C h a r a c t e r7 1unprovocatively. Neither is she a schemer, as the phrase ‘full of
petty stratagems’ would suggest. It is not at all clear that she
‘speeded on’ the death of her first lover. He claims that she broke
his heart, but the charge is pretty preposterous. Not many people
die of this particular ailment, not least when they are gravely ill in
any case, as Sue’s first lover seems to have been. Nor does she treat
Jude with ‘astounding callousness’. It is not her fault that Phillotson
is hounded out of his job. The passage is a tissue of untruths. If Sue
were alive today, she could sue for defamation of character. She
could, however, screw a lot more damages out of D.H. Lawrence,
who brands her in his Study of Thomas Hardy as ‘almost male’, ‘an
‘old- woman type of witch’ who adheres to the ‘male principle’ and
is ‘scarcely a woman at all’. Rather oddly, Lawrence also accuses her
of being ‘physically impotent’. So Sue is really a man, but a man
who is not a real man. It is hard to get more sexually confused
than that.
It is true (to do my younger self a spot of justice) that I proposed
this version of Sue as only one possible reading. It is also true that
she can be jealous, capricious and exasperatingly inconsistent.
These, however, are hardly hanging offences. Much of Sue’s behav-
iour makes sense once one sees that it is driven by a deep fear of
sexuality. This is not because she is a Victorian prude, but for
exactly the opposite reason. She is an enlightened young woman
with boldly progressive views about marriage and sexuality. She is
also something of a sceptic when it comes to religious belief. The
irony is that she is wary of sexuality precisely because of her eman-
cipated views. She regards marriage and sexuality as snares which
rob women of their independence, and the novel itself fully
supports her in this opinion. ‘ “Is it,” [ Jude] said, “that the women
are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the