Two
Sue’s: Hardy’s Sue Bridehead from Jude
the Obscure in the Context of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”
Nick Harris, Nov. 22, 2024
Hardy
presents the character of Jude Fawley’s love interest Sue Bridehead in the
novel Jude the Obscure as a young woman determined to live her life by
her own emotional needs and not by constrictions put upon her by British
Victorian society. The reader of Jude today cannot but wonder if we
should view Sue’s character under the same rebellious conditions. Susan Sontag,
in her essay “Against Interpretation” calls for such a reading of any aesthetic
work, not by the terms of a restricted view of critical interpretation, but by
the emotional impact of each moment the reader receives from the artistic work.
If we view Sue’s character as an artistic work, then we may view her likewise
“Against Interpretation” in the Sontag manner, especially since Sue’s character
longs to live life “against” the restrictions thrust upon her by the judgements
of the individuals in the society that surrounds her.
The reader can view Sue Bridehead as the
expression of emotional pronouncement over societal pronouncement, over what
society demands as proper and aesthetically pleasing. Sue’s attitude becomes
synonymous with that of the rebel against aesthetic values, a rebel that Sontag
proclaims to be. Sontag’s ideas are an outgrowth of the pragmatism of John
Dewey. Dewey writes in Art and Experience:
Many a
person who writes from a museum conception of art, still shares
the fallacy from which
that conception springs. For the popular
notion comes
from a separation of
art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience that
many theorists and
critics pride themselves upon holding and even elaborating.
p.
6
We may equate the “museum conception of art” with critical
“interpretation” for Sontag uses this idea of “interpretation” as something for
which she is “against.” The “scenes of ordinary experience,” then, we can
equate with emotional and visceral reactions that the critics may eschew as
unworthy of “interpretation.” But Sontag’s point is that these immediate
reactions are the valid replacement for interpretation. For Sontag agrees with
Dewey when she writes of “the sensual and vengeful barbarism that [is] engulfing
our culture” (100, brackets mine). Sontag, however, elevates these cheap and
vulgar recognitions of immediate emotions to a status of aesthetic validity. Here
she likens herself to Thomas Hardy’s heroes. Sue Bridehead, the female hero of
Jude likewise elevates the proclamation of her emotional life as valid, even
though it may go against the values of what her society considers proper, may
even go into the world of the vulgar and the barbaric.
The reader
is first introduced to Sue through a picture that Jude’s aunt owns. The aunt
will not give him the picture of the girl “from the inimical branch of the
family,” and thus Sue is immediately poised as a symbol of rebellion (Part Second,
Chapter 1, par. 5 ). The hazy reality with which Jude views Sue through this
picture makes Sue an example of what R.P. Dawson calls a characteristic
attribute of the novel, a surreal or anti-realism (“Jude the Obscure by
Thomas Hardy” 654). Because of the heightened extremes of the events in the
novel, especially the brutal death of Jude and Sue’s children, Dawson writes
“this almost deliberate antirealism” makes the novel a precursor to modernist
surreal convention, or even the postmodernist movements of negating the surreal
with purposeful confusions of narrative truths (such as in the novels of Fowles
or Ackroyd). The reader should not be surprised that Sue, under the view of
this lens, also brings a surrealistic quality to her rebellious nature, one
that we can only understand by delving into Sue’s immediate motives in each of
her circumstances.
When Sue
first meets Jude, for instance, her immediate attraction to him makes her instantly
question her intentions, for she is debating, at this point, whether to take as
valid the attentions of another, older suitor (Part Third, Chapter7).
Sue eventually marries this older man, but when her impetuous nature of
independence asserts that she asks her husband to let her go to Jude, he gives
in to her request (Part Fourth, Chapter 3). She leaves to have a nonlegal union
with Jude, one that produces children and, eventually, discontent and tragedy.
Sontag,
though not speaking specifically to Hardy, tells the reader to view each artistic
action with an immediacy of affect. Sontag claims we must ally with Sue as she
proclaims her immediate desires as her true reality. This sense of immediacy that
Sue exhibits makes her a strong candidate for a Sontag model. Sontag writes, “The
world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of
it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99).These words
could be Sue Bridehead’s cry as she leaves her husband. He is a duplicate of
reality, an enforced prescription put upon her by society. Her world must be
one of more immediate sensation. So she goes to Jude, tragic as that situation
is to become.
Sue’s
sense of immediacy defines her character. Her refusal to accept the norms of
society as enforced duplicates of reality sends her into the real life with
Jude that she craves. It is a life rife with disheartenment, but she
experiences each tragedy as a subsequence of joy that she must feel with a
desperate immediacy. This refusal of the real defines Sue’s surrealism. Eventually
she is met with the immediate reality of the return of Jude’s wife. This ironic
development, ironic because Sue genuinely likes Jude’s wife, causes her to go
back to her own husband. Each instance of the progression of her life she feels
with a desperate attempt to be a part of her real world. Sometimes this immersion
is painful. But Sue always feels the passion of each moment of her life, and
she acts according to her own sensations, not those of the “depleted,
impoverished” world that Sontag rails against.
References
Dawson,
R.P. “Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 1895” in Encyclopedia of the Novel,
Volume 1, ed. by Paul Schellinger. Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1998,
pp. 654-655.
Dewey,
John. Art and Experience. 3rd ed. NY: Capricorn Books, 1938.
Hardy,
Thomas. Jude the Obscure.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth
Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.
