Hardy's Jude and Weber's Ethic.

Whereas Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native immerses herself in the natural environment of the heath (as I wrote of in my earlier blog), Jude Fawley of Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, recognizes the beauty of nature alongside of its ugliness and longs to be free of it. In so doing, he finds himself, over the course of the novel, denied the progress of the mind he pursues. He inadvertently attempts to escape into the virtues of a work ethic that can be compared to Hardy’s contemporary Max Weber’s ideas of the edification of the soul through work, the Protestant work ethic. We can compare the humanism Weber calls for through humble work to Jude’s search for a humanistic edification of his character and better understand the transition of society into the industrial age and how that transition affects the induvial for theoretical good or harm.

At the start of Jude the Obscure, Hardy writes of Jude’s own immersion into a oneness with nature that he was born into in his rural roots, expressed in how the land reminds him of its place in the pleasures of life, especially those of a sexual nature:

…to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to

spare—echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy

deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-

play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every

square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made

up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the field

from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would not turn

their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many

a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the

next seed-time….  II. par. 10.

Clearly Jude holds a romantic notion of how this natural environment produced the pleasures of days gone by. Yet Jude longs to go away from this natural environment, escaping into the life of the mind at the distant town where a college sits. He finds this idea preferable to staying with the ugliness which he also perceives inherent in the heath:

The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round, where

it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s

produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and

the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family.

“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. II. pars. 8-9.

Jude longs to escape into the world of the human intellect. He thinks the road to this is by getting to the nearest city where he has a friend in the university, hoping that the friend will enable him to be a student, the pathway he sees as his road out of the ugliness of the environment of his youth. Hardy's novel reflects the broader societal upheavals of the Industrial Revolution through the character of Jude, a young man realizing the limitations of the agrarian society  into which he was born. Jude realizes that traditional agrarian communities face disruption in the face of an Industrial Revolution, and he abandons the agrarian world just as the industrialized world urges. But unlike industry, Jude yearns for the development of humanity. Jude uses this humanistic urge, originating in his humble roots and developed through a course of scholarly study, as an impetus for his evolution as an individual in his contemporary world.

Max Weber, writing at the same time of the late novels of Hardy, tells why humanism is preferable to industrialism, especially the morality that becomes inherent in humanism at its simplest level, that of the hard worker:

“We want to cultivate and support what appears to us as valuable in man: his

personal responsibility, his basic drive toward higher things, toward the spiritual

and moral values of mankind, even where this drive confronts us in its most

primitive form. Insofar as it is within our power we want to create the external

conditions which will help to preserve—in the face of the inevitable struggle for 

existence with its suffering—the best that is in men, those physical and emotional 

qualities which we would like to maintain for the nation” (Weber, 1894 speech

before the Evangelische-Soziale Kongress, quoted in Bendix, 44).

What Weber speaks to here is the humanism of workers, farmers in particular, in relation to the landowners and industrialists that are determining the economic and political zeitgeist of the society. The “most primitive form” Weber writes of here is that of human individuals who are farm laborers, the economically simple. These individuals contain the “drive toward higher things” that is truly important for the self-definition of human beings. We “foster and maintain” these qualities “for the nation,” but we do so at an individual level. This individual level is best realized when the economic level of the individual is simple, a life unclouded by the zeal for economic advancement.

            Jude understands the common life of a farmer, the beauty of the land growing from the ground and through the shoes of the individual who becomes one with the land. But he understands the ugliness of that life also, the crude qualities of the muck and the mud, the hunger that comes from physical striving with no immediate reward. Jude imagines the way out of this ugliness is through the development of the mind. But he gets caught in the crudity of the industrial world, the society that tells him he must support himself and those dependent on him or else go hungry. He becomes a stonemason in order to appease this place in which this industrial world places him. But the stones do not hold the beauty that was inherent in the land of his childhood, even though that beauty also held a flip side of ugliness.

            Rest assured, I am not attempting a Marxist review of Jude…, dependent on economics as its only theme. My intent is as ecocritical as the sense of place I associate with Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native. Environment as a theme is Hardy is well documented; see, for instance, Barrett’s “Character and Environment in Hardy’s Fiction” (2012). But Jude’s society will not let him explore the wonders of the human mind as he wants. He cannot, therefore, escape the harshness of the earth, together with its beauty, except to plunge deeper into the squalid life of the worker in the industrial world.

Jude tries to compensate by living out of wedlock and raising a family with the novel’s magnificent female character Sue Bridehead, who is married also. As a suffragette, she accompanies Jude into a world counter to the culture of proper industrial society. Nothing appeases their longing for something better, their need to get beyond the norms that imprison them, and the situation ends tragically.

Because Jude appears to have no hope, or a hope that ever diminishes wherever he turns his head, Hardy’s final novel reads also as his bleakest. The mysticism of the land, which Eustacia Vye never completely abandons, is gone after the first few chapters, and Jude sets himself headed away from Weber’s simple “best that is in men.”

 

Barrett, Charlotte. “Character and Environment in Thomas Hardy's Fiction,”  http://writersinspire.org/content/character-environment-thomas-hardys-fiction licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK). Published on 15 May 2012. Accessed on 21 February 2024.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Project Gutenberg. Release Date: August, 1994 [eBook #153] [Most recently updated: August 28, 2022] [original publication 1890.] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm

Weber, Max. “Speech before Evangelische Soziale Kongres, 1894,” reprinted in Richard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Doubleday, Anchor, 1962, p. 44.

                                                                        Nick Harris, February 2024