Hardy uses the motif of Jude’s relationship with stone—heavy, hard, and solid—to illustrate the difficulty the protagonist experiences in changing his life and his career. In Part 1, Chapter 5, Jude feels frustrated with the difficulty of learning Greek from a primer and muses that:
Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Jude wants to work with intangible, “precious” things like philosophy, the Classics, and religion as a Christminster student, but he is stuck in the work he was trained in. That career is the total opposite of a life of religious study. There are not many jobs more manual and less abstractly theoretical than stonemasonry. Jude wants to devote himself to the "mediæval colleges" of Christminster, the beauty of their “romance in stone,” and to a spiritual life, but he cannot. He is weighed down by the real stones involved in his obligation to work and provide for his family.
Like his hours cutting stone, Jude's work to better himself is hard, dangerous, and arduous. He can cut through granite, sandstone and marble more easily than he can make headway as a prospective student in 19th-century England. His efforts come to nothing, no matter how much he tries. Regardless of how much he studies, he's always thrown back into stonemasonry.
The stones he cuts so expertly are painfully and literally the building-blocks of the institutions he can't be a part of. Churches do not welcome him because of his scandalous personal life, and the universities built of glowing stone that he aspires to work in instead of on turn him away. In Part 6, Chapter 1, the statues decorating the stone buildings are so opposed to Jude’s desired life of study that they become personified, threateningly staring down his family as they pass:
[...] the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous persons who had no business there.
The stones of the buildings and the statues on them come alive and turn on the Fawleys as they look for lodging, judging Jude and Sue's family as unworthy, poor, and "bedraggled." Being in Christminster surrounded by students makes Jude feel he must be a "frightful example of what not to do," as he says to Sue just after this. Even though Jude helps to build the city of Christminster, he and his family are “seen” by the statues and then by the landlords who turn them away as “ludicrous persons who had no business there.”
Hardy uses the motif of Jude’s relationship with stone—heavy, hard, and solid—to illustrate the difficulty the protagonist experiences in changing his life and his career. In Part 1, Chapter 5, Jude feels frustrated with the difficulty of learning Greek from a primer and muses that:
Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Jude wants to work with intangible, “precious” things like philosophy, the Classics, and religion as a Christminster student, but he is stuck in the work he was trained in. That career is the total opposite of a life of religious study. There are not many jobs more manual and less abstractly theoretical than stonemasonry. Jude wants to devote himself to the "mediæval colleges" of Christminster, the beauty of their “romance in stone,” and to a spiritual life, but he cannot. He is weighed down by the real stones involved in his obligation to work and provide for his family.
Like his hours cutting stone, Jude's work to better himself is hard, dangerous, and arduous. He can cut through granite, sandstone and marble more easily than he can make headway as a prospective student in 19th-century England. His efforts come to nothing, no matter how much he tries. Regardless of how much he studies, he's always thrown back into stonemasonry.
The stones he cuts so expertly are painfully and literally the building-blocks of the institutions he can't be a part of. Churches do not welcome him because of his scandalous personal life, and the universities built of glowing stone that he aspires to work in instead of on turn him away. In Part 6, Chapter 1, the statues decorating the stone buildings are so opposed to Jude’s desired life of study that they become personified, threateningly staring down his family as they pass:
[...] the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous persons who had no business there.
The stones of the buildings and the statues on them come alive and turn on the Fawleys as they look for lodging, judging Jude and Sue's family as unworthy, poor, and "bedraggled." Being in Christminster surrounded by students makes Jude feel he must be a "frightful example of what not to do," as he says to Sue just after this. Even though Jude helps to build the city of Christminster, he and his family are “seen” by the statues and then by the landlords who turn them away as “ludicrous persons who had no business there.”
