Herzen im Aufruhr (Roman) (1895)

Hardy's last, and perhaps saddest, completed novel. While all who love the studied lyricism and social insight of Hardy will not find this novel wanting, the heavy burdens of institutional fatalism require me to caution readers about trying to bring this volume into bedside with your lovers for its romance--it has none.

The main character is a well-developed as a pro(t)agonist. Jude Fawley is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main agonist is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is his recurring love interest. The novel brilliantly describes the 18th century Victorian issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage which, for obscure and quite inexcusable reasons, remain robust today.

Jude Fawley lives in a village and labors with the hope of entering university. Jude, like many of us, is born lonely, horny and relentlessly naïve. He is seduced by Arabella Donn, a bold but superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. The marriage is a failure, and Arabella leaves Jude and later emigrates to Australia, where she enters into a bigamous marriage. Hardy is highlighting the inability of the Poor to perform up to the pieties expected by "law" and society.

After Arabella leaves him, Jude moves to Christminster. Still working as a mason, he studies subjects hoping to enter Oxford. He meets and falls in love with his pretty and spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. Jude introduces Sue to his former school teacher, Mr. Phillotson, and he marries Sue, despite the fact that he is some twenty years her senior. She soon regrets this marriage. Sue is in love with Jude, and is horrified by the notion of sex with her husband. Curiously, Sue asks Phillotson for permission to leave him for Jude, and he grants this permission. Phillotson understands she cannot fulfill what her marital duties to him since she loves Jude. The marital rift is a scandal—but it is Phillotson's willingness to allow his wife to leave for another man—which forces Phillotson to give up his career as a schoolmaster. Wessex in 1890s.

Sue and Jude live together without marriage or any sexual consummation. Sue apparently fears both sex and marriage. She "shudders". Soon after, Arabella reappears having fled her Australian husband, a hotelier in Sydney.
Arabella and Jude divorce and she legally marries her bigamous husband, and Sue also is divorced. However, these legalizations resolve none of the anguish. Arabella reveals that she had a child of Jude's, eight months after they separated. The boy is named Jude and nicknamed "Little Father Time" because of his intense seriousness and lack of humor.

Jude, back to the mason father, eventually convinces Sue to sleep with him and, over the years, they have two children together and expect a third. But Jude and Sue are socially ostracised. They are not married.

Jude's employers dismiss him because of the illicit relationship, and the family is forced to move from town to town seeking employment and housing before eventually returning to Christminster. The child, Little Jude comes to believe that he and his illegitimated half-siblings are the source of the family's woes. The morning after the family arrives in Christminster, Little Jude murders Sue's two other children and kills himself by hanging. He a note that simply reads, "Done because we are too menny. " [sic] Shortly thereafter, Sue has a miscarriage.

Beside herself with grief and blaming herself for Little Jude's actions, Sue turns to her religion long rebelled against. The children's deaths appear to be divine retribution for her relationship with Jude. Arabella discovers Sue's feelings and informs Phillotson, who proposes they remarry. Sue leaves Jude again for Phillotson, and she has sex with him as her punishment. Jude is devastated. Arabella plies Jude with alcohol and once again tricks him into marriage.

In the middle of an ice-storm -- described brilliantly -- Jude makes one final, desperate visit to Sue. Jude becomes seriously ill and dies within the year in Christminster. His hopes for love and learning, and decency and family, are failures. Sue grows "staid and worn" with Phillotson, the lively spirit utterly annihilated. Arabella fails to mourn Jude's passing, but steeled by pragmatism, prepares to ensnare her next suitor.

I highly recommend reading this, and all of Hardy's novels and poems, for their mix of clinically scientific observations and glimmering magic, always "rich and strange", glowing with consciousness. We need this vision. ( )

A truly magnificent bummer. ( )

I might have liked this book. There's honestly no way to tell for sure, since my first encounter has been thoroughly overwhelmed by the audiobook's dreadful narration. Frederick Davidson (aka, David Case) reads his way through every bit of narrative with an inflectionless sing-song that lands on important words in a whisper as often as it lands on irrelevant ones with emphatic volume. He sobs his way through tearful dialogue instead of reading it with pathos; changes his rough-voiced characters to simpering whiners whenever they're having an emotional moment; and imbues every female character with the least attractive vocal qualities of their sex---limpid die-away airs or hard-voiced whorish manipulation, with no in between.

While there might have been something redeemable in these characters if I'd read their story, myself, I've been left with the indelible impression that, no, in fact, these characters are nothing more than mincing ninnies or greedy narcissists or self-deluding fools. And that while, yes, their story is framed by the devouring juggernaut of the English educational system and marriage laws, they would've determinedly ruined their lives even in the absence of these things.

My philosophy teacher in college told me I desperately needed to read this book, that if I did, I would see a British author's compassionate treatment of his characters (in contrast, according to her, to Jane Austen's contempt for them). But I didn't see Hardy's compassion for these people---and I've read Tolstoy, so I know what the compassionate expression of very flawed people looks like. What I saw, what I read, was a determined lambasting of a social system via sad, pathetic people who probably couldn't have made a go of life even under the best of circumstances. Hardy made it difficult for me to even care about these people, let alone have compassion for their circumstances.

I might laugh at Austen's characters, but she means me to. I don't think Hardy wants me laughing, let alone sneering, at his...but that's what I fought not to do through the entire book.

Poor Jude. Poor Sue. What unfortunate wretches you are. ( )

God, Hardy is depressing. I would like to read more, but I don't think I could handle it. ( )

God, Hardy is depressing. I would like to read more, but I don't think I could handle it. ( )