2 - Terminal satire and Jude the Obscure

Summary

MOSTLY THE SATIRISTS

Two words haunted Thomas Hardy in the years he was plotting and composing Jude the Obscure. The first of these, satire, litters his notebooks and diaries of the era, and it appears with remarkable frequency in the finished novel itself. The word first surfaces when Jude receives his cousin Sue's letter stating her decision to marry his former schoolmaster Phillotson. The letter is brutally short; Sue is so formal that she signs her complete name. Hardy then shifts to Jude's reaction:

Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast; and kept on drinking tea because his mouth was so dry. Then presently he went back to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so confronted. Everything seemed turning to satire. And yet, what could the poor girl do? he asked himself: and felt worse than shedding tears.

The sentence in question seems deliberately vague, as if Jude's paranoid sense of victimhood cannot place the source of the cruel joke to which he has been subjected. The satire is on Jude. But from what or from whom does this satire issue – from Sue, or Phillotson, or God? This question may be simply another useless effort to pursue the elusive riddle of Jude the Obscure, which is the problem of knowing why Jude Fawley must suffer so intensely and relentlessly. The satirist in question must be elusive.