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Scanned image, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham. Reproduced courtesy of Dorset County Council Library Service

Commentary

The ninth plate introduces Jude's son and his great-aunt's friend from Shaston, the Widow Edlin (who has just arrived bearing wedding presents), thereby encompassing three generations and encapsulating past, present, and future. While we have two early representations of Arabella's face with which to establish the boy's maternity (the first two plates show that her nose resembles his), here Hatherell invites a comparison of the boy's features to those of Jude. Described consistently as small for his age in the text and shown as diminutive in Hatherell's tenth plate, the boy here seems to be a gangly adolescent.

The moment realized is close to the beginning of the ninth instalment, thereby minimizing the suspense-generating power of the plate. The Widow Edlin in the fireside ease of the Fawley home in Aldbrickham has just clarified the tale behind the supposed Fawley "marriage curse" to which Jude's Great-Aunt Drusilla had constantly alluded. Where Jude's yearnings for the life of a Christminster scholar began and will end, at the milestone between Marygreen and Alfredston, on the hill by the Brown house, in the time of the widow's grandfather a Fawley was--so the story goes--hanged on the gibbet for burglary. In fact, when arrested he was trying to take possession of the body of his dead son after having broken into the house of his estranged wife, "and being obstinate, wouldn't tell what he broken in for" (Ch. 37).

Thus, Jude's ancestor, the Widow Edlin reveals, did not murder his wife at all; rather, perhaps as a result of his execution, she went mad. However, the narrator of the village anecdote cautions her hearers that this couple may not have been related to Jude and Sue. Her commonsense and matter of fact approach to her tale is contrasted by the superstitious natures of the present Fawleys, for at this moment, near midnight in the barely lit room, Father Time (about whose presence the others have quite forgotten since he seldom speaks) chimes in --

“A small voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as if out of the earth: 'If I was you, mother, I wouldn't marry father!' It came from little Time, and they started, for they had forgotten him” (Ch. 37).

Father Time, who is manifestly anxious in Hatherell's plate, contributes to the otherwise rational Sue's growing unease about being married at the local registry office the next morning, reversing the determination that her interview with Arabella aroused in the previous instalment. The effect of the Widoiw's tale and Time's advice upon Sue Hatherell has avoided depicting, highlighting the faces of the nervous child and his contemplative father, and revealing the Widow Edlin but sketchily in "the shade of the fireside" which is suggestive of the shadows of the past bourne into the present by oral tradition. Indistinctly we see such domestic details as the kettle on the hob and poker (left), and the chairs occupied by father and son. The scene's darkness is consistent both with the lateness of the hour, the lack of light, and the "tragic doom" of "the house of Atreus," the allusion Hardy makes to the Orestia of Aeschylus. Contributing to the mood of gloomy foreboding established by the boy's response to the inset narrative, the weather the next morning is foggy, dull, and chilly, and the street in from of the registry office muddy.

And so Sue, having witnessed the unions of disreputable couples in the office and a naive couple in the church, elects not to be married after all. She rationalizes, "If we are happy as we are, what does it matter to anybody?" (Ch. 37). Ironically, her self-centred decision will severely impact upon little Time and his peer relationships at school.

Bibliography

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

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Last modified 16 February 2003