Most readers will, if they have learned nothing else from Jude the Obscure, know how a pig of the nineteenth century was killed, dressed, and its carcass disposed of. ‘The pig-sticking and so forth’, as D.H. Lawrence dismissively calls it in his Study of Thomas Hardy, is uncomfortably prominent. Hardy’s proclaimed intention in Jude was to tell his story ‘without a mincing of words’. Where things porcine are concerned, his words are notably unminced. There are, however, some aspects of this strand in the novel which may elude the modern reader, and are perhaps designed by Hardy to be elusive. Take, for example, the irruption of Arabella into Jude’s life, with the ‘missile’:

In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future [Jude is dreaming of becoming a bishop] Jude’s walk had slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking at the ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern. On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet.

A glance told him what it was – a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other purpose. (Chapter 6)

What strikes one here is the odd tentativeness which masks an obvious knowledgeability about country matters. The parodic cupid’s dart is described with the maximum of periphrasis compatible with not actually disguising what the organ is, ‘a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig’. Twice more in the scene it is referred to. Arabella saucily observes: ‘If I had thrown any thing at all, it shouldn’t have been that’ (Ch. 6). Later on it occurs to the otherwise gullible Jude that ‘it had been no vestal who chose that missile for opening her attack on him’ (Ch. 6). In neither case is ‘that’ specified any more than it was on its first appearance.

Hardy’s delicacy of description serves a number of purposes. First, and most simply, he could not be as frank on matters of sexual detail as he might have liked. Mrs Grundy – in the form of his editors and publishers – would not let him. More artistically, the lack of specification aptly mimics the coyness of the ‘maidens’ and conveys the prim disgust of Jude, who shrinks from naming the object (‘that’), even in the private recesses of his own mind. The maidens’ motive for avoiding the word is aggressive sexual mock-modesty, his is genuine sexual timidity. And, at the rhetorical level, yet another function is performed. Hardy must have been aware that relatively few of his public (townees all) would have known what part of pork offal was used for boot-dubbin in the West Country.

The reader is thus teased into supplying his or her own suggestion for what ‘that’ might be. Not everyone gets it right. Kate Millett, for example, in her otherwise acute discussion of Jude in Sexual Politics, writes that the lovers ‘first meet when Arabella pitches the scrotum of a butchered barrow-pig at Jude’s head’.1 This is a misapprehension which leads to a misreading of the episode. A barrow-pig is a castrated boar reared for pork, not breeding, and sui generis, has no scrotum. That part of the beast’s sexual equipment is cut away while it is still a piglet, so that it will grow a fat, porcine eunuch. What Arabella throws at Jude is a pizzle or penis. But nor is it quite sufficient merely to describe it as a ‘penis’, as Patricia Ingham does in her Oxford World’s Classics account of how Hardy was forced to bowdlerize this scene for its various forms of publication. The stress is on the observation ‘it was useless for any other purpose’. It is a dysfunctional penis. The ‘message’ is not one of sexual invitation, but one of taunting. Arabella’s missile is not a symbol of animal potency but of animal impotency. The message is mischievously provocative (‘Is yours as useless as this, young man?’). This aggressive sexual taunting is a note which will reverberate through the lovers’ subsequent relationship until Arabella finally disposes of her thoroughly emasculated mate at Christminster.

Notes

1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1969), 130.