An Interpretation of Jude's Personality in Jude the Obscure —— From the Perspective of Freud's Theory

An Interpretation of Jude's Personality in Jude the Obscure —— From the Perspective of Freud's Theory

I。 Introduction

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), a celebrated realistic novelist and poet in the Victorian Era, is distinguished for his Wessex novels。 The Wessex novels are also called "Novels of Character and Environment", including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), etc。 These novels mirror Hardy's views on social issues in Victorian England。论文网

Although Hardy had a reputation for writing novels, he insisted on poetry writing which permeated his whole life and set himself up primarily as a poet。 His poems exerted a profound influence on the Poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin。

During Hardy's lifetime, the comments on him made by folks of that time were various。 Moreover, he was once desolated and neglected after his death。 Fortunately, Hardy earned respect from the scholars at home and abroad after a time, then his works were republished incessantly and adapted to films and television programs many times。 Nowadays, there is an increasingly number of readers and scholars paying attention to Hardy and his works。

Jude the Obscure, one of Hardy's Wessex novels, has struck an unprecedented critical response on account of its fairly debatable issues of marriage, religion, class and education since its first publication in the book form in 1895。 Above all the controversial issues, the explicit descriptions of sex and the affronts to the social institutions were the most difficult part to accept for most critics。 However, the critics changed their attitudes towards Jude the Obscure because of the emergence of new critical theories and new research methods。

Over the past several decades, a good deal of researchers at home and abroad have thrown lights on Jude the Obscure from various aspects。 In the first place, domestic researches make clear that some scholars studied the novel with the purpose of exploring inpidual tragedy and criticizing social reality, for example, Zhai Ruixiao’s A Study on Jude’s

Illusions in Jude the Obscure。

In the second place, foreign reseachers particularly focused on the following several aspects。 Firstly, Sumpter Caroline explores the sympathy in Jude the Obscure to contemporary scientific debates over moral evolution in his On suffering and sympathy: "Jude the Obscure," evolution, and ethics。 Secondly, Roger Vlitos analyzes the prospect of Wessex in his A Distant Prospect of Wessex: Archaeology and the Past in the Life and Works of Thomas Hardy。 Thirdly, Liqing Fang and Weiqing Jiang interprets Thomas Hardy`s feminist consciousness in their Thomas Hardy’s Feminist Consciousness in Jude the Obscure。

To sum up, the papers mentioned above make an extensive and complicated study of Jude the Obscure, but scholars have paid inadequate attention to Jude's personality in the light of Freud's personality theory and published only a few papers on it。 Freud's personality theory, one of the most significant theory of literary criticism, offers large scholars a new angle to dissect all kinds of literary works, and adds the deeper understanding of them and enlarges the research field。 This paper makes an attempt to explore the leading character Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure from the perspective of Freud's personality theory。

Ⅱ。 Freud's Personality Theory

This thesis applies Freud’s theory of personality to interpret the protagonists’ character in Jude the Obscure, and Freud’s theory of personality is a significant portion of Freudian Psychoanalysis。 Thus, it is indispensable to give a brief outline of the Freudian theories which are closely concerned with the interpretation of the novel in the next few parts。 This part includes three sections: the first section is the formation and development of Freudian Psychoanalysis, the second section is the key systems of Freud’s personality theory, and the last section is its influence over the mass of literary criticism works。