ABSTRACT
the 'poor lady' (as Hardy called her in the 1912 preface to Jude) who 'screamed' in Blackwood's Magazine that there was an unholy anti-marriage league afoot was not the only one whose attention was caught by the fact that, in Jude the Obscure, Hardy seemed to dwell with uncommon and unnecessary repetition upon the theme of marriage and mismating. Professor Bruce Mc Cullough, of New York University, eventually made the same observation and decided that there was 'some evidence of a failure of temper' on the part of the author. No careful reader of the novel can fail to notice the vehemence with which the subject of mating is discussed. 'A marriage ceremony ... is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience' (Chapter IV, 2). 'Fewer women like marriage than you suppose; ... they enter into it for ... the social advantages it gains them' (V, 1). 'Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw' (III, 9). 'I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a Government stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises' (V, 1). 'Arabella . . . has made me feel more than ever how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is' (V, 3). Hardy once pointed out to a friend in private that all these remarks occur in dialogue—it is Jude or Sue talking, not Hardy himself—and that these five quotations are only five, in a book of five hundred pages; but we who have noticed the many autobiographical features in the novel will not be easily convinced by Hardy's disclaimer. Nor are we likely to be overimpressed by the arguments of those who stress the fact that the subject of marriage and divorce was on everyone's lips in England in 1890, at the time when the notorious Parnell Case filled the newspapers.
