Where should the dreamer return

2007-04-29 00:29:53 　　来自: 幽人
Jude the Obscure (Penguin Classics)的评论   

　　Jude The Obscure is Hardy’s last all-time tragedy before he devoted exclusively to poetry. It’s no surprise that I was completely stunned by the darkening and heart-breaking ending of the story. The hollowness of existence during the process of trying to escape from conventional and hypocritical life keeps on haunting the whole story. To some extent, this tragic story accords with the pattern of Greek tragedy illustrated by Aristotle, that is “it would be a person who is neither perfect in virtue and justice, nor one who falls into misfortune through vice and depravity, but rather, one who succumbs through some miscalculation.” Both the hero and heroin fight extremely hard with social conventions and dream to find a peaceful corner for their love, but ironically ending with the hero’s painful death and heroin’s spiritual death.
　　
　　I should say that I’m a little disappointed with my own sentimentality, because it’s always the emotional struggles, love, marriage and even betrayal that attract my attention and preference in a novel. But I can hardly sublime my understanding to a social and philosophical level when I read a novel for the first time. Jude The Obscure starts with Jude’s consciousness of the sordid and painful side of life and nature. From the very beginning of the novel, I’ve become deeply pitiful for Jude, who as Sue expresses as “the dreamer of dreams, and a tragic Don Quixote.” Ever since childhood, Jude is enslaved to a false dream of learning and an idle religious superstition. No matter how hard life is, he keeps on indulging himself in the great dream of learning. As the reality unwrapped for him, he gradually finds that he, the lonely fighter for spirit, has become an outcast of the society. At this juncture of his emotional growth, Arabella, a coarse, lusty girl disperses all his disappointments and sadness with her captivating womanhood. The unvoiced call of woman to man completely gets Jude encaged. From this point, Jude begins his serious betrayal of his own dream, and the pursuit of education and self-advancement for the temporary pleasure of sexuality. Ironically, in the later part of Jude’s life, he can’t stop the stunning bitter betrayal of fate to him until his last breath.
　　
　　To be frank, when reading the part about the relationship between Jude and Arabella, I was even shocked to get the awareness of the so-called courtship of those who treat love and marriage as a kind of business. So many little loving glances, sweet words, pretending cares are only a part of game. How ridiculous! Love is only a game! The highly self-conscious Jude is completely astounded and lost when after a short marriage his flirtatious wife dumped him. The emptiness of existence haunts his mind day and night after the disappearance of love and betrayal of marriage. When later on he meets his angel-like cousin Sue, he is even too shameful for his own sin to show his feeling frankly to her. As he gets more and more in love with Sue, he is impressed with the unconventional spirit of Sue and gets ready to endure any hardships in life. However, Hardy arranged for him a road of continuous betrayal--- marriage, love, learning, and the whole society. He and Sue love each other immensely, but they still become increasingly enmeshed in the society they have sought to reject. The tragic story of Jude makes me ponder over the questions for a long time---what does marriage mean? Is it a business contract which enslaves two independent persons together to make the long lonely life tolerable, just like the marriage between Jude and Arabella? Is it really sinful for two lovers like Jude and Sue who want to share each other’s emotions, fancies and dreams to achieve marriage which may cause some miseries to someone else? It is an age when religious belief and conventional ideas become doubtful for young men. In other words, God is dead, but people still can’t find their own ideas reasonable and convincing in that transitional society. So, at last, after the painful but true love with Sue, Jude dies, alone, reciting the curses of Job, while the outside is in a rapturous atmosphere. It’s a sharp ironic revenge of fate and social conventions to those who refuse the common-accepted track of life. The dreams, idolization, sensitivity, betrayal, educational and sexual desires of Jude make fate seem extremely empty and poignant.
　　
　　When referring to Sue, I must say that she is the most unfathomable heroin I ever met. Since childhood, she has preferred people to treat her as a boy. She is too conscious to her feminity and tries hard to remain her freedom as an independent woman in Victorian age. Unconventional as she is, she once lives with a university graduate but queerly refuses to have sex with him. when coming to her relationship with Jude, she agrees to elope with him shortly after her marriage with Phillotson. However, she flinches from marriage with Jude because of the “tragic doom” overhanging the marriages of their family. Sue’s refusal of sex is a psychological method for her to “get back to the life of my infancy and its freedom”, and her refusal of marriage dues to her doubt for the false social embodiments of love. For her, to get married with her love brings a fear of being possessed and being suffocated by social rituals. Like Jude, she is also dreaming of her own world which can get rid of all the dead social conventions and the doomed family tragedy to keep the freshness and sincerity of true love. She speaks of sex and marriage as the opposite of freedom. When she agrees to sleep with Jude out of jealousy of his wife, it means one part of compromise of her will. She and Jude, two outcasts of the society, live together as lovers, shrinking away from the form of marriage. Although they are rejected by the public to some extent, they still can live as they like and enjoy love in their special way. However, the sudden and ironic death of her two children totally blunts her. Sue’s former courage and will to fight with social conventions become more imprisoned with the frame of the self and reality. From that deathblow, she is enslaved to self-renunciation and seals herself off almost from all human feelings. She is eager to leave Jude whom she loves deeply just to “satisfy the world which does not see things as they are.” She has experienced too much painfulness to feel the pain of leaving the one she loves and getting married again with her first husband. This is an act of being defeated and returning to common society. However, she can never find peace because “she is no longer in Jude’s arms” and because her living spirit has already dead. This is a tragedy of the one who tries desperately with social morality but finally defeated and finds no corner to return to.
　　
　　Sue has becomes an image of “the woman of the feminist movement” because of her consciousness of womanliness, her reluctancy for sex and marriage for the sake of freedom and identity, her final failure and her returning to the deathlike life. There is a sharp difference between Sue and Jude in their reaction to the agonizing tragedy. As Jude said, “strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably.” Jude seems to proceed vigorously through the successive hardships of reality. He has learned to live with the sadness of life. On the contrary, Sue who is so courageous and unfaltering in her fighting for unconventional life, becomes totally enclosed in self punishment. Her vision of life is suddenly narrowed with no door out. It’s said that Hardy likes women and understands them quite well. Then is it true that women usually tend to wince into their own world when stunned by sharp tragedy of life. Perhaps Sue is really a forerunner of feminist who at last defeated by self-consciousness and social morality.
　　
　　 Tragedy is caused by the miscalculation of the weakness in humanity. Jude and Sue both experience the failure in their dreams and marriage, but they ironically return to the original failures and find no true life any more. That’s the reason of their painful ending. Sue finds no peace because she is not in Jude’s arms, but she cannot find peace in his arms either. She finds no peace anywhere. Where should they end, where should they return? No hope, no consolation, no dream any more, that’s Hardy’s tragedy.