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Reverse Typology in Jude the Obscure

Eleanor McNees
Christianity & Literature 1989 39: 35
DOI: 10.1177/014833318903900105
The online version of this article can be found at:
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Christianity and Literature

Vol. 39, No.1 (Autumn 1989)

Reverse Typology in Jude the Obscure

Eleanor MeNees

In his 1922 "Apology" prefixed to Late Lyrics and Earlier, Thomas

Hardy defends himselfagainst critical attacks of pessimism by explaining
that he believes in "evolutionary meliorism" (Complete Poems 557), or
"loving- kindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated
by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when
the mighty necessitating forces-unconscious or other-that have 'the
balancings of the clouds, 'happen to be in equilibrium, which mayor may
not be often" (Complete Poems 558). Such a cautious belief, he notes, is
best expressed bya line from his poem "In TenebrisII" written in 1895,the
same yearin which he completedJude the Obscure: ".. .ifway to the Better
there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst" (14). Numerous critics have
striven to interpret this oblique philosophy and to argue for or against
Hardy's religious views. Theygenerallycite Darwin's evolutionarytheory
and German higher criticism of the Bible as the corrosive elements in
Hardy's fall from faith.' Unable to cull many clues from Hardy's letters
or his Life, many point to the poems which tangle repeatedly with religious questions. "The Impercipient" from Hardy'sfirst collection, Wessex
Poems and Other Verses (1898), well articulates Hardy's battle between
the will to believe and the skepticism that inhibits that will. Originally
titled "The Agnostic," its first stanza explains the persona's stance at a
cathedral service:
That with this bright believing band
I have no claim to be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Is a strange destiny. (l-6)

And stanza four intensifies the image of faith as mirage:

I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company
Standing up fingered, with, 'Hark! hark!
The glorious distant sea!'

35
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ELEANOR McNEES

And feel, 'Alas, 'tis but yon dark

And wind-swept pine to me!' (19-24)

In opposition to a number of Hardy's critics, John Coulson refuses to

view Hardy as an unbeliever. He insists that Hardy suffers "from a kind
oftheological malnutrition for which he is not responsible. Instead his
position is one, not so much of agnosticism, as of carefully circumscribed
theological continence." Coulson notes that in the writings "what is
defined is an unresolved and continuing crisis of belief' (l09). This
"continuing crisis of belief" highlights a constant tension between the
will to believe and the rational suppression of that will,"
Later poems ('The Blow," "God- Forgotten," "God's Funeral") enunciate this tension in various ways-through interrogations of the dead and
God to such bald statements as "No aimful author's was the blow I That
swept us prone, I But the Immanent Doer's That doth not know" ("The
Blow" 22-24)-to reach a resolution. "ACathedral Facade at Midnight,"
written in 1897 shortly after Jude the Obscure, crystallizes the dilemma of
both Jude and Hardy under the guise of martyred saints:
A frail moan from the martyred saints there set
Mid others of the erection
Against the breeze, seemed sighings of regret
At the ancient faith's rejection
Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress
Of Reason's movement, making meaningless
The coded creeds of old-time godliness. (1521)

As a youth Jude is obsessed with decoding these "coded creeds." He

adheres to the rules of biblical typology, believing in the movement from
type to anti type to final fulfillment. After numerous disillusionments,
however, he succumbs to the "steady stress I Of Reason's movement"
and actually reverses his direction. He depletes the antitype and moves
backward to the unfulfilled type. This reversal of typological method
conveys Hardy's anger against a Church whose rituals have become
hypocritical. Yet, paradoxically, both Jude and Sue end with relentlessly
ritualistic behavior: Jude dies quoting Job, and Sue returns to the Anglican Church and to blind obedience to the sacrament of marriage. The
crisis of belief is never satisfactorily resolved. Neither true believers nor
thorough agnostics, Jude and Sue bothcling to old rituals to provide them
with meaning, albeit a sorely depleted one.
The aim of this essay is to expose Hardy's use of unconventional
biblical typology in Jude the Obscure. In this final novel typology lends
Hardy an exegetical method which he can pervert to criticize man's
search for spiritual meaning in a world devoid of spirituality. By denying

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37

the eschatological goal of typology, Hardy demonstrates the futility of

ritual. At the same time he shows the inability of his characters to
abandon that ritual. He suggests that for the late Victorians the scaffolding of belief and convention comes to replace the building or the inner
faith. Bydepleting biblical types and moving backwards from Newto Old
Testaments, Hardy manipulates biblical narrative techniques to prove
his thesis.
In a j oumal entry which serves as a parodic gloss to the fates of Jude
and Sue, Hardy in 1907 says of Church ritual:
We enter church, and we have to say, "Wehave erred and strayed from
Thy ways like lost sheep," when what we wantto say is, "Why are we made
to err and stray like lost sheep?" Then we have to sing, "My soul doth
magnifythe Lord,"when whatwe want to sing is, "Othatrnysoul could find
some Lord that it could magnify! Tillit can, let us magnify good works, and
develop all means of easing mortals' progress through a world not worthy
of them."
Still, being present, we say the established words full of the historic
sentiment only, mentally adding, "How happy our ancestors were in
repeating in all sincerity these articles of faith!" But we perceive that none
of the congregation recognizes that we repeat the words from an antiquarian interest in them, and in a historic sense, and solely in order to keep a
church of some sort afoot-a thing indespensable; so that we are pretending what is not true: that we are believers. This must not be; we must leave.
And if we do, we reluctantly go to the door, and creep out as it creaks
complainingly behind us. (Life 332-33)

For Hardy ritual, like typology, requires faith, not superficial obedience.
In gradually depleting the New Testament antitypes of Iude and Christ in
Jude the Obscure, Hardy shows the hypocrisy of false ritual. Just prior to
writing Jude Hardy accused his friend Florence Henniker, thought to be
the prototype for Sue Bridehead, of reverting to "ritualistic ecclesiasticism" (Collected Letters 23) and "retrograde superstitions" (Collected
Letters 26). And two years after the publication oiIude, Hardy complains
to his friend Edward Clodd: "The older one gets, the more deplorable
seems the effect of that terrible, dogmatic ecclesiasticism-Christianity
so called (but really Paulinism plus idolatry) on morals & true religion: a
dogma with which the real teaching of Christ has hardly anything in
common" (Collected Letters 143). Indeed, Hardy makes this "terrible,
dogmatic ecclesiasticism" responsible for the final rupture between Jude
and Sue. In the end of the novel the two exchange positions: Jude
ceremoniouslyrenounces his allegianceto his Oxfordidols-Pusey, Keble,
and Newman-while Sue becomes a devotee of High Anglican ritual.
Traditional spiritual autobiographies from Augustine's Confessionsto

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ELEANOR McNEES

Bunyan's The Pilgrim'sProgress embody, as Avrom Fleishman suggests,

the progressive movement of typology. One event leads to a greater
event, one type to a fuller one. Fleishman posits a six-part model for such
works: (1) natural childhood; (2) fall and exile; (3)journey; (4) crisis; (5)
epiphany and conversion; and (6)renewal and return (58-66). Fleishman
argues that by the late eighteenth century the antitype-usually Christis replaced by the "aftertype" or fulfilled self. The "self-transcendent"
goal of Augustine becomes the "transcendent self" (106) of the Romantics. While the Victorians inherit this Romantic legacy, they are suspicious of the inflation of selfhood. Consequently, according to Fleishman,
they lack a "stable symbolic mode for self-writing.... The type becomes
a palimpsest" (115-16).
Paul I. Korshin identifies the use of an "abstracted typology" which
eighteenth-century authors began to use in place of traditional biblical
typology. This "abstracted typology" substituted "imagistic technique"
(165) for biblical exegesis. It replaced Old Testament figures with pagan
or historical types and made antitypes out of contemporaryfigures. Such
distorted typology lent authority to the Victorian myth of progress and
showed, rightly or wrongly, how sacred methods could be adapted to
explain secular events.
In a survey of typological methods in Victorian poetry, George P.
Landow argues that the Victorians tried to apply the progressive movement of typology to biological evolution. Such an enterprise endeavored
to mend the fissure between faith and science, to reconcile the "surface
and symbol" (321). He stresses the significance ofthe typological image
with its "potential to thrust the reader into another context, demonstrating in the process how everything and every man exist simultaneously in
two realms of meaning" (327).
While all three of these critics attempt to adapt traditional biblical
typology to its Victorian manifestations, none discusses the purposeful
inversion of typology as a tool with which to criticize Victorian society. If
one accepts Erich Auerbach's definition oftypology-"Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first
of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second
encompasses or fulfills the first" (53)-itis possible to investigate jude the
Obscure as anoppositional movementfrom double significationto em pty
signification or absence.
Of the depletion of meaning in the late Victorian novel, Philip M.
Weinstein states: "The novel spreads before its hero, not the transcendental home of the spirit, butinnumerable halfway houses that betray the
spirit even as they promise it material abode" (126). Hardy records this
progressive betrayal of spirit in jude by forcing his protagonist to move
backwards from spirit to the letter that no longer reveals the spirit. While

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tus OBSCURE

39

initially Jude attempts to move toward eschatological fulfillment in the

"heavenly Jerusalem" (18) of Christminster, he ultimately discovers
Christminster to be the ash-heap of Job. It is certainly no accident that
Hardy chose as epigraph for Jude only the first halfoflI Corinthians 3:6"The letter killeth"-and omitted the second half-"but the spirit giveth
life." Traditional typology moves from the letter of the Old Testament to
the spirit of the New Testament fulfilled by Christ's passion and resurrection. As Jude journeys from New Testament antitype (St. Jude, Christ,
even Judas) to Old Testament type (Samson, Job), he demonstrates the
extinction of the spirit by the letter and thus reverses the order of Paul's
advice to the Corinthians.
As a boy Jude believes that the route to Christminster, the "mirage
mist" he sees from the ladder against the ominous Brown House, entails
a hermeneutical penetration of the Latin and Greek scriptures. Like
sixteenth-century biblical exegetes,
he concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain,
primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher,
which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at
will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one .... Thus he
assumed that the words of the required language were always to be found
somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the
art to uncover them. . .. (26)

At this point for Jude the original spiritual language of the scriptures
simply awaits typological discovery. The English language lends a set of
types or codes which signifies the sacred language. One must learn this
sacred language to become a scholar worthy of living and studying in
Christminster. Significantly, the letter seems to promise life, not death.
Although Jude is prophetically warned by a carter he meets that the
language of Christminster is beyond ordinary understanding-"'foreign
tongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families
spoke alike" (21)-he determines to find a superior language which will
enable him to understand such babble. Thus a central theme in Jude the
Obscure becomes Jude's lifelong search for a master text.' This master
text is housed in the inaccessible Christminster where Jude believes the
"tree of knowledge" (23) grows.
Jude's first disillusionment comes with his realization, after he has
received the Latin and Greek grammar books from Phillotson, that "there
was no law of transmutation ... but that every word in both Latin and
Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of
plodding" (27). For the first time Hardy suggests Jude's inversion of
typologyin the comparison of Iude to the Israelite captives in Egypt. Here
too, as at the end of the novel, Jude wishes he had never been born. This

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ELEANOR McNEES

is in ironic contrast to the text of Exodus 1 where the midwives spare the
Hebrew male infants despite Pharaoh's order to kill them. Hardy invariably attenuates and distorts biblical allusions to show both the similarity
and discrepancy between Jude and his biblical types. Jude's death wish
reveals a latent pessimism despite his overt determination to acquire the
languages regardless of the rigor required to master them. He quickly
abandons the pagan authors for the New Testament gospels and epistles
and determines to be not only a scholar but also a Christian divine. Like
his New Testament antitype, St. Jude, he fears the hypocrisy to which he
might fall prey should he continue reading pagan authors while aspiring
to be a Christian.
Hardy's choice of one of the briefer and more obscure epistles in the
Bible, that of Iude, and the placement of that epistle next to Revelation
signify his typological tactics. The biblical Jude warns those who are
"called" to God not to fall into hypocrisy or unbelief. The entire epistle is
a plea to the faithful to avoid lust. It moves from Old Testament examples
of God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha to the warnings of the
Apostles: "How that they told you there should be mockers in the last
time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. These be they who
separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit" (Jude 18-19).
This passage echoes ironicallyfor Jude Fawleywhen he meets Arabella
Donn in a scene filled with mockery and lust. Unfortunately, Jude's
eschatological direction toward Christminster (the New Jerusalem of
Revelation) is sadly thwarted by this encounter. In his musings Jude has
mentally elevated himselfto first son of Christminster and thus to Christ:
"Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son,
in whom she shall be well pleased'" (32-33). His intellectual and spiritual
thoughts are abruptly interrupted by a language of gibberish-"'Hoitytoity'" (32)-a sarcastic comment on his scholarly vocation. Arabella
teaches Jude neither the meaning of the letter nor that of the spirit but
rather what S1. Jude warns eventually cancels both-the world oflust. In
teaching Jude this new language, she deceives him into marrying her and
forces him to abandon his studies. Hardy uses an analogy to reading in
order to emphasize Jude's fall: "He saw this with his intellectual eye, just
for a short fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might
momentarily see an inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in
darkness" (36).
Hardy indicates Jude's regressively typological movement by an allusion to the picture of Samson and Delilahwhich hangs in the public house
where Arabella and Jude stop. The allusion is sandwiched between two
references to the Greek title of the New Testament. The latter allusion to
the New TestamentpropheticallychartsJude's reverse movement: "There
lay his book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-

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REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE tnt: OBSCURE

41

page regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like the
unclosed eyes of a dead man" (41). As the epigraph to Jude states, the
letter without the spirit kills.
After hearing about the unhappy fate of his parents flrst from Arabella
and then from his Aunt Drusilla, Jude feebly tries to kill himself by
jumping on an ice-covered pond, then dulls his despair in the public
house near the picture of Samson and Delilah. Bythe conclusion ofBook
I, however, Jude appears to have revived his dream of Christminster as he
reverses Hardy's previous analogy to the darkened inscription. Seeinghis
old lettering on a mile post pointing to Christminster, Jude feels "in his
soul a spark of the old fire" and sees Christminster once again "by the eye
of faith" (62). Throughout the rest of the novel Hardy gradually depicts
the shutting of this eye and shows how Jude disregards St. Jude's advice
until he regresses from New Testament antitype to the Old Testament
Job.
Jude enters Christminster at night and allies himself with the ghostly
city's inhabitants, particularly the Tractarian leaders-Newman, Keble,
and Pusey. During this nocturnal ramble he tries to transform letter (all
his reading) into spirit and almost succeeds. But he chooses a Christminster suburb nicknamed Beersheba in which to lodge, a suburb which
typologically extends St. Jude's warning to that of Christ to the people of
Capernaum.'
Ashe goes to stone-cuttingyards lookingforwork, Jude unconsciously
witnesses the descent of the spirit to the letter. This descent translates, as
J. Hillis Miller notes of the poetry, into an obsession with the way the past
is inscribed on the present (Linguistic Moment 286). In Christminster
Jude is unable to accept the discrepancy between past spirit and present
fact. He perceives that the stone-cutting business seems to be one of
"copying, patching and imitating," but "He did not at that time see that
mediaevalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other
developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic
architecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity of
contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in
reverence was not revealed to him" (69).
Still holding to his medieval principles, Jude moves more toward
fidelity to the letter over the spirit in his flrst sight of Sue Bridehead. She
is lettering "ALLELUIA" on a scroll, an act which Jude mistakenly interprets as '''A sweet, saintly, Christian business'" (72). He elevates Sue to
the status of a saint even before he meets her, investing her with a faith
and spirituality which she does not possess. In reality, in a scene parodically parallel to Jude's encounter with Arabella, we find on the same
Saturday night Sue reading about Julian the Apostate and staring at her
newly purchased pagan sculptures while Jude is reading a text from the

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ELEANOR McNEES

Greek New Testament. His text stands in obvious contrast to Sue's

activity. I Corinthians 8 warns against having other idols, while Julian the
Apostate converts from Christianity back to paganism. The chapter
preceding Jude's reading contains Paul's admonition to wives and husbands about marriage and the higher spirituality of virginity. Jude and
Sue's opposite journeys are here typologicallymirrored by their readings.
Sue ultimately moves toward the ascetic position of St. Paul's message in
I Corinthians 7. Jude experiences a fall from Christianity into agnosticism. Hardy lards Jude the Obscurewith such intertextual prophecies,
both juxtaposingthem to Jude's contemporary reality and also emptying
the prophecy of spirit. The biblical allusions hasten the progression of the
plot towards its final negative fulfillment. They also provide types and
antitypes for Jude. The NewTestament antitypes serve as sharp contrasts
to Jude's actualdescentfrom faith, while the OldTestamenttypes (Samson,
Job) provide more accurate analogues. Hardy skillfully manipulates
these allusions to surround Jude with typological options: either he can
strive to realize himself as antitype, or he can regress to unfulfilled type.
Hardy employs a different tactic with Sue. He shows her as gradually
moving from pagan type to Christian antitype. Yetthismovement proves
ironic, for Sue (at least according to Jude and Hardy) lacks the faith
required to link type to antitype," Thus Sue illustrates not the reverse
typology of Jude but rather a parody of the true typological movement
from type to antitype. Perhaps even more than Jude, she illustrates the
precept that the letter kills.
It is literally a letter from one of the Christminster dons that serves the
death blow to Jude's hopes of entering a Christminster college. The sixth
chapter of the Christminster section is filled with images of Iob's despair.
Jude scrawls on one of the college gates the retort of Iob to his friend
Zophar: "'I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you:
yea, who knoweth not such things as these?'-Job xii. 3" (97). As he drinks
in a public house, he illustrates Job's warning that men abandoned by
God will "grope in the dark without light, and ... stagger like a drunken
man" (Job 12:25). He further demonstrates Job's statement that "I am as
one mocked of his neighbour who calleth upon God, and he answereth
him: the just upright man is laughed to scorn" (Job 12:4) when he
drunkenly tries to recite the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds in Latin before
an illiterate audience in the public house. From this point onward in the
novel Jude becomes a type of Job. He is gradually shorn of his possessions, his children, his "wife" Sue until, on his death bed, he retreats to the
Job of the third chapter, cursing the day he was born,"
Although he decides to abandon his Christminster dream of becoming
a scholarly divine, Jude decides to pursue the life of a curate and devote
himselfto a humbIer means of serving God. He follows Sue to Melchester

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43

and resumes his reading of the Church fathers and of the Tractarians.
Here Hardy suggests Job and Jude's antitype, Christ, a frequent, though
fainter, parallel to Jude throughout the remainder of the novel. The
allusions to Jude as Christ come mostly from Jude's own musings in
which he both contrasts and likens himself to Jesus. In determining to
pursue life as a curate, he is pleased to realize that he will be thirty at the
time he begins his ministry-"an age which much attracted him as being
that of his exemplar when he first began to teach in Galilee" (104).
Jude holds to his plan while Sue subtlyundermines it by her professed
preference for pagan over Christian subjects and by herrearrangement of
the NewTestament books (an obvious allusion to the historical criticism
which had crossed from Germany to England). It is not until after Sue is
married and his Aunt Drusilla dies that Jude finally decides to abandon
his Christ-like pursuit of a curacy. The final foil to his plans is his
realization that he loves Sue physically, not spiritually, and that he wishes
to commit adultery. He betrays himself and introduces another New
Testament figure, Judas, when he kisses Sue. He realizes that "it was
glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier
and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best
a frailty, and at its worst damnation" (172). He burns his religious books
in a revolt against his hypocrisy, although he does not yet abandon his
faith.
Once Jude and Sue begin living together, Jude descends from stone
mason to tombstone letterer. This vocation ironically bolsters Hardy's
epigraph-"The letter killeth." But the climactic illustration of the epigraph comes when Jude and Sue attempt to restore the Ten Commandments above a church altar in Aldbrickham. Hardy has one of the
onlookers relate a story about drunken workmen leaving out the "not's"
in a similar restoration of the Commandments. While technically Jude
and Sue have not committed adultery, they are, in the eyes of the community, adulterous because they are not legally married. Their struggle
against the letter of the law, both legally and theologically, has isolated
them and has finally even cost Jude his trade. At this point Jude surrenders the lastvestige of his faith by refusing to repair sacred buildings. And
at this point too he begins to adopt Sue's original pagan position. Hardy
has shown the gradual grinding down of a faith based on the theological
letter of the law. Rejected by the Christminster dons, diverted from his
ambitions ofacuracy, and finally shorn ofhis trade, Jude is ready, like Job,
to be robbed of his final solace-his family.
Part six of Jude the Obscure begins and ends on Remembrance Day at
Christminster. It chronicles the final demise of Iude during the course of
one year. Here all the typological allusions coalesce; Jude is at once Job,
Samson, and Christ, although the first two types appear to cancel out the

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ELEANOR McNEES

third. Inhis extemporaneous speech to the crowdwatching the academic

procession he states, "'I am in a chaos of principles-groping in the
dark-acting by instinct and not after example'" (258). Yet, perhaps
perversely, he still retains his zeal for ritual and strains to hear the Latin
of the ceremony. He has been unable to realize the spirit behind the
letter. Hardy suggests that society inhibits such a discovery by forcing its
members to adhere exclusively to the letter of the law.
This adherence is painfully demonstrated by Sue's conversion, after
her children die, to the HighAnglican ritual of penance. She begins to use
New Testament allusions to describe her family's plight: '''Leaving Kennetbridge for this place is like coming from Caiaphas to Pilate" (261). The
crucifixion images multiply as Jude, Sue, and their children are surrounded bySacrcophagus and Rubric Colleges. When FatherTime hangs
himself and the other two children, the reader is forced to envisage a
grotesque parody of the crucifixion ironically reminiscent of Sue's early
positioning of her pagan statues on either side of a portrait of the hanging
Christ. Jude's fatalistic reaction to the deaths-his allusion to the
Agamemnon-contrasts with Sue's sudden entrenchment in Anglican
dogma. His sarcastic query '''Where are dear Apollo, and dear Venus
now!'" (278)when he finds Sue at S1. Silas' Church expresses his desire for
the old pagan Sue and not the perverselypenitential one. He nevertheless
accedes to Sue's wishes and accepts her adherence to the theological
letter-that she is still Richard Phillotson's wife. He frees Sue by putting
the final seal on the preceding crucifixion imagery: "Then let the veil of
our temple be rent in two from this hour" (280). This statement is
ambiguous in terms of Jude's own state of mind. Having virtually renounced Christianity, Jude secularizes the image to embody his natural
marriage to Sue. He also uses the ritualistic language to which Sue has
suddenly devoted herself. They have reversed roles: Jude has rejected a
language devoid of faith, and Sue has appropriated the language as a
substitute for a faith she does not possess.
During his drunken three days with Arabella, Jude becomes a "shorn
Samson" (300) and, though he remarries Arabella, he determines to die.
He has been metaphorically blinded by drink, his confessed weakness.
The portrait of Samson and Delilah in the public house of the early
courtship of Jude and Arabella is figurally realized in this second courtship.
The full realization of the killing quality of the letter is announced by
Jude when he visits Sue for the last time. He warns her not to run away
when he states, "Sue, Sue! we are acting by the letter; and 'the letter
killeth" (308). Finally, however, both are unable to avoid obeisance to the
letter. Jude must pursue his Samson/Job-like destiny, and Sue must fulfill
her penitential obligation to Phillotson. On his way back to Christminster

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to die, Jude passes the Brown House and the mile post on which he had
carved "THITHER J. F." (62). Now he no longer sees but only feels the
etching, which is almost" 0 bliterated by moss" (310). The lettering which
had encouraged him to pursue his dream of scholarship in Christminster
serves only as a dull reminder of defeat and illustrates the emptiness ofhis
hopes.
His entrance into Christminster on Arabella's arm presents an ironic
reversal of his first entrance into that city. It is again night, and again he
conjures up the ghosts of Christminster. This time, however, he realizes
the collapse of the spirit which had supported his vision:
'I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling. But 1don't revere all
of them as 1did then. 1don't believe in half of them. The theologians, the
apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen,
and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for me by the
grind of stern reality!' (311)

This "stern reality" closes in on Jude as he dies on Remembrance Day

quoting the third chapter of Iob: "'Let the day perish wherein I was born,
and the night in whichitwas said, There is aman child conceived" (320).
Jude's quotations are punctuated by the "Hurrah's" of the Christminster
crowd witnessing the commencement parade. In reversing the typological progression from Old Testament to New Testament, Hardy has gone
even further. He does not allow Jude to fulfill either Samson's fate or
Job's. Having lost his faith, Jude does not pull the pillars of Christminster
down with him, nor does he live to hear God's voice in the whirlwind and
be reimbursed by God for his sufferings. Instead he dies a prey to the
unfulfilled letter. He aptly illustrates the book's epigraph and denies the
unwritten second half-"but the spirit giveth life."
In "God's Funeral," written between 1908 and 1910, Hardy asks:
"Whence came it we were tempted to create lOne whom we can no
longer keep alive?" (23-24). Such a question seems to haunt Jude the
Obscure. The poem's persona argues that such temptation arose from
"our own early dream I And need of solace" (29-30), but that nowwe must
face the death of that dream:
So, toward our myth's obllvlon,
Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,
Whose Zion was a still abiding hope. (37-40)

Jude lives to see the obliteration of this myth. His belief in a typological
anchor which would assure spiritual connection between himself and
both Old and New Testament types has collapsed, and he is left without

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ELEANOR McNEES

the faith of Job. He moves backward instead of forward, regressing from

New Testament antitype to Old Testament type and finally to a fragment
of the Old Testament type. His view of Christminster as the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse likewise collapses to that of the unrepentant
Capernaum of Matthew 11:23, a city more deserving of destruction than
Sodom. Hardy's purposeful parody of the traditional typological movement constitutes a harsh critique of a society striving to hold fast to a
structure emptied of spirit. AsTheodore Ziolkowski suggests, it is virtually impossible for the modern novelist to employ traditional biblical
typology: "The modern author who writes a novel based typologically on
themesfrom the Bible. . . is literally incapacitated by history and his
own consciousness from writing out of the faith that was accessible even
to the most sophisticated medieval authors" (354).7 Jude the Obscure
details Jude's gradual fall into a consciousness which destroys faith," It
makes this consciousness all the more painful as it shows Sue's opposite
fall into unconsciousness. Byabandoning herself and fleeing to dogma,
Sue becomes the true villain of the novel. She commits the sin of
hypocrisy, which Jude and all of his biblical types from Jesus to Job most
abhor.
Through Jude Hardyforces his readers to take "afulllookattheWorst."
While Jude dies before he can discover any "way to the Better," Hardy
holds outmorehope for the reader. In "The Profitable Reading of Fiction"
he says that "Our true object is a lesson in life, mental enlargement from
elements essential to the narratives themselves and from the reflections
they engender"(Life and Art 60). The evolutionary meliorism which
Hardy professes in his 1922 "Apology" entails such a belief in mental
enlargement, or at least an increase in self-awareness. At several points
Hardy suggests that Jude is ahead of his time, that had he lived fifty years
later his views would have been accepted by his society. Since they are
not, Jude is forced to see himselfin the same terms as those of the persona
of "In Tenebris II": "one born out of due time, who has no calling here"
(8). In order to illustrate Jude's plight so that the reader might gain a truly
enlarged view of human nature, Hardy perverts the Victorian crisis autobiography and reverses the accompanying typology. The Christian journey toward eschatological fulfillment is ultimately exposed as a flight
away from the self toward the "mirage mist" of a mythical religion. Jude
becomes a tragic hero in his solitary denial of the mirage which Hardy felt
too many Victorians refused to penetrate.
University ofDenver

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NOTES
Iparticulary astute on Darwin's influence is Gillian Beer, who sees Hardy's
dilemma as one of finding "a scale for the human, and a place for the human
within the natural order" (252). Beer argues that Darwin's theories aid Hardy's
attention to observation of minute details, not that these theories extinguish
Hardy's religion. J. HillisMiller thinks the problem is one of scale as well, but also
of immanence replacing transcendence: "The supreme power is immanent
rather than transcendent. It does not come from outside the world, but is a force
within nature, part of its substance. It is a version of the inherent energy of the
physical world as seen by nineteenth-century science: an unconscious power
working by regular laws of matter in motion" (Thomas Hardy 14). But Thomas
Vargish and T. R. M. Creighton are more pessimistic about the loss ofbeliefto
scientific skepticism in Hardy's works. Vargish asserts that Hardy's novels lack
the"providential aesthetic" that informs the traditional Victorian novel. He sees
Hardy's characters realizing the "weightlessness of life in a universe essentially
bereft of meaning because ithas been abandoned by the source of meaning" (54),
and Creighton views Hardy's conflict as one between prelapsarian vision and
nineteenth-century rationalism where Hardy's characters wander "in the deserts
between Darwin and Jehovah" (67).
2Uke Coulson, Dwayne Howell sees in Hardy's poetry particularly a crisis
of belief in which Hardy's rational thought conflicts with his "extra-rational
feeling" or "'dogma'" (5). Howell thinks the poetic persona and the variety of
poetic forms are better suited to express this dilemma than the novels.
:!Weinstein sees Jude the Obscure as a novel about the inadequacy oflanguage
to provide an adequate frame of reference for the characters' actions. He views
Jude and Sue as borrowers of discourse because their language is "already ...
coopted" by an "alien culture" (128). Weinstein proceeds with a deconstructive
reading of the text but does not consider Hardy's use ofinverted typology.
4Hardy's original manuscript had Capernaum for Beersheba. In Matthew
11:23-24 Christ warns the inhabitants of Capernaum: "And thou, Capernaum,
which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty
works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have
remained until this day. But 1say unto you, that it shall be more tolerable for the
land of Sodom in the day ofjudgment, than for thee." Applied personally to Jude,
this statement is heavil yprophetic. Jude exalts both himselfand Christminster to
heavenly status and dies in the sheer hell of Job. He, like the targets of Christ's
warning to the denizens of Cape rnaurn, fails to repent and be faithful. This is a
variant of Hardy's use of reverse typology: Jude fails to heed prophecies and is
consequently punished. Thus the negative side of the prophecy is fulfilled.
5Theodore Ziolkowski, speaking of modern typology, notes that parody is the
result "when form becomes absolute and the original meaning disappears" (360).
Both Jude and Hardy view Sue's conversion as a fraudulent adherence to form
over faith.
61 n "AKinship with Job" Alexander Fischler deals with Hardy's use of the Job
story as an attempt to make Jude heroic and mythical. While Fischler mainly
focuses on the interplay between the darkness of Job and the light of Remem-

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ELEANOR McNEES

brance Day, he does pinpoint Hardy's deviation from the story of Iob: "He has
even given up the notion of an adversary, a power beyond that hides the way and
hedges man in. He clings only to Job's consoling wisdom that in death, when lack
ofsympathyand absence ofanswers cease to matter, he too will find peace" (527).
By eliminating Satan from the narrative, Hardy exposes the randomness of ill
fortune that befalls Jude. He abbreviates the biblical story and makesJudealmost
existential by erasing both cause and final effect and focusing only on the present
loss.
7Fischler, however, defends Hardy's use of the Job type: "Choosing a latterday Job for hero allowed Hardy to suggest that, in a modern stratified society, as
in the land ofUz, convention remains the basis for damning judgment, causing
merit to go unrecognized and material failure to be the accepted proofof spiritual
inadequacy" (525).
SWilliamClyde Brown blames Hardy's own loss of faith on his acquaintance
with the "higher criticism" of the Bible as well as with Darwin, noting: "Where the
factuality of a [b]iblical narrative could be questioned, there could be no dependable ground for Hardy's belief' (88). Likewise there could be no basis for a
typological view of history if neither type nor antitype were true.
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