Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

"...You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude.  And a tragic Don Quixote.  And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened.  Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!" -- Sue Bridehead

When Jude Fawley is a little boy, his schoolmaster advises him, "Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."  It seems like a particularly banal and childish piece of counsel, but it turns out to be the most humane moral code Jude will ever encounter in a universe where kindness seems to have no moral value whatsoever.

Jude's dream is to elevate himself, despite his poverty, to the ranks of the learned, and as a boy he studies his Latin and Greek assiduously.  As is commonly the case, his ambitions are derailed by sex.  He falls for a girl named Arabella Donn, who, not wishing to let Jude go, seduces him and tricks him into marriage with a made-up pregnancy.  Hardy describes their marriage this way:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, fell, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks.  What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

Jude's foil in this is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, whom he meets long after his marriage has crumbled and Arabella has run off to Australia.  He falls for Sue, who falls for him, but not before she has married the same old schoolmaster, Phillotson, to assure her position as a teacher.  Phillotson, true to his advice to the young Jude, releases Sue from her bonds, but this remarkable act of kindness fails to change the material reality of Jude and Sue's existence, which is defined by the marriage bonds which they have made but cannot shake.

As Sue tells Jude, "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!'  First it said, 'You shan't learn!'  Then it said, 'You shan't labour!'  Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"  The external thing which says You shan't is the moral code which values the bond of marriage over human kindness.  For most of the book neither Jude's nor Sue's spouses assert any claim to them, but the pair are roundly denigrated for their scandalous relationship, chased out of work and home.

 Jude the Obscure caused quite a controversy in its day, one which may seem quaint compared to modern attitudes of marriage, but I think Hardy's contemporaries were right to see that the book savages much more than marriage itself: It criticizes the value of the Christian moral framework, which Hardy sees as elevating doctrine over simple kindness and love.  Not too subtly, he emphasizes this by having Jude and Sue chased off a job restoring a monument of the Ten Commandments.

But the highest tragedy of Jude is that Jude, though he ultimately abandons his religion, cannot escape his own moral snare.  At one point he stands before a gathered crowd and offers himself as "a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story":

"However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten.  It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called--were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should really be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies."

See how entangled, in Jude's mind, are poverty and rectitude: a good man knows his place, in wedlock and in penury.  Jude has forgotten his schoolmaster's advice, but we have not, and are forced to ask ourselves, which is the better path--to "be kind to animals and birds," or to "be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig?"

It is easy to see why Hardy found the response to Jude so personally draining, and never wrote another novel.  Giving his readers the choice between human decency and old-time religion, many of them said we'll take the old-time religion, thank you.  Doubtless Hardy must have felt much like Jude.  And yet, I would argue that Jude might have been more nuanced.  A happy marriage is simply a concept that does not exist in this novel; though we laugh at the innkeeper who is suspicious of Jude and Arabella's relationship until he recognizes her "flinging a shoe at his head" to be "the note of genuine wedlock," it isn't clear to me that Hardy's opinion is very different.

Jude presents us with a handful of really gut-wrenching set-pieces where Hardy provides enough pathos to make nuance unnecessary.  In between them, I admit I found parts of it tedious and artificial.  Hardy's natural long-windedness is effective when accompanying real agonies, but does little for Sue's long campaign of mind-changing and sexual frigidity.  Did Far from the Madding Crowd suffer from the same flaws, which show as well in The Mayor of Casterbridge?  Probably so, but I'll take it over those two anyway.

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

"Before and with God we live without God." -Protestant theologian Bonhoeffer

Warning: This is kind of sloppy and disjointed. It is 3 a.m. I'll fix it later.

While The Mermaid Chair is a novel about a restless woman in her forties struggling with restlessness due to her creativity and love for her husband having atrophied, Jessie's feelings of loss of self really resonated with me and made it hard for me to put the novel down. I wanted to watch her climb out her dormant state towards some kind of awakening. I wanted her to take me along for the ride.

Jessie ends up escaping her home in Atlanta and her husband Hugh when she is called to Egret Island to watch after her mother, who has just cut her finger off with a meat cleaver and won't tell anyone why. Since Jessie's father's death years upon years prior, her mother Nelle has always been a bit off--slaving endlessly away in the kitchen at the Benedictine monastery beside her home to avoid facing her own realities. The monastery is home to the Mermaid Chair, a relic that seems to cause Nelle endless suffering regardless of her fixation with the story that accompanies it. The myth around the chair is that a wild mermaid named Asenora who had tried to draw the monks away from their monastery was converted and decided to lead a Godly life inside the monastery. She shed her fish tail and the monks kept it hidden away under the Mermaid chair, but when she was tired of living the life of a saint she would steal her tail away to go back into the ocean until ready to face her other life again. Nelle's personal saint is Saint Senora, and when Jessie finds her on the island , Nelle is burying her severed finger under a statue of the saint.

While Jessie tries to coax her mother back towards sanity in the months that follow her own life starts to spin out of control. Next door at the monastery, a former lawyer turned monk dubbed Brother Thomas for his doubt struggles with the reasons he came to the monastery four years ago after his wife died and is questioning whether or not he should take his final vows and choose to remain there indefinitely. He knows he doesn't belong with the other monks but isn't sure he can "be spit back into that other life. Phil, Oprah, Sally. Madonna's fishnet hose. Revenge of the Nerds movies. Out there where normal people, even bank tellers, used the words 'totally aswesome' to describe the most banal things." Since Jessie and Brother Thomas are both waiting for something to bring about cataclysmic change that will carry them towards life changing revelations, it only follows that they meet one another. Jessie finds a kind of sexual awakening and artistic rebirth while her psychiatrist husband analyzes their failing marriage back in Atlanta and Brother Thomas experiences spiritual anguish. As Thomas puts it, what happens both saves and damns them all.

Just as Nelle seems to be getting better, she cuts off another finger with a meat cleaver. Eventually, we find out that this is an act of "white martyrdom"--in other words following the footsteps of a saint. In this case, Nelle was copying the actions of a fictional St. Eudora who had taken the verse about severing the hand that sins instead of letting your whole body be cast into Hell a little too far. The story escalates and gets a lot messier before anything is resolved, but assuming that you might be interested I won't ruin the ending for you.

The reason that I enjoyed the book so much was maybe not so much the actual plot as it was the questions that were brought up, most of them coming from the floundering Brother Thomas who had committed himself not to God but the search for God, "the one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere." Another interesting character in the book was the quirky and slightly dissident Brother Dominic, who often referred to himself as a heretic despite his calling. The novel is littered with nods to various theologians both Protestant and Catholic and myths and stories of saints. I kept my notebook beside me while I read so I could scribble down different things to look up after I was finished reading. The abbey definitely created a kind of setting for both the characters and myself that led to a lot of thinking about those Big Questions beyond the ones that plagued Jessie about infidelity and marriage. While all of the characters were deeply flawed their earnest search for answers and the ways that they stumbled upon their own truths were what made them forgivable. Its strange how fiction often offers a more inviting way to work through your own spiritual frustrations than reading any kind of apologetic writing can. It's easier to feel like another average person bogged down with doubts in the the face of a fictional character than it is to feel like an inept heretic in the face of people who have already gone through hell and made it out with clarity to show for it that you can't yet begin to conceive. Or maybe that's just me. I've also always been kind of fascinated how certain Druid myths have been woven into different Catholic and Christian traditions, which is something Kidd also touches on, but I guess that's territory that I should stay away from.

Also, the novel really made me want to drop everything and plan a trip to one of the South Carolina islands that Egret Island was based off of, with its depictions of the rookery and the marsh and the remnants of the Gullah culture. Kidd really has a knack for drawing you into the world her characters inhabit and despite the tragedies that happened on her island, she still managed to make it a magical place.

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

I had to read Anna Karenina for a class on Russian History. Despite the fact that it was assigned to me, and that it is just shy of 900 pages, I really enjoyed the book. I was told by my professor that I should check out some of Tolstoy’s short stories. This was 2003, and I am just now getting around to taking his advice.

The Kreutzer Sonata, named after a piece by Beethoven, begins with the narrator – we never get his name – remembering a train ride that he took not that long ago. A little ways into the trip he became involved in a conversation about men and women, marriage, and love. A number of people were contributing to the lively discussion until an old man, who had kept to himself up to this point, injected himself into the conversation. He asserted that love, as those party to this conversation were defining it, simply did not exist. This brought a rise out of many of the people there. Someone responded that the fact that marriages existed proved that there was such a thing as love. To which the man responded, “[People] enter into marriage without seeing in it anything except copulation, and it usually ends in either infidelity or violence. Infidelity is easier to put up with.” “Yes, there’s no doubt that married life has its critical episodes,” someone responded. The man brought silence with his reply, “Pozdnyshev’s the name. I’m the fellow who had one of those critical episodes you were talking about. So critical was it, in fact, that I ended up murdering my wife.” The narrator of our story later seeks out Pozdnyshev and begins talking with him. The old man opens up and tells his story, which essentially occupies the rest of the novella.

As he did in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy does a good job of creating characters to which the reader can relate. The situations that he puts them in are situations that could essentially happen this day.

The picture that he paints of married life is extremely bleak. The Kreutzer Sonata is really an indictment of marriage, with Tolstoy arguing that most marriages are simply a sham. I found it interesting that Tolstoy drew on his own experiences with marriage when writing this book, much to the shock and dismay of his wife. The Kreutzer Sonata was a quick read and was very interesting.