Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure

by

Thomas Hardy

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Themes and Colors
Marriage Theme Icon
Fate Theme Icon
Social Criticism Theme Icon
Women in Society Theme Icon
Religion Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jude the Obscure, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate Theme Icon

Throughout the book Hardy subjects his characters to many hardships and unlucky coincidences which come to feel like fate, whether that fate is interpreted as a supernatural punishment for rebelling against religion or a fate determined by a society structured to thwart independent, sensitive souls like Jude and Sue. The novel’s overarching story of fate is that Jude and Sue’s family is “cursed” in marriage – both Jude’s parents and Sue’s parents were divorced, and they have an ancestor who was hanged for stealing his child’s body from his estranged wife. This curse comes to affect the protagonists’ actions, as they avoid marrying each other and possibly doubling the curse. Fate looms over the characters in other situations as well, like when Jude tries so hard to get into a college but is always fated to fail because of his poverty and class. Over the course of the book Jude, Sue, and their children are slowly crushed by their bad luck and an unfriendly society. They become depressed, and start to believe that it is better never to be born than to live in such a cruel world. The climax of the novel, Little Father Time’s murder-suicide, is portrayed as an inevitable result of the situation in which he was raised: a product of divorce, depression, and bad luck. As with the marriage question, Hardy gives no easy answer regarding fate. He seems to imply that humans should struggle against their fate (if it’s bad), but at the same time he shows just how futile this struggle usually is.

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Fate Quotes in Jude the Obscure

Below you will find the important quotes in Jude the Obscure related to the theme of Fate.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Quotes

As the halo had been to his eyes when gazing at it a quarter of an hour earlier, so was the spot mentally to him as he pursued his dark way.
“It is a city of light,” he said to himself.
“The tree of knowledge grows there,” he added a few steps further on.
“It is a place that teachers of men spring from, and go to.”
“It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion.”
After this figure he was silent for a long while, till he added,
“It would just suit me.”

Related Characters: Jude Fawley (speaker)
Related Symbols: Christminster
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 25-26
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 11 Quotes

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a life-long comradeship tolerable.
“Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your mother, and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?” she asked. “All you Fawleys be a queer lot as husbands and wives.”

Related Characters: Jude Fawley (speaker), Arabella Donn (speaker)
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 2 Quotes

Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall – but what a wall!

Related Characters: Jude Fawley
Related Symbols: Christminster
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 3 Quotes

Jude, do you think that when you must have me with you by law, we shall be so happy as we are now? The men and women of our family are very generous when everything depends upon their good-will, but they always kick against compulsion. Don’t you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don’t you think it is destructive to a passion whose essence is its gratuitousness?

Related Characters: Sue Bridehead (speaker), Jude Fawley
Page Number: 272
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 8 Quotes

“She’d have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! it’s all the same in the end! However, I think she’s quite fond of her man still – whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn’t have let her go! I should have kept her chained on – her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There’s nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf task-master for taming us women. Besides, you’ve got the laws on your side. Moses knew… ‘Then shall the man be guiltless; but the woman shall bear her iniquity.’ Damn rough on us women; but we must grin and put up wi’ it – Haw haw! – Well; she’s got her deserts now.”
“Yes,” said Phillotson, with biting sadness. “Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!”

Related Characters: Arabella Donn (speaker), Richard Phillotson (speaker), Jude Fawley
Page Number: 318
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 2 Quotes

“No,” said Jude. “It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says that there are such boys springing up amongst us – boys of a sort unknown in the last generation – the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

Related Characters: Jude Fawley (speaker), Little Father Time
Related Symbols: Little Father Time
Page Number: 337
Explanation and Analysis:

The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill-assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died.

Related Characters: Jude Fawley, Little Father Time
Related Symbols: Little Father Time
Page Number: 337
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 3 Quotes

Perhaps as we couldn’t conscientiously marry at first in the old-fashioned way, we ought to have parted. Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!

Related Characters: Jude Fawley (speaker)
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 10 Quotes

As for Sue and me when we were at our best, long ago – when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless – the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us. And so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her, and recklessness and ruin on me!

Related Characters: Jude Fawley (speaker), Sue Bridehead
Page Number: 400
Explanation and Analysis: