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sotweedfactor 's review for:
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure is one of the most tragic love stories I've yet to be told, and its tragicness comes as heterodox as the love between poor Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead. The two are built to not fit into society, Jude being a sensitive and smart boy not built for the trials of hard labor, and Sue being a woman determined to learn her way out of common Christian moral and the social mores of the Victorian persuasion. Already, the two have their destiny sealed, for their very fiber is a rejection of their surroundings, and Jude and Sue repeatedly note that their ideas come fifty years too soon. This statement is apt, and in a way, fatalistic. The tragedy comes not in the failure of their emotions, which always remain, but in the overbearing society that pushed against them for too long and too hard. A society that took every chance it could to reject, befoul, constrain, and imprison the two who dared live against its code. And it should be understand this is not a tragedy left in the Victorian age, but still all too present in the lives of the dreamers who tried and failed. So then, Thomas Hardy paints a bleak picture, and a picture that remains mournfully accurate.