Jude the Obscure (1895): High Farce

Abstract

Jude the Obscure is in many ways a self-consciously complete inversion of Victorian novelistic practice. Nineteenth-century English fiction seems often to adapt the Bildungsroman into an ameliorative parable, dealing often with a young, male bourgeois protagonist thrust by circumstance into an alien working-class or petty bourgeois world. There he becomes déclassé (it seems) and by strength of character finds his way through a quasi-Gothic ‘château’ of previously unmapped class and cultural experience to a lost inheritance of authority and money. He achieves this by learning ‘real’ human values from his working-class and petty bourgeois companions, seeing at the same time the callous values of his ‘own’ class of origin when he experiences its behaviour from a working-class point of view. A gentleman is made a gentleman once more by what he learns from ‘nature’’s gentlemen (and ladies), and so the bourgeois code seems to be revised. Nicholas Nickleby is perhaps the purest example of this. Hegemony is maintained by the organization of working-class experience into bourgeois narrative and language and a bourgeois aesthetic through a means of production and reproduction with this tendency at its heart, and is always mediated by the ‘character’ and qualities predicated on the hero.