History Literature / JudeTheObscure

%% NOTE - as a rule, the Administrivia/SpoilersOff cutoff for older works aligns to OlderThanRadio. This is just out of that category - 1895 vs. 1890 - so please keep spoilers tagged until/unless there is a consensus to change this.

* FromBadToWorse: Essentially the whole book. Even as an eleven-year-old, Jude thinks it would be better if he had never been born, his parents both having died and his great-aunt and guardian finding him a burden. Then he gets tricked into a marriage with Arabella that is over before it begins, his dreams of attending the university at Christminster meet the cold hard reality of 19th century class immobility, and he falls in love with Sue only to see her marry Phillotson. Sue eventually leaves Phillotson for Jude, but is still getting over her reluctance to marry him when Jude's son by Arabella is thrust into their lives, leading them to become outcasts among people who think the boy is Sue's and is illegitimate. Their union collapses after Jude's children by both Arabella and Sue [[spoiler:die in a murder-suicide,]] and they return to their previous unhappy marriages. At the end of the book, Jude dies alone and miserable, while Sue is alive but even more miserable.

* FromBadToWorse: Essentially the whole book. Even as an eleven-year-old, Jude thinks it would be better if he had never been born, his parents both having died and his great-aunt and guardian finding him a burden. Then he gets tricked into a marriage with Arabella that is over before it begins, his dreams of attending the university at Christminster meet the cold hard reality of 19th century class immobility, and he falls in love with Sue only to see her marry Phillotson. Sue eventually leaves Phillotson for Jude, but is still getting over her reluctance to marry him when Jude's son by Arabella is thrust into their lives, leading them to become outcasts among people who think the boy is Sue's and is illegitimate. Their union collapses after Jude's children by both Arabella and Sue [[spoiler:die in a murder-suicide]], and they return to their previous unhappy marriages. At the end of the book, Jude dies alone and miserable, while Sue is alive but even more miserable.

** Bridehead is possibly a pun on maidenhead, which means virginity. Sue is asexual and disliked sex. Possibly a Darwinian message to say how the sensitive people are doomed never to survive and propagate descendants.

* {{Asexuality}}: Sue's attitude toward sex is indifference at best and thorough disgust at worst; one of the tragedies is the love between a heterosexual man and an asexual woman. At least part of the cause of her estrangement from Phillotson is her distaste for sex, and when she decides that [[spoiler:the deaths of her children]] are a punishment from God for her extramarital relationship with Jude, she decides that she must accept marital relations with Phillotson as part of that punishment.

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler: Jude's children die in a murder/suicide. Sue miscarries their baby. She also returns to her husband, utterly screwed up and beating herself up morally, convinced that she had been justly punished. Jude dies alone, having lost the love of his life, while his wife flirts with a doctor.]]

* {{Adorkable}}: Sue during the sex scene of the film version.
-->'''Jude''': You don't have to do this.
-->'''Sue''': I want to. But you have to help me, I don't know what I'm doing, I won't even pretend. Do I talk too much?
-->'''Jude''': No.
-->'''Sue''': I'm doing it all wrong, aren't I?
-->'''Jude''': No.
-->'''Sue''': I'm intellectualizing.
-->'''Jude''': You're not.
-->'''Sue''': Kiss me before I start talking again.

* ComedyOfRemarriage: Couples made up and separated are joined together at the end again. Although there is nothing comedic in it; Arabella and Jude are even more miserable the second time around than the first, and so are Sue and Phillotson.