Death, Entrapment, and Marriage in "Jude the Obscure"

Jamie Ferrell

Professor Kent Puckett

UC Berkeley English 125B

11 May 2018

Death, Entrapment, and Marriage in Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure scandalized English society with its audacious representations of love, marriage, and death. Hardy incorporates several graphic death scenes of animals in the novel, which reflect largely on Jude’s values and role in his relationships with women while also paralleling the deaths of his children and himself. When forced to slaughter a pig, Jude kills it quickly to put it out of its misery despite reducing the quality of the meat. Later, after finding a rabbit caught in a gin, he breaks its neck to end its suffering. Importantly, although he kills both animals quickly, their corpses, or parts of them, are both left in their respective places for hours. These moments specifically foreshadow Jude’s own death; Arabella halfheartedly tends to Jude in his final hours, and after finding Jude dead in his bed, leaves him there for a full afternoon and goes about her day with another man before addressing the aftercare of the body. While morbid, this brief abandonment of his corpse also acknowledges the end of his suffering in both illness and marriage. The commodification of the animals’ bodies alludes to a commodification of Jude in his marriage, and especially after death, his bodily autonomy is relinquished to someone living, who may subsequently abandon it, care for it, or both.

The pig slaughtering scene is one of the most revealing moments of Arabella’s and Jude’s relationship. When the butcher does not arrive in time, Jude decides to slaughter the pig himself even though Arabella is clearly more knowledgeable on the subject, exposing essential differences in their upbringing and values. Jude first expresses shock that the pig has eaten nothing for a full day, and Arabella says, “We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!” to which Jude responds, “That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!” (Hardy 63). The pig’s final moments are characterized by its squealing and crying, which are noticeably human: “The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but a cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless” (64). Jude decides to “stick un effectually” despite Arabella’s protests that the animal must be “eight or ten minutes dying, at least” (64) so that the meat is well bled. Like many death scenes in the novel, this one is deliberately graphic and upsetting as it appeals more to Jude’s merciful perspective: “The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes rivetting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.” (64). Despite being told from the narrator’s perspective, it is clear that Jude’s emotions are at the forefront of this scene as they villainize Arabella specifically and refer to the pig as “he” rather than “it.” This description also aligns with Jude’s feelings towards her, not only in the pig’s death scene but also in his own as he waits for death to release him from their marriage.

In most scenes with Arabella, she is characterized as being vain or petty, but her deft understanding of the slaughter in comparison with Jude’s incompetence is one of the first moments in which we understand how out of touch Jude has become with country life. Arabella responds to Jude’s exasperation quite matter-of-factly, saying, “Pigs must be killed,” and later, “Poor folks must live” (65). Despite Jude doing the killing, Arabella is the active partner in the scene, crying instructions and berating him for his mishandling of the animal. After the pig’s death, Arabella begins boiling down its fat, but at Jude’s request she stops midway and finishes the job later: “Next morning, which was Sunday, he resumed operations about ten o’clock” (68). Hardy often specifically quantifies times of day and minutes passing, creating an explicit idea of the characters’ schedules for the readers to follow. Although not specifically mentioned in the narrative, the pig’s fat and other remains are surely stored in Jude’s and Arabella’s house overnight as they take a break from the task of harvesting it. Their ability to store its body and body parts reveals an essential part of death--after the suffering has ended, the body itself as an object is immediately separated from the subject and placed in the care of someone living. Placing it “out of sight, out of mind” is something that cannot be done while the subject is suffering, but the subsequent calm after death affords the living a grace period in which they may briefly abandon or ignore the body in order to address other tasks in their schedule. In other words, by putting an end to the animal’s suffering, they effectively take ownership of it, which also gives them the right to abandon or ignore it for indeterminate amounts of time.

Jude’s relationship with Arabella is subsequently juxtaposed with that of him and Sue in another animal death scene from Part Fourth, in which he kills a rabbit stuck in a trap. Upon waking to its shrieks, he lays in his bed for a while before going outside and striking it on the back of the neck to put it out of its misery. Again, Hardy mentions the specific time at which Jude awakens: “At some time near two o’clock, when he was beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill squeak…” (213) and “Almost half-an-hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry” (214). In this case, the graphic imagery comes more from Jude’s imagination as he lays picturing the animal:

If it were a ‘bad catch’ by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it to escape, it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb. If it were a ‘good catch,’ namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken, and the limb nearly torn in two in attempt at an impossible escape. (213-14)

As with the pig’s death scene, Jude ruminates on the rabbit’s physical discomfort in a quite detailed account of the body’s position and destruction. He also focuses on the rabbit’s cry, describing it as a “shrill squeak” that repeats itself several times throughout the night. After killing the animal, Jude notices Sue has awoken and come outside with the same intention of putting it out of its misery, an essential example of how their common merciful tendencies differ from Arabella’s; unlike in the pig scene, Jude is the active partner here as Sue looks on in support. Jude kills the rabbit quickly: “The faint click of the trap as dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead” (214). However, after this moment, there is no more mention of the rabbit--Jude and Sue begin a different conversation and we are left to presume that the rabbit will lay dead in the gin for the rest of the night until the trapper comes to retrieve it in the morning. As with the pig, the calm after death allows both Jude and Sue to return to sleep and other matters, free of the nuisance and the guilt of listening to the rabbit’s pain. In both cases, it is important to note that while Jude is putting an end to the suffering of other living beings, he is also putting an end to his own brief second-hand suffering while watching them. Listening to their cries and observing their pain puts him in pain of his own, so putting an end to them frees him briefly as well.

The rabbit’s death specifically parallels the deaths of Jude’s children in the final section of the novel, as they are killed by hanging and the physical damage to the neck is an unmistakable connection. The doctor also determines that they were hanging upstairs for at least an hour before their bodies were found, similar to the rabbit’s body remaining bound to the gin all night. However, it is Jude’s death itself that bears an important resemblance to the two animal deaths; Arabella finds him dead and then leaves him where he lies for the entire afternoon.

After her first appalled sense of what had happened the faint notes of a military or other brass band from the river reached her ears; and in a provoked tone she exclaimed, ‘To think he should die just now! Why did he die just now!’ Then meditating another moment or two she went to the door, softly closed it as before, and again descended the stairs. (405)

Prior to this moment Arabella has halfheartedly kept watch over Jude in his final hours, similarly bound in marriage to him as he is to her. And, as in the animals’ death scenes, Jude’s death finally puts both himself and Arabella out of their misery, having been trapped in betrothal to each other their entire lives. After his death, Jude’s body undergoes a type of commodification as subject is separated from object and Arabella may treat it as such, abandoning it briefly for her own purposes--after all, her sudden responsibility for his body also grants her the ability to leave it unattended. Eventually, Arabella addresses the body, having realized that “if Jude were discovered to have died alone an inquest might be deemed necessary” (406). Again, the time of day is emphasized to impress how much time has passed; shortly before Arabella found Jude’s body, the cathedral bell rang for the five o’clock service, so we know that his body has been left unattended for five hours when we read, “By ten o’clock that night Jude was lying on the bedstead at his lodging covered with a sheet, and straight as an arrow” (407). This repeated emphasis on time of day is an essential part of creating a realistic sense of the characters’ schedules, as even the mundane task of checking the clock and arriving somewhere on time takes priority over disposal or care of a corpse. All of the characters’ actions operate within a timeframe and a schedule that, when disrupted by a death, may then be returned to and prioritized in refuge during the calm after said death.

The animals’ death scenes are notable for their graphic violence, which necessitates Jude ending their suffering as soon as possible in order to simultaneously abate his own discomfort and return to his routine. That being said, the animals are more easily commodified in the traditional sense; the pig will be butchered and its meat will be sold, the rabbit will be skinned and consumed. The commodification of Jude himself is less tangible, but still present; during Jude’s own death scene, Arabella is the one who experiences a release and return to her preferred schedule without the chore of caring for her husband anymore. The rush to put something or someone out of their misery is immediately followed by a period of calm in which the body may be stepped away from and returned to at one’s leisure, a form of commodification that comes immediately after the moment of death. And, the loss of bodily autonomy after death, despite signaling a commodification of the body for someone else’s purposes, nonetheless offers a somewhat peaceful respite from the suffering for all involved.