個別性と普遍性 : Jude the Obscureのひとつの問題点

It is a remarkable lack of development that we can regard as one of the most important features of the characters in Thomas Hardy's fictions. His characters maintain their fixity of their view of life or values against the outer world even after they have passed through plenty of hard affairs and obstacles. When we appreciate his last novel, Jude the Obscure, in that light, we can see rather a peculiar fact in this work which does not exist in Hardy's other works. It is the fact that the hero, Jude, unlike the fixed characters of the earlier works, develop through some of his experiences in life and that this is the main element of the work. Jude's experiences are explained by the author himself in the Postscript added to the First Edition; which are the problem of marriage, the difficulties "of acquiring knowledge in letters without pecuniary means" and the struggle of personal life against social conventions. These problems have various kind of influences on the hero's development. But we cannot overlook another fact that there is a certain kind of abstractness in this work. The world which Jude throws himself into has not the sense of concreteness of everyday life that has made real and solid the world of the English novel since Defoe. The problem besetting Jude's life is that antinomy of the conflict between social life and private, personal life which is one of the important themes of the English Bildungsroman. After the failure of his married life with Arabella and the frustration of his ambition of a college education in Christminster, he succeeds in flinging away his subjective dreams and illusions, and discovers a real life. When he glimpses "his destiny among the manual toilers", he grasps the chance of growing "a working-class hero". But he cannot retain this destiny to the last, because the author generalizes Jude's private affliction to the universal fate of man, instead of giving him any real foundation of a civil life. The unsubstantially of this work grows out of such an unreal and generalized description of the relations between the hero and the outer world. This fact is brought to light more radically in his last self-recognition. After losing realistic and struggling relation with Sue, Jude, who has discovered a real life and has recognized the significance of his existence as a victim in the society whose "formulas have something wrong", suddenly begins to be an unreasonably spiritualized man. He tells Mrs. Edlin in a form of monologue about the gap between the time's and his (and Sue's) ideas. His recognition presented in this monologue is not the natural result of the inner development through his real experiences but is derived from a certain generalized view point based on the universal interpretation of man and society.