reverse typology in jude the obscure

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DOI: 10.1177/014833318903900105 1989 39: 35Christianity & Literature

Eleanor McNees Jude the ObscureReverse Typology in

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Christianity and LiteratureVol. 39, No.1 (Autumn 1989)

Reverse Typology in Jude the ObscureEleanor MeNees

In his 1922 "Apology" prefixed to Late Lyrics and Earlier, ThomasHardydefends himselfagainst critical attacks of pessimism by explainingthat he believes in "evolutionary meliorism" (Complete Poems 557), or"loving- kindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuatedby the modicum of free will conjecturallypossessed by organic life whenthe mighty necessitating forces-unconscious or other-that have 'thebalancings of the clouds, 'happen to be in equilibrium, which mayor maynot be often" (Complete Poems 558). Such a cautious belief, he notes, isbest expressedbyaline from his poem "In TenebrisII" written in 1895,thesame yearin which he completedJude the Obscure: ".. .ifway to the Betterthere be, it exacts a full look at the Worst" (14). Numerous critics havestriven to interpret this oblique philosophy and to argue for or againstHardy's religiousviews. Theygenerallycite Darwin's evolutionarytheoryand German higher criticism of the Bible as the corrosive elements inHardy's fall from faith.' Unable to cull many clues from Hardy's lettersor his Life, many point to the poems which tangle repeatedly with reli-gious questions. "The Impercipient" from Hardy'sfirst collection, WessexPoems and Other Verses (1898), well articulates Hardy's battle betweenthe will to believe and the skepticism that inhibits that will. Originallytitled "The Agnostic," its first stanza explains the persona's stance at acathedral service:

That with this bright believing bandI have no claim to be,

That faiths by which my comrades standSeem fantasies to me,

And mirage-mists their Shining Land,Is a strange destiny. (l-6)

And stanza four intensifies the image of faith as mirage:

I am like a gazer who should markAn inland company

Standing upfingered, with, 'Hark! hark!The glorious distant sea!'

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36 ELEANOR McNEES

And feel, 'Alas, 'tis but yon darkAnd wind-swept pine to me!' (19-24)

In opposition to a number of Hardy's critics, John Coulson refuses toview Hardy as an unbeliever. He insists that Hardy suffers "from a kindoftheological malnutrition for which he is not responsible. Instead hisposition is one, not so much ofagnosticism, as of carefullycircumscribedtheological continence." Coulson notes that in the writings "what isdefined is an unresolved and continuing crisis of belief' (l09). This"continuing crisis of belief" highlights a constant tension between thewill to believe and the rational suppression of that will,"

Later poems ('The Blow,""God-Forgotten," "God's Funeral") enunci-ate this tension in various ways-through interrogations of the dead andGod to such bald statements as "No aimful author's was the blow I Thatswept us prone, I But the Immanent Doer's That doth not know" ("TheBlow" 22-24)-to reach a resolution. "ACathedral Facade at Midnight,"written in 1897shortly after Jude the Obscure, crystallizes the dilemma ofboth Jude and Hardy under the guise of martyred saints:

Afrail moan from the martyred saints there setMid others of the erection

Against the breeze, seemed sighings of regretAt the ancient faith's rejection

Under the sure, unhasting, steady stressOf Reason's movement, making meaninglessThe coded creeds of old-time godliness. (1521)

As a youth Jude is obsessed with decoding these "coded creeds." Headheres to the rules of biblical typology, believing in the movement fromtype to anti type to final fulfillment. After numerous disillusionments,however, he succumbs to the "steady stress I Of Reason's movement"and actually reverses his direction. He depletes the antitype and movesbackward to the unfulfilled type. This reversal of typological methodconveys Hardy's anger against a Church whose rituals have becomehypocritical. Yet,paradoxically, both Jude and Sue end with relentlesslyritualistic behavior: Jude dies quoting Job, and Sue returns to the Angli-can Church and to blind obedience to the sacrament of marriage. Thecrisis of belief is never satisfactorily resolved. Neither true believers northoroughagnostics, Jude and Sue bothcling to old rituals to provide themwith meaning, albeit a sorely depleted one.

The aim of this essay is to expose Hardy's use of unconventionalbiblical typology in Jude the Obscure. In this final novel typology lendsHardy an exegetical method which he can pervert to criticize man'ssearch for spiritual meaning in a world devoid of spirituality. Bydenying


REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE TIlE OBSCURE 37

the eschatological goal of typology, Hardy demonstrates the futility ofritual. At the same time he shows the inability of his characters toabandon that ritual. He suggests that for the late Victorians the scaffold-ing of belief and convention comes to replace the building or the innerfaith. Bydepletingbiblical types and moving backwards from Newto OldTestaments, Hardy manipulates biblical narrative techniques to provehis thesis.

In a j oumal entry which serves as a parodic gloss to the fates of Judeand Sue, Hardy in 1907 says of Church ritual:

We enter church, and we have to say, "Wehave erred and strayed fromThy ways like lost sheep," when what we wantto say is, "Why are we madeto err and stray like lost sheep?" Then we have to sing, "My soul dothmagnifythe Lord,"whenwhatwe want to sing is, "Othatrnysoul could findsome Lord that it could magnify! Till it can, let us magnifygood works, anddevelop all means of easing mortals' progress through a world not worthyof them."

Still, being present, we say the established words full of the historicsentiment only, mentally adding, "How happy our ancestors were inrepeating in all sincerity these articles of faith!" Butwe perceive that noneof the congregation recognizes thatwe repeat the words from an antiquar-ian interest in them, and in a historic sense, and solely in order to keep achurch of some sort afoot-a thing indespensable; so that we are pretend-ing what is not true: thatwe are believers. This must not be; we must leave.And if we do, we reluctantly go to the door, and creep out as it creakscomplainingly behind us. (Life 332-33)

For Hardy ritual, like typology, requires faith, not superficial obedience.In gradually depleting the New Testament antitypes of Iude and Christ inJude the Obscure, Hardy shows the hypocrisy of false ritual. Just prior towriting Jude Hardy accused his friend Florence Henniker, thought to bethe prototype for Sue Bridehead, of reverting to "ritualistic ecclesiasti-cism" (Collected Letters 23) and "retrograde superstitions" (CollectedLetters 26). And two years after the publication oiIude, Hardy complainsto his friend Edward Clodd: "The older one gets, the more deplorableseems the effect of that terrible, dogmatic ecclesiasticism-Christianityso called (but really Paulinism plus idolatry) on morals & true religion: adogma with which the real teaching of Christ has hardly anything incommon" (Collected Letters 143). Indeed, Hardy makes this "terrible,dogmatic ecclesiasticism" responsible for the final rupture betweenJudeand Sue. In the end of the novel the two exchange positions: Judeceremoniouslyrenounces his allegianceto his Oxfordidols-Pusey, Keble,and Newman-while Sue becomes a devotee of High Anglican ritual.

Traditional spiritual autobiographies from Augustine's Confessionsto


38 ELEANOR McNEES

Bunyan's The Pilgrim'sProgress embody, as Avrom Fleishman suggests,the progressive movement of typology. One event leads to a greaterevent, one type to a fuller one. Fleishman posits a six-part model for suchworks: (1) natural childhood; (2) fall and exile; (3)journey; (4) crisis; (5)epiphanyand conversion; and (6)renewal and return (58-66). Fleishmanargues that by the late eighteenth century the antitype-usually Christ-is replaced by the "aftertype" or fulfilled self. The "self-transcendent"goal of Augustine becomes the "transcendent self" (106) of the Roman-tics. While the Victorians inherit this Romantic legacy, they are suspi-cious of the inflation of selfhood. Consequently, according to Fleishman,they lack a "stable symbolic mode for self-writing.... The type becomesa palimpsest" (115-16).

Paul I. Korshin identifies the use of an "abstracted typology" whicheighteenth-century authors began to use in place of traditional biblicaltypology. This "abstracted typology" substituted "imagistic technique"(165) for biblical exegesis. It replaced Old Testament figures with paganor historical types and made antitypes out ofcontemporaryfigures. Suchdistorted typology lent authority to the Victorian myth of progress andshowed, rightly or wrongly, how sacred methods could be adapted toexplain secular events.

In a survey of typological methods in Victorian poetry, George P.Landow argues that the Victorians tried to apply the progressive move-ment of typology to biological evolution. Such an enterprise endeavoredto mend the fissure between faith and science, to reconcile the "surfaceand symbol" (321). He stresses the significance ofthe typological imagewith its "potential to thrust the reader into another context, demonstrat-ing in the process how everything and every man exist simultaneously intwo realms of meaning" (327).

While all three of these critics attempt to adapt traditional biblicaltypology to its Victorian manifestations, none discusses the purposefulinversion of typology as a tool with which to criticize Victorian society. Ifone accepts Erich Auerbach's definition oftypology-"Figural interpre-tation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the firstof which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the secondencompasses or fulfills the first" (53)-itis possible to investigate jude theObscure as anoppositionalmovementfrom double significationto emptysignification or absence.

Of the depletion of meaning in the late Victorian novel, Philip M.Weinstein states: "The novel spreads before its hero, not the transcen-dental home of the spirit, butinnumerablehalfwayhouses that betray thespirit even as they promise it material abode" (126). Hardy records thisprogressive betrayal of spirit in jude by forcing his protagonist to movebackwards from spirit to the letter that no longer reveals the spirit. While


REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE tus OBSCURE 39

initially Jude attempts to move toward eschatological fulfillment in the"heavenly Jerusalem" (18) of Christminster, he ultimately discoversChristminster to be the ash-heap of Job. It is certainly no accident thatHardy chose as epigraph for Jude only the first halfoflI Corinthians 3:6-"The letter killeth"-and omitted the second half-"but the spirit givethlife." Traditional typology moves from the letter of the Old Testament tothe spirit of the New Testament fulfilled by Christ's passion and resurrec-tion. As Jude journeys from New Testament antitype (St. Jude, Christ,even Judas) to Old Testament type (Samson, Job), he demonstrates theextinction of the spirit by the letter and thus reverses the order of Paul'sadvice to the Corinthians.

As a boy Jude believes that the route to Christminster, the "miragemist" he sees from the ladder against the ominous Brown House, entailsa hermeneutical penetration of the Latin and Greek scriptures. Likesixteenth-century biblical exegetes,

he concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain,primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher,which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change atwill all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one.... Thus heassumed that the words of the required language were always to be foundsomewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had theart to uncover them. . .. (26)

At this point for Jude the original spiritual language of the scripturessimply awaits typological discovery. The English language lends a set oftypes or codes which signifies the sacred language. One must learn thissacred language to become a scholar worthy of living and studying inChristminster. Significantly, the letter seems to promise life, not death.Although Jude is prophetically warned by a carter he meets that thelanguage of Christminster is beyond ordinary understanding-"'foreigntongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two familiesspoke alike" (21)-he determines to find a superior language which willenable him to understand such babble. Thus a central theme in Jude theObscure becomes Jude's lifelong search for a master text.' This mastertext is housed in the inaccessible Christminster where Jude believes the"tree of knowledge" (23) grows.

Jude's first disillusionment comes with his realization, after he hasreceived the Latin and Greek grammarbooks from Phillotson, that "therewas no law of transmutation ... but that every word in both Latin andGreek was to be individuallycommitted to memory at the cost of years ofplodding" (27). For the first time Hardy suggests Jude's inversion oftypologyin the comparison of Iude to the Israelite captives in Egypt. Heretoo, as at the end of the novel, Jude wishes he had never been born. This


40 ELEANOR McNEES

is in ironic contrast to the text of Exodus 1 where the midwives spare theHebrew male infants despite Pharaoh's order to kill them. Hardy invari-ably attenuates and distorts biblical allusions to showboth the similarityand discrepancy between Jude and his biblical types. Jude's death wishreveals a latentpessimism despite his overt determination to acquire thelanguages regardless of the rigor required to master them. He quicklyabandons the pagan authors for the New Testament gospels and epistlesand determines to be not only a scholar but also a Christian divine. Likehis NewTestament antitype, St. Jude, he fears the hypocrisy to which hemight fall prey should he continue reading pagan authors while aspiringto be a Christian.

Hardy's choice of one of the briefer and more obscure epistles in theBible, that of Iude, and the placement of that epistle next to Revelationsignify his typological tactics. The biblical Jude warns those who are"called" to God not to fall into hypocrisy or unbelief. The entire epistle isa plea to the faithful to avoid lust. Itmoves from Old Testament examplesof God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha to the warnings of theApostles: "How that they told you there should be mockers in the lasttime, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. These be they whoseparate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit" (Jude 18-19).

This passage echoes ironicallyfor Jude Fawleywhen he meetsArabellaDonn in a scene filled with mockery and lust. Unfortunately, Jude'seschatological direction toward Christminster (the New Jerusalem ofRevelation) is sadly thwarted by this encounter. In his musings Jude hasmentally elevated himselfto first son of Christminster and thus to Christ:"Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son,in whom she shall be well pleased'" (32-33). His intellectual and spiritualthoughts are abruptly interrupted by a language of gibberish-"'Hoity-toity'" (32)-a sarcastic comment on his scholarly vocation. Arabellateaches Jude neither the meaning of the letter nor that of the spirit butrather what S1. Jude warns eventually cancels both-the world oflust. InteachingJude this newlanguage, she deceives him into marrying her andforces him to abandon his studies. Hardy uses an analogy to reading inorder to emphasize Jude's fall: "He saw this with his intellectual eye, justfor a short fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one mightmomentarily see an inscription on a wall before being enshrouded indarkness" (36).

Hardy indicates Jude's regressively typological movement by an allu-sion to the picture ofSamson and Delilahwhich hangs in the publichousewhere Arabella and Jude stop. The allusion is sandwiched between tworeferences to the Greek title of the New Testament. The latter allusion tothe NewTestamentpropheticallychartsJude's reversemovement: "Therelay his book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-


REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE tnt: OBSCURE 41

page regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like theunclosed eyes of a dead man" (41). As the epigraph to Jude states, theletter without the spirit kills.

After hearing about the unhappy fate of his parents flrst from Arabellaand then from his Aunt Drusilla, Jude feebly tries to kill himself byjumping on an ice-covered pond, then dulls his despair in the publichouse near the picture of Samson and Delilah. Bythe conclusion ofBookI, however, Jude appears to have revived his dream of Christminster as hereverses Hardy'sprevious analogyto the darkened inscription. Seeinghisold lettering on a mile post pointing to Christminster, Jude feels "in hissoul a spark of the old fire" and sees Christminster once again "by the eyeof faith" (62). Throughout the rest of the novel Hardy gradually depictsthe shutting of this eye and shows how Jude disregards St. Jude's adviceuntil he regresses from New Testament antitype to the Old TestamentJob.

Jude enters Christminster at night and allies himselfwith the ghostlycity's inhabitants, particularly the Tractarian leaders-Newman, Keble,and Pusey. During this nocturnal ramble he tries to transform letter (allhis reading) into spirit and almost succeeds. But he chooses a Christmin-ster suburb nicknamed Beersheba in which to lodge, a suburb whichtypologically extends St. Jude's warning to that of Christ to the people ofCapernaum.'

Ashe goes to stone-cuttingyards lookingforwork, Jude unconsciouslywitnesses the descent of the spirit to the letter. This descent translates, asJ.Hillis Miller notes of the poetry, into an obsession with the waythe pastis inscribed on the present (Linguistic Moment 286). In ChristminsterJude is unable to accept the discrepancy between past spirit and presentfact. He perceives that the stone-cutting business seems to be one of"copying, patching and imitating," but "He did not at that time see thatmediaevalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that otherdevelopments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothicarchitecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity ofcontemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held inreverence was not revealed to him" (69).

Still holding to his medieval principles, Jude moves more towardfidelity to the letter over the spirit in his flrst sight of Sue Bridehead. Sheis lettering "ALLELUIA" on a scroll, an act which Jude mistakenly inter-prets as '''A sweet, saintly, Christian business'" (72). He elevates Sue tothe status of a saint even before he meets her, investing her with a faithand spiritualitywhich she does not possess. In reality, in a scene parodi-cally parallel to Jude's encounter with Arabella, we find on the sameSaturday night Sue reading about Julian the Apostate and staring at hernewly purchased pagan sculptures while Jude is reading a text from the


42 ELEANOR McNEES

Greek New Testament. His text stands in obvious contrast to Sue'sactivity. I Corinthians 8 warns against having other idols, while Julian theApostate converts from Christianity back to paganism. The chapterpreceding Jude's reading contains Paul's admonition to wives and hus-bands about marriage and the higher spirituality of virginity. Jude andSue's opposite journeysare here typologicallymirrored by their readings.Sue ultimatelymoves toward the ascetic position of St. Paul's message inI Corinthians 7. Jude experiences a fall from Christianity into agnosti-cism. Hardy lards Jude the Obscurewith such intertextual prophecies,both juxtaposingthem to Jude's contemporary realityand also emptyingthe prophecyofspirit. The biblicalallusions hasten the progression of theplot towards its final negative fulfillment. They also provide types andantitypes for Jude. The NewTestament antitypes serve as sharp contraststo Jude's actualdescentfrom faith, while the OldTestamenttypes (Samson,Job) provide more accurate analogues. Hardy skillfully manipulatesthese allusions to surround Jude with typological options: either he canstrive to realize himself as antitype, or he can regress to unfulfilled type.

Hardy employs a different tactic with Sue. He shows her as graduallymovingfrom pagan type to Christian antitype. Yetthismovementprovesironic, for Sue (at least according to Jude and Hardy) lacks the faithrequired to link type to antitype," Thus Sue illustrates not the reversetypology of Jude but rather a parody of the true typological movementfrom type to antitype. Perhaps even more than Jude, she illustrates theprecept that the letter kills.

It is literally a letter from one of the Christminster dons that serves thedeath blowto Jude's hopes of entering a Christminster college. The sixthchapter of the Christminster section is filled with images of Iob's despair.Jude scrawls on one of the college gates the retort of Iob to his friendZophar: "'I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you:yea, who knoweth not such things as these?'-Job xii.3" (97). Ashe drinksin a public house, he illustrates Job's warning that men abandoned byGod will "grope in the dark without light, and ... stagger like a drunkenman" (Job 12:25). He further demonstrates Job's statement that "I am asone mocked of his neighbour who calleth upon God, and he answerethhim: the just upright man is laughed to scorn" (Job 12:4) when hedrunkenly tries to recite the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds in Latin beforean illiterate audience in the public house. From this point onward in thenovel Jude becomes a type of Job. He is gradually shorn of his posses-sions, his children, his "wife" Sue until, on his death bed, he retreats to theJob of the third chapter, cursing the day he was born,"

Although he decides to abandon his Christminster dream of becominga scholarly divine, Jude decides to pursue the life of a curate and devotehimselfto a humbIer means of servingGod. He follows Sue to Melchester


REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE ttte OBSCURE 43

and resumes his reading of the Church fathers and of the Tractarians.Here Hardy suggests Job and Jude's antitype, Christ, a frequent, thoughfainter, parallel to Jude throughout the remainder of the novel. Theallusions to Jude as Christ come mostly from Jude's own musings inwhich he both contrasts and likens himself to Jesus. In determining topursue life as a curate, he is pleased to realize that he will be thirty at thetime he begins his ministry-"an age which much attracted him as beingthat of his exemplar when he first began to teach in Galilee" (104).

Jude holds to his plan while Sue subtlyundermines it by her professedpreferencefor pagan over Christian subjects and by herrearrangementofthe NewTestament books (an obvious allusion to the historical criticismwhich had crossed from Germany to England). It is not until after Sue ismarried and his Aunt Drusilla dies that Jude finally decides to abandonhis Christ-like pursuit of a curacy. The final foil to his plans is hisrealization that he loves Sue physically, not spiritually, and that he wishesto commit adultery. He betrays himself and introduces another NewTestament figure, Judas, when he kisses Sue. He realizes that "it wasglaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldierand servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its besta frailty, and at its worst damnation" (172). He burns his religious booksin a revolt against his hypocrisy, although he does not yet abandon hisfaith.

Once Jude and Sue begin living together, Jude descends from stonemason to tombstone letterer. This vocation ironically bolsters Hardy'sepigraph-"The letter killeth." But the climactic illustration of the epi-graph comes when Jude and Sue attempt to restore the Ten Command-ments above a church altar in Aldbrickham. Hardy has one of theonlookers relate a story about drunken workmen leaving out the "not's"in a similar restoration of the Commandments. While technically Judeand Sue have notcommitted adultery, they are, in the eyes of the commu-nity, adulterous because they are not legally married. Their struggleagainst the letter of the law, both legally and theologically, has isolatedthem and has finally even cost Jude his trade. At this point Jude surren-ders the lastvestige of his faith by refusing to repair sacred buildings. Andat this point too he begins to adopt Sue's original pagan position. Hardyhas shown the gradual grinding down of a faith based on the theologicalletter of the law. Rejected by the Christminster dons, diverted from hisambitions ofacuracy, and finally shorn ofhis trade, Jude is ready, likeJob,to be robbed of his final solace-his family.

Part six of Jude the Obscure begins and ends on Remembrance Day atChristminster. It chronicles the final demise of Iude during the course ofone year. Here all the typological allusions coalesce; Jude is at once Job,Samson, and Christ, although the first two types appear to cancel out the


44 ELEANOR McNEES

third. Inhis extemporaneous speech to the crowdwatchingthe academicprocession he states, "'I am in a chaos of principles-groping in thedark-acting by instinct and not after example'" (258). Yet, perhapsperversely, he still retains his zeal for ritual and strains to hear the Latinof the ceremony. He has been unable to realize the spirit behind theletter. Hardy suggests that society inhibits such a discoveryby forcing itsmembers to adhere exclusively to the letter of the law.

This adherence is painfully demonstrated by Sue's conversion, afterher children die, to the HighAnglican ritual ofpenance. She begins to useNew Testament allusions to describe her family's plight: '''Leaving Ken-netbridge for this place is like comingfrom Caiaphas to Pilate" (261). Thecrucifixion images multiply as Jude, Sue, and their children are sur-rounded bySacrcophagus and Rubric Colleges. When FatherTime hangshimself and the other two children, the reader is forced to envisage agrotesque parody of the crucifixion ironically reminiscent of Sue's earlypositioningof her pagan statues on either side of a portrait of the hangingChrist. Jude's fatalistic reaction to the deaths-his allusion to theAgamemnon-contrasts with Sue's sudden entrenchment in Anglicandogma. His sarcastic query '''Where are dear Apollo, and dear Venusnow!'" (278)when he finds Sue at S1. Silas' Church expresses his desire forthe old paganSue and not the perverselypenitential one. He neverthelessaccedes to Sue's wishes and accepts her adherence to the theologicalletter-that she is still Richard Phillotson's wife. He frees Sue by puttingthe final seal on the preceding crucifixion imagery: "Then let the veil ofour temple be rent in two from this hour" (280). This statement isambiguous in terms of Jude's own state of mind. Having virtually re-nounced Christianity, Jude secularizes the image to embody his naturalmarriage to Sue. He also uses the ritualistic language to which Sue hassuddenly devoted herself. They have reversed roles: Jude has rejected alanguage devoid of faith, and Sue has appropriated the language as asubstitute for a faith she does not possess.

During his drunken three days with Arabella, Jude becomes a "shornSamson" (300) and, though he remarries Arabella, he determines to die.He has been metaphorically blinded by drink, his confessed weakness.The portrait of Samson and Delilah in the public house of the earlycourtship of Jude and Arabella is figurally realized in this second court-ship.

The full realization of the killing quality of the letter is announced byJude when he visits Sue for the last time. He warns her not to run awaywhen he states, "Sue, Sue! we are acting by the letter; and 'the letterkilleth" (308). Finally, however, both are unable to avoid obeisance to theletter. Jude mustpursue his Samson/Job-like destiny, and Sue must fulfillherpenitential obligation to Phillotson. On his way back to Christminster


REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE THEOBSCURE 45

to die, Jude passes the Brown House and the mile post on which he hadcarved "THITHER J. F." (62). Now he no longer seesbut only feels theetching, which is almost"0 bliterated by moss" (310). The letteringwhichhad encouraged him to pursue his dream of scholarship in Christminsterserves onlyas a dull reminder of defeatand illustrates the emptiness ofhishopes.

His entrance into Christminster on Arabella's arm presents an ironicreversal of his first entrance into that city. It is again night, and again heconjures up the ghosts of Christminster. This time, however, he realizesthe collapse of the spirit which had supported his vision:

'I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling. But 1don't revere allof them as 1did then. 1don't believe in halfof them. The theologians, theapologists, and theirkin the metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen,and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for me by thegrind of stern reality!' (311)

This "stern reality" closes in on Jude as he dies on Remembrance Dayquoting the third chapter of Iob: "'Let the day perish wherein I was born,and the night in whichitwas said, There is aman child conceived" (320).Jude's quotations are punctuated by the "Hurrah's" of the Christminstercrowd witnessing the commencementparade. In reversing the typologi-cal progression from Old Testament to New Testament, Hardy has goneeven further. He does not allow Jude to fulfill either Samson's fate orJob's. Having lost his faith, Jude does not pull the pillars of Christminsterdown with him, nor does he live to hear God's voice in the whirlwind andbe reimbursed by God for his sufferings. Instead he dies a prey to theunfulfilled letter. He aptly illustrates the book's epigraph and denies theunwritten second half-"but the spirit giveth life."

In "God's Funeral," written between 1908 and 1910, Hardy asks:"Whence came it we were tempted to create lOne whom we can nolonger keep alive?" (23-24). Such a question seems to haunt Jude theObscure. The poem's persona argues that such temptation arose from"our own early dream I And need of solace" (29-30),but that nowwe mustface the death of that dream:

So, toward our myth's obllvlon,Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and gropeSadlier than those who wept in Babylon,Whose Zion was a still abiding hope. (37-40)

Jude lives to see the obliteration of this myth. His belief in a typologicalanchor which would assure spiritual connection between himself andboth Old and New Testament types has collapsed, and he is left without


46 ELEANOR McNEES

the faith of Job. He moves backward instead of forward, regressing fromNew Testament antitype to Old Testament type and finally to a fragmentof the Old Testament type. His view of Christminster as the New Jerusa-lem of the Apocalypse likewise collapses to that of the unrepentantCapernaum of Matthew 11:23, a city more deserving of destruction thanSodom. Hardy's purposeful parody of the traditional typological move-ment constitutes a harsh critique of a society striving to hold fast to astructure emptied of spirit. AsTheodore Ziolkowski suggests, it is virtu-ally impossible for the modern novelist to employ traditional biblicaltypology: "The modern author who writes a novel based typologically onthemesfrom the Bible. . . is literally incapacitatedby history and hisown consciousness from writing out of the faith that was accessible evento the most sophisticated medieval authors" (354).7 Jude the Obscuredetails Jude's gradual fall into a consciousness which destroys faith," Itmakes this consciousness all the more painful as it shows Sue's oppositefall into unconsciousness. Byabandoning herself and fleeing to dogma,Sue becomes the true villain of the novel. She commits the sin ofhypocrisy, which Jude and all of his biblical types from Jesus to Job mostabhor.

ThroughJude Hardyforces his readers to take "afulllookattheWorst."While Jude dies before he can discover any "way to the Better," Hardyholds outmorehope for the reader. In "The Profitable Readingof Fiction"he says that "Our true object is a lesson in life, mental enlargement fromelements essential to the narratives themselves and from the reflectionsthey engender"(Life and Art 60). The evolutionary meliorism whichHardy professes in his 1922 "Apology" entails such a belief in mentalenlargement, or at least an increase in self-awareness. At several pointsHardy suggests that Jude is ahead of his time, that had he lived fiftyyearslater his views would have been accepted by his society. Since they arenot, Jude is forced to see himselfin the same terms as those of the personaof "In Tenebris II": "one born out of due time, who has no calling here"(8). In order to illustrateJude's plight so that the reader might gain a trulyenlarged view of human nature, Hardy perverts the Victorian crisis auto-biography and reverses the accompanying typology. The Christian jour-ney toward eschatological fulfillment is ultimately exposed as a flightaway from the self toward the "mirage mist" of a mythical religion. Judebecomes a tragic hero in his solitary denial of the mirage which Hardy felttoo many Victorians refused to penetrate.

University ofDenver


REVERSE TYPOLOGY IN JUDE rns OBSCURE

NOTES

47

Iparticulary astute on Darwin's influence is Gillian Beer, who sees Hardy'sdilemma as one of finding "a scale for the human, and a place for the humanwithin the natural order" (252). Beer argues that Darwin's theories aid Hardy'sattention to observation of minute details, not that these theories extinguishHardy's religion. J. HillisMiller thinks the problem is one of scale as well, but alsoof immanence replacing transcendence: "The supreme power is immanentrather than transcendent. It does not come from outside the world, but is a forcewithin nature, part of its substance. It is a version of the inherent energy of thephysical world as seen by nineteenth-century science: an unconscious powerworking by regular laws of matter in motion" (Thomas Hardy 14). But ThomasVargish and T. R. M. Creighton are more pessimistic about the loss ofbelieftoscientific skepticism in Hardy's works. Vargish asserts that Hardy's novels lackthe"providential aesthetic" that informs the traditionalVictorian novel. He seesHardy's characters realizing the "weightlessness of life in a universe essentiallybereftof meaning because ithas been abandoned by the source of meaning" (54),and Creighton views Hardy's conflict as one between prelapsarian vision andnineteenth-centuryrationalismwhere Hardy's characterswander "in the desertsbetween Darwin and Jehovah" (67).

2Uke Coulson, Dwayne Howell sees in Hardy's poetry particularly a crisisof belief in which Hardy's rational thought conflicts with his "extra-rationalfeeling" or "'dogma'" (5). Howell thinks the poetic persona and the variety ofpoetic forms are better suited to express this dilemma than the novels.

:!Weinsteinsees Jude the Obscure as a novel about the inadequacyoflanguageto provide an adequate frame of reference for the characters' actions. He viewsJude and Sue as borrowers of discourse because their language is "already ...coopted" by an "alien culture" (128). Weinstein proceeds with a deconstructivereading of the text but does not consider Hardy's use ofinverted typology.

4Hardy's original manuscript had Capernaum for Beersheba. In Matthew11:23-24 Christ warns the inhabitants of Capernaum: "And thou, Capernaum,which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mightyworks, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would haveremained until this day. But 1say unto you, that it shall be more tolerable for theland of Sodomin the day ofjudgment, than for thee." Applied personally to Jude,this statement isheavil yprophetic. Jude exalts both himselfand Christminster toheavenly status and dies in the sheer hell of Job. He, like the targets of Christ'swarning to the denizens of Cape rnaurn, fails to repent and be faithful. This is avariant of Hardy's use of reverse typology: Jude fails to heed prophecies and isconsequently punished. Thus the negative side of the prophecy is fulfilled.

5Theodore Ziolkowski, speaking of modern typology, notes that parody is theresult "whenform becomes absolute and the original meaning disappears" (360).Both Jude and Hardy view Sue's conversion as a fraudulent adherence to formover faith.

61n "AKinship with Job" Alexander Fischler deals with Hardy's use of the Jobstory as an attempt to make Jude heroic and mythical. While Fischler mainlyfocuses on the interplay between the darkness of Job and the light of Remem-


48 ELEANOR McNEES

brance Day, he does pinpoint Hardy's deviation from the story of Iob: "He haseven given up the notion of an adversary, a power beyond that hides the way andhedges man in. He clings only to Job's consoling wisdomthat in death, when lackofsympathyand absence ofanswers cease to matter, he too will find peace" (527).By eliminating Satan from the narrative, Hardy exposes the randomness of illfortune thatbefalls Jude. He abbreviates the biblical storyand makesJudealmostexistential by erasing both cause and final effect and focusing only on the presentloss.

7Fischler, however, defends Hardy's use of the Job type: "Choosing a latter-day Job for hero allowed Hardy to suggest that, in a modern stratified society, asin the land ofUz, convention remains the basis for damning judgment, causingmerit to go unrecognized and material failure to be the accepted proofof spiritualinadequacy" (525).

SWilliamClyde Brown blames Hardy's own loss of faith on his acquaintancewith the "higher criticism" of the Bible aswell as with Darwin, noting: "Where thefactuality of a [b]iblical narrative could be questioned, there could be no depend-able ground for Hardy's belief' (88). Likewise there could be no basis for atypological view of history if neither type nor antitype were true.

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Eric. Scenes from the Drama ofEuropean Literature. Trans. RalphManheim. 1959. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1973.

Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, GeorgeEliotandNineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge, 1983.

Brown, William Clyde. "The Ambiguities ofThomas Hardy." Notre DameEnglishJournal 15.3 (1983): 85-103.

Coulson, John. Religion and Imagination: "In Aid of a Grammar ofAssent."Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.

Creighton, T.R.M. "Some Thoughts on Hardy and Religion." Thomas Hardy afterFifty Years. Ed. Lance St. John Butler. Totowa: Rowman, 1977. 64-77.

Fischler, Alexander. "A Kinship with Job: Obscurity and Remembrance inHardy's Jude the Obscure." JEGP84 (1985): 515-33.

Fleishman, Avrom. Figures ofAutobiography: The Language ofSelfWriting inVictorian and Modern England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.

Hardy, Florence Emily. The Life ofThomas Hardy, 1840-1928. London: Macmil-lan; New York: St. Martin's, 1962.

Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Letters ofThomas Hardy. Ed. Richard tittle Purdyand Michael Millgate. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. 7 vols. 1978-88.

---. The Complete Poems ofThomas Hardy. Ed. James Gibson. New York:Macmillan, 1976.

---. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Norman Page. New York: Norton, 1978.--. LifeandArtbyThomasIIardy. New York: Greenberg, 1925.Howell, Dwayne. "Dogma and Belief in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy." English

Literature in Transition, 1880-192019 (1976): 5-14.Korshln, Paul J. "The Development of Abstracted Typology in England, 1650-


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1820." Miner 147-203.Landow, George P. "Moses Striking the Rock: Typological Symbolism in Victo-

rian Poetry." Miner 315-44.Miller, J.Hillis. The LinguisticMoment: From Wordsworth to Stevens. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1985.---. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP,

1970.Miner, Earl, ed. Literary UsesofTypologyfrom the Late MiddleAges to the Present.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.Vargish, Thomas. The ProvidentialAesthetic in Victorian Fiction. Charlottesville:

UP of Virginia, 1985.Weinstein, Philip M. The Semantics ofDesire: Changing Models ofIdentityfrom

Dickens to Ioyce. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.Ziolkowski, Theodore. "Some Features of Religious Figuralism in Twentieth-

Century Literature." Miner 345-69.


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