Hardy’s Sue Bridehead and the Irony of Natural Passion

Over the course of these blog posts, I have emphasized human relationships to the environment as shown through ideas of literature and literary criticism (including film criticism). In the case of my posts on Thomas Hardy, especially the novels The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure, I have attempted to show how the human individual relates to the natural world, especially in the realms of personal aspirations including both philosophical and physical/sexual goals and passionate expectations. The female protagonists of both novels show ambiguous and contradictory behaviors through their inherent relationship with the rural environments that define their early years and the urban environments to which they aspire. This essay examines the character of Sue Bridehead, the female protagonist of Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel. Sue is a character the reader never sees in the natural environment. Still, she feels out of place and confrontational in the urban environment in which she has moved and meets and interacts with the male protagonist Jude.

Jude first knows Sue through a picture of her in his rural home, as she is his distant cousin. His mother, upon noticing his interest in the picture, warns him to stay away from her (JTO, Part 2. Ch 1. Par. 5). Sue’s intellect and independence have led her to ambivalent moralities of which the mother does not approve. Jude meets Sue only after his own marriage dissolves when his wife runs away to Australia, and he moves into the urban center of Christminster. There he finds she is entering what is to be an unhappy marriage and is struggling to break free of it; indeed, she finds herself as caught between personal aspirations and societal expectations as is Jude in his unfulfilled marriage (JTO Part 4, Ch 6).

Kate Winslet as Sue Bridehead in the 1996 film Jude, directed by Michael Winterbottom

 

Sue Bridehead is as much a proclamation of nature as Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native who literally breathes in tune with the natural environment around her, or of Hardy’s other heroine who works knee-deep in the mud or the hay, depending on the season, and thus proclaims herself as one with the earth, Tess of the D’Ubervilles. Sue Bridehead comes from rural beginnings, but soon marries into the urban life, though the marriage is abusive. She initially escapes the abuse of her marriage by investigating societal attempts by the female population to overcome oppression. When she meets Jude, she sees a similarly oppressed person, oppressed by a doleful marriage he cannot escape, as well as someone from a similar rural background come into the urban environment to find escape. Sue’s escape to a partnership with Jude is her affirmation of a life more natural than that which society would force upon her.

Sue betrays a preference for emotional connections over societal obligations. She holds a desire to break free from constraints, whether they be imposed by urban or rural human moralities. But the unconventionality of her position aligns her with the wildness of nature. Passion holds a natural element to it, and Sue wants this natural element to dominate over the rules imposed by human society. She admits this to her husband when she visits him on his sickbed (JTO Part 4, Ch 6). The reader sees Sue as a symbol of passion, whether this be a woman’s right to speak freely and passionately, including the right to vote, or her actions regarding the personal realms of the heart.

The couple’s relationship ultimately leads to disillusionment. This disillusionment is one of a series of tragic events, including the cunning return of Jude’s first wife and the death of Jude and Sue’s children, for Hardy shows the bleakest of worldviews in Jude. The reader understands the destructive impact of societal expectations in the face of the tragedies that a wild nature can throw upon the individual. Sue eventually returns to embrace societal norms by going back to her legal husband, disillusioned with the trajectory her relationship with Jude has brought to her. Her personal tragic irony is that she cannot escape the rigid demands of societal norms, no matter how much her passion dictates. Passion fades in the face of continued hard existence, and societal norms overwhelm Sue’s impulse for freedom.

The reader faces many contradictions in Sue Bridehead. By taking these contradictions and ironies in turn, the reader can understand Sue as a passionate thinker, determined not to conform to the societal norms that entrap her. But in the end, she cannot escape them, and she returns to her husband. Even this last ironic act betrays the suddenness of Sue’s decisions and the fatalistic outcomes that result from them.

 

Nick Harris

10/24/2024

Robinson Jeffers, Humanity and the Eagle

“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

 

                                                 Robinson Jeffers “Carmel Point” 13-15

 

            Robinson Jeffers is a poet of the American Western wilderness. Of special interest to him are the craggy cliffs of Carmel in early twentieth-century California and the wild condors and other birds he often saw fly there. He coupled a celebration of the idea of wilderness with a thought-provoking indulgence in myth, tragic stories told in long narrative poems that contrasted to the shorter bullet-shots of his shorter poems, eight to one hundred or so lines of pinpointed sudden realizations. These poems hold an immediacy akin to Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” approach, one that heralds the reader’s priority in immediate visceral reactions over the more modernist concerns of long-range forms or universal notions of “greatness” in art. I will show through investigation of a short passage of one of my favorites of Jeffers’ poems, “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” that direct, blood-boiling actions play a predominant part in overall interpretation, especially in the shorter poems such as those of Jeffers. I began by quoting from one such short poem, “Carmel Point,” a sonnet-like insight into human encroachment in the natural world (fifteen lines instead of fourteen, typical of Jeffers’ Whitmanesque sudden lengthening of poetic normalcies). By going into “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” I will point out a more specific and direct instance of the theme of human versus the wild.

            When I was a child, Jeffers was taught as a counterpoint to Robert Frost with Frost’s comfortable, yet unsettling snowy New England forests replaced by the wild ocean coastlines of California. Jeffers dropped out of favor, partly because the inevitability of human encroachment in California makes his plea to the wild nature of existence inconsistent, that wild nature no longer a constant presence. Also, the Steinbeck idea of “Westering” that Jeffers coincided with became known as a mostly Caucasian construct, one that disregarded the diversity of how the human populations of the AmericanWest in fact arrived there. The Hispanic, African American, Asian, and the hundreds of groups of American indigenous peoples that roamed around the North American continent were not “Westering” so much as drifting in broad circles from all directions. But they all dealt with the natural boundary that was and is the ocean coastline. Jeffers celebrates that coastline and its predominant wildness, even in the face of astounding human interference.

 

 

Condor on the California Coast. Credit:  AP.

 

Turning now to the lines I wish to investigate more closely, here is the excerpt from “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” CW p. 185 lines 8 – 21.

 

“The nerves of men after they die dream dimly

And dwindle into their peace, they are not very passionate,

And what they had was mostly spent while they lived.

They are sieves for leading desire; they have many pleasures

And conversations, their dreams too are like that.

The unsocial birds are a greater race;

Gulf-eyed, and their blood burns. What heaped up to death,

The extension of one storm-dark wing filling its world,

Was more than the soft garment that fell. Something had flown away. Oh, cage-hoarded desire,

Like the blade of a breaking wave reaped by the wind, or flame-rising from fire, or cloud-coiled

 lightning,

Suddenly unfurled in the cave of heaven; I am stationed, and cold at heart, incapable of

  burning,

My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool, my desire-to the rock, how can I speak

                                                                                                                                      of you?

Mine will go down to the deep rock.”

 

The seven lines before these act as a prologue to the remainder of the poem. Notice how, after line twelve, the focus of the speaker turns from the nature of human dreams to the eagle. The remaining lines, and sixty-four more after these, continue the intense death-dream of the eagle. The remainder of the poem describes in beautiful, majestic, and harsh detail the passionate dreams of the dying eagle. The lines I have quoted show Jeffers’ theme, that humans have no concept of the passion of wild things, the living eagle dying, and, by extension, the ever-continuing passion of the “cold-eyed” wilderness itself.

            My thinking is that the immediacy of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” approach proves itself in these lines. Even without thinking of the larger form, most of the poem’s beauty lies in the dying eagle’s death dream. The blatant exposition of the first seven lines tells of two humans who quickly shoot a caged eagle. Jeffers names the humans, and thus the reader identifies with them, but Jeffers then abandons them in favor of the eagle. The reader takes on the responsibility of the wild animal’s dream by comparing its possibilities to her/his own. Jeffers’ comparison claims that no human can know the passion experienced by the wild thing. This immediate visceral claim is akin to the reader’s own bullet, shot into her/his reason through the violent act of killing the eagle. Jeffers directs his claim solely to these lines, ending with the bleak phrase “Mine will go down to the deep rock.” The “Mine” refers to desire, the limited desires of humans (the “dreams” of lines eight through twelve) in comparison to the long-reaching desire of nature, with nature fated to prevail. Though nature, represented by the dying eagle’s dream, will be celebrated in the remainder of the poem, the reader takes this moment, this immediacy to confront the hard-hitting theme that the idea of wilderness contains within it the short-sighted brevity of human interference.

            These descriptions are violent, a violence that Jeffers celebrates as inevitable when humans confront nature. According to Robert Zaller’s The Cliffs of Solitude:  A Reading of Robinson Jeffers, the confrontation of human violence and fated natural violence is predominant in Jeffers: “extremes of violation (violence) were both a means and an effect of Jeffers’ quest for psychic autonomy and poetic form” (68). Humans, in “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” long for psychic autonomy, but only the Eagle can comprehend such a visionary experience. Jeffers’ poetic form, then, is also an attempt towards a natural perfection that humans can only partly realize. The natural world holds this poetry as well as the connection to something supernatural. Humans writhe in their meager attempts to achieve both a natural and a supernatural connection. The eagle succeeds.

            The reader can view the remainder of the poem as a series of immediate moments also, though explaining them as such is not my purpose in this essay. I only mean to show that Jeffers, a modernist in league with the Western mythos of Steinbeck and the formal concerns of poets such as American modernists like Robert Frost, also proves to be an exemplar of Sontag’s early postmodernist position. Indeed, a reader or viewer can apply Sontag to most anything, but with Jeffers, the process works wonderfully to open up a poem such as “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” to other, even more blood-curdling interpretations, or, rather, “against interpretations.” Jeffers interprets the natural world and its connection to the supernatural through violence erupting in sudden, impactful moments. The sudden impact is the only gateway the mere human readers of his poems can fathom both natural and poetic forms.

 

Nick Harris 

blog post 10.16.2024

 

References

Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robertson Jeffers. Random House, 1938.

Oelschlager, Max, “The Idea of Wilderness in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder,” The Idea of Wilderness, Yale University Press, 1991, 243-280.

Sontag, Susan.  “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation & Other Essays. Farrar,            Strauss & Giroux, 1963, 3-14.

Zallar, Robert. The Cliffs of Solitude:  A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

 Nick Harris

10/10/2024

A Century of Cinema Revisited

            According to Philip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag, Susan Sontag’s most successful work was possibly her early writings on film. She challenges film viewers and critics alike with the heralding of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 60s, the campiness of slapstick, and an inherent sense of feminine ownership. Her later essay (1995) “A Century of Cinema” encapsulates her views by centering on a few important films to her theory of what film could be to contemporary culture. These films include, though not in a major fashion, Antonioni’s L’Avventura from 1960 which I have commented on in my early blogs in this venue. I am always quick to point out the influence of Sontag to my thinking in terms of ethics applied to art, whatever the medium. This was especially true in my comments on L’Avventura, wherein I spoke of image as symbol creating a visceral reaction from the viewer. These blood-churning reactions to images as they reflected on large screens in dark halls enhanced Sontag’s view of film criticism, making her aesthetic one both of popular shouts and whistles and of critical mind-bending philosophies.

Sontag writes seriously of cinema and its loss of meaning to contemporary movie-goers.  She attacks the concept that cinema-as-art and cinema-as-entertainment should be separate considerations as they are in the contemporary world (“A Century of Cinema” 1090). What she terms “Cinephilia,” or love of film as artistic beauty, is not a part of most contemporary movie-going experience because movie viewers of today do not agree with the basic tenet of film-as-beauty.  “For by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, cinephilia cannot help but sponsor the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object”  (1096).  Sontag is seriously investigating the meaning of film viewing; if the “movie viewers of today” were to do the same thing, Sontag’s position most likely would be their reluctance to go any further than film as metaphor or catch-phrases such as “This film stands for freedom.”

The irony of her attitude is that Sontag is a herald of postmodernism.  The film movements she mentions prominently in her essay include those of the mid 1950s wherein the  financial accreditations of Hollywood were aschewed by a new wave of Italian and French diretors. The social films of Italians such as Bertolucci and Rossellini and the French New Wave films of Godard and Trufaut and, an especial favorite of Sontag’s, Brossard. These were stark black-and-white films made on small budgets using crude plots, often from dime novels, to show a reality that Hollywood had been running away from for decades and which was running the studio system of Hollywood into oblivion (see “A Century of Cinema” 1094). But Sontag saw these films as heralds of an era. It was the 1950s European experiments with surreal narrative and complex realism that created an atmosphere wherein “going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion of university students and other young people” (1094). Experimental forms with narrative were a herald of modernism, but in these films, that modernism began to take on a new perspective, one which turned against the commonplace Hollywood cinema and its obsession with “greatness” and more toward the gritty yet surreal lives of everyday people caught in harsh situations that defied the faux-worlds of Hollywood.

Her seminal work “Against Interpretation” argues that traditional modernist views miss the point of artistry by concentrating on obscure concepts of content and not celebrating visceral reactions to form (3-4).  Even in this early work Sontag relies heavily on cinema.  Making her point in respect to the filmmaker Alain Resnais, she says, “But the temptation to interpret Marienbad (Last Year at Merienbad, 1963) should be revisited.  What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form” (9).  Hers is a serious postmodernist viewpoint.

            In her 1963 innocence, Sontag became not so much an attacker of modernism as a foreteller of postmodernism (MacFarquar par. 6). Later in the Sixties she would interpret the films of Godard with phrases like “rapid turnover of styles and forms”, “daring efforts at hybridization”, “insouciant mixtures of tonalities, themes and narrative methods” (Sontag, 1968 236).  With these words Sontag could have been defining her own brand of postmodernism.  In “A Century of Cinema” she explores the history of film and film’s beauty by such a mixture of tonality, theme and narrative, and thus confirms the characteristic postmodernism of her writings.

            Sontag’s viewpoint of the moviegoer, therefore, is not one of condescension, as her attitude might suggest, but rather a call to action of the power of the viewer.  In “A Century of Cinema,” the reader discovers a message on film aesthetic that speaks to the casual viewer.  True art is not dependent on any relationship with a cheesy metaphor but comes about through an independent process based on the comfort of one’s own attitudes. 

            Critics such as Larissa McFarquar describe Sontag as peculiarly ambivalent, loving pop culture, but for loftier philosophical reasons (MacFarquar par 4).  Even in “A Century of Cinema” she presents a quick overview of a popular idiom but does so by calling forth its most esoteric elements, foreign to the pop culture of many contemporaries, including her readers. But she seriously investigates the love of film and defining a film aesthetic that reflects a societal aesthetic.  Her postmodernism encompasses the range of pop culture and complex aesthetic philosophy. Film is a pop phenomenon and a serious means toward poetic statement, and this is not, as McFarquar would have it, a negative criticism.

 

References.

Lopate, Phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton University Press, 2009.

MacFarquar, Larissa. “Premature Postmodern” Nation Oct. 16, 1995 261:12 432-36.  review of   Liam Kennedy Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion.  retrieved on 12/03/07              http://galenet.galegroup.com.proxy.tui.edu/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=D            ataType&n=10&l=d&c=2&locID=vol_m761j&secondary=false&u=CA&u=CLC&u=DL            B&t=KW&s=1&NA=Sontag&TX=postmodernism  

McGowan, Jack. “Postmodernism” in Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism       Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins Press 1994. 

Sontag, Susan.  “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation & Other Essays NY: Farrarr,    Strauss & Giroux 1963 3-14.

                        “A Century of Cinema” in Norton Reader Peterson and Brereton, eds. 11^th edition             NY: Norton 2004 1090-1096 (Originally written for the German newspaper Frankfurter           Rundschau in 1995.)