The university town of Christminster is a "golden city" to Jude Fawley in Hardy's novel, often described using the visual imagery of jewels and precious metals. The first time that Jude searches for it from a distance in Part 1, Chapter 3, he sees that:
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere
Pricking out like tiny stars from the misty landscape, Jude sees “points of light” before he sees the shape of buildings. In this quote, the "points" of Christminster's college towers and churches ecstatically reveal themselves to the child Jude. They look like a pile of distant treasure. The visual language of preciousness and of a break in the otherwise heavy darkness is important, here. Hardy is suggesting that Christminster is a treasure and can offer Jude the riches of the world of learning. Its lights break the “darkness” of the night, but they also symbolically promise to do the same with the "obscurity" of Jude's dim (or nonexistent) prospects in Marygreen.
These visual images of brightness, reflection, and sharpness laid out in “shining spots” of stone contrast with the dull, dismal greens, greys, and blacks of the visual imagery of Jude's hometown. It is telling that the boy, upon seeing the city for the first time, notices the stone before he knows what the city is. This early impression foreshadows his actual future, in which he is limited to working with the stones instead of attending the university as a student. He can build and decorate the "treasures" of Christminster, but he cannot do university work inside the illustrious buildings. He will go there, but not to become what he wants to become. Hardy provides a grim portent of the way in which Jude's social position will eventually limit his dreams in this early fragment.
In Jude the Obscure Hardy foreshadows his characters' hopeless prospects through the visual imagery of darkness "obscuring" the world. For example, in Part 4, Chapter 3, Mr. Phillotson returns from teaching to his cold home with Sue. He gazes blankly out of the window at the Vale of Blackmoor, a wide and spacious valley:
[...] pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene.
Even though Phillotson is very familiar with the view that this window commands in daylight, in this instance it's covered with "mysterious darkness." Hardy evokes the closeness of the schoolmaster's face to the window with the physical and visual sensory language of the phrase "hard-breathing." Phillotson is pressed so close his breath is misting the glass, obscuring his view even more. He can't see because it's dark, but he also makes it harder for himself with his extreme proximity and "fixity."
Just before this passage, Hardy's narrator tells the reader that Sue at this point is very discontented. She feels she is "the wife of a husband whose person [is] disagreeable to her," and she is considering leaving Phillotson. His future—which should be as predictable as the view from his window for a man in his position—is hence in jeopardy of abruptly changing. He has no idea, but Hardy suggests some upcoming upheavals with this veil of darkness. Phillotson can't see what is coming, both literally and symbolically. In instances like this, the visual imagery of darkness and obscurity reflects the dark and depressing paths Hardy's characters take. It also parallels the unpredictable nature of the future in his novels. If you are born poor and unknown in a Hardy book, you are doomed to stay poor and unimportant (or "obscure").
A clear example of this is the visual imagery surrounding the village of Jude's birth. As a child, he lives in a dingy and "nestling hamlet" called Marygreen. The insides of houses are gloomy and smoky, and the horizon is "not far" from anything, indicating the village's extremely small size. Because of this stifling smallness, the dim landscape often closes in over Jude. It limits how far he can see, just as his poverty "obscures" his ambitions. The first time Jude tries to leave Marygreen to visit the city of Christminster in Part 1, Chapter 3, the night grows "funereally dark" and the "vague city" is "veiled in mist." Though there are lights, even these are "obscured":
No individual light was visible, only a halo or glow-fog overarching the place against the black heavens behind.
Even at this early point, Hardy foreshadows the failure of Jude's ambition to escape "obscurity." There are no "individual lights" for Jude in Christminster. There's only a vague and unreachable suggestion of light, and the glowering presence of the "black heavens" which eventually consume him. Fittingly, in Part 6 Chapter 11 when Jude dies, the last things he says are Biblical verses calling down darkness, reflecting his own absolute lack of hope and "light":
‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’
(‘Hurrah!’)
‘Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it [...]
Jude is born into a dark world, struggles to exit "obscurity" his entire life, and dies in darkness so deep even God cannot "regard it from above."
Hardy foreshadows Jude's marital misery in a scene from Part 1, Chapter 7, in which Jude and Arabella eat at an inn. He does so by alluding to the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, making this allusion in relation to a painting of Samson and Delilah hanging above the table at the inn:
The maid-servant recognized Jude, and whispered her surprise to her mistress in the background, that he, the student, ‘who kept hisself up so particular, ’ should have suddenly descended so low as to keep company with Arabella. The latter guessed what was being said, and laughed as she met the serious and tender gaze of her lover – the low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman who sees she is winning her game.
They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and Delilah which hung on the wall.
In this biblical story, an immoral woman seduces a good man and robs him of his powers for personal and social gain. Jude in this situation is aligned with Samson, while Arabella is aligned with Delilah. Unbeknownst to him, she is beginning to lead him down a path that will eventually destroy him.
Everyone can see that Jude who “kept hisself up so particular” is keeping company with someone below his station, but Arabella brazenly doesn't care. She "laughs" as she meets Jude's "serious and tender gaze" because, like Delilah with Samson, she knows she has snared him. Later, in Part 1, Chapter 11, when Jude is so unhappy he is contemplating suicide, he comes back to this inn and sees the painting again:
He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him. What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? [...] He struck down the hill northwards and came to an obscure public-house. On entering and sitting down the sight of the picture of Samson and Delilah on the wall caused him to recognize the place as that he had visited with Arabella on that first Sunday evening of their courtship.
Jude’s misery is intensified by seeing the picture, as he recognizes himself in the story this time. The fact that Arabella leaves him shortly after this seems like a very good thing, although it’s in violation of the religious and social principles that made them marry initially. However, in this moment he feels so low that he thinks he is not even good enough or "sufficiently dignified" to commit suicide. He enters an "obscure" public house to drown his sorrows; whenever Jude is associated with this word, it's never a good sign.
Hardy foreshadows Jude's marital misery in a scene from Part 1, Chapter 7, in which Jude and Arabella eat at an inn. He does so by alluding to the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, making this allusion in relation to a painting of Samson and Delilah hanging above the table at the inn:
The maid-servant recognized Jude, and whispered her surprise to her mistress in the background, that he, the student, ‘who kept hisself up so particular, ’ should have suddenly descended so low as to keep company with Arabella. The latter guessed what was being said, and laughed as she met the serious and tender gaze of her lover – the low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman who sees she is winning her game.
They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and Delilah which hung on the wall.
In this biblical story, an immoral woman seduces a good man and robs him of his powers for personal and social gain. Jude in this situation is aligned with Samson, while Arabella is aligned with Delilah. Unbeknownst to him, she is beginning to lead him down a path that will eventually destroy him.
Everyone can see that Jude who “kept hisself up so particular” is keeping company with someone below his station, but Arabella brazenly doesn't care. She "laughs" as she meets Jude's "serious and tender gaze" because, like Delilah with Samson, she knows she has snared him. Later, in Part 1, Chapter 11, when Jude is so unhappy he is contemplating suicide, he comes back to this inn and sees the painting again:
He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him. What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? [...] He struck down the hill northwards and came to an obscure public-house. On entering and sitting down the sight of the picture of Samson and Delilah on the wall caused him to recognize the place as that he had visited with Arabella on that first Sunday evening of their courtship.
Jude’s misery is intensified by seeing the picture, as he recognizes himself in the story this time. The fact that Arabella leaves him shortly after this seems like a very good thing, although it’s in violation of the religious and social principles that made them marry initially. However, in this moment he feels so low that he thinks he is not even good enough or "sufficiently dignified" to commit suicide. He enters an "obscure" public house to drown his sorrows; whenever Jude is associated with this word, it's never a good sign.
In the third chapter of Part 2, Hardy alludes to a poem by a Victorian contemporary of his, foreshadowing Sue Bridehead’s later encounters with death and the extreme highs and lows of her life. When Sue can't sleep after an awkward interaction with Jude, she turns to a book of poetry by the Victorian writer Algernon Swinburne. It falls open to these lines from "The Hymn to Proserpine":
– ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean
The world has grown grey from thy breath!’
This poem centers around a speech made by the Roman Emperor Julian after Christianity was first established in Rome—an event that significantly restructured its culture. This is another moment in the text where Sue shows a scholarly interest in non-Christian deities and world history while also demonstrating that she’s reading and understanding contemporary poetry enough to understand Swinburne’s lines. She seems shaken herself by the poem, as immediately after this she “extinguishes” her candle and lies down in the dark again.
Hardy only puts a small bit of this poem into the novel. It's unnerving enough by itself, and it signals that something is wrong even if the reader isn't familiar with Swinburne. However, the poem as a whole directly addresses what is to come for Sue later in the novel. In his "Hymn to Proserpine," Swinburne references and mourns the eventual death of all gods as the world changes and regimes die out. By including a subtle reference to this poem, Hardy delicately foreshadows the deaths to come in Sue's life, as well as the "death" of her intellectual freedom and happiness.
Hardy foreshadows Sue's pivot to conservative values when her landlady smashes her statues of Roman gods. In Part 2, Chapter 4, Sue describes this unpleasant interaction to Jude:
‘Well – I must go, ’ she continued. ‘Miss Fontover, one of the partners whom I serve, is offended with me, and I with her; and it is best to go.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘She broke some statuary of mine.’
‘Oh? Wilfully?’
‘Yes. She found it in my room, and though it was my property she threw it on the floor and stamped on it, because it was not according to her taste, and ground the arms and the head of one of the figures all to bits with her heel – a horrid thing!’
These statues symbolize Sue’s intellectual exploration: she bought them secretly because they represented something bold and beautiful to her. But Fontover knocks them over and destroys them because she thinks they're sacrilegious. This foreshadows Sue's later troubles with questioning the rules of conventional Christian choices, and it also anticipates her eventual acceptance of those more conventional views.
When Sue and Jude talk about this later, after their children die, Jude brings up this incident, asking her where the Sue “had gone” who could mock her landlady and keep images of classical gods. Sue weeps, acknowledging that she has changed and that she was "wrong, proud in her own conceit" to try to be free-spirited in the first place. Her spirit has been so broken by her grief that she can’t even remember what she was like in her youth.
In Jude the Obscure Hardy foreshadows his characters' hopeless prospects through the visual imagery of darkness "obscuring" the world. For example, in Part 4, Chapter 3, Mr. Phillotson returns from teaching to his cold home with Sue. He gazes blankly out of the window at the Vale of Blackmoor, a wide and spacious valley:
[...] pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene.
Even though Phillotson is very familiar with the view that this window commands in daylight, in this instance it's covered with "mysterious darkness." Hardy evokes the closeness of the schoolmaster's face to the window with the physical and visual sensory language of the phrase "hard-breathing." Phillotson is pressed so close his breath is misting the glass, obscuring his view even more. He can't see because it's dark, but he also makes it harder for himself with his extreme proximity and "fixity."
Just before this passage, Hardy's narrator tells the reader that Sue at this point is very discontented. She feels she is "the wife of a husband whose person [is] disagreeable to her," and she is considering leaving Phillotson. His future—which should be as predictable as the view from his window for a man in his position—is hence in jeopardy of abruptly changing. He has no idea, but Hardy suggests some upcoming upheavals with this veil of darkness. Phillotson can't see what is coming, both literally and symbolically. In instances like this, the visual imagery of darkness and obscurity reflects the dark and depressing paths Hardy's characters take. It also parallels the unpredictable nature of the future in his novels. If you are born poor and unknown in a Hardy book, you are doomed to stay poor and unimportant (or "obscure").
A clear example of this is the visual imagery surrounding the village of Jude's birth. As a child, he lives in a dingy and "nestling hamlet" called Marygreen. The insides of houses are gloomy and smoky, and the horizon is "not far" from anything, indicating the village's extremely small size. Because of this stifling smallness, the dim landscape often closes in over Jude. It limits how far he can see, just as his poverty "obscures" his ambitions. The first time Jude tries to leave Marygreen to visit the city of Christminster in Part 1, Chapter 3, the night grows "funereally dark" and the "vague city" is "veiled in mist." Though there are lights, even these are "obscured":
No individual light was visible, only a halo or glow-fog overarching the place against the black heavens behind.
Even at this early point, Hardy foreshadows the failure of Jude's ambition to escape "obscurity." There are no "individual lights" for Jude in Christminster. There's only a vague and unreachable suggestion of light, and the glowering presence of the "black heavens" which eventually consume him. Fittingly, in Part 6 Chapter 11 when Jude dies, the last things he says are Biblical verses calling down darkness, reflecting his own absolute lack of hope and "light":
‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’
(‘Hurrah!’)
‘Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it [...]
Jude is born into a dark world, struggles to exit "obscurity" his entire life, and dies in darkness so deep even God cannot "regard it from above."
In Jude the Obscure Hardy foreshadows his characters' hopeless prospects through the visual imagery of darkness "obscuring" the world. For example, in Part 4, Chapter 3, Mr. Phillotson returns from teaching to his cold home with Sue. He gazes blankly out of the window at the Vale of Blackmoor, a wide and spacious valley:
[...] pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene.
Even though Phillotson is very familiar with the view that this window commands in daylight, in this instance it's covered with "mysterious darkness." Hardy evokes the closeness of the schoolmaster's face to the window with the physical and visual sensory language of the phrase "hard-breathing." Phillotson is pressed so close his breath is misting the glass, obscuring his view even more. He can't see because it's dark, but he also makes it harder for himself with his extreme proximity and "fixity."
Just before this passage, Hardy's narrator tells the reader that Sue at this point is very discontented. She feels she is "the wife of a husband whose person [is] disagreeable to her," and she is considering leaving Phillotson. His future—which should be as predictable as the view from his window for a man in his position—is hence in jeopardy of abruptly changing. He has no idea, but Hardy suggests some upcoming upheavals with this veil of darkness. Phillotson can't see what is coming, both literally and symbolically. In instances like this, the visual imagery of darkness and obscurity reflects the dark and depressing paths Hardy's characters take. It also parallels the unpredictable nature of the future in his novels. If you are born poor and unknown in a Hardy book, you are doomed to stay poor and unimportant (or "obscure").
A clear example of this is the visual imagery surrounding the village of Jude's birth. As a child, he lives in a dingy and "nestling hamlet" called Marygreen. The insides of houses are gloomy and smoky, and the horizon is "not far" from anything, indicating the village's extremely small size. Because of this stifling smallness, the dim landscape often closes in over Jude. It limits how far he can see, just as his poverty "obscures" his ambitions. The first time Jude tries to leave Marygreen to visit the city of Christminster in Part 1, Chapter 3, the night grows "funereally dark" and the "vague city" is "veiled in mist." Though there are lights, even these are "obscured":
No individual light was visible, only a halo or glow-fog overarching the place against the black heavens behind.
Even at this early point, Hardy foreshadows the failure of Jude's ambition to escape "obscurity." There are no "individual lights" for Jude in Christminster. There's only a vague and unreachable suggestion of light, and the glowering presence of the "black heavens" which eventually consume him. Fittingly, in Part 6 Chapter 11 when Jude dies, the last things he says are Biblical verses calling down darkness, reflecting his own absolute lack of hope and "light":
‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’
(‘Hurrah!’)
‘Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it [...]
Jude is born into a dark world, struggles to exit "obscurity" his entire life, and dies in darkness so deep even God cannot "regard it from above."
