Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead: An Exemplification of the Ways in Which Men Can Never Understand the Burdens of Freedom As a Result of Themselves Never Having Been Oppressed Genna Rivieccio
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mong the most grossly misunderstood and unfairly maligned characters in classic literature is undoubtedly Sue Bridehead. Perceived as wretched and unfathomable for her “cruelty” (in terms of not wanting to give in to making everything somehow turn carnal with men), Sue is easily one of Thomas Hardy’s most complex protagonists (naturally inspired by his own first wife, Emma Gifford—because woman is nothing to man if not muse, especially if, like Emma, she cannot serve her biological purpose as childbearer). That the amount of the spotlight she dominates from the person who is supposed to be our intended hero, Jude, is telling of just what an unusual for the time (Jude the Obscure was published in its complete novel form in 1895) “bird” Sue is. Although Jude’s
sweet-natured and remediless optimism makes him highly endearing at the outset of the novel, as the story wears on, we see that his false ideals of how people (and, of course, life and the institutions that represent it) ought to be is less Christ-like than it is sheer ignis fatuus. Sue, to be sure, is one of the foremost beacons of his delusive expectations. To make matters even worse than the fact that Sue is Jude’s cousin, she also possesses the rare combination of feminine qualities known as beauty and intellect, sheer kryptonite for men like Jude and Richard Phillotson, the very person who ends up filling Jude with the ultimately tragic notions of scholastic grandeur by telling him of Christminster (a university and town modeled after Oxford), the place Phillotson plans to continue teaching upon leaving Jude and his
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