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Review of Literature: Jude the Obscure--Part 4
Material focusing on male relations in Jude the Obscure has been much easier to find. So far, Richard Dellamora is one of the strongest sources I have found on male relations in Thomas Hardy. His book, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, focuses on gender issues in general during Victorian times. Dellamora points out that Havelock Ellis, a Hardy contemporary, wanted to label any woman as lesbian (or otherwise “deviant”) if she was “invading public (male) space . . . and working and earning in new ways” (like Sue and Bathsheba) (194-195). The text that Dellamora focuses on is Jude the Obscure, but his observations could work for the other novels as well, and his arguments have more in common with mine then anyone else I have been able to find. He discusses, to some extent, the homosocial bonds (and lack thereof) in the novel, and he concludes that the reason that Jude the Obscure offended people so much was because Hardy “subverted male privilege in marriage” (212). Even more helpful has been Dellamora’s “Male Relations in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.” In this essay, Dellamora says he is “interested in the connection between the ‘ambitious wishes’ and the ‘erotic desires’ of young men” (145). Dellamora attributes Jude’s failure to “the unsuitability for reasons of class of Phillotson as a vehicle of Jude’s ambitions” (148). I agree with Dellamora’s arguments about class hindering Jude’s relationships, but although extremely interesting, I do not find his arguments about sexual desire between the men convincing.
Elizabeth Langland has also discussed male relations in “Becoming a Man in Jude the Obscure.” Langland concludes that in death Jude ultimately chooses Christminster over Sue because he wants to, “in spirit, join the fraternity that has otherwise excluded him” (44). This ties in very well with my argument that the male homosocial bonds are more potent in the novels than the heterosexual bonds.