ABSTRACT
MOST READERS CONSTRUCT Jude the Obscure as replete with pain and sex. A few connect the pain and the sex. The ways in which pain and sex are connected doubtless vary some, all of us being different people, but I'd like to propose two broad categories that would accommodate the readerly experiences of most or all of us with this novel: homicidal voyeurism and sadism. Assuming that does not sound insulting or otherwise unpersuasive, I will feel authorized to turn directly to exploring what it is readers do with Jude. Briefly, we readers 1 direct both the voyeurism and the sadism toward children, weaving and embellishing patterns of erotic desire that take the form of an unusually violent sort of pedophilia, what today we would call physical and sexual abuse of children. Further, these pornographic projections both build on and subvert (or at least expose) the demeaning, even murderous distancing devices we use to keep desire alive, the ways in which we push people into the next county, into the role of mere objects, into childhood or some other embodiment of otherness in order to lust after them.
