Critical attention understandably concentrated on Sue Bridehead. Two main points of departure:

(i) Hardy's own account of her in 1912 Preface, as 'a woman of the feminist movement', 'the intellectualized. emancipated bundle of nerves' produced by modern conditions; and
(ii) Lawrence's in Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), a quasi-psychological reading which attacks Sue's denial of her own femininity ('that which was female in her she wanted to consume within the male force').

Both accounts -- Sue as representative, Sue as warped -- prompt questions about the male presentation of a female character. Suggestion here is that Jude explores the ways in which Sue is taught to see herself within Victorian sexual ideology. In the realist tradition, the novelist implicitly claims to describe characters as they are, from a non-ideological position; in Jude Hardy moves away from this tradition, to show Sue as (briefly) not so much an autonomous character as the site or battleground of conflicting pressures.

The treatment of divorce in the novel suggests the narrator's sympathies with contemporary feminist argument; this is felt still more in the account (or in the refusal to give an account) of Sue's dislike of sexual relations with Phillotson. The refusal to explain (explain away?) Sue's feelings is not a failure of realism, but a mark of Hardy's attempt to get beyond realism. TH's feminist position may be linked with J. S. Mill's central argument, that 'what is now called the nature of women is an eminently arbitrary thing', i.e., precisely not natural but socially constructed. Hardy challenges the late Victorian science which tried to show, in opposition to Mill, that women's nature was biologically given (cf. work by Maudsley, Romanes). It may be impossible to change what is biologically given; but what TH shows is the operation of cultural and political forces, which leaves open the possibility of change. He returns Sue to history, not to 'Nature'.

Three main themes of the novel: (a) women's self-awareness in a patriarchal society; (b) Jude's attempts at self-education; and (c) the decline of religious faith. All three draw on same pool of vocabulary: opposing spirit and flesh, noble and gross, high and low, etc., so that all three areas of discussion interpenetrate each other. Arabella's conduct is 'low' in sexual and in class terms; Jude's 'high' academic hopes refer to both his spiritual ambitions and his social ones; when Sue's 'freedom from everything that's gross' elevates Jude, the terms are social as well as moral. The dominant language of the book privileges one set of terms over the other, and suggests an all-pervading dualism in the world Sue and Jude encounter -- or, contrary to D. H. Lawrence, experience within them, in their language, not (as DHL suggests) simply 'out there' as a recognisable enemy. It's to establish how all-pervasive this language is/these values are, that Hardy has the double focus, on Jude and on Sue.

Novel then shows how Sue is taught to inhabit her gender, to see herself first and last as 'a woman'. Jude contributes to this: just as Christminster is seen by Jude as spiritual, in opposition to ugly utilitarian Marygreen, so Sue is seen as ethereal and pure, in opposition to the fleshly and coarse Arabella. Jude, the Christminster graduate, and Phillotson, all insist on seeing Sue in a gendered way. But this becomes increasingly a double-bind for Sue: she's loved for her chastity or refinement, rebuked for her frigidity; sex is presented as gross, or as one element in the social contract of marriage, but also as the defining personal commitment. The dominant language is increasingly shown to be contradictory as well as cruelly coercive.

The anti-realist strategy of the novel allows Hardy to expose this language not as natural but as itself made, socially constructed. To that end the novel draws attention to its own fictive character: hence the diagrammatic plotting, the obtrusion of reference to numerous other texts, and, especially, the refusal to claim to be able to enter Sue's mind, and explain (from what standpoint?) the experiences which strike her as incoherent: typically, 'whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.'

Novel thus shows TH at his most radical, showing that Sue is trapped within the language of her society, a language which is also, necessarily, the author's. So no 'realist' stance available, since that would imply a transparent language, opening directly on to the reality of Sue's experience. There is no 'given', no immutable natural fact about gender, to which a novelist has unique access; what TH chooses to do is to explore the complex of pressures which play on, define and enclose his heroine.

PVM