statues decorating the stone buildings are so opposed to Jude’s desired life of study that they become personified, threateningly staring down his family as they pass:
[...] the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous persons who had no business there.
The stones of the buildings and the statues on them come alive and turn on the Fawleys as they look for lodging, judging Jude and Sue's family as unworthy, poor, and "bedraggled." Being in Christminster surrounded by students makes Jude feel he must be a "frightful example of what not to do," as he says to Sue just after this. Even though Jude helps to build the city of Christminster, he and his family are “seen” by the statues and then by the landlords who turn them away as “ludicrous persons who had no business there.”
Related Themes:
Part 6, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Birds:
Hardy regularly associates the ethereal Sue Bridehead with the motif of birds in this novel. Jude often refers to her as a bird or speaks of her as birdlike when he is frustrated with their their horrible luck, as he does in this fragment from Part 4, Chapter 2:
‘It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue – horrible!’ he said abruptly, with his eyes bent to the floor. [...] Your part is that you ought not to have married him. I saw it before you had done it, but I thought I mustn’t interfere. I was wrong. I ought to have!’
‘But what makes you assume all this, dear?’
‘Because – I can see you through your feathers, my poor little bird!’
In this passage, Jude refers to both their mutual emotional strain and his own dissatisfaction. Although Sue is safely married to a man with a regular job, Jude still thinks he can can "see her" through her “feathers.” This refers to the metaphorical idea that she looks thin and weary, as if she is a bird molting from stress and neglect. It’s also a suggestion by Jude that Sue's husband Phillotson doesn't really know her character but just wants her beauty. Jude believes he himself does more than this, thinking he can see "her" through her "feathers." In the same way as her counterpart Arabella Donn is linked to pigs, Sue is described by Hardy as being light, small, and delicate like a bird.
Sue is also associated with birds through her own choices. She memorizes Poe's poem "The Raven" as a child, an early instance of her desire to learn and exceed her circumstances. Although that poem is quite well-known now, it was relatively new and exciting for Victorian readers at the time in which Jude the Obscure is set. It would also have been considered an unusual choice for a young girl to learn, as it is full of grim and Gothic imagery. In this moment, Hardy makes a real-world reference to emphasize an early example of Sue’s free-thinking ways to his reader. Later in the book, Sue also releases birds from their cage, as if in sympathy for her own entrapment.
When Phillotson is considering reuniting with Sue in Part 6, Chapter 5, he is chastised through a metaphor by his friend Gillingham for "letting the bird go” in the first place:
‘Well – if you’ve got any sound reason for marrying her again, do it now in God’s name! I was always against your opening the cage-door and letting the bird go in such an obviously suicidal way.
Sue is described metaphorically here as a bird in a cage, as Hardy again refers to marriage as a cage or a trap from which she can be “released.”
Related Themes:
Part 6, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Maiden Blushes:
Hardy uses the visual imagery of things reddening as a motif. In Part 6, Chapter 6 Arabella tries to pass off her “spirituous crimson” (a red flush from drinking too much) as nothing more than a “maiden blush”:
‘Well, we’ve been waiting for certain legal hours to arrive, to tell the truth, ’ she continued bashfully, and making her spirituous crimson look as much like a maiden blush as possible. ‘Jude and I have decided to make up matters between us by tying the knot again, as we find we can’t do without one another after all. So, as a bright notion, we agreed to sit on till it was late enough, and go and do it off-hand.’
Her glowingly red cheeks indicate Arabella’s drunkenness in this passage, but she attempts to pass it off as the “maiden blush” that one might expect from a bride-to-be. The reader, Jude, and Arabella’s companions all know that Arabella drinks too much and that she has already been a bride a couple of times. Her “modesty” would be natural in a bride-to-be but is totally incongruous in a woman of her experience. This fake shyness doesn’t convince anyone and just makes her blatant machinations to ensnare Jude even more obvious and unpleasant.
Indeed, this false flush might seem familiar to the reader. Arabella’s face and lips are similarly described as “flushed” and “crimson” just before she and Jude begin sleeping together in Part 1. Her flushed face calls her previous sexual manipulations to mind when it recurs again here in Part 6.
In line with her lack of sexual innocence (although she seems determined in this passage to make people think she still has it, saying she and Jude are “waiting for legal hours” to sleep together again), the color red is regularly associated with Arabella in this book to denote her association with "flesh" and embodiment. Fittingly, the "redness" the reader encounters most often with Arabella is that of blood. Arabella’s skin is often literally covered in pig's blood and entrails. She tells Jude in Part 1, Chapter 10 that her pigs have to be “well bled” in order to sell, as no-one wants “red and bloody” pork. When she has trapped Jude into marrying her again, her face fills up with “crimson." This echoes the blood Jude will soon be forced to cover himself in again as they slaughter and “bleed” pigs together. Arabella’s blushes are never “maiden” responses but are instead indicators of her tendency to manipulate and to overindulge.
Related Themes:
Part 6, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Pigs:
Throughout the novel, Arabella is associated with a motif of sensuality, dirtiness, and slovenliness. More specifically, she is often associated with details related to pigs. In Part 6, Chapter 8, she berates Jude for his debilitating chronic illness, raging that:
‘I’ve got a bargain for my trouble in marrying thee over again!’ Arabella was saying to him. ‘I shall have to keep ’ee entirely, – that’s what ’twill come to! I shall have to make black-pot and sausages, and hawk ’em about the street, all to support an invalid husband I’d no business to be saddled with at all. Why didn’t you keep your health, deceiving one like this? You were well enough when I married you!’
At this point in the novel, Jude has been coerced into marrying her for a second time after Sue leaves him. When he returns to her, she is still involved in the pig business. She also returns to criticizing him as she did in their first marriage, angrily referring to the unpleasant act of making "black-pot" (blood pudding) as a way of belittling Jude and implying that he's squeamish.
Early in their first marriage in Part 1 of the novel, she shows no distaste for the grim and bloody act of killing pigs. She is endlessly practical and willing to get bloody and dirty, but Jude sees it as a "dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle." She is a woman "of rank passions,” Jude believes, like the pigs she keeps.
It's notable given this association that Arabella first gets Jude's attention by throwing a pig penis at him, which she sees as a normal act of flirtation. Like the pigs in this novel, Arabella is described as being sensuous, plump and stupid, with little care for what is societally or morally appropriate as long as she's not in trouble.
Related Themes:
