![]() ![]() These themes lie below the waterline, but they are perhaps the more menacing for being submerged. With brilliant economy, Hardy opens up three themes: the struggle of the poor and disadvantaged to make their way in a bourgeois world the tyranny of marriage in the lives of women oppressed by a patriarchal society and the stranglehold on English life inflicted by an established church, defensively circling its wagons in the aftermath of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. ![]() But Jude Fawley, who talks to the crows he is supposed to be scaring away, is a modern English boy, with his eye on Christminster (Oxford). ![]() When the novel opens, we seem to be in Hardy's Wessex, the world of Far From the Madding Crowd or Tess of the d'Urbervilles. And it was a new beginning because henceforth he would become one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century. It was another kind of turning-point, too, because Thomas Hardy, shaken by the hostility aroused by the novel dubbed "Jude the Obscene", would never write fiction again. In hindsight, it signals the transition to a modern literary sensibility while also painting a picture of a profoundly Victorian rural society. T he publication of Jude the Obscure is both an end and a beginning. ![]()
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