In February 1894 a collection of Hardy’s short stories was published by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. under the title Life’s Little Ironies. The Hardys again rented accommodation in London, taking their servants with them and spending the spring in their customary way, viz. attending dinners, plays and the theatre.
At this time Hardy was still engaged in his never-ending quest to understand women; Emma in particular. This much is clear from certain annotations which he made in the margins of a book of short stories entitled Keynotes, by George Egerton, given to him by Florence Henniker. Beside a passage in the book which describes ‘the eternal wilderness, the untamed, primitive, savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman’, Hardy remarked: ‘This if fairly stated is decidedly the UGLY side of a woman’s nature.’ And where Keynotes refers to man’s ‘chivalrous, conservative devotion to the female idea he has created, [which] blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problem of her complex nature’, Hardy asks if the conclusion is that ‘REAL woman is abhorrent to man? hence the failure of matrimony?’ If so, this is a desperately negative view of the female sex on Hardy’s part, but it should be remembered that he was a man of limited experience where women were concerned, and his conclusions were based almost entirely on his relationship with Emma.1 Meanwhile, an idea was developing in his mind for a novel in which the problem of male/female relationships would be explored in full.
Hardy had ‘jotted down’ the plot for what was to become Jude the Obscure in 1890.2 Two years later, he visited the village of Great Fawley in Berkshire, from where his maternal grandmother, Mary Head, who had experienced a miserable life as an orphan, had originated. The hero of the story, Jude Fawley, would derive his name from this village. The novel was to be serialised, commencing in November 1894 in Harper’s Magazine, but only after certain changes were made at the insistence of the publisher. Hardy then restored the work to its original version – an exhausting process – before its publication in book form a year later, in November 1895, again by Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co.
In Jude the Obscure, the plot develops in Hardy’s characteristic style, taking innumerable twists and turns as he throws not one, but a sackful of proverbial spanners into the works (or paths) of his ‘characters’.
Following the death of his parents, Jude Fawley is brought up in the village of Marygreen by his great-aunt, Miss Drusilla Fawley. Drusilla urges Jude to persuade his schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson (who had advised Jude to ‘read all you can’), ‘to take ’ee [Jude] to Christminster [Oxford] wi’ un [him], and make a scholar of ’ee’. With this suggestion Jude is entirely in accord; Christminster, in his eyes, being a romanticised world where scholars work in the rarefied atmosphere of high academia. Here, Hardy the author is fully in tune with his hero: a sound education is something they both value. Before Jude has the opportunity to fulfil his dream, however, he is tricked into marrying Arabella Donn, the daughter of a pig breeder.
Jude had been taught by his schoolmaster to ‘be kind to animals and birds’, and when his and Arabella’s pig has to be slaughtered, he is broken-hearted. After the pig’s death he mourns the creature: a scene in which Hardy manages to convey, simultaneously, a sense of both pathos and humour – even though it is obvious that the author’s sympathies are entirely with Jude and the pig. This, Hardy makes clear when he admits to having deliberately introduced this episode into the novel, in order for it to ‘serve a humane end in showing people the cruelty that goes on unheeded under the barbarous régime we call civilization’.3
Arabella deserts Jude and goes to live in Australia. Jude now moves from Marygreen to Christminster, where he obtains employment as a stonemason, continuing with his studies in his spare time. Here, he meets his cousin, Sue Bridehead.
Jude longs to use his talents and to have them recognised, whereas Sue prefers to be unconventional – a free spirit. Sceptical of religion, Sue sees the saints as the stuff of legend rather than reality, and sees Christminster as a place where intellect is pushing one way and religion the other, ‘like two rams butting each other. The medievalism of Christminster must be sloughed off,’she declares, ‘or Christminster itself will have to go.’ This statement reflects Hardy’s own inner struggle to reconcile what his intellect is telling him on the one hand, with Christian dogma on the other.
Jude’s ambition at Christminster is to study at the university, but he finds himself thwarted by the university authorities. He is a stonemason, therefore he cannot be a scholar; not officially at any rate. In this, Hardy was not writing from personal experience (he appears not to have made any serious attempt to enter university, despite the encouragement of Horace Moule), but was making the general point that university was a ‘closed shop’ for all but the privileged few.
Jude introduces Sue to Phillotson, whom she subsequently marries. However, the marriage ends acrimoniously, and Phillotson, seeing how unhappy she is, and out of ‘natural, straightforward humanity’, agrees to give her freedom and a divorce. She returns to Jude. For his act of compassion, Phillotson is dismissed from his post as schoolmaster.
Jude receives a letter from Arabella to say that she has remarried. She also tells him that, unbeknown to him, she has borne his child; a son, ‘little Jude’ – or ‘Juey’ – to whom she wishes Jude to give a home, a proposal to which both he and Sue agree. Jude finds himself falling in love with Sue, but there are problems here also, for she has a natural aversion to marriage. At one point, the couple get as far as the registrar’s office, before Sue says to Jude: ‘Let us go home, without killing our dream.’
There comes an event which brings Jude and Sue’s failure to marry into sharp relief. He is employed by the church to inscribe a stone tablet with words from the Ten Commandments, which include: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’When he is recognised as one who is committing this very sin himself, he is told that his services are no longer required. Subsequently, for the very reason that he and Sue are unmarried and therefore ‘living in sin’, the couple, along with their children, now three in number including Juey, are turned out of the lodgings which they occupy in Christminster.
When Commemoration Day (which Hardy calls ‘Remembrance Day’) dawns, and the university remembers its former founders and benefactors, Jude sees it more as ‘humiliation day’, for despite all his knowledge, gained from long years of study, he is still regarded as an outsider.
The ultimate tragedy occurs when Juey, Jude’s son by Arabella, hangs Jude’s two children by Sue and then hangs himself; which Sue regards as a judgement from God. She returns to Phillotson, remarries him, and finally submits to his desires because ‘it is my duty’.Meanwhile, Jude is tricked into marrying Arabella for a second time, shortly after which he becomes seriously ill and dies.
Jude the Obscure contains an important clue as to the real reason why Hardy chose not to become a clergyman. The reason he gave at the time was that it would have involved him in a prolonged period of study, but surely, for a scholar such as he, this would have presented no problem. In this novel, however, when Jude Fawley kisses Sue Bridehead, he experiences all the pleasure of that moment of intimacy. He realises how ‘glaringly inconsistent’ it would be for him to pursue ‘the idea of becoming … a servant of religion’, when that religion (in this case Christianity) regards sexual love ‘at its best as a frailty, and at its worst a damnation’.
In the book’s preface, Hardy describes Jude the Obscure as a ‘tragedy of unfulfilled aims’. Intended for men and women of ‘full [adult] age’, it was an attempt, he said, to confront the issue of:
the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity [physical attraction and sexual desire]; to tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit.4
Hardy begins the novel with a quotation from the book of Esdras in the Apocrypha:
Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women.
Those who read Jude the Obscure at the time it was published may be forgiven if they failed to realise that in reality, the problematical male/female interpersonal relationships discussed therein relate to Hardy himself and Emma. However (as will be seen), when the full story of the Hardys’ marriage finally emerges, it becomes clear that this was absolutely the case.
It would be a mistake for the reader to assume that in the novel it is the hero, Jude Fawley, who invariably voices the true thoughts of Hardy, for sometimes his thoughts are expressed by Sue Bridehead, or even by one of the more minor characters. It is therefore interesting to ‘unscramble’ the story in an effort to discover the meaning, of the plot within the plot. Firstly, however, it is important to note that the novel begins with a caveat, namely Jude’s great-aunt Drusilla’s dire warning to him about the consequences of matrimony. Said she:
Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any more. The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound.
Drusilla subsequently apprises Jude of the various tragedies that have befallen his forebears, including his own parents. And after Drusilla’s death, Jude tells Sue that his great-aunt had once told him that the Fawleys ‘particularly … members of our family … made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we made unhappy ones.’ Drusilla’s friend, Mrs Edlin, reinforces this idea when she tells cousins Jude and Sue about certain mishaps which their common ancestors had experienced. ‘They was always good-hearted people … wouldn’t kill a fly if they knowed it, but things happened to thwart ’em.’ This leads Sue to say, despairingly: ‘It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus [a tragic family from Greek mythology].’
Of Love
When Jude first sets eyes on Sue:
the emotion which had been accumulating in his breast as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized locality he dwelt in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this half-visionary form; and he perceived that for whatever his obedient wish in a contrary direction, he would soon be unable to resist the desire to make himself known to her.
Subsequently, instead of regarding Sue as a cousin, he comes to admit that his interest in her is ‘unmistakably of a sexual kind’. Yet, as far as love is concerned, he feels that his relationship with her is one-sided, for, referring to himself, he declares: ‘I, who love you better than my own self, – better – O far better than you have loved me!’ If only she would say that she loved him ‘a quarter, a tenth, as much as I do you’ then he would ‘be content’.
‘Sue, you are not worth a man’s love!’ he tells her, in exasperation. ‘Sue, sometimes when I am vexed with you, I think you’re incapable of real love.’
Sue, nevertheless, sees matters entirely differently. In respect of Phillotson, she explains to Jude that ‘sometimes a woman’s love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn’t love him at all’. To which the horrified Jude replies: ‘You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it?’
‘Well – if you put it brutally – it was a little like that,’ says Sue. Her love for Jude began similarly, she said, ‘in a selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you’. But she does admit that eventually she did come to love him truly.
Marriage
Presenting matters from the male standpoint, Jude tells Sue: ‘People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces [presumably, sexual attraction], although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.’
And he expresses his impatience to marry Sue by telling her: ‘I’ve wanted you to be [my wife], and I’ve waited with the patience of Job, and I don’t see that I’ve got anything by my self-denial.’
This can only be interpreted in one way – that their relationship is, at Sue’s insistence, a platonic one. Sue, for her part, feels that she rushed into her marriage to Phillotson without proper consideration. Says she: ‘Before I married him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me – there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed on.’
And when she left Phillotson for Jude, she was extremely nervous at the prospect of remarriage, having a ‘dread’, as she told him, ‘lest an iron contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for you, as it did between our parents’. She goes on to say:
If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing …– which it seems to be – why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it hurts and grieves him or her? [For once one is] contracted to cherish … [the other] under a Government stamp … Ugh, how horrible and sordid.
Instead of being bound by a ‘dreadful’ marriage contract, the whole essence of a relationship, in her view, should be one of ‘voluntariness’. For this reason, having got as far as the registry office with Jude, she declares: ‘An irrevocable oath is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream!’
Sexual Incompatibility
Jude describes Sue as ‘such a phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who – if you’ll allow me to say it – has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can’t’.
As for Sue, when she was married to Phillotson, who was about twenty years her senior, she declared that:
Though I like Mr Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like him – it is a torture to me to – live with him as a husband! I suppose you’d call it – a repugnance on my part. What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally! I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for feeling as I do! But he does nothing.
Phillotson discovers Sue sleeping in a ‘clothes-closet’ under the staircase, instead of sharing the marital bed with him. When he attempts to enter the closet by wrenching open the door, ‘she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and trembling’ and implored him to ‘go away’. Sue requests that she be allowed to leave Phillotson and go to Jude, even though she does not love him. But, ‘if you won’t let me go to him, will you grant me this one request – allow me to live in your house in a separate way?’
Phillotson agrees for the two of them to sleep in separate bedrooms. However, when one evening he enters her bedroom inadvertently, she demonstrates her physical aversion to him once again when she ‘sprang out of her lair and implored him [once again] to go away’. On a third occasion, when Phillotson accidentally enters the room that his wife is occupying, Sue’s reaction is to leap out of the window, even though her bedroom is on the first floor. Said Phillotson:
She jumped out of the window, so strong was her dread of me! Though as a fellow-creature she sympathizes with me, and pities me, and even weeps for me, as a husband she cannot endure me – she loathes me – there’s no use mincing words.
Finally, he speaks of Sue’s ‘unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband. Even though she may like me as a friend, ’tis too much to bear [any] longer.’ He therefore agrees that she may return to Jude.
Sue admits to Jude that she has been ‘so cold’ to Phillotson, but, despite everything, she tells the schoolmaster that she will continue ‘with so much pleasure’ to copy manuscripts for him at any time, should he require it.
The reason that Sue gives for her coldness to Phillotson is a curious one. For her to live on ‘intimate terms’ with him, she declares, would be regarded by herself as ‘adultery, in any circumstances, however legal’. She had said as much on her wedding night when, having been handed a pretty nightgown to wear, she cried, as she tore it to pieces. ‘It is adulterous! It signifies what I don’t feel … It must be destroyed!’ He had told her that her action had hurt him, and reminded her that she (in the marriage ceremony) had ‘vowed to love me’.
Sue becomes introspective, and asks Jude:
Are there many couples, do you think, where one dislikes the other for no definite fault? Wouldn’t the woman be very bad-natured if she didn’t like to live with her husband; merely because she had a personal feeling against it – a physical objection – a fastidiousness, or whatever it may be called – although she might respect and be grateful to him? I am merely putting a case. Ought she to try to overcome her pruderies?
When Jude again professes his love for Sue, she admits that she has kept him at ‘a distance’. Nonetheless, she does not like to be thought of as a ‘coldnatured, sexless creature’.
‘The marriage laws’, said Hardy in a postscript to Jude the Obscure, written sixteen years after its publication in April 1912, were ‘used in great part as the tragic machinery of the tale’; his own opinion being that ‘a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties – being then essentially and morally no marriage’.5
In the preface to Jude the Obscure, Hardy explains the reasons why he has written the novel. It was, he said, ‘simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings [apparent, but perhaps not real, occurrences], or personal impressions’.6 In other words, he is writing about his personal experiences in an effort to make sense of them. This begs the question, just how much does Jude the Obscure reflect the author’s own life?
When Jude’s great-aunt Drusilla warned that the Fawley family ‘was not made for wedlock’, it may be assumed that it was Emma’s family which Hardy had in mind. After all, his own parents had, by all accounts, a harmonious relationship with each other, and as for his siblings, none of them were married. On the other hand, as Hardy was doubtless aware, several of Emma’s relatives had mental health problems (an account of which will be given shortly). Thus, when ‘Sue Bridehead’ acknowledges the fact that ‘a tragic doom’ overhangs her family, this was equally applicable to the family of Emma; at least as far as certain members of it were concerned. Hardy may also have had in mind Emma’s family’s ‘truly horrible home’, her father John Attersoll Gifford’s ‘drunken ravings’, and the fact that he once ‘chased [Emma’s] mother into the street in her nightgown’.7
Only with hindsight, and with a full knowledge and recognition of just how traumatised Hardy was by his marriage to Emma, is it possible to be confident about the following working hypotheses in respect of Jude the Obscure.
When Jude first sets eyes on Sue he clearly falls head over heels in love with her, and experiences an ‘unmistakeably … sexual’ attraction to her. However, he feels that he in return has received only a fraction of the love from Sue that he gave to her. Hardy felt exactly the same way about Emma. Just as Sue had behaved in a ‘selfish and cruel’ way by encouraging Phillotson to make advances to her, simply because she had fallen in love with a ‘love of being loved’, so Emma had behaved in a similar way towards Hardy. When Jude became frustrated at having waited ‘with the patience of Job’ for Sue to become his wife, Hardy was deliberately mirroring the fact that the reason why his courtship to Emma lasted for four and a half long years, was that she had feared the marriage contract, just as Sue did.
The following possibilities must also be considered: that Emma felt the same way as Hardy’s fictitious character Sue Bridehead, who confessed that the idea of falling in love held a greater attraction for her than the experience of love itself; that Emma, like Sue, derived a perverse pleasure from seeing her admirers break their hearts over her; that Emma felt the same physical revulsion for Hardy that Sue had felt for Phillotson; and that just as Jude regarded Sue as ‘phantasmal’, ‘bodiless’ and ‘cold’, so Hardy saw Emma in the same light.
What of Sue Bridehead’s belief that to make love to Phillotson, her husband, would, for the reason that she did not love him, be to commit adultery? Did Emma feel the same way towards Hardy, and if so, was this irrational belief of hers a manifestation of a delusion on her part? (Emma’s manuscript What I Think of My Husband may have shed more light on the matter, had Hardy not chosen to destroy it.) And finally, as with Phillotson and Sue, did Hardy regard his marriage to Emma as ‘a cruelty’ and ‘morally no marriage’ at all?
Did Hardy simply pluck the notions expressed by Sue and Jude in Jude the Obscure out of thin air, or were they based on his own bitter experiences? And was the writing of the novel in reality an attempt on his part to try to understand the differences between himself and Emma, in the desperate hope that these difference might be resolved?
Those who remain sceptical, and regard the similarity between the lives of Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead and those of Hardy and Emma as being purely coincidental, should ask themselves this: why, having been obliged to endure criticism over other works of his, in particular Tess of the D’Urbervilles, did Hardy risk provoking the critics further by choosing the subject of sex in a relationship, as a primary theme, in a novel which he intended to place before both them and the notoriously prudish Victorian public? And why did he risk finally and irrevocably antagonising Emma, whom he must have guessed would read the novel, and in so doing realise exactly why he wrote it? (Unlike Hardy’s other novels, this was one which she had not previously had access to.)
Sue enquires, in a moment of reflection: ‘Is it wrong, Jude, for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in their marriage?’8 Hardy came very close to doing just that, when, on 20 November 1895 (the very day of the novel’s publication), he wrote to ‘a close friend’ to tell him more about the characters of Jude and Sue; in reality it was of himself and Emma that he spoke.9
Although Hardy’s sympathies lay primarily with Jude and Phillotson, he bent over backwards to present Sue’s (Emma’s) point of view also. And he subsequently elaborated on this in a letter to Edmund Gosse. One of Sue’s reasons for fearing the marriage ceremony, said Hardy, was that she was afraid that it would be:
breaking faith with Jude to withhold herself [from having sexual intercourse with him] at pleasure, or altogether, after it; though while uncontracted, she feels at liberty to yield herself as seldom as she chooses. This has tended to keep his [Jude’s] passion as hot at the end as at the beginning, & helps break his heart. He has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.10
This may be seen as an admission by Hardy that he is broken-hearted, after years of frustration, and a confirmation by him that his marriage to Emma was never consummated.
To the above hypotheses a final caveat must be added. Hardy, in Jude the Obscure, was voicing his opinion as to why Emma did not love him as he deserved, and why she refused to make love to him. Whether the reasons for this, given vicariously by Jude and Sue, are the correct ones, or whether Emma had different reasons for adopting the attitude towards Hardy that she did, can never be known with certainty, given the fact that the majority of her private writings and correspondence was destroyed. What appears not to be in doubt, however, is that she did not love Hardy in a physical and demonstrative sense, and that she did not have a sexual relationship with him. However, some further light will be shed shortly on Emma’s attitude in this respect.
What is surprising is that, despite everything, the couple maintained an outward veneer of normality, in that Emma continued to travel with Hardy and to attend social functions with him.
In June 1894, in an article published by the New Review, Hardy was prompted to ask whether young women should be informed of the facts of life prior to marriage, instead of being left to discover them afterwards. The inference here is that had Emma been apprised of precisely what the act of sexual intercourse entailed, she would not have consented to marry Hardy, which would have saved them both much anguish. And Hardy is scarcely able to contain his sense of bitterness and disillusionment when he goes on to enquire whether marriage was ‘such a desirable goal for all women as it is assumed to be’. Or was it the truth that that particular institution had ‘never succeeded in creating that homely thing: a satisfactory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes’.11
The ‘earthquake’ which followed the publication of Jude the Obscure was of an even greater magnitude than that which had followed Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In January 1896 Hardy complained that the novel had been misinterpreted, in that the theme of ‘the doom of hereditary temperament and unsuitable mating in marriage’ had been taken as an attack on that institution in general. He also denied that the book was in any way immoral.12 The following month he complained of ‘fearful depression’ and a ‘slight headache’.13
That section of the press which greeted Jude the Obscure with outrage and disgust now chose to ignore Hardy and his works. As for the Bishop of Wakefield, he announced that he had thrown the novel into the fire. Hardy reacted to this news by remarking, dryly, that ‘theology and burning’ had been associated for many centuries, and supposed that ‘they will continue to be allies to the end’.14
(In a postscript to Jude the Obscure, written some years later, Hardy made further comments on the novel and on its reception by the public and the critics: an experience which, he declared, completely cured him of any further interest in novel writing.)
Despite everything, Hardy and Emma continued with their routine of travelling up to London, where during the 1896 season they met with such people as Susan, Countess of Malmesbury (a writer); the Duchess of Montrose; Theresa, Lady Londonderry, and the author Henry James. August found the couple at Stratford-upon-Avon, where they visited places associated with William Shakespeare. September saw them in France and in Belgium where Emma, who had by now given up horse riding, purchased a bicycle which she imported into England. When Hardy revisited the site of the Battle of Waterloo, he doubtless had in mind the epic drama The Dynasts, which he was about to write. It was based on the mighty struggle between the French army, commanded by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and the British army, commanded by the Duke of Wellington. In June he wrote from London to his sister Katharine, offering to obtain for her ‘pianoforte pieces’, or ‘dance music’, from the music publisher Chappell.15
In October 1896 Hardy once more vented his spleen against the critics:
To cry out in a passionate poem that the Supreme Mover … [which he believed controlled all earthly happenings, and which he would shortly allude to in The Dynasts] must be either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel – which is obvious enough, and has been for centuries … [would] set all the literary contortionists jumping upon me, a harmless agnostic, as if I were a clamorous atheist.16
In his characters, plots and locations, Hardy was the master of disguise. But for once he is found out. In the words of Emma’s nephew, Gordon Gifford, she ‘strongly objected to this book [Jude the Obscure], and, I think, the outlook of some of the characters depicted therein’.17 Clearly, Emma had recognised herself in the novel, and felt that she had been portrayed in a poor light. Consequently, after its publication, the rift between herself and Hardy grew wider than ever.
By now, because his marriage was defunct in all but name, Hardy felt that in having Jude the Obscure published he had nothing to lose as far as Emma was concerned. He therefore forged ahead regardless, and having remained silent for so long, vented all his pent-up frustrations, bemusement, bitterness and anguish, which, no doubt, was to some extent a catharsis for him.
Just prior to his death, Jude uttered these words from the Book of Job:
Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.
Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? … For now should I have lain still and been quiet. I should have slept: then had I been at rest.
Was this how Hardy himself felt? Did he now regret that at his birth, when he was thought to be dead, the vigilant nurse, realising that he was still alive, had intervened to save his life? It is a possibility which has to be faced and, if true, it is impossible to read the above lines from Job without feeling unutterably sorry for Hardy.
Why, in view of the trauma that he had suffered, did Hardy not simply walk away from Emma and petition for a divorce? There were several possible reasons: one was pride – in that he wished to avoid a scandal, which may have led to him being ostracised by society and shunned by his publisher; also, he still felt responsible for Emma’s welfare, and he could not bear the thought of the upheaval which this would entail, including the disruption to his writing. The over-riding reason, however, may have been that, as will be seen, the vision of Emma as he had once perceived her – the beautiful woman who had transfixed him, perhaps at first sight – had not left him, and it never would. And he would spend the remainder of his days in bewilderment, searching for his lost Emma, and hoping against hope that the vision would return.
The meaning of the two previously mentioned poems, which Hardy wrote in the year 1875, now becomes all too painfully obvious, for it is clear that the words ‘Wasted were two souls in their prime’ (from We Sat at the Window), and ‘Between them lay a sword’ (from To a Sea Cliff), clearly apply to himself and Emma. The poems also confirm that Emma’s failure to respond to his sexual advances was a problem for Hardy, right from the very onset of their married life.