Obscure Forms: The Letter, the Law, and the Line in Hardy's Social Geometry

Abstract

There could scarcely be a novel more searingly critical of social contradictions than Thomas Hardy's last, and arguably the last Victorian one, Jude the Obscure. Between its Pauline epigraph (“the letter killeth”) and its unforgettable tragedy (“done because we are too menny”), Jude bears out in its plot an indictment of law's inherent abjections and an interrogation of the value of life that seem to precociously articulate the consensus of today's hegemonic biopolitical theory: that human institutions tend inexorably to subjugate humanity itself. Yet the form of the novel develops another theory of the political, another conception of the letter of the law. In ways legible from the presentation of the epigraph onward, that form is conspicuously experimental about typography, the lining and lettering of the letter. The form is also, as Hardy himself repeatedly maintained, “geometrically constructed,” riveted by the study of lines and shapes. Reading Jude's manifold geometric imagery in the context of the revolutionary non-Euclidean break in Victorian-era mathematics and tracing the novel's bold typographic experiments, this essay highlights Hardy's surprising exuberance about the shape of letters. Typography and geometry are unexpectedly crucial to the political imaginary of Jude the Obscure, which projects the malleability of social lineaments even as it tells the tale of lethally rigid norms.

Slow Fire: Serial Thinking and Hardy's Genres of Induction

“…In sensation novels "the image of a loss or shift of class identity" must paradoxically be "class[ed] as accidental" in plots "constructed on the principle of inevitable sequence" (130,117). Yet if Hardy engages in this sort of mystification, Desperate Remedies also adumbrates the critical complexities that others have found in novels like Jude the Obscure (1895), which threads together social inclusion and exclusion (Jaffe 2010), rigid legal norms and plastic social arrangements (Kornbluh 2015). Hardy includes several of the framing devices of "bourgeois norms" that enact the "estrangement from and attachment to a culture that relies on their invisibility" (Jaffe 2010, 386), cannily jumping boundaries even as he establishes them: "a glass pane in the partition dividing [the parlour] from the bar" (Hardy [1871(Hardy [ ] 2003; Cytherea and Edward catching one another's images reflected in a river (237 -38); Manston's face against the glass of Cytherea's hiding place in Casterbridge (357 -58).…”