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Reproduced courtesy of Dorset County Council Library Service

Commentary

In the plate accompanying the fifth instalment (April 1895) of Hearts Insurgent (afterwards, Jude the Obscure), the artist again obscures Jude's face as, standing at his shoulder (as in the limited omniscient narrative), we see Phillotson and Sue preparing to depart on their honeymoon after their wedding at St. Thomas's, Melchester (Salisbury), and subsequent mid-day meal at Jude's new rooms. We learn early in the next instalment that the newly-weds will be spending some time in London before returning to the teacherage at Shaston (Shaftesbury). Although Sue is wearning the same dress that she wore in Plate 3, in which Hatherell depicted her for the first time, she has exchanged her former look of demure innocence for a world-weariness, and her figure seems much more mature here. It is afternoon (two o'clock in the text), and the street on which Jude has taken larger rooms to accommodate Sue's wedding is almost deserted as the couple cross the pavement to their rented fly. Hatherell's Phillotson, getting into the carriage (left), completely misses the significant look that Jude and Sue exchange.

The artist has conflated two closely-related textual moments: the first occurs when Sue looks back at Jude, "a frightened light in her eyes"; the second is moments later, when, having gone indoors (supposedly to retrieve a handkerchief), she reappears on the pavement. Because his face is turned upstage, we cannot judge how well Jude is bearing this "trying ordeal" after that of having to give her away in the cremony. Beside Jude is his new landlady, whom Hardy does not describe but mentions as offering to retrieve Sue's handkerchief for her. Everything else in the picture -- the cobblestone street, the stone housefronts, and even the umbrellas (suugestive, perhaps, of stormy weather ahead in this ill-matched marriage) of Phillotsons -- is Hatherell's invention. Avoiding anything smacking of the picturesque in order to emphasize the prosaic nature of everything in the scene but Sue's visage, Hatherell fails to provide even a glimpse of Salisbury Cathedral's famous spire, so that the quiet street might be anywhere in Hardy's Wessex.

Sue, just off centre in the plate and therefore the focal character, is in her travelling clothes once again. One feels that the artist has deliberately avoided depicting her in white wedding dress and bonnet, over which Jude had thrown "two or three yards of white tulle . . . as a veil." Phillotson is in somber black, too, with the highly starched collar that Hardy had described earlier. Their black attire and Sue's dead gaze suggest more the funeral than the wedding journey. Whatever Sue "had meant to say [to Jude] remained unspoken" (although in Hatherell's illustration that she has realised her error is only too apparent), and the fifth instalment ends with the moment foretold by the plate at its very opening, clarifying the circumstances under which the cousins part.

Bibliography

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

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Last modified 16 February 2003