“Are god and nature at strife?” (alfred lord tennyson, in memoriam). write an essay that examines victorian perceptions of nature in thomas hardy's novel jude the obscure and at least one other victorian poem studied in
1529 mots
7 pages
Jude the Obscure is a novel written by Thomas Hardy and published in 1895 during the Victorian period. It is a bildungs roman which tells the story of Jude, a boy from the countryside who wants to dedicate his life to knowledge and to become one of the well educated men of Christminster but who fails. It also talks about his marriage with Arabella and most of all, his love for Sue Bridehead (his cousin). In this essay, I will focus on the perceptions of Nature in the novel and in the sections 54 to 56 of the poem untitled In Memoriam by Lord Tennyson who was a Victorian writer too.
Victorian authors often have a pessimistic vision of nature, unlike the romantic authors. It is the beginning of Darwinism, the theory of evolution and the selection of species. Nature is not seen as something beautiful and full of mystery anymore. It is not admired anymore, it is feared. It is seen as a god who does not have any pity for the livings. Life is not a marvelous thing but it has become a struggle in the minds of Victorian people.
This aspect of struggle is quite obvious in the novel because all of the characters are from the working class, they tend to be poor and their life is very hard. Jude for example has great expectations but each time he thinks that he is going to reach his goal, he realizes that he has to give up and work hard as a craftsman because he needs money in order to survive in the city. Moreover, starting from a certain point in the novel he lives with Sue who is pregnant and with his three children. An episode of the book shows how life is hard during the Victorian period, when Little Time (the son of Arabella and Jude) kills the two other children (a boy and a girl) and kills himself after that. Sue finds them all hung in the bedroom, with a note from Little Time: ‘done because we are too meny’ (p.325). This shows quite clearly how life was hard at the time because the boy, seeing how him and the other children make Jude’s life difficult, decided