H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e7 4not doomed but before its time, as he himself comes to acknowl-
edge. Not long after his death, a college for working people was
established in Oxford, and still exists today. In any case, the novel
suggests with cold- eyed realism that for its hero to try to break into
the benighted set- up known as Oxford University was not worth
the effort. Repairing the walls of the very colleges which shut him
out, which is one of Jude’s jobs, is more useful in Hardy’s eyes than
most of the learning that goes on within them.
One reason why it is easy for critics to see Sue as frigid and
neurotic is that we view her largely through the eyes of others. We
are not allowed much access to her from the inside. For much of
the narrative, she exists as a function of Jude’s experience, not as a
character in her own right. If she seems so tantalisingly opaque, it
is partly because she is filtered through the needs, desires and delu-
sions of the protagonist. As one critic puts it, she is made the
instrument of Jude’s tragedy rather than the subject of her own. It
is not surprising that after Jude’s death she is no longer seen at all.
To this extent, the novel itself is complicit in the sidelining of its
heroine. But it is also extraordinarily perceptive in its presentation
of her.
* * *Jude the Obscure invites us to sympathise with Sue Bridehead, but it
also wants us to see how she escapes any simple understanding. If
nobody in the novel itself can truly own her, the same is true of its
readers. We are asked to feel for Sue, but not in a way that irons out
her inconsistencies. Some of the book’s other characters, including
from time to time Jude himself, mistake her elusiveness for the
eternal enigma of Woman. On the whole, however, the novel itself
refuses this patronising viewpoint. Sue’s ‘mystery’ springs largely