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Commentary

Although the Widow Edlin raises her hands as she advocates moderation and cautions Sue against wantonly destroying something so beautiful and useful as her embroidered linen nightgown, Sue in her fervour to atone for her sins (which, she believes, have resulted in her children's deaths) rips the garment into shreds because it is a palpable reminder of her life with Jude. Because Jude's allure remains so great that the only means of resisting the temptation to fly to him is to destroy any vestige of her old life, she rends it as if were the veil in the temple, symbol of the old dispensation, with all the vehemence of a reformed alcoholic smashing a bottle of whiskey.

In the serial text's Chapter 46 (the second in the October instalment), not wishing to offend Victorian propriety even at the fin de siecle (ever a consideration in magazine fiction of the nineteenth century), Hardy refers to the linen garment as "some apparel" and "night-clothes." Ironically, the artist has select for illustration a symbolic act of self-destruction that only has significance in the unexpurgated volume, for the nightgown in the unBowdlerized text is clearly an objective correlative for Sue's happiness, her spiritual, emotional, and sexual fulfilment with Jude. However, in the serial text, in a purely platonic relationship with his fair cousin Jude will presumably never have seen her in the garment. For Sue on the eve of her re-marrying Richard Phillotson, the nightgown is not sufficiently "penitential": "It was in the wrong style for my present feeling" (uttered in the serial text as justification for shredding the nightgown) hardly seems sufficient explanation for her sudden fit of agression. In the 1895 volume (Part 6, Chapter V), her wanton and capricious act transforms the garment in which she has slept with Jude and conceived three children into a symbol of their shared life of the perfect balance of spirit, intellect, and body.

The coarse nightgown of unbleached calico which she chooses instead is thus a counter-symbol of her act of contrition, ultimately of self-immolation, as she determines to destroy her only chance for happiness by re-marrying a man who, whatever his noble qualities, physically revulses her. The cheap garment produced by modern mills rather than the traditional loom of the linen weaver is still rolled up before Sue in Hatherell's plate, beside a torn sleeve with its worked-linen cuff. Responding to socially-dictated rather than naturally-inspired conscience, Sue regards the "tastefully embroidered" garment, like her idyll with Jude, as "adulterous" even though, in reality, it is but a harmless piece of feminine fashion. Sue in her new-found Christian conventionality consignns it as a thing "accursed" to the flames of the fireplace (perhaps immediately behind her in the plate).

She recalls that she "bought it long ago -- to please Jude," but in the serial only her act of purchasing it can have brought him any pleasure. In destroying the beautiful reminder of what she asserts she wishes to forget, Sue foreshadows sacrificing her own body on altar of respectability by finally sharing Richard Phillotson's bed, her rejection of which originally led to her unconventional relationship with Jude. In essence, she is masochistically punishing herself for the deaths of the children at the hands of Father Time, whose destructive act, too, was the result of social conditioning. The Widow Edlin's gesture of shock, then, is not merely at Sue's violent handling of the nightgown (which the Widow herself would have liked if Sue no longer wanted it) but also at Sue's decision to re-marry her ex-husband against her instinct. Here, as elsewhere, the Widow is the steadfast, traditional Wise Woman, in contrast to Sue's quixotic New Woman.

Bibliography

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.

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Last modified 16 February 2003