Fremale Charactures In Tess Of The Dubervilles

The novels of Thomas Hardy are intricate and complicated works whose plots seem to be completely planned before the first word is ever actually formed on paper. Though I have no proof of Hardy's method of writing, it is clear that he focuses more on plot development than characterization in the novels Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The advantages of this can be easily seen in the clever twists and turns that occur in the novel which hold the reader's interest. But the main reason Hardy uses this method, especially in the tragedies Tess and Jude, is to present a moral argument to the reader through actions done by and to the main characters of the novels. By mapping out the turning points ahead of time, Hardy is able to control the course of his writings, and they emerge as a social criticism. But in doing this, the characters are condemned to a literary predestination. Hardy concentrates more on forcing the characters to carry out these actions than allowing their personalities to become fully and freely developed. Females perform most of the necessary but unlikely actions, and Hardy blames any erratic behavior on woman's natural inconsistency. Thus, in reaching for a high literary purpose Hardy inadvertently stunts the development of the main female characters.

Jude the Obscure is designed to show the faults and repercussions of religious and social conventions, with an emphasis on marriage. According to Hardy, short-lived impulses cause people to marry, which binds couples together until their deaths. When these feelings of affection fade, they must live together in misery instead of following their natural inclination and finding new partners. The characters in Jude who do follow their instincts, and not the rules of society and religion, are condemned by their peers and come to tragic ends. When Mr. Phillotson allows Sue Bridehead to leave their loveless marriage to be with Jude Fawley, he is fired from his job and unable to find any other fitting his education and experience, since no one wants their children to be taught by a man who allows his wife to have such freedoms. Jude and Sue decide not to marry, because of "how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is," even though they have children (284). As a result they are forced to travel from town to town, avoiding those they recognize, and are refused boarding when their situation becomes known. After the death of their children, Sue suddenly becomes religious and believes that the death of the innocent children was a punishment from God. Sue then follows the actions that proper society demands, and spends the rest of her life bound to Phillotson, later engaging in a physical relationship with him that repulses her. After Sue abandons Jude, he no longer cares what happens to himself, and brings about his own death by standing in the rain.

All of these events must occur for the negative image of marriage that Hardy is aiming for to be projected to the reader, but these happen at the expense of Sue's character development. Sue cannot leave Phillotson to be with Jude without his permission, because her character would take on an adulteress aspect, because Phillotson could force her to come back to him, and, as Jude put it, "It may not have worked so well for us as if he had been less kind, and you had run away against his will" (251). Therefore, a unique situation has to occur that would cause Phillotson to voluntarily free Sue when very few, if any, men of his religious views, education and feelings for Sue would do so. As a result, Hardy makes Sue jump out of a window when she believes that her husband wants to have sexual intercourse. This makes Phillotson realize how extreme Sue's feelings are, and since he is not a brute who forces others against their will, he allows her to leave. This works well for the plot, but severely damages Sue's credibility as a character. As mentioned before, Phillotson would never force himself on Sue, so all she had to do was ask him to leave. Her uncalled for action causes the reader to forget her earlier strengths, namely her rebellious atheist opinions, and regard her as a simple, hysterical female. Hardy would never get away with writing a man having such extreme emotions, so he attributes any irrational behavior to Sue.

This pattern repeats itself throughout the novel. Shortly after this scene, when Sue lives with Jude, Hardy again tries to prevent her from seeming adulterous. So he stops Jude and Sue from consummating their relationship even though they both believe that they are free to be together. To explain their chaste arrangement, Hardy has her say, "Put it down to my timidity, to a woman's natural timidity when the crisis comes...Assume that I haven't the courage of my opinions" (252). According to this statement, not only is Sue hysterical, but she, and all females, are cowardly. She shows even less conviction when she surrenders her formerly resolute beliefs about religion in favor of Christianity after her children's deaths. Jude and Sue still love each other, and since Hardy cannot have a tragedy that ends with them still together, Hardy causes her to believe their relationship is wrong so she will leave Jude and enter into "fanatic prostitution" with Phillotson (380). When she tells him that she wants to remarry Phillotson, he says, "What I can't understand in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?" (370). Again, a necessary and strange action, turning to Christianity when such a horrible event as the murder of children would lead most people to believe there is no God, is performed by the female and attributed to some flaw that all women supposedly share.

Another hard to believe action committed by Sue is her conversation with Father Time. The death of the children is important, not only because it adds more tragedy, but because it causes Jude and Sue to split. The oldest child must commit the murder, because an outsider doing it would seem more like a freak occurrence than a judgement from God. The catalyst ends up being Sue's speech to Juey. She agrees with him that every child's worst fear, not being wanted, is true in his case. When he says, "I wish I hadn't been born," Sue actually replies, "You couldn't help it, my dear" (350). She justifies her comments by telling Jude that she only wanted to be honest. But no matter how unpracticed at motherhood or truthful a person wants to be, no one with any slight degree of affection would ever tell a child what she told Juey. But since the idea of the world being better without children had