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1.Deterministic view, deprived of the consolation of divine order;
2.Southwest corner of England and County of Dorset (called “Wessex”):
3.Nature is indifferent to men and it is the pattern of decay which characterizes human life;
4.Thomas Hardy exposes the most conventional, moralistic and hypocritical aspects of Victorian society. He criticises the attitude to religion: Christianity is no longer capable of fulfilling the needs of modern man;
5.Use of the Victorian omniscient narrator. The action is presented through the eyes of an hypothetical observer, with whom the reader is implicitly invited to identify himself
page 334 "Jude's Obscurity"
Hardy follows the Victorian convention of placing an orphan at the centre of the story but denies him the (1) POSSIBILITY to fulfil his hopes. Instead, he takes him from defeat to defeat to the (2) DENIAL of any form of life, love and peace. Despite the social criticism it involves, the tragedy of Jude is (3) MAINLY of (4) FRUSTRATION and (5) LONELINESS due to his uprooting. In his first experience of Christminster, he becomes a “self-spectre”, and this experience is repeated throughout his career so that he can declare at the end: “I am neither a (6) DWELLER among men nor ghosts”. Jude’s attempt to improve himself fails in the face of centuries of accumulated class prejudice: his ambitions and (7) SENSIBILITY separate him from his own class while winning him no place in any other.
Jude the Obscure represents a (8) DEPARTURE from Victorianism, while its portrayal of weakened vitality and grey despair, in a bleak urban (9) SETTING deprived of dynamism and characterized by a sense anxiety and self-destruction. By focusing on the relationship between Jude and Sue, Hardy develops the story through the characters’ (10) REPEATED dialogues, denying the narrator the possibility to explain and interpret things. In this way, he anticipates the aesthetics and tragic quality of the modern novel by means of a two-voiced process of analysis of the human psyche.