"ENSLAVEMENT TO FORMS": SUBJECTION AND REBELLION OF THREE OF HARDY'S WOMEN
 
A Thesis
 
Presented to
 
the Division of English and Foreign Language
 
EMPORIA STATE UNIVERSITY
 
In Partial Fulfillment
 
of the Requirements for the Degree
 
Master of Arts
 
By
 
Susan Roberta Darling
 
/~ 
December, 1987 
I 
D 
AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS 
Susan Roberta Darling for the Master of Arts 
in English presented on 10 December >_1287 
Title: "Enslavement to Forms": Subjection and Rebellion of Three of 
Hardy I S Women 
Abstract approved: ____~eventO'~LJ~·~JL=d~ 
Throughout his career as a novelist Thomas Hardy shows concern about 
issues affecting women, especially their subordinate status in marriage 
and their subjection to the double standard of morality. As his career 
develops, he takes a more cogent stand on these and other subjects 
concerning women as evidenced by the increasing rebelliousness of his 
women protagonists against Victorian social conventions. This study 
first identifies the conventions that confined women to limited roles 
and kept them second-class citizens throughout much of the nineteenth 
century. The study then documents the increasing rebellion of three of 
Hardy's women protagonists: Elfride Swancourt of A Pair of Blue Eyes 
(1873), Eustacia Vye of The Return of the Native (1878), and Sue 
Bridehead of Jude the Obscure (1895). 
Like women in Victorian England, these women characters are viewed 
by their society primarily as sexual beings. Their sexuality is central 
460921 Df APR 2/ 'B8 
to the novels in which they appear. For example, all three characters 
face the angel/whore dichotomy. These women accept in varying degrees 
the angel ideal which dictates that women be docile and chaste and that 
their only goal be marriage. Elfride Swancourt internalizes this ideal. 
Eustacia Vye, who wants "to be loved to madness," knows she has moved 
far beyond the angel ideal. Sue Bridehead makes an intelligent argument 
against women being forced into this role and tries to live her life 
accordingly but society will not allow it. 
These women also rebel in varying degrees against their society's 
refusal to view them as intelligent people capable of being independent. 
They are educated women, in their society's view, but they cannot use 
their education to improve their stations in life. Elfride tries to be 
a successful writer but she faces unfair criticism from her male critic. 
Although Eustacia has no clear idea of an occupation in which she would 
be self-supporting, she rejects the limited roles open to her: teacher 
of children, companion, wife/mother, and mistress. Sue desires a col­
 lege education available only to men and also a job in which she would 
have the freedom to work independently. Faced with sharply restricted 
professional opportunities, all of these women are or become financially 
dependent on men. 
Hardy's awareness of how these and other Victorian social conven­
 tions affect women and his growing sympathy with women as victims of 
these conventions culminate in his portrayal of women characters who 
are intelligent and rebellious. In the end, however, convention not 
only denies them self-development and fulfillment but destroys them. 
&d
 
/' -0 noJlL ~~J~Q 
Approve4 for the Graduate Council 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
My deepest thanks to Dr. Jeremy Wild whose expertise, guidance, and 
patience made this thesis possible. I would also like to thank Dr. 
James Hoy for his help. I greatly appreciate the English Department 
faculty for making my graduate study enlightening and enjoyable. 
My gratitude also to my friends Laurie, Barbara and Bill for their 
encouragement. 
TABLE OF CONTENTS
 
CHAPTER PAGE
 
I. VICTORIAN WOMEN AS VICTIMS OF CONVENTION 1
 
II. ELFRIDE SWANCOURT 19
 
III. EUSTACIA VYE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
 
IV. SUE BRIDEHEAD 48
 
LIST OF WORKS CITED. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
 
1 
CHAPTER ONE
 
VICTORIAN WOMEN AS VICTIMS OF CONVENTION
 
Introduction
 
Hardy had a fascination with studying women characters and men/women 
relationships in his novels. Many of his women protagonists are remark­
 able in that they are strong-willed, passionate, intelligent and finan­
 cially independent, unlike the typical Victorian woman. Necessarily 
involved in the portrayal of these independent women are the effects 
that Victorian social conventions have on them and, more specifically, 
the extent to which these women accept their society's conventions. In 
order to put the struggles of Hardy's fictional women in the context of 
the Victorian woman, Chapter One identifies the conventions that kept 
women subordinate during the nineteenth century. 
Even though some changes occurred in attitudes and laws concerning 
women in the latter part of the century, throughout much of it women 
were second-class citizens. As will be seen, paradoxical assumptions 
about women were the basis for their subordinate status: women were not 
as intelligent as men, yet women were morally superior. On the basis of 
these assumptions, women were restricted to the roles of wife and 
mother. 
Because the only goal for women was marriage, they were denied a 
good education and entry into the professions. If a woman received an 
2 
education, it was to prepare her to attract a husband and manage a 
household. If a woman was forced to be self-supporting, only a limited 
number of "respectable" occupations was open to her: she could be a 
teacher in a primary school, a governess, or a companion to the sick and 
old. The jobs open to lower-class women--factory worker, shop clerk, or 
servant,--were less respectable. 
The second assumption about women, that they were morally superior, 
again restricted women to specific spheres. It was their duty to serve 
others, the poor and sick, their families, and especially their hus­
 bands. While it was the man's role to participate in the competitive, 
sordid business world where he might easily lose touch with his higher 
sentiments, it was the woman's role to make the horne a bastion against 
the evil forces of the outside world. Thus, the woman was considered 
the "angel in the house." 
The ideal of women as morally superior "angels" also prescribed that 
they be chaste. This was the basis for the sexual double standard which 
greatly restricted their social freedom. It was forgivable if men 
transgressed because they had more "passionate natures" but respectable 
women were not supposed to think or talk about sex. Contraception was 
not available because the purpose of sex for the married, respectable 
woman was to produce children. Since the ideal was for "good" women to 
be chaste and uninterested in sex, men turned to "bad" women, or pros­
 titutes or mistresses, for sexual gratification. 
These assumptions about women are reflected in the laws concerning 
marriage and divorce that legally sanctioned women's subordinate posi­
 tion. Women were denied the right to own property once they became 
engaged and then during marriage. They were not allowed to take legal 
3 
action. Women were also denied rights over their own persons because 
their husbands legally owned them. It was virtually impossible for a 
woman to divorce her husband because it was expensive and she must prove 
her husband's adultery plus other crimes, such as desertion, sodomy, 
bestiality or rape. A husband, however, could obtain a divorce by only 
proving adultery. 
Many of these conventions directly affect the three women protago­
 nists of Hardy's discussed in Chapters Two, Three, and Four. These con­
 ventions are obstacles to these women's self-development and happiness 
and eventually destroy them. 
Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 but even around 1800 the 
traditionalist ideal of women ensconced in the home and subservient to 
man was widely accepted in English society. Such clear sex role defini­
 tions were part of the strict guidelines of social behavior which the 
rising middle class established to maintain its precarious position in 
"polite society." This traditionalist view was reinforced by the popu­
 larity of Protestantism, with its strict moral sanctions, among the 
middle class early in the Victorian period. This view, however, was 
slowly changed by the decline of Christianity and the developing eman­
 cipation of women. Historians generally agree that the decade of 1860­
 69 marked the beginning of serious questioning of established social 
mores, including the authority of Christianity and woman's place in 
society. Christianity was challenged by Darwinism (the Origin of Spe­
 cies was published in 1859) and the new sciences of anthropology and 
psychology (Crow 30). John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, 
published in 1869, increased interest in the emancipation of women. 
4 
However, despite this serious questioning of mores and reforms in other 
areas such as trade and working conditions, women remained second class 
citizens throughout much of the 19th century. 
Until some changes in attitudes and laws concerning women occurred 
in the latter part of the century, women were denied a good education, 
entry into most professions, the right to hold property, and even rights 
over their own bodies. Two assumptions about women were the basis for 
their subordinate role in society: Women were not as intelligent as 
men, yet women were morally superior. On the basis of these assump­
 tions, women were restricted to the role of wife and mother. 
Because a woman's only goal was marriage, her education prepared her 
to attract a husband and then to be a proper wife. The education of the 
typical middle and upper-class girl consisted of "polite accomplish­
 ments" designed to make her interesting and attractive to a prospective 
husband. These accomplishments included music, painting, a smattering 
of carefully selected literature, flower arranging and the like, and 
sometimes a foreign language. She also learned sewing and needlework 
and perhaps other domestic skills to prepare her to manage a household 
once she was married. Girls of this class were either taught by their 
parents or governesses or sent to boarding schools. In 1864-68, the 
Schools Inquiry Commission found boarding schools girls' education 
"fragmentary, multifarious, disconnected; taught not scientifically as a 
subject, but merely as so much information and hence, like a wall of 
stones without mortar, it [falls] to pieces" (qtd. in Crow 150). How­
 ever, boys of this class were given a secondary and college education. 
Their college education, which, in addition to the humanities, included 
mathematics, science, and economics, prepared them for a possible pro­
5 
fession. The education of lower-class children was essentially equal 
for boys and girls in that schools were established for them by the 
government and churches. These schools, however, were poorly attended, 
and fewer girls went than boys. 
Only in slow, plodding steps during the latter half of the Victorian 
Era was a college education comparable to men's available to women. In 
fact, there was strong opposition to women obtaining a college educa­
 tion, as shown in this excerpt from an anonymous article in a series 
published in a Conservative weekly, Imperial Review, in 1867-68. This 
piece is entitled "True Colleges for Women": 
It is difficult to treat with gravity this preposterous pro­
 posal of a University career for the potential wives of En­
 glishmen without being betrayed into an indignation such as, 
nowadays, is never effective and is not infrequently ridiculous 
Home, and home only [is] the 'True College' for girls. 
We are treading on delicate ground and must needs pick our way 
daintily. Nevertheless, we need not shrink from saying that 
the congregation of young girls at a certain age, either in 
boarding school, true colleges, or any other gregarious estab­
 lishment . is a downright forcing of minds which ought, for 
the moment, to be kept as dormant as possible. By minds we do 
not mean intellects; we mean what everybody who is acquainted 
with human nature will understand. (qtd. in Crow 198-99) 
One of the first colleges open to women, Queen's college, was foun­
 ded in 1818 to provide better training for governesses since many were 
incompetent. A women's college was established at Cambridge in 1869 and 
Oxford in 1879, but it was not until 1920-21 that women were allowed to 
6 
receive degrees from these institutions. In 1880 a true college educa­
 tion, not just governess training, was available to women when the 
University of London was opened to them and they could receive degrees. 
Even after the establishment of women's colleges, there was still 
strong opposition from both men and women against higher education for 
women. Mrs. Lynn Linton, author of many articles against women's rights 
published in the Saturday Review, also wrote The One Too Many, a novel 
about women students at Girton college who are characterized as women 
who flirt, drink, smoke, swear and know and talk about unfit subjects 
(Crow 327). And Stopford Brooke, a clergyman and professor at Queen's 
College, felt that the better part of women's nature suffered in their 
pursuit of higher education. According to him, educated women looked 
with contempt on self-sacrifice, sentiment, imagination, beauty and art, 
and the "higher passions of the ideal or of the religious life" (Crow 
327). 
Along with the prejudice against women obtaining a college education 
was the prejudice against their entering the professions. Women were 
thought not to have the intellectual or managerial capacity to partici­
 pate in the nation's increasingly complex mercantile economy (Altick 
51). The upper and middle-class woman, even if she was well-educated, 
was not supposed to work. In an era when hard work and utility were 
valued, many middle and upper-class women were encouraged to be "deco­
 ratively futile" (Altick 51). These women were symbols of the wealth 
and status of their husbands. However, many women were involved in 
philanthropy, helping the sick and poor. Indeed, a few of these philan­
 thropic pursuits such as nursing became professions later in the cen­
 tury. But throughout much of the era the only jobs open to upper and 
7 
middle-class women, when circumstances forced them to work, were as 
teachers in primary schools or governesses, both of which had low pay 
and prestige. Some women tried, and were successful at, professional 
writing but they encountered the male critic's prejudice against women 
writers. Many women writers, among them George Eliot and Anne and 
Charlotte Bronte, wrote under pseudonyms to avoid undue criticism. An 
example of such prejudice is Robert Southey's letter of March 1837 to 
Charlotte Bronte warning her against making a career of writing: "Lit­
 erature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to 
be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties the less leisure she 
will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation (qtd. in 
Basch 108). 
While it was not respectable for upper and middle-class women to 
work with their hands, such work was a necessity for most lower-class 
women in order to help support their families. The lower-class in 
general provided cheap labor for jobs in shops and as house servants and 
the more hazardous jobs in mines, factories, and sweat shops. Women and 
children were paid even less than men. Even after the Factory Acts 
improved conditions for women working in mines and textile mills, de­
 plorable conditions still existed in trades such as dressmaking, nail­
 making, matchmaking, and piece-working. One abuse brought to public 
attention was the match-tipper's hazard of "phossy jaw," a form of 
necrosis caused by the phosphorus they handled (Altick 57). Some lower­
 class women supplemented their incomes by becoming prostitutes, or 
prostitution became their only means of support. 
The ideal vocation for Victorian women of all classes, however, was 
wife and mother. This ideal came from the middle-class traditionalist 
8 
view that women should be sheltered in the home and subservient to men. 
Women were viewed as weaker physically and intellectually but at the 
same time invested with moral superiority, which is the second major 
assumption which made Victorian women subordinate to men. This assump­
 tion of women's moral superiority, conversely, was founded on the belief 
that women are imperfect if not completely evil (Basch 3). The Chris­
 tian belief, especially through Saint Paul, of women as easily corrupt­
 ible and having a propensity for corrupting men, was influential in 
Victorian society. According to this belief, because women are morally 
weaker, they must constantly fight to overcome their faults through 
religious devotion. The Victorian ideal of women as moral guardians of 
society was therefore based on the view that women can be truly admira­
 ble only when they overcome their moral weakness by devoting themselves 
to serving God and humanity and thus attaining moral superiority. Women 
were constantly reminded that they were to be on guard against moral 
failure. Mrs. Sarah Ellis, author of popular books on the proper social 
behavior of women, reminded her readers in The Daughters of England, 
1845, to avoid the typical feminine faults of selfishness, indolence, 
and vanity by cultivating "habits of industry, feelings of benevolence 
and Christian meekness" (qtd. in Basch 4). 
This virtuousness in women was insisted upon and idealized, indeed, 
idealized to the point where women were viewed not as humans but angels. 
This idealization was similar to the medieval courtly love tradition in 
which women were also idealized. Coventry Patmore's famous poem, "The 
Angel in the House," defined and glorified the innocent, moral, unearth­
 ly being that women were to aspire to be and men were to woo and marry: 
9 
Her dispostion is devout, 
Her countenance angelical; 
The best things that the best believe 
Are in her face so kindly writ 
The faithless, seeing her, conceive 
Not only heaven, but hope of it. (Bk. I, Canto III) 
This idealization of women, however, enforced on them strict social 
behavior and confined them to the "woman's sphere" of home, family, 
religion, and philanthropy. Women were not to aim at self-development 
but self-renunciation. Their main function was to serve, and to serve 
especially their husbands. Mrs. Ellis wrote in her essay, "Behaviour to 
Husbands," which appeared in her book The Wives of England. Their Rela­
 tive Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations, 1843, that a 
wife was to be 
. supremely solicitious for the advancement of her hus­
 band's intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature. She should 
be 'a companion who will raise the tone of his mind from low 
anxieties, and vulgar cares and will lead his thoughts to 
expatiate or repose on those subjects which convey a feeling of 
identity with a higher state of existence beyond this present 
life. ' (qtd. in Houghton 351) 
While the man's role was to participate in the competitive, sordid 
business world where he might easily lose touch with his higher senti­
 ments, it was the woman's role to make the home a bastion against the 
evil forces of the outside world. The home was a sanctuary of peace 
and innocence to which the man could escape and be the sole authority. 
The woman lived a sheltered life, only venturing out when she offered 
10 
her help to the sick and poor. She was also busy with her children 
which tended to be abundant because of increased knowledge of medicine 
and sanitation, lowering infant mortality, and the unavailability of 
contraception. 
This rigid stereotyping of roles is stated by the king in Tennyson's 
poem The Princess, 1847: 
When man wants weight, the woman takes it up, 
And topples down the scales; but this is fixt 
As are the roots of earth and base of all; 
Man for the field and woman for the hearth: 
Man for the sword and for the needle she: 
Man with the head and woman with the heart: 
Man to command and woman to obey; 
All else confusion. (Part V, 434-441) 
Women were endowed with the power to ennoble and inspire others but this 
revered position "was the fruit of subjection and submission" (Basch 6). 
Ruskin wrote in "The Crown of Wild Olive" that "A true wife, in her 
husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is 
queen . " (The Works of John Ruskin 491). 
The ideal of women as angels or priestesses and the home as sanctu­
 ary was reinforced by the need of many individuals for a moral founda­
 tion in the face of religious questioning. Because of the internal 
corruption of the Anglican Church, Darwin's theory of evolution was 
drastically diminished Man's place in the universe, and the over-all 
rise of criticism of established authority (so typical of Benthamism), 
Christian theological dogma lost much of its hold. A more secular 
religion which included the ethics of Christianity was a replacement for 
11 
some people. The family was the source of the highest emotions. Women 
were chaste and devoted to serving others and men protected and cher­
 ished their families. 
The ideal of women as morally superior "angels" greatly restricted 
their social freedom. The "angel" ideal strictly prescribed that a 
woman be chaste. It was also the ideal for men to be chaste but it was 
generally accepted that men have more "passionate natures" and so it was 
forgivable if they transgressed. Therefore, women, unmarried and mar­
 ried, were subject to a double standard of morality concerning sexual 
conduct. Young unmarried women were strictly chaperoned. It was the 
mark of good upbringing if a girl came to her husband ignorant of sex. 
A woman who had "fallen" from her "pure" state was not likely to become 
the wife of a respectable man since she could not possibly be the pro­
 tectoress of his moral and spiritual values. "Respectable" ladies were 
not supposed to think or talk about sex. While it was a married woman's 
duty to produce children, she was not supposed to, "by nature," have any 
sexual passion and was considered indecent if she did. Nor would a 
respectable woman ever hear of contraception because it was the "har­
 lot's habit." The medical profession refused to have any part in making 
contraception available. One doctor resigned from the London Dialec­
 tical Society because it "had discussed the propriety of assigning to 
medical men the intimated function of teaching females how to indulge 
their passion and limit their families" (qtd. in Crow 280). 
This seeming confusion on the question of women's sexual passion-­
 either they have none or are overly passionate--stems from the enormous 
Victorian effort to overlay the belief that women have a voracious 
sexual appetite and a desire to seduce men with the ideal that women are 
12 
morally superior. Basch points out the "mutation of the Eve myth into 
the Mary myth, of temptress into redeemer, implied a fundamental process 
of desexualization of the woman, who was bit by bit deprived of her 
carnal attributes . "(8). Thus the dichotomy of women being seen by 
men as either totally "good" (symbolized by Mary, a lily, and an angel) 
but sexless, or "bad," (symbolized by Eve, a rose, or a she-devil), is 
especially strong in Victorian society. 
Since the ideal was for "good" women to be chaste and uninterested 
in sex, men turned to "bad" women, prostitutes or mistresses, for sexual 
gratification. Contributing to the market for prostitutes was the fact 
that many Victorian couples waited to marry until the young man had 
enough money to establish himself firmly in the middle class. There was 
no doubt that the future bride would not enter into a sexual relation­
 ship before marriage. Therefore, a large market for prostitutes existed 
in Victorian England and because of the lack of jobs for women there was 
a large supply of prostitutes. Victorian English society, however, 
tended to place the cause of prostitution on the prostitute's "wanton­
 ness" rather than acknowledge the deplorable economic condition of 
lower-class women. Bracebridge Hemyng, author of a description of 
London prostitution, which was part of Henry Mayhew's four volume study 
entitled London Labour and the London Poor, published in the 1860's, 
. believed, along with many other Victorian respectables, 
that female operatives--in which definition he included almost 
all women working for a living from milliners to ballet girls-­
 were by their nature unchaste and in the habit of prostituting 
themselves either for money 'or more frequently for their own 
gratification. ' (Cross 226) 
13 
This double standard of morality is reflected in the laws concerning 
marriage and divorce, laws which legally sanctioned women's subordinate 
position. Once a woman became engaged, all of her property automati­
 cally became her fiance's. Once she was married, her property remained 
his and anything she earned or was given became his too. Moreover, upon 
marrying, she lost the right to take part in any legal action: she 
could not sign a contract or lease, or collect debts, or sue for any 
reason. If her husband spent all of her money, or deserted her and kept 
drawing on her resources, she had no legal recourse. (It was not until 
1870 that the Married Woman's Property Act gave a wife the right to her 
own earnings, investments, inheritance, and gifts.) A man also legally 
owned the persons of his wife and children and was free to beat, im­
 prison, or to do anything else he cared to do with them. A small degree 
of protection came in 1857 when the Matrimonial Causes Act made divorce 
easier to obtain. Before the Act, divorce was only possible by an act 
of Parliment for each case and cost about £800 or £900. Obviously this 
was only for the very rich and of course a wife, not owning any prop­
 erty, could not bring suit against her husband. After 1857 divorce was 
cheaper but still upheld the double standard. A man could ask for a 
divorce on the grounds of his wife's adultery but a wife could divorce 
her husband only if she could prove adultery plus "cruelty or desertion 
or the crimes of sodomy, bestiality, or rape" (Crow 158). The widely 
held belief that a wife's adultery was more serious than a husband's was 
based on the fact that "spurious offspring" could gain inheritance. It 
was not until 1929 that the grounds for divorce were made equal for men 
and women. 
14 
These conventions in Victorian society that kept women in a subor­
 dinate position also affect the three fictional characters, Elfride 
Swancourt, Eustacia Vye, and Sue Bridehead, discussed respectively in 
Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Like women in Victorian England, these characters 
are looked upon by their society primarily as sexual beings. These 
characters rebel against their subordinate role and struggle to be 
viewed as thinking beings. The extent to which they rebel is in direct 
correlation with Hardy's growing awareness of how these conventions 
affect women. 
These characters' sexuality is central to the novels in which they 
appear. For example, all three face the angel/whore dichotomy. Elfride 
is viewed as an angel by her two suitors, Smith and Knight, until they 
learn that other men have fallen in love with her. Though she is still 
a virgin, they see her as a fallen woman and therefore unmarriageable. 
Eustacia is considered a fallen woman by conventional standards, which 
are expressed through Diggory Venn and the Yeobrights, because of her 
unsanctioned relationship with Wildeve. Her husband Clym Yeobright 
tries to fit her into his idea of a chaste, schoolteacher-wife but then 
views her as unworthy to be his wife when he learns that Wildeve had 
visited Eustacia after her marriage. And Sue too, is first seen as a 
pretty, sweet angel by her lover, Jude. He wants to possess her by 
marrying her but she refuses to be forced into legally binding herself 
to him. Society then views her as a fallen woman when it learns that 
she and Jude live together but are not married. 
These three women accept in varying degrees the angel ideal. El­
 fride dearly wants to be the submissive, chaste wife of Knight. Eus­
 tacia wants "to be loved to madness" but knows she cannot fit into the 
15 
angel ideal. Sue makes an intelligent argument against women being 
forced into this role and tries to live her life accordingly but society 
will not allow it and she too "falls into the enslavement of forms." 
The threat of economic ruin hangs over these women because of their 
fall from respectability. Society will not accept them in any role 
other than chaste young women and then wife/mother so that when they 
step outside the norm they have no acceptable position in society. 
Nor are these women allowed to support themselves because of the 
opposition to women obtaining an education and entering the professions. 
Elfride, Eustacia, and Sue are educated women in their society's view 
but they cannot use their education to improve their stations in life. 
Elfride tries to be a successful writer but her ruse of assuming a man's 
pen name is seen through by her male critic and she faces unfair criti­
 cism of her novel by, ironically, the man she falls in love with. Eus­
 tacia and Sue have even gone beyond the typical girls' education and 
have training to become teachers. Eustacia has no clear idea of an 
occupation for herself in which she would be self-supporting but she 
rejects the limited ones open to her: teacher, companion and wife/­
 mother. Sue is not content with the extent of her education and desires 
a college education available only to men. She therefore befriends a 
university student and reads his books and gleans some of his education 
from him through conversation. She is the only one of these women 
characters who is self-supporting, though in a menial task, but she 
later becomes dependent on Jude. She is also turned away from a teach­
 ing position and helping Jude with masonry, because she is a social 
outcast. When she and Jude are in financial difficulties, she again 
must take on a menial task. 
16
 
Eustacia and Sue are also affected by the divorce laws, which are 
unfair to women. For Eustacia, who is trapped in a marriage to a hus­
 band who despises her, divorce is not an option. She must wait for 
Clym to reclaim or divorce her, since she is unable to bring proceedings 
against him. Sue is able to obtain a divorce from Phillotson only 
because of his kindness in releasing her. Phillotson obtains the di­
 vorce by claiming Sue's adultery. 
Hardy had a fascination with studying women characters and men/women 
relationships but his portrayal of women matured as he better understood 
to what extent social forces worked to keep them subordinate. Through­
 out his career, his nobles showed concern with two important issues 
affecting women and relationships: his rejection of the "traditional 
demands for purity in women" and his cynicism about marriage (Cunningham 
Even when his heroines possess "typical feminine" faults, which 
of them do, they have his full support when they are trapped in a 
and/or are victims of the sexual double standard. His 
stand on	 these subjects became stronger in his last three major novels: 
In The Wonderlanders a great deal is said in favour of divorce 
and against the discriminatory marriage laws; Tess of the 
D'Drbervilles is a powerful indictment of the double moral 
standard; and even Hardy himself, who often went to almost 
mendacious lengths in his attempts to dissociate his novels 
from contemporary problems, was forced to concede that Jude the 
Obscure at least 'involves' the marriage question. (Cunningham 
80) 
The more cogent stand on these subjects in his later novels coin­
 in his personal life and the growing interest in 
17 
England of the "New Woman." Hardy, who questioned the viability of 
marriage in many of his novels, refrained from giving his personal views 
on the subject, perhaps because of his own strained marital relation­
 ship. While he was writing Jude, his relationship with his wife Emma 
was becoming increasingly difficult, exacerbated when she made her 
grievances against him public (Millgate, Biography 391). In 1894, 
however, Hardy did make his views known. When asked by the New Review 
about his opinion on premarital sex education for young people, he 
suggested that perhaps the problem was broader: 
As your problems are given on the old lines, so I take them, 
without entering into the general question whether marriage, as 
we at present understand it, is such a desirable goal for all 
women as it is assumed to be; or whether civilization can 
escape the humiliating indictment that . . it has never 
succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory scheme 
for the conjunction of the sexes. (qtd. in Cunningham 85) 
And two years later in a letter to his close friend Florence Henniker, 
he was even more pessimistic: "Seriously, I don't see any possible 
scheme for the union of the sexes that would be satisfactory" (qtd. in 
Cunningham 86). Hardy was also influenced by the pervading interest in 
the "new" emancipated woman in the later 1800's. He had read many "New 
Woman" novels about women protagonists who seek emancipation from the 
marriage market, the double standard, and limited educational and pro­
 fessional choices. He even copied passages from George Egerton's (Lady 
Clairmonte) novel, Keynotes, into his notebook at the time he was writ­
 ing Jude. He was also in contact with authors of "New woman" fiction, 
among them George Gissing, George Meredith, Florence Henniker, and Grant 
18 
Allen. In the "freer atmosphere" of the 1890 IS, Hardy "brought his 
earlier interests into sharper, and perhaps more fashionable, focus" 
(Cunningham 94). 
't: 
19 
CHAPTER TWO
 
ELFRIDE SWANCOURT
 
A Pair of Blue Eyes is one of Hardy's first complete studies of the 
recurring theme of "how male visions of a woman corrupt, compromise, and 
finally destroy her" (Lucus 127). In this novel, the social forces that 
confine women to limited roles are active but the characters and the 
narrator do not give them as much overt consideration as in later nov­
 els, especially Jude the Obscure. Rather, A Pair of Blue Eyes is more a 
study of how the characters' flaws, which stern from their strict ad­
 herence to convention, bring about the downfall of the protagonist, 
Elfride Swancourt. 
Elfride is, in many ways, the forerunner of Hardy's later women 
protagonist. Her situation at the beginning of the story is similar to 
that of other women characters at the beginning of theirs. As Millgate 
points out, Elfride is one of the first young women characters whose 
"parents fail them through selfishness, insensitivity, or death." These 
women must confront their problems without "parental help or in the face 
of actual parental opposition" (71). Elfride's mother is dead. Parson 
Swancourt, Elfride's father, imposes his social climbing aspirations on 
her, which restricts her choice of suitors. This also necessitates her 
attention to propriety in terms of social behavior. She is strictly 
censured by her father when she does not behave appropriately. He sees 
her as a commodity to buy the Swancourts a higher position in society. 
20 
Elfride also has personality traits which later heroines possess. 
She has coquettish moods, she loves flattery, and she is evasive and 
vacillating. These "typically feminine" traits, though unflattering, 
can be read as survival techniques used by a woman in a society in which 
women's only goal is marriage. Her flirtatiousness attracts suitors and 
her vacillation from one man to another occurs because she sees the 
latter as a better protector. Her evasiveness stems from her fear that 
she will be rejected. 
Unlike most of Hardy's heroines, Elfride also possesses traits 
typical of the ideal "good" Victorian woman. She serves others, such as 
ministering to her father when he is ill and spending time with the 
neighboring children, the little Lady Luxillians, who call her their 
"little mama." She is docile, usually obeying her lovers' and father's 
wishes. She has a strict sense of propriety. She is accomplished in 
the "feminine" pursuits of a middle-class lady: directing the household 
servants, tending flowers and houseplants, and playing the piano. She 
is also subject to self-destructive romanticism which Lisa Gerrard, in 
her study, sees as the "actual position of many middle class women in 
the second half of the nineteenth century: the superficial education, 
the absence of meaningful work, and the narrowness of daily activities 
give rise . to the obsessive fantasizing and self-delusion. " 
(1). Elfride, being a middle-class woman and living in an isolated 
place, has few responsibilities and little to do so she has time to 
indulge in romantic fantasizing. She reads romances and even writes a 
medieval romance of her own. Even though it is not explicit in the 
beginning of the novel, it becomes evident that Elfride accepts marriage 
as her only goal so her role is to passively wait for a man, a knight, 
21 
so to speak, to come and marry her. She is unsophisticated in matters 
of love because she has not yet been in a love relationship before she 
meets Stephen Smith. 
Elfride finds her knight in Stephen Smith, the architect's assistant 
restoring her father's church. She is unintimidated by him because he 
is near her age, good looking (pretty almost), and lacks the cynical, 
sophisticated air she expected from a London man. She is also attracted 
to him because she thinks he is of an acceptable social rank, one at 
least equal to the Swancourt's. 
I..
 ,,'
 Just as Elfride projects her ideal of "knight" onto Stephen, he :';1 
::~,iiprojects his ideal of "lady" onto her. He sees her as a vision on the t1:J 
,~' 
"'l 
evening of their first meeting, embodying the ideal Victorian woman: I, 
.
 :"1
 ., 
,~beautiful, accomplished, and angelic (pure): 
l~, 
Miss Elfride's image chose the form in which she was beheld 
during these minutes of singing, for her permanent attitude of 
visitation to Stephen's eyes during his sleeping and waking 
hours in after days. The profile is seen of a young woman in a 
pale gray silk dress with trimmings of swan's-down, and opening 
up from a point in front, like a waistcoat without a shirt; the 
cool colour contrasting admirably with the warm bloom of her 
neck and face. The furthermost candle on the piano comes imme­
 diately in a line with her head, and half invisible itself, 
forms the accidentally frizzled hair into a nebulous haze of 
light, surrounding her crown like an aureola. Her hands are 
in their place on the keys, her lips parted, and trilling 
forth, in a tender diminuendo, the closing words of the sad 
apostrophe: 
22 
'0 Love, who bewailest
 
The frailty of all things here,
 
Why choose you the frailest
 
For your cradle, your home, and your bier!
 
Her head is forward a little, and her eyes directed keenly 
upward to the top of the page of music confronting her. Then 
comes a rapid look into Stephen's face, and still more rapid 
look back again to her business, her face having dropped its 
sadness, and acquired a certain expression of mischievous 
archness the while; which lingered there for some time, but was 
never developed into a positive smile of flirtation. (13) t'., 
I, 
t,i 
passive voice with which this passage begins and ends indicates that 
t;p 
~; " 
1Il]1 
~. :~, 
narrator, Stephen, and Elfride herself participate in making this ... 
..
 .. 
The narrator participates in that he postulates that to en- ,­
 ,~ 
the beloved [forming "a mental picture of especially in advance 
realization" (Webster's 9th ed. 417)], is inherent in the beginning 
In the previous paragraph he states that "Every woman who 
a permanent impression on a man is usually recalled to his mind's 
as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be 
special form of manifestation throughout the pages of his memory" 
Stephen participates in that he has an ideal woman in mind and 
this ideal on Elfride. Elfride encourages Stephen's vision by 
mild flirtatiousness. Stephen is also attracted to Elfride because 
is of a higher social rank than he. He later tells his mother, "To 
would be the great blessing of my life--socially and practi ­
 well as in other respects. No such good fortune as that, I'm 
she's too far above me. Her family doesn't want such country 
I in it" (69). 
Ill, 
23 
Stephen wants to possess Elfride because he views her as an exqui­
 object, far above him and difficult to reach. He does not need to
 
her as an individual because his vision of her is what he wants.
 
This attitude is evident in the scene in which Elfride asks Stephen what 
her for and he lists her physical attributes: "Perhaps, 'twas 
neck and hair ... etc." (47). She replies, "Ah, that's 
pretty to say; but I don't care for your love, if it made a mere flat 
picture of me in that way. . "(47). She presses him further and he 
says laconically," .. I ought not to think about you if I loved you 
Elfride does not know that he is referring to the dif- , 
.
 "
 •
 in their social rank since she is unaware of his lower rank.
 
knows that their engagement will bring trouble to Elfride be-

 her father will never agree to it, but he persists in wanting
 
Elfride shows her concern for class distinction when Stephen tells 
that his father is the local stonemason and his mother ran a dairy. 
She tells him, "I don't see how happiness could be where drudgery of 
" 
to be done for a living--the hands red and chapped, and 
the shoes clogged Stephen, I do own that it seems odd to regard 
you in the light of-of- having been so rough in your youth, and done 
menial things of that kind" (56). 
Stephen, too, is mildly disillusioned with Elfride when she admits 
that she has had an admirer, a local farmer. She tells Stephen that she 
would not have married Farmer Jethway because "he was not good enough, 
even if [she] had loved him" (59). Stephen understands that she means 
Jethway was socially beneath her. He says, "A large farmer not good 
enough--how much richer than my family!" (59). The narrator implies 
24 
that Stephen adheres to the Victorian double-standard to a mild degree 
because he is upset that she has had a previous admirer, and Elfride 
accepts this convention: "Women accept their destiny more readily than 
men. Elfride had now resigned herself to the overwhelming idea of her 
lover's antecedents; Stephen had not forgotten the trifling grievance 
that Elfride had known earlier admiration than his own" (60). 
Elfride clings to the relationship because of her need for a 
"knight" even though she knows that she is above Stephen in intelli­
 gence, sophistication, and social standing. She continues to declare 
her love for Stephen even in the face of her father's prohibition 
against the engagement after he learns of Stephen's social rank. She 
and Stephen agree to elope. 
;~,:,~ 
l,'Stephen's ineptitude in arranging the elopement, in addition to 
'~ 
~ 
other shortcomings that she has perceived, cause Elfride to decide not 
to go through with it. She is exceptionally nervous about the elopement 
because of her fear of her father. At one point of her lone journey to 
meet Stephen, she considers turning back, saying to herself, "Still, if 
I had a marna at horne I would go back!" (86), as she realizes that she 
does not have a close relationship with anyone but Stephen. When she 
meets Stephen, he informs her they will have to travel much farther to 
London because the marriage license he obtained is good only in that 
county. Elfride's nervousness increases because she had planned to 
travel horne the same day, keeping the marriage secret from her father. 
When they arrive in London, Elfride tells him, "0 Stephen, I am so 
miserable! I must go horne again--I must--I must! Forgive my wretched 
vacillation. I don't like it here--nor myself--nor you!" (89). John 
Lucus sees Elfride's "pull back from commitment" as instinctual because 
25 
she is "emotionally and intellectually more mature" than Stephen (131). 
She still agrees, however, to marry him later after he has made his 
fortune in India because she still craves her connection with him. 
This connection lasts until Elfride meets and falls in love with a 
man whom she believes is greater than Stephen, Henry Knight. Elfride 
is intrigued with Knight even before they actually meet. She had heard 
Stephen praise his intellect since Knight was Stephen's mentor. After 
Stephen leaves for India, Elfride's novel is published and, ironically, 
Knight reviews it anonymously. The review is a patronizing which per­
 turbs her. In it, Knight says that he would be pleased to find some­
 thing new in the romance but, "instead of this we found ourselves in 
the hands of some young lady, hardly arrived at years of discretion, to "t, 
j~,
 . 
judge by the silly device it has been thought worth while to adopt on ('I' 
~" 
.,~the title page, with the idea of disguising her sex" (116). He then 
";1 
says that the only talent of the young lady is "a style of narration 
peculiar to herself, which may be called a murmuring of delicate emo­
 tional trifles, the particular gift of those whom the social sympathies 
of a peaceful time are as daily food" (117). He also says she ought to 
stick to descriptions of "domestic experience" (117). He obviously is 
more interested in criticising the author than the book. 
When Knight visits the Swancourts, at Mrs. Swancourt's invitation, 
Elfride meets the man with whom she has been preoccupied. She is awed 
by what she sees as his superior intellect, but she soon becomes frus­
 trated with his criticisms of her and wishes to turn them into admira­
 tion. Knight displays his chauvinism in this particular criticism: 
"That a young woman has taken to writing is not by any means the best 
thing to hear about her." Elfride asks what is and he replies, "Well 
26 
. I suppose to hear that she is married." Elfride asks, what, after 
she is married, and he says, "Then to hear no more about her. It is as 
Smeaton said of his lighthouse: her greatest real praise, when the 
novelty of her inauguration has worn off, is that nothing happens to 
keep the talk of her alive." Elfride replies, "But of course it is 
different quite with men" (124-25). The chess game between them is also 
indicative of Elfride's desire to impress and Knight's condescending 
manner. She challenges him to a game, knowing that she is a good chess 
player "for a woman" (her father says) but she is vexed when she real­
 izes that Knight is letting her win, just as she did Stephen when they 
played. Elfride challenges Knight to game after game, trying to beat 
him and becomes so intent that she takes ill. Millgate sees the chess 
game as "at once an image and an actual battleground of sexual contest 
[that] operates as a cogent dramatic device" (68-9). After being mas­
 tered by Knight, Elfride tries even harder to please him. 
Elfride's desire to gain Knight's admiration becomes even stronger 
as she falls in love with him. This is evident in the scene in which 
she asks to see Knight's notebook and therein reads Knight's chauvinis­
 tic impression of young women's behavior based on his observation of 
her. Consequently, she is upset that he views her as childish and tries 
to parry: "But it is well known that the slower a nature is to 
develop, the richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women 
before they come of age are nobodies by the time that backward people 
have shown their full compass." He rejoins, " . you must not take it 
for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has not 
reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because she 
is slow to develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for 
27
 
developing" (140-41). He then comments on the "unquestionably beautiful 
heads of hair" of the ladies whose portraits hang in the room. Elfride 
seizes on this opportunity and asks, "Which color do you like best?" and 
he answers "dark," contrary to her own. She presses him further for a 
compliment, asking what color of eyes he prefers; he answers "hazel," 
contrary to hers (141). Her thirst for a compliment from him on her 
appearance contrasts with her dismay at Stephen's praise of the same. 
Elfride had taken Stephen's infatuation for granted and looked for his 
deeper reason for his love yet she looks for any compliment from Knight, 
however superficial, knowing that he will not praise her for her intel­
 lect, prudence, or other qualities. 
Knight has become, in Elfride's eyes, the better "knight," a strong­
 er, more capable protector. The narrator compares Knight's place in her 
affections to Stephen's: 
Love frequently dies of time alone--much more frequently of 
displacement. With Elfride Swancourt a powerful reason why the 
displacement should be successful was that the new-comer was a 
greater man than the first. By the side of the instructive and 
piquant snubbings she received from Knight, Stephen's general 
agreeableness seemed watery; by the side of Knight's spare 
love-making, Stephen's continual flow seemed lackadaisical. 
She had begun to sigh for somebody further on in manhood. 
Stephen was hardly enough of a man. (203) 
He is also of a higher social rank than Stephen, making him more attrac­
 tive to her and definitely more acceptable to her father and step­
 mother. 
28 
Even though Knight seems to Elfride to be the perfect "knight," she 
perceives the danger in choosing for her protector someone who has such 
conventional, strict views of women. In addition to his disregard of 
women's intellect and strength of character, she notices his insistence 
on sexual purity in women. This is foreshadowed in the novel by com­
 parisons of Knight to Hamlet. Knight's brow is described as being 
"sicklied o'er by the unmistakable pale cast," an allusion to Hamlet and 
his obsession with chastity. Comments of Knight's such as, "I have been 
rather absurd in my avoidance of women," and "I have never given a woman 
a kiss in my life, except yourself and my mother," (235) prompt Elfride 
to tell him that she has never been kissed. Her intense longing for 
Knight as the greater man and her fear of his censure of her relation­
 ship with Stephen force her to keep that relationship secret. 
Elfride's belief that her strength of character and virtuousness are 
inadequate to Knight's standards causes her to act insecurely. Instead 
of being confident in her intellect (proved by her literary accomplish­
 ment and arguments with Knight), courage and resourcefulness (her saving 
Knight when he fell off the cliff), and her sexual purity (she returned 
home a virgin from her failed elopement with Stephen), she becomes 
increasingly uneasy with herself as her relationship with Knight pro­
 gresses. These better qualities are replaced with her emotional and 
intellectual dependence on Knight. The narrator points out, "She never 
once held an idea in opposition to anyone of his, or insisted on any 
point with him, or showed any independence, or held her own on any 
subject" (239). She is content to be an object, an adjunct to him as 
shown in her pride when she receives earrings from him: she tells him, 
I 
29 
"I like ornaments, because I want people to admire what you possess, and 
envy you, and say, 'I wish I was he'" (224). 
Elfride's insecurity leaves her defenseless against Knight's probing 
questioning about her previous involvement with men. He asks her if she 
has had a lover and she tries "desperately to keep the color in her 
face" and is evasive, admitting that she has had an admirer but will not 
say to what extent she loved him. Her reluctance to tell incites Knight 
to more brutal questioning until she confesses she had been engaged. 
Her sense of shame convinces Knight she has done great wrong. She tells 
him, "I would gladly have told you; for I knew and know I had done 
wrong. But I dare not; I loved you too well. 0, so well! You have 
been everything in the world to me--and you are now. Will you not 
forgive me?" (271). When she admits that she had been away to London 
alone with her former lover, he is certain that they had had a sexual 
relationship. 
The strength of Knight's obsession with his ideal of sexual purity 
in Elfride is in proportion to his disgust with her when he thinks he ,1 ~. l,i 
has uncovered her unchaste affair. Rosmary Sumner also notices that 
Knight's browbeating of Elfride throughout the relationship is indica­
 tive of his unconscious hostility towards her which now reveals itself 
(124-5). He breaks their engagement immediately after his discovery. 
The narrator comments on his lack of justice and tolerance: 
It is a melancholy thought that men who at first will not allow 
the verdict of perfection they pronounce upon their sweethearts 
or wives to be disturbed by God's own testimony to the con­
 trary, will, once suspecting their purity, morally hang them 
30
 
upon evidence they would be ashamed to admit in judging a dog. 
(271) 
Knight's disgust is caused partly by his fear that Elfride, being, 
as he thinks, more sexually experienced, would show up his sexual inade­
 quacy. Even before he wrings the "confession" from her, he is upset by 
her admission of a previous admirer: 
A flush which had in it as much of wounded pride as of sorrow, 
passed over Knight as he thought of what he had so frequently 
said to her in his simplicity. 'I always meant to be the first 
corner in a woman's heart, fresh lips of none for me. 1 How 
childishly blind he must have seemed to this mere girl! How 
she must have laughed at him inwardly! He absolutely writhed 
as he thought of the confession she had wrung from him on the 
boat in the darkness of night. The one conception which had 
sustained his dignity when drawn out of his shell on that 
occasion--that of her charming ignorance of all such matters-­
 how absurd it was! (247) 
Based on this and other examples of Knight's insistence on sexual 
inexperience, George Wing conjectures that Knight fears sex. Wing says 
of Knight: "His pride and perverted joy lie in a form of ownership and 
he wishes to keep his anticipated property burnished and unused--even, 
the improbable implication is, by himself" (13). This is reinforced by 
the narrator who says, "Perhaps his lifelong constraint towards women, 
which he had attributed to accident, was not chance after all, but the 
natural result of instinctive acts so minute as to be undiscernible even 
by himself" (260). And Elfride also senses this sexual fear. She tells 
Knight, "Ordinary men are not so delicate" (260). 
31
 
Knight's determination to reject Elfride persists when she goes to 
London to his quarters at Bede's Inn to ask his forgiveness, resulting 
in complete loss of self-worth. She debases herself before him: 
I am afraid that if--you lose sight of me--something dark will 
happen, and we shall not meet again. Harry, if I am not good 
enough to be your wife, I wish I could be your servant and live 
with you, and not be sent away never to see you again. I don't 
mind what it is except that! (274) 
And Knight, ignoring her distress, is struck only by her indiscretion in 
corning to Bede's Inn. He thinks to himself: 
Then carne the devastating thought that Elfride's childlike, 
unreasoning, and indiscreet act in flying to him only proved 
that the proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that the 
unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant 
indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a 
woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a 
mood of the bitterist cynicism: The suspicious discreet woman 
who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures 
is far too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like 
Elfride are the women who fall.' (276) 
Knight's strict adherence to convention blinds him to Elfride's suffer­
 ing: he cannot reach out to her as a human being. 
In accepting her society's dictate that her only goal is marriage, 
Elfride neglects her self-development to become the adjunct of a man. 
With the combination of lack of close relationships and lack of a worth­
 while pursuit or even profession, she has little to give her a sense of 
self-worth. Even though she is intelligent and ambitious, her accep­
 " 
32
 
tance of the marriage goal is so much a part of her make-up that she 
crumbles when her "knight" rejects her. She has nothing to support 
her; her life is empty. She does not have the strength of character and 
practicality of a Mrs. Smith who had to run her own dairy. Mrs. Smith 
herself had realized that Elfride, being of a higher social class and 
aspiring higher through marriage, lacked support if this fragile world 
of the "marriage market" fell apart. She had commented to Stephen when 
she learned he wanted to marry Elfride that if Elfride had "learnt to 
make figures instead of letters when she was at school 'twould have been 
better for her pocket; for as I said, there never were worse times for 
such as she than now" (71). 
Because of her loss of self-worth and her father's censure for her 
rash behavior, Elfride returns to her father's house and takes ill. She 
wishes she were dead. Her father, as her maid reports, "was bitter to 
her and harsh upon her" (307). She accepts Lord Luxellian's marriage 
proposal because, as she told her maid, she would "do anything for the 
benefit of [her] family, so as to turn [her] useless life to some prac­
 tical account" (306). Soon after her marriage, she dies in childbirth. 
The meeting between Stephen and Knight at the end of the novel in 
which they accuse each other of ill-using Elfride, shows their jealousy 
and immaturity. They leave their meeting, each determined to rush to 
Elfride to propose marriage, unaware of her fate. They catch the same 
train and continue their ludicrous argument of who is the better man for 
her to marry. This posturing brings into relief Elfride's tragedy. 
Even after they learn she is dead, they are more incredulous at the fact 
that she married: "'False, I whispered Knight," and Stephen replies, 
"'and dead. Denied us both. I hate "false"--I hate it! ,,, (305). They 
33 
still cannot see what part they played in the tragedy, as is made evi­
 dent in this speech of Knight's: 
She is beyond our love, and let her be beyond our reproach. 
Since we don't know half the reasons that made her do as she 
did, Stephen, how can we say, even now, that she was not pure 
and true in heart? . Can we call her ambitious? No. 
Circumstance has, as usual, overpowered her purposes--fragile 
and delicate as she--liable to be overthrown in a moment by the 
coarse elements of accident. I know that's it,--don't you? 
(305) 
Knight can still bring her faults under examination but neither he nor 
Stephen can see their own faults. They blame the tragedy on "circum­
 stance." 
Elfride's internalization of her society's conventions which dictate 
that she be docile and chaste and that her only goal be marriage brings 
about her downfall. She is unable to defend her actions against 
Knight's charge of sexual impropriety because she herself believes that 
she has acted wrongly. Her belief that her life will only be worthwhile 
if she marries the "right" man causes her to crumble when Knight rejects 
her. She loses all self-esteem because she has no emotional support nor 
sense of self-worth outside of a love relationship. 
A further implication of this theme of society's dictate that wom­
 en's reason for being is wifedom is that they are always financially 
dependent and therefore under the control of a man. After she is re­
 jected by Knight, she must live with her father and step-mother who 
disapprove of her behavior. She then has the choice of continuing to 
live there or to marry Lord Luxellian, whom she does not love. She has 
34 
not been encouraged by society in general or her family to be indepen­
 dent. 
Elfride Swancourt, with her innocence, capriciousness, and deep 
desire to be loved, is a charming woman but her meek acceptance of 
Victorian social conventions and her loss of self make her pathetic. 
She does not have the strength to try to break out of the limited roles 
prescribed for women. She does not have the impact that later heroines 
have because she does not rebel against her situation as Eustacia Vye 
does nor question women's place in society as Sue Bridehead does. 
35
 
CHAPTER THREE
 
EUSTACIA VYE
 
The Return of the Native is a midpoint in Hardy's career as a novel­
 ist regarding his awareness of and concern for the limitations which 
Victorian society imposes on women. Eustacia Vye rebels against these 
limitations by not accepting the typical roles open to women in her 
society. Her rebellion, although passionate, is frustrated because her 
desired role is vague and unrealistic. Further frustrating her desire 
is her attempt to break out of these limited roles through the conven­
 tional means of depending on men. The men she depends upon, Clym 
Yeobright and Damon Wildeve, fail her, Clym because his conventional 
expectations of her conflict with her own aims and Wildeve because of 
his weak nature. 
In a novel in which Victorian conventions playa large role in 
destroying the female protagonist, it is interesting to note that the 
setting, Egdon Heath, is a wild place where the native inhabitants are 
not greatly affected by these conventions. Because of its isolation, 
the conventions of the rest of Victorian England have not taken root. 
Also, Christianity has never had a strong hold on the inhabitants. John 
Paterson, in his essay on The Return of the Native, notes that the 
peasant community of Egdon has an "anti-Christian character:" 
The bonfires they build in their first appearance have their 
antecedents in a barbaric Druidical and Anglo-Saxon past. As 
36
 
mummers they reenact the old folk-play, the St. George play, 
whose Christian veneer scarcely conceals the pre-Christian 
fertility rite. As participants in the ancient ritual of 
Maypole-day, they celebrate a vitality older and stronger than 
Christianity. 'In name they were parishioners,' Hardy notes 
with evident satisfaction, 'but virtually they belong to no 
parish at all.' (17) 
The natives of Egdon, unaffected by many typical Victorian mores founded 
in Christianity, have a sense of ethics and morals stripped of "civi­
 lized" veneer. They are wary of strangers and new ideas. Eustacia is 
feared by some because of her "foreignness" (she is not a native and is 
truly foreign in that she is the daughter of a Greek bandmaster and an 
English woman from Budmouth, a sophisticated seaside resort). Bournelha 
points out that Eustacia is also feared because she "poses a particular 
threat to the women of the community, being disruptive by virtue of her 
unfocused sexuality. She is not. . bound by legal, or even emotion­
 al, ties to anyone sexual partner." (53). "On Egdon, [where] coldest 
and meanest kisses were at famine prices " (96), a highly individu­
 alistic and passionate woman is disruptive to the usual mating and 
marrying patterns of the small heath community. Finally, Eustacia is 
seen as evil by some of the natives. Susan Nunsuch even goes so far as 
to make a wax effigy of Eustacia to ward against her "evil." 
The Yeobrights and Eustacia, by wealth and education the "aristo­
 crats" of the heath, seek to maintain their separateness from the peas­
 ant community but are nevertheless affected by conventions which have 
strength outside that community. These conventions are standards that 
Mrs. Yeobright, especially, lives by and which she imposes on her son 
37 
Clym and niece Thomasin. For example, Clym received a good education 
and, at his mother's encouragement, went to Paris to become a diamond 
merchant, thus conforming to the Victorian ideal of a successful gentle­
 man. Mrs. Yeobright also tries to guide Thomasin according to conven­
 tion. She forbids the banns against Thomasin's marriage to Wildeve, a 
failed engineer now running a public house, because of his lower place 
in society and his rumoured reputation with women. At Thomasin's per­
 sistence in wanting to marry Wildeve, Mrs. Yeobright agrees to the 
marriage but insists they be married in another parish to save the 
family embarrassment. When Thomasin returns home unmarried because of 
Wildeve's mistake in obtaining a marriage license for the wrong parish, 
Mrs. Yeobright urges Thomasin to marry him for the sake of appearances, 
which Thomasin eventually does with the help of her aunt's maneuvering 
of Wildeve. Boumelha also sees that "Tamsin's behaviour is at once 
~. governed and sustained by an awareness of the judgement of others" (52). 
... Thomasin remains subject to convention throughout the novel . 
Eustacia Vye, the Romantic rebel, rebels against convention. ':':111, 
·'.1 
Leonard Deen says that "She is a romantic (she is the whole history of 
romanticism) seen romantically" (122). Hardy compares her to Artemis, 
Athena, Hera, Heloise, and Cleopatra, imbuing her with their power, 
passion, pride, capriciousness and mythological greatness. Eustacia's 
beauty is described in romantic language: "Her presence brought memo­
 ries of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; 
her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in 'Athalie', her motions, 
the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola" (94). Her scorn at 
having to live on the heath is described as "smouldering rebelliousness" 
(94) . 
38
 
In addition to her rebelliousness at being trapped on the heath, 
Eustacia rebels against convention in varying degrees. She shows her 
nonconformity in small ways: she does housework on Sundays when every­
 one else rests, she sings psalms on Saturday nights and reads the bible 
on weekdays, "that she might be unoppressed with a sense of doing her 
duty" (97). More important, Eustacia does not conform to the conven­
 tions that most women living in England between 1840 and 1850 (when the 
story takes place) were expected to do. She rejects the traditional 
view of love; "fidelity in love for fidelity's sake had less attraction 
for her than for most women: fidelity because of love's grip had much" 
(96). Her attitude is evident in her relationship with Wildeve. She 
does not consider him a possible mate or protector, as Elfride Swancourt 
does her suitors, but rather she enjoys the passionate, vacillating 
nature of the relationship. She tells him, "Indeed, I think I like you 
to desert me a little once now and then . Don't you offer me tame 
love, or away you go!" (109). Her affair with him is also highly uncon­
 ventional because it is not the chaste relationship proper for an unmar­
 ried couple. In the 1895 version of the novel, Hardy makes clear their 
sexual relationship: Eustacia says to Wildeve, "I have had no word with 
you since you . deserted me entirely, as if I had never been yours 
body and soul so irretrievable!"* Moreover, early in the novel Eustacia 
makes clear that she will not accept the typical occupations available 
to Victorian women, even though doing so would make her financially 
*In the 1912 version, this fact was less obvious but nevertheless pres­
 ent. Because of editorial censorship aimed at not offending Victorian 
sensibilities, the "body and soul so irretrievable" part is left out. 
39 
independent, allowing her to leave the heath she hates. When Diggory 
Venn, who seeks to loosen her hold on Wildeve, offers her a job in 
Budmouth as a companion to an old sick woman, she replies, "It is to 
wear myself out to please her! and I won't go" (119). It also becomes 
evident that Eustacia does not see herself in the ideal role of Vic­
 torian woman as wife and mother. Later in the novel, she rejects the 
role of schoolmistress. Her dream is to move in polite society, perhaps 
the salons of Paris, where her beauty and wit would be admired. 
Even though Eustacia is presented as the Romantic, rebellious hero­
 ine, she is simultaneously presented in more realistic terms as a young, 
lonely, discontented woman with no way to fulfill herself. She is 
economically dependent on her grandfather but they have little in common 
and therefore do not have a close relationship. She is intelligent, 
educated, beautiful, and ambitious but with no purpose to turn these 
qualities to. Because she rejects the usual occupations of Victorian 
women, she has little to do. The narrator informs us that Eustacia 
fantasizes to fill this nether-world she lives in: 
And so we see our Eustacia--for at times she was not altogether 
unlovable--arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels 
that nothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of 
her existence by idealizing Wildeve for want of a better ob­
 ject. This was the sole reason of his ascendency: she knew it 
herself. At moments her pride rebelled against her passion for 
him, and she even had longed to be free. But there was only 
one circumstance which could dislodge him, and that was the 
advent of a greater man. (98) 
40 
Eustacia the romantic heroine is also the romantic girl with un­
 formed, naive, schoolgirlish dreams. Like Elfride, Eustacia indulges 
in romantic fantasies which are ultimately destructive. Eustacia sees 
herself as having "emotional power over other individuals [which] is the 
only kind of influence she can exercise Her attraction towards 
Wildeve is partly determined by the eroticism of the power which his 
relative passivity allows her to imagine that she holds over him" 
(Boumelha 56). In this passage she is absorbed with this illusion of 
power even though Wildeve responds to the fire because it is a prear­
 ranged signal: 
[I] thought I would get a little excitement by calling you up 
and triumphing over you as the Witch of Endor called up Samuel. 
I determined you should come; and you have come! I have shown 
my power. A mile and a half hither, and a mile and a half back 
again to your home--three miles in the dark for me. I have not 
shown my power? (91) 
Eustacia's goal of being a fine lady in sophisticated society is 
another example of her romantic fantasizing because the goal is vague 
and unrealistic. Eustacia, being a woman and financially dependent, 
does not have the freedom or means to realize her plan. Her romantic 
schema seems attainable to her, however, when she learns that Clym 
Yeobright, who has become successful in Paris, that glittering "centre 
and vortex of the fashionable world," as Eustacia thinks of it, is 
coming to Egdon to visit his mother. Eustacia immediately fantasizes 
that Clyrn and she are a good match because she overhears the opinion of 
some of the local men that she and Clym are "of one mind about niceties 
for certain, and learned in print, and always thinking about high doc­
41 
trine . They'd look very natty, arm-in-crook together . . if 
he's at all the well-favored fellow he used to be" (133). Soon after, 
Eustacia has a dream in which she is dancing with a knight in armour 
whose face is hidden by a visor. He starts to remove his visor to kiss 
her and "his figure fell into fragments like a pack of cards." She 
awakens and says, "Twas meant for Mr. Yeobright!" The narrator tells us 
that Eustacia "was by this time half in love with a vision" (143). 
Despite her dignified, smouldering rebelliousness, Eustacia, like 
Elfride, hopes that a man, a knight, will fulfill her life. 
Eustacia's assertiveness in procuring Clym as her "knight" who will 
take her away from the heath to a splendid life is revealed in her 
taking the part of the Turkish knight in the mummer's play of St. 
George. She does this so that she may go to the Yeobright's Christmas 
party to catch a glimpse of Clym. Once she is there, she realizes that 
her boy's costume obscures "the power of her face. , the charm of 
her emotions. , the fascinations of her coquetry. " (168) yet 
Clym notices that the Turkish knight is unique and ascertains that she 
is a woman. The narrator compares Eustacia to Aphrodite in a similar 
situation: "When the disguised Queen of Love appeared before AEneas a 
preternatural perfume accompanied her presence and betrayed her quality" 
(166). 
Despite strong signals to the contrary, Eustacia believes that Clym 
is the man who can fulfill her life and consequently she falls in love 
with him. In her illusion of him as her "knight," she does not realize 
how strong is his determination to stay on the heath and be a "school­
 master to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what nobody else will" 
(198). He proposes to her, believing that her dreams of Paris will 
42 
f', 
vanish and she will make a good schoolmistress and she accepts, believ­
 ing that she can convince Clym to return to Paris. 
This marriage of two idealists at cross-purposes is doomed from the 
beginning. It is complicated by the fact that soon after the marriage 
Clym goes partially blind, forcing him to abandon his plan for starting 
a school and to take up furze-cutting, the occupation of the heath 
peasants. Clym, a man who held much promise, is perversely content with 
his menial occupation and unconcerned that he is forcing his wife to 
live an isolated, mean life. Therefore, not long after her marriage, 
Eustacia realizes that her "knight" has fallen far short of her expecta­
 tions, like the knight in her dream who falls into fragments. Clym will 
not take her away from the heath. Millgate places the blame of the 
failing marriage on Clym: 
Clym forces his bride into a situation which blankly affronts 
not only her ambitions but her most fundamental sensitivities 
as a young and beautiful woman. His physical blindness becomes 
emblematic of his whole personality. By persisting in the work 
of a furze-cutter--financially dispensable, socially degrading 
in Eustacia's eyes, and physically exhaustive--Clym prepares 
the ground for those characteristically impulsive actions which 
drive the couple finally apart. (139) 
Eustacia is also sexually disappointed in the marriage (Boumelha 60) as 
is evident in her argument with Clym: 
And how madly we loved two months ago! You were never tired of 
contemplating me, nor I of contemplating you. Who would have 
thought that by this time my eyes would not seem so very bright 
43 
to yours, nor your lips so very sweet to mine? Two months--is 
it possible? (276) 
Because of her disappointment in her marriage, Eustacia is again 
'J attracted to Wildeve who is also unhappy in his marriage with Thomasin. 
They accidently meet at the gypsying and they dance ecstatically in the 
moonlight: "The enchantment of the dance surprised her. A clear line 
of difference divided like a tangible fence her experience without it. 
Her beginning to dance had been like a change of atmosphere; outside, 
she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by comparison with the tropical 
sensations here" (283). The contrast between how she feels with Clym 
and how she feels with Wildeve is painfully clear to her. 
Diggory Venn and Mrs. Yeobright set themselves up as moral police, 
intervening in Wildeve's and Eustacia's affairs. Venn, early in the 
novel, tries to convince Eustacia to let Wildeve go so that Wildeve will 
marry Thomasin. Venn spies on Eustacia and Wildeve throughout the novel 
and even tries to prevent Wildeve from visiting her by holding a gun on 
him. Mrs. Yeobright, using less violent means, accuses Eustacia of 
being a "hussy" and of accepting money (the misdirected inheritance 
meant for Clym) from Wildeve after her marriage to Clym. 
Eustacia begins to fear social censure once she is married and 
especially once her interest in Wildeve is renewed. She knows she is 
trapped in her marriage to Clym and to complicate matters she still 
feels loyal to him while being attracted to Wildeve. She feels the 
pressure of social censure, specifically Mrs. Yeobright's. When Wildeve 
visits Eustacia at her home for the one and only time in the fateful 
"Closed Door" scene, she is loyal to Clym but admits the marriage is 
disappointing: "Many women would go far for such a husband . I 
44 
married him because I loved him, but I won't say that I didn't love him 
partly because I thought I saw a promise of life in him" (303). When 
Mrs. Yeobright knocks on the door, Eustacia asks Wildeve to leave be­
 cause, as Eustacia tells him, "I have a bad name with her, and you must 
not be seen. Thus I am obliged to act by stealth, not because I do 
ill, but because others are pleased to say so." She then tells Wildeve 
that they must not meet again (304). 
When Clym discovers that Eustacia did not open the door to his 
mother who later died that day, he blames Eustacia for her death. "He 
does not stop to inquire into the real circumstances . (which are 
vastly less damaging to Eustacia than he supposes), but assails his wife 
with coarse abuse" (Grimsditch 123). He dashes her desk to the floor in 
search of love letters from Wildeve, and insinuates she is an adulter­
 ess. The letters he does find from Wildeve are innocent. 
Clym's obsessive love for his mother leads him to accuse and reject 
Eustacia. For the remainder of the novel he retreats from society, 
immersing himself in his Oedipal-like grief for Mrs. Yeobright. 
Millgate too, recognizes that Clym's grief is excessive: in the" 
extravagance of his remorse he treats her memory with almost religious 
devotion, her words with the sanctity of revealed truth" (138). 
Eustacia then is completely trapped on the heath and married to a 
husband who abhors her. She cannot divorce him because she does not 
have the money, and, as a Victorian woman, must prove his adultery plus 
cruelty, desertion, or other crimes. She then goes to her grandfather's 
house, her only hope being that Clym will reclaim her. 
Wildeve offers Eustacia an escape by proposing that they leave their 
marriages and go away together since he has recently inherited some 
45 
money. But Eustacia does not consider being his mistress to be a much 
better situation: 
'Can I go, can I go? she moaned. 'He's not great enough for me 
to give myself to--he does not suffice for my desire! . If 
he had been a Saul or a Bonaparte--ah! But to break my mar­
 riage vow for him--it is too poor a luxury! . And I have no 
money to go alone! And if I could, what comfort to me? I 
must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this year, and the 
year after that as before.' (371-72) 
Eustacia is completely trapped by convention: she cannot obtain a 
divorce nor does she, as a woman, have money or freedom to leave the 
heath to live on her own. She is also alone: her husband is estranged 
from her, her grandfather is unconcerned, and Wildeve, lacking the 
strength of character she desires, can offer her only a humiliating 
(socially and emotionally) future as his mistress. 
.' Given Eustacia's refusal of the limited occupations open to her 
combined with the ruin of her marriage, her only solution is death. 
Millgate recognizes that there is no future for her: 
This is the pathos and the irony of Eustacia's situation: that 
her aspirations are novelettish and impossibly grandiose does 
nothing to lessen the bitter sense of discrepancy between those 
aspirations and her actual opportunities. The Eustacia who 
finally gains the reader's sympathy is not a type of Promethean 
rebelliousness but a frightened, frustrated, and deeply disap­
 pointed woman, the sources of whose fear, frustration and 
disappointment are presented specifically and in intensely 
human terms: Clym's angry self-absorption; the denial of her 
46 
femininity and her social ambitions; her own appalled sense of 
being trapped in a hostile environment, with no alternative of 
action, no prospect of future amelioration. (134-35) 
The question of whether Eustacia's drowning in the weir is an accident 
or suicide is not answered in the novel but suicide is likely because of 
her contemplation of it earlier in the novel when she looks for a long 
time at her grandfather's pistols. 
Unlike Elfride's death, Eustacia's is tragic because Eustacia has 
never compromised and remains the romantic rebel to the end. Eustacia, 
directly before her death, stands on the Rainbarrow in a storm and rages 
against destiny: 
'How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how 
destiny has been against me! . I do not deserve my lot!' 
she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. '0, the cruelty of 
putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of 
much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by 
things beyond my control! 0, how hard it is of Heaven to 
devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at 
all!' (370) 
Even though " . Eustacia fails . . we are never asked to accept the 
achievement of [her] spiritual expansion through submission to another 
human being" (Kennard 71). Unlike other Victorian novels which end with 
the heroine supposedly maturing by succumbing to convention, The Return 
of the Native presents a woman with the strength and intelligence to 
rebel even though it kills her. Eustacia's face in death becomes even 
more beautiful and stately and " . the expression of her finely 
carved mouth was pleasant. The stateliness of look which had 
47 
been almost too marked for a dweller in a country domicile had at last 
found an artistically happy background" (393). In rebelling against "a 
society which denies the beautiful, the educated, the courageous and the 
individual woman like Eustacia the power to determine her positive 
potential . " (Mikelson 70), Eustacia sets herself apart from women 
who do not challenge convention or eventually succumb to it. 
Eustacia, unlike typically "good" Victorian women such as Elfride 
and Thomasin, does not accept the limited roles offered to women in her 
society. Even though she has no clear vision in which she sees herself 
as independent, she rebels against the fact that she is not allowed to 
direct her own life. Sue Bridehead, like Eustacia, does not accept the 
role of chaste unmarried woman and then wife and mother. Sue, however, 
analyzes social conventions and finds that they threaten her indepen­
 dence and development as an individual. She then attempts to live 
outside of them. 
48 
CHAPTER IV 
SUE BRIDEHEAD 
Sue Bridehead is the most advanced of Hardy's women characters. 
Victorian society poses many of the same problems for her as it does for 
Elfride and Eustacia but Sue reacts to these problems with a more finely 
tuned intellectual and emotional sensibility. Sue goes farther in 
seeking self-determination by trying to break out of the limited roles 
that her society gives women. She speaks for women in general because 
she has given much thought to women's relationship to their society, 
especially in marriage, and has voiced these opinions more than any 
previous woman character in Hardy. 
Sue's powerful intellect combined with her "frail, delicately balan­
 ... ced" nature (Hardwick 69) have caused some critics to label her "by"­
 turns an enigma, a pathetic creature; a nut, and an iceberg" (Millet 
133-4). The most famous criticism is D. H. Lawrence's account of Sue as 
"no woman" but a neurotic creature whose "male principle" dominates the 
"female principle" in her. 
That which was female in her she wanted to consume within the 
male force, to consume it in the fire of understanding, of 
giving utterance. Whereas an ordinary woman knows that she 
contains all understanding, that she is the unutterable which 
man must forever continue to try to utter. (509) 
In defining her desire, Sue is more "masculine" than the typical woman. 
49 
She tries to define herself as a human being, not just as a woman as her 
society defines "woman." 
In his response to Lawrence, John Goode explains Sue's attempt to 
define herself as disturbing to some critics: 
What is unforgivable about Sue is her utterance, her subjecting 
of experience to the trials of language. Lawrence, underneath 
the hysterical ideology, seems very acute to me, for he recog­
 nizes that Sue is destructive because she utters herself-­
 whereas in the ideology of sexism, the woman is an image to be 
uttered. That is to say, woman achieves her womanliness at the 
point at which she is silent and therefore can be inserted as 
'love' into the world of learning and labor; or rather, in 
Lawrence's own terms, as the 'Law' which silences all ques­
 tions. (101) 
Sue must "utter" or define herself because she refuses to be defined by 
a male dominated society which allows women only to be the unmarried 
virgin, then wife/mother, or, "fallen woman." She has no model or 
support for this attempt at self-definition, so her efforts are stum­
 bling, prompting critics to see Hardy's characterization of her as 
muddled. What Hardy has done, however, is to give us a complete and 
coherent picture of a woman trying to define herself, as Lawrence and 
Goode suggest. Kathleen Blake also sees Hardy's characterization of Sue 
as coherent: "I think that to place Sue in relation to Victorian 
thought on the woman question is to reveal the coherence of the 'woman 
of the feminist movement,' whose daring and precise logic of emancipa­
 tion also produces its rending tensions" (704). 
50 
The "rending tensions" which Sue faces spring from her desire to be 
an individual and not "woman," i.e., not one whose life is directed by a 
man who legally owns her. Her society, however, has no place for a 
woman as an independent, active organism, but only woman as image. 
Sue's struggle for independence is complicated by the fact that she 
desires a love-relationship with a man, including sex, but society 
dictates that such a relationship be sanctioned by marriage and the 
sexist laws that are included therein. Thus Sue's seemingly mad vacil­
 lation between encouraging and rejecting a relationship with Jude is 
explained by her dual desires for love and independence which her soci­
 ety cannot reconcile. 
Sue is the most perceptive and outspoken of Hardy's women characters 
on the position of women in Victorian society. She alone considers what 
she would be losing upon entering into a relationship with a man whereas 
Elfride and Eustacia consider what they gain. Elfride has only blind 
devotion for Knight, to the point of negating her individuality because 
her desire for his regard is so consuming. Her desire is only to be 
loved by what she sees as a superior (dominant) man. Elfride is not 
aware of the fragility and ultimate destructiveness of her dependence on 
the love of the "right" man to fulfill her life. Eustacia wants not 
only love from a man but she wants him to give her a life off the heath 
in a more glamourous and cultured society. Though Eustacia does not 
lose her identity to the extent that Elfride does, she still works with­
 in the confines of the "knight" image of men. Like Elfride and 
Eustacia, Sue wants love but not at the cost of her independence. She 
does not expect a man to complete her life, including providing economic 
security which is part of the "knight" expectation. (She says she wants 
51 
"an occupation in which I will be more independent" (83).) Sue's refu­
 sal of the traditional roles in men-women relationships, i.e., woman as 
dependent and submissive, man as provider, is part of the reason why 
Jude is attracted to her, especially after he had been trapped into 
marriage by the scheming Arabella. But Sue's avoidance of a sexual 
relationship is confusing and painful to him. He does not understand 
that Sue wants to be allowed to have a platonic relationship with a man 
without being pressured into a sexual relationship and she also wants 
the freedom to have a sexual relationship if she chooses without the 
loss of her independence. Penny Boumelha explains this double bind: 
A refusal of the sexual dimension of relationships can seem the 
only rational response to a dilemma; in revolt against the 
double bind by which female-male relationships are invariably 
interpreted as sexual and by which, simultaneously, sexuality 
is controlled and channeled into a single legalized relation­
 ship, Sue is forced into a confused and confusing situation in 
which she wishes at one and the same time to assert her right 
to a non-sexual love and her right to a non-marital sexual 
liaison. It is the conflict of the two contradictory pressures 
that makes her behavior so often seem like flirtation. (143) 
One of the reasons that Sue ventures into the world of men in uncon­
 ventional ways is to gain the intellectual stimulation and education 
otherwise denied her. Sue's method of doing this was to establish a 
relationship with a young man, a university undergraduate, when she was 
eighteen. When Jude asks her how she has come to have read "queer" 
52 
books*, "Lempriere, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brantome, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, 
Fielding, Shakespeare . (117), Sue tells him that she entered into 
"a friendly intimacy" with a young man. "I have no fear of men, as 
such, nor of their books," she tells Jude (117). This undergraduate 
asked Sue to live with him and she agreed but as she tells Jude, "when I 
joined him in London I found a different thing from what I meant. He 
wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him-­
 and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to my plan, he did 
so" (117). At the end of fifteen months, however, the undergraduate 
became ill, claiming that Sue's "coldness" was killing him. He later 
died. 
Jude cannot understand and is depressed by what he terms Sue's 
"curious unconsciousness of gender" [i.e. sexuality] (118) after she 
tells him of this relationship. John Goode refutes other critics who 
believe that Jude has cause to be agitated by what they see as Sue's 
terror of sex: "the only terror in this seems to me to be Jude's--the 
sense that there must be something unnatural in a woman who won't give 
way to a man she doesn't love" (105). Jude does not realize how attrac­
 tive the undergraduate's world of books, ideas, and company were to her, 
how she could readily enjoy the undergraduate's company without feeling 
sexually attracted to him. Sue tells Jude, "We used to go about on 
walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men 
almost" (117). In her relationship with the undergraduate, Sue claimed 
the right to have a platonic relationship with a man rather than the 
*"Writers notable, by Victorian standards, for their frankness or in­

 decency" (Norton critical ed. of Jude the Obscure 118).
 
53 
traditional one in which she would be treated more as a sexual than a 
thinking being. She realizes that men see her in a sexual light and 
that her "holding out" on them causes them pain. Jude's remarks to her 
about her relationship, "But some women would not have remained as they 
began," and Sue replies, "Better women would not. People say I must be 
cold-natured,--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it [people 
thinking that of her]!" (118). Despite her guilt at causing men pain 
and "people's" opinion of her as sexless, which she believes untrue, she 
remains true to her nature by not succumbing to a sexual relationship 
with someone she does not love. 
In the beginning, Sue's and Jude's relationship seems a repetition 
of Sue's and the undergraduate's but Sue's basis for her relationship 
with Jude is different. Her main reason for being attracted to the 
undergraduate was his instructive company, and Jude offers a similar 
attraction. But she can be and is much more assertive as a thinker with 
Jude than with the undergraduate. For example, they talk about Jude's 
ambition to go into the clergy and Sue influences Jude to question his 
religious conviction. She tells him of her respect for intellect and 
reason over religious dogma which clouds one's view of reality. She 
calls Christminister" a place full of fetichists and ghostseekers!" 
(120). She tells Jude that she has only contempt for the ecclesiastical 
synopsis at the head of each chapter in the Song of Songs: "I hate such 
humbug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions 
such ecstatic, natural human love as lies in that great and passionate 
song!" (121). She had made herself a new New Testament by rearranging 
the books in chronological order to, as she explains "make it twice as 
interesting as before, and twice as understandable" (121). 
54 
During this intimate conversation it is evident that they are fall­
 ing in love. They express admiration for each other in a highly-charged 
emotional atmosphere. Sue's moods range from tearful, to confident, to 
friendly when talking to him. She tells him " . you are good and 
dear" (120) and he says " I shall always care for you!" Sue re­
 plies, "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to 
your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" (122). Jude is also impressed 
with her knowledge and recognizes it as superior to his. He thinks to 
himself: 
If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed 
to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would 
make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects 
only drew them closer together on matters of daily human ex­
 perience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had 
ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or 
absence, would ever divide them. (122) 
Jude is the rare man who would make a good companion for Sue because 
the more he gets to know her, the more he values her individuality. 
They also have many things in common which make them close: they are 
cousins, they are both orphans, raised by the same aunt, though at 
different times, they both try to overcome external obstacles to acquir­
 ing an education, and neither has close friends or family. 
Sue and Jude have a genuine affinity for each other but a profound 
tension exists between them because Jude presses for a sexual relation­
 ship and Sue must repress her sexuality in order to retain her indepen­
 dence. Sue needs Jude emotionally, causing her to be friendly and even 
speak of love but at the same time she must be somewhat distant towards 
55 
him so as not to encourage physical contact. As many critics have 
noted, Sue is the most forthcoming towards Jude when they are physically 
separated: she is more loving and direct in her letters to him than she 
is in person and they have some of their tenderest conversations when 
they are separated by a window sill. 
Because Jude and Sue have such an affinity for each other, Sue is 
deeply hurt when she learns that Jude has been married all along. She 
calls him cruel and she withdraws her hand when he tries to take it and 
"regards him in estranged silence" (132). She is jealous that Jude has 
loved another woman as is evident when she says, "I suppose she--your 
wife--is--a very pretty woman even if she's wicked?" (132). She is 
described as a "heart-hurt woman" who "attempts to keep herself free 
from emotion" (133) but she cries and despite her words, it is obvious 
she loves Jude: "I am--not crying--because I meant to--love you, but 
because of your want of--confidence!" (133). She tells Jude, "Ah--you 
should have told me before you gave me the idea that you wanted to be 
allowed to love me!" (133). In direct reaction to this news, Sue agrees 
to marry Phillotson. 
In Jude's reaction to Sue's letter informing him of her impending 
marriage, both Jude and Hardy show awareness of Sue's (and other wom­
 en's) disadvantaged position in society in being looked upon as a piece 
of goods. Sue is considered a "used piece" of goods because she and 
Jude have been seen together and this news reaches the authorities at 
Sue's training school. Jude cries: 
o Susanna Florence Mary! . You don't know what marriage 
means! 
56 
Could it be possible that his announcement of his own 
marriage and pricked her on to this . ? To be sure, there 
seemed to exist these other and sufficient reasons, practical 
and social, for her decision; but Sue was not a very practical 
or calculating person; and he was compelled to think that a 
pique at having his secret spring upon her had moved her to 
give way to Phillotson's probable representations, that the 
best course to prove how unfounded were the suspicions of the 
school authorities would be to marry him off-hand, as in ful­
 fillment of an ordinary engagement. Sue had, in fact, been 
placed in an awkward corner. (135 ) 
Jude realizes that his attentions to Sue have caused her to be seen by 
society as a "loose" woman and that now Sue's conventional choices of 
what to do with herself are limited. 
Sue goes through with the marriage only to find out her original 
instincts about marriage are her true feelings. Her contempt for the 
institution itself is clear in this note she writes to Jude right before 
her marriage: 
I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, 
an it seems to be very humiliating that a giver-away should be 
required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, 
my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I 
don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or 
she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Bless your exalted 
views of woman, 0 churchman! (135 ) 
Sue's views on marriage are reaffirmed by her personal experience as a 
wife or as Mary Jacobus puts it, " . she no longer expresses a femi­
57 
nism that is only intellectually related to herself" (309). One aspect 
of marriage that Sue cannot reconcile herself to, as she says in a 
speech to Jude, is the loss of identity women suffer within the institu­
 tion: 
I have been thinking . that the social moulds civilization 
fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than 
the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real 
star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a 
calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am 
not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, 
all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipath­
 ies (162) 
Her objections to marriage become more personal as she realizes a few 
weeks into the marriage that she cannot bring herself to have physical 
contact with Phillotson. She likes him "as a friend" but says "it is a 
torture to me to--live with as a husband!" (168). As with her under­
 graduate friend, Sue refuses to enter into a sexual relationship, de­
 spite pressure to do so, because she does not feel love or attraction 
towards him. Elizabeth Hardwick notes that, for Sue, "hypocrisy, espe­
 cially in matters of feeling, is to her a sacrilege" (72). And Kathleen 
Blake sees Sue's stand on sexuality and marriage as being "in the inter­
 est of personal emancipation" (707). Hardwick says: 
Hardy explicitly says in a letter to Gosse what he felt he must 
leave circumspectly implied in his novel, that part of Sue's 
reluctance to marry is her reluctance to relinquish the right 
to 'withhold herself at pleasure, or altogether. I This is 
behind Sue's aversion to being 'licensed to be loved on the 
58 
premises' . the link between women's rights and the right 
over one's own body expressed in withholding it casts Sue in a 
distinctly feminist light. (715 ) 
Even though Sue's sexual repugnance of Phillotson is not recognized by 
"the world in general . " (168), Phillotson himself recognizes it and 
grants her the divorce she wants. She is convinced of her "torture" 
after she jumps out of the window when he enters her bedroom one night. 
The "world in general," however, views Phillotson's decision to let Sue 
have her way as crazed. Phillotson's friend Gillingham acts as the 
Greek chorus, espousing society's view on Phillotson's indulging his 
wife's "whims." Gillingham says to Phillotson, "But if people did as 
you want to do, there'd be a general domestic disintegration. The 
family would no longer be the social unit" (183). And he soon after 
says, "I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses-­
 that's what I think!" (184). Phillotson loses his teaching position 
because of his decision. Arabella, in her conversation with Phillotson 
later in the novel, points out that he would have been perfectly within 
his legal right to restrain Sue and implies that indeed, this is a 
common practice: 
She'd have corne round in time. We all do! Custom does 
it! . I should have kept her chained on--her spirit for 
kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing 
like a bondage and a stone-deaf task-master for taming us 
women. Beside, you got the law on your side. Moses knew 
'Then shall the man be guiltless; but woman shall bear her 
iniquity.' Damn rough on us women; but we must grin and put up 
wi' it! (252) 
59 
Arabella accepts but does not like the fact that her society is set up 
by and for men. 
Sue, however, cannot accept this situation. She quotes Mill to 
Phillotson, "She, or he, 'who lets the world, or his own portion of it, 
choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than 
the ape-like one of imitation'" (177). Though Phillotson does not fully 
understand her philosophy, he does recognize Sue's suffering and the 
"extraordinary sympathy, or similarity" between Sue and Jude (182). 
Phillotson compassionately agrees to the divorce and is able to obtain 
one because he, as a man, need only claim his wife's infidelity. She 
had led him to believe that her relationship with Jude is more than 
platonic. Ironically, Phillotson uses the laws that favor men to give 
Sue what she wishes. 
Sue's position of retaining her independence by avoiding a sexual 
relationship becomes even more precarious when she goes to live with 
Jude. Jude presses her for a physical relationship as had her under­
 graduate friend and Phillotson, but she was not tempted to enter into a 
sexual relationship with them as she is with Jude. Sue loves Jude, and 
is physically attracted to him, contrary to how she felt about the other 
two men. Some critics, Desmond Hawkins among them, believe that Sue is 
sexually perverse in her abstaining from a sexual relationship but she 
does respond to Jude physically. She responds to Jude hesitantly early 
in their life together because of fear of losing her independence. When 
she first goes to Jude after leaving Phillotson, she tells him, "My 
liking for you is not as some women's perhaps. But it is a delight in 
being with you, of a supremely delicate kind ... "; she admits an 
60 
attraction to him: "You did kiss me just now, you know; and I didn't 
dislike you to, I own it, Jude" (190-191). 
When Arabella returns on the scene and Jude decides to see her, Sue 
sees her as a sexual threat and realizes "that the price she pays for 
with-holding herself is insecurity--that the complement of personal 
freedom must be self-reliance" (Jacobus 314). She is not prepared to 
give up her relationship with Jude as shown in her desperate entreaties 
to him not to go: "0' it is only to entrap you, I know it is!" (208) 
and then, "I have nobody but you, Jude, and you are deserting me! I 
can't bear it; I can't!" (210). Sue then sees her only way to keep Jude 
is to do as he wishes: "She ran across and flung her arms around his 
neck. 'I am not a cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you 
at such a distance? I am sure you don't think so! Wait and see! I do 
belong to you, don't I? I give in! I (210). 
Arabella clearly recognizes that a woman's security lies in her 
"giving herself" to a man and legalizing the relationship. This is her 
way of survival. She "trapped" Jude into marriage by claiming to be 
pregnant. Elizabeth Hardwick explains that Arabella's upbringing has 
encouraged her to believe that men must be trapped by sex into becoming 
providers: "Arabella's driven poverty, the crude urgings of an unen­
 lightened family, the scheming habit of the other poor girls in the 
village have severely limited her vision" (69). Not surprisingly, the 
sensitive, intellectual Sue who has been striving for independence is 
apalled at the vulgarity of Arabella's practical philosophy of marriage. 
Arabella advises Sue to "make it legal" when she understands that Sue 
and Jude are now lovers: 
61 
Life with a man is more business-like after it, and money 
matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and 
he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, 
which you can't otherwise, unless he half runs you through with 
a knife, or cracks your noodle with a poker. And if he bolts 
away from you--I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for 
there's never any knowing what a man med do--you'll have the 
sticks 0' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief. 
(213 ) 
This makes clear what Sue has been fighting against: her security 
traded for legally giving up her independence, and she cannot bring 
herself to go through with the marriage to Jude which he sorely wants. 
She does respond to Jude physically, nevertheless, after the consum­
 mation of their "natural" marriage, showing that she is not a cold, 
sexless creature. She returns "his kisses in a way she had never done 
before" (211). Their happiness is evident in the scene where they 
admire the roses at the Agricultural Exhibition. Sue says, "But I 
suppose it is against the rules to touch them--isn't it, Jude?" He 
replies, "Yes, you baby," and playfully gave her a little push, so that 
her nose went among the petals" (235), symbolizing Sue's sexual initia­
 tion. Mary Jacobus describes how this scene is evidence of Sue's sexual 
awakening: 
The rose which compliments the lily in Sue had been brought 
into flower by Jude; it is he who gives her the playful push 
into contact with her own sensuous nature, making her fully and 
joyously responsive here. The 'cultural literary convention 
(Lily and Rose)' has been realistically blurred. (316-17) 
62 
Sue is not labeled as either the lily-virgin or the rose-whore but an 
individual, a woman in love. This is a more humane, realistic descrip­
 tion than Elfride Swancourt is given by the narrator and her lovers. 
Different too, is that Sue, unlike Elfride and Eustacia, is allowed to 
have a fulfilling love relationship. The narrator says that Sue and 
Jude "seemed to live on in a dreamy paradise" for a few years (215). 
Their paradise is ultimately shattered by what Penny Boumelha calls 
the " . involuntary physiological processes of conception, pregnancy 
and childbirth, and these in turn enforce upon her [Sue] a financial and 
emotional dependence on Jude which is destructive for both of them" 
(147). Sue's security has turned to dependency. In Jude, Hardy no 
longer blames the woman's suffering and infliction of suffering on 
others on the woman's fickleness or selfish aspirations but on her 
"physiological processes" combined with the gin of social mores. Hardy 
believes that women are at a greater disadvantage because they are 
forced to be dependent and therefore subordinate to men because they are 
the childbearers. This view is put forth earlier in Jude where the 
narrator describes the young women at the Melchester Training School 
that Sue had attended: 
they all lay in their cubicles, their tender feminine 
faces upturned to the flaring gas jets which at intervals 
stretched down the long dormitories, every face bearing the 
legend "The Weaker" upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein 
they were moulded, which by no possible exertion of their 
willing hearts and abilities could be made strong while the 
inexorable laws of nature remain what they are. They formed a 
pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of whose pathos and beauty 
63 
they were themselves unconscious, and would not discover till, 
amid the storms and strains of after-years, with their injus­
 tice, loneliness, childbearing and bereavement, their minds 
would revert to this experience as to something which had been 
allowed to slip past them insufficiently regarded. (111-12) 
The women in the training school, a "species of nunnery," are protected 
for the time being from the "sexual disaster" (Blake 707) which will end 
their time of relative independence and education. Sue, unlike the 
other girls, consciously tried to avoid this fate, and later, when she 
is in a sexual relationship, refuses to marry. Sue's sexual repression, 
however, has weakened with Jude and she now is a victim of the social 
trap. 
Sue and Jude must live the economic life of the family with their 
two children and Little Father Time, the child of Jude and Arabella whom 
Arabella left with the couple when she returned with her second husband. 
The family lives an impoverished, nomadic existence because the people 
in each successive town eventually find out that Sue and Jude are not 
legally married. Little Father Time is taunted by his schoolmates and 
Jude is turned from work. These social pressures, " ... reduce Sue's 
opposition to marriage to formalism by pretending to marry Jude and 
adopting his name, . and that gradually convinces her that 'the 
world and its ways have a certain worth' and so begins her collapse into 
'enslavement to forms'" (Boumelha 148). 
These social forces press harder on the family until tragedy occurs, 
breaking the relationship of Jude and Sue. When they go to 
Christminister, they cannot find lodgings because they have so many 
children and Sue is pregnant. Little Father Time realizes the children 
64 
are the reason for their difficulties. He gets angry at Sue for having 
"a-sent for another" child: "How ever could you, mother be so wicked 
and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was better off, 
and father well!--To bring us all into more trouble!" (264). Sue feels 
guilty about her pregnancy, especially at Father Time's accusation. She 
tells him, "It does seem--as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in 
these difficulties! I can't explain, dear! But it--is not quite on 
purpose--I can't help it!" (264). Little Father Time then hangs the two 
children and himself as soon as they are alone, leaving the note, "Done 
because we are too menny" (266). Kathleen Blake sees Father Time's 
action as an extension of Sue's guilt: 
I think the catastrophe he brings about is not coincidental, 
because he acts out what Sue already feels, that she should not 
have had children. Having them is something she tells little 
Jude she must be 'forgiven' for . Sue explains that a 'law 
of nature' brought them to birth. , and in killing them 
and himself he repudiates this law of nature. (724) 
Sue's enslavement to the social forms she has fought against all 
along becomes complete after this catastrophe because it is the final 
point in the string of incidents which have made her feel guilty and 
anxious about her and Jude's unconventional lifestyles. She tells Jude 
that she believes she belongs to Phillotson because they were legally 
married. She also turns to Christianity. Many critics see Sue's reac­
 tion as inconsistent but it is clear, as evidenced by the text, that 
after the beginning of her sexual relationship with Jude she has fol­
 lowed a pattern of joy followed by penance (Burns 16). She felt anxious 
because she had compromised her independence and then the added respon­
65 
sibility of raising children in the impoverished and unstable life-style 
they led increased her guilt. She sees the death of her children as 
~ retribution exacted by a vengeful God for her "unlawful" joy. She tells 
"N~ Jude, "I have thought that we have been selfish, careless, even impious 
~ in our courses, you and I. Our life has been a vain attempt at self­
 ,.Lot
 •..,,; delight. But self abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the 
flesh--the terrible flesh--the curse of Adam!" (273). She realizes that 
she, as a woman, cannot escape the natural laws (pregnancy) and social 
pressures (ostracism because she is not married). Penny Boumelha says 
that these cause Sue's return to, what is for her, retrograde philoso­
 phies: "Sue's 'breakdown' is not the sign of some gender-determined 
constitutional weakness of mind or will, but a result of the fact that 
certain social forces press harder on women in sexual and marital rela­
 tionships, largely by virtue of implication of their sexuality in child­
 bearing (153). Sue's penance is complete when she returns to 
Phillotson, "giving herself" to him legally and physically. 
When Sue embraces these conventions, Jude asks her, "What I can't 
understand in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. 
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its 
integer?" (278). This question is posed to Sue throughout the novel. 
John Goode explains the implications of this question: 
What is important is that this question should be asked; it 
poses for Sue only one of two possibilities--that the nature of 
her blindness to her own logic must be explained either by her 
'peculiarity,' or by her belonging to womanhood. Either way 
she is committed to being an image, and it is this that per­
66 
vades the novel. Nobody ever confronts Jude with the choice 
between being a man or being peculiar. (102) 
Jude does not realize what a strain Sue has been under in living the 
unconventional life they have chosen. The killing of her own children 
by Jude's son, whom she has included in the family, and the subsequent 
publicity of their unconventional life, make Sue realize that they 
cannot continue. This strain compels Sue to believe she must repent. 
Goode points out that these are obvious reasons for Sue to embrace 
retrograde philosophies but that the emphasis in the novel is on Jude's 
predicament: "But of course we don't consider it [Sue's reaction] 
naturalistically, because we don't ever ask what is happening to Sue; 
because it is rather a question of Sue happening to Jude" (104). 
Although Hardy's stated theme of "flesh versus spirit" refers to 
Jude's distraction from his pursuit of education and the clergy, it also 
applies to Sue. Her aim of being an independent individual is deflected 
by her relationship with Jude. His desire to possess her draws her into 
a sexual relationship, then motherhood and dependency. 
To a certain extent Jude, like society, cannot accept Sue as an 
individual; she must be wife and then mother. He is attracted to her 
even before he meets her because she represents the "spiritual" as 
opposed to the "carnal" Arabella. Thus Jude first sees Sue as such an 
image; a saintly, beautiful, passive woman who would be sympathetic to 
his aims. He sees a picture of her at his Aunt's house; "a pretty 
girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating folds under the brim like 
the rays of a halo" (63). Soon after, in Christminster, he first ob­
 serves her in person at her job as she illuminates a Church text and 
thinks, "A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!" (71). He pursues 
67 
her as part of his spiritual ideals: ecclesiastical training, educa­
 tion, and a partner who could " ... supply both social and spiritual 
possibilities" (74). Soon after he meets Sue, he is impressed by her 
learning and forward-thinking opinions but he wants to possess her 
legally and physically, making her wife and mother. In this desire to 
possess Sue, he is also a victim of his society's attitude toward women. 
Finally, Jude and Sue do not so much struggle against each other as 
against society's mores. Jude the Obscure is a tragedy in which Jude 
and Sue try to live together on their own terms but society will not let 
them. They perceive their love for each other as all that is needed to 
form their relationship. Once their bond is also physical, society 
further disapproves. Randall Williams agrees that Jude and Sue are 
victims of convention: 
Hardy does not dogmatise about the right or wrong of passion; 
he simply represents its potency in human life. The importance 
given to passion in his philosophy necessitates his considera­
 tion of the sex question . the grim aspect of the problem, 
however, is portrayed in Jude the Obscure. The two unhappy 
marriages of Jude and Arabella and of Phillotson and Sue afford 
ample scope for a detailed treatment of the sex question to a 
philosopher who has seen the short-comings of our social laws. 
These two disastrous marriages, together with the subse­
 quent free union of Jude and Sue with its tragic results, 
provide the sociologist with material revealing the havoc which 
social conventions on the one hand, and the violation of them 
on the other hand, may and indeed do, create. The reactionary 
force of social legislation, more especially of our marriage 
68 
law, is one of the principal causes of this 'tragedy of unful­
 filled aims.' (141-42) 
Sue's tragedy is that society forces her into roles in which she is not 
an individual. Once her brief, happy "free union" with Jude is shat­
 tered, she sees no choice but to obey convention and lose herself. 
69 
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