Truth be told, I only read three chapters of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure while in England and instead finished a very light-hearted book (T.J. Klune’s Under the Whispering Door), but I get to make the rules on my own blog, and Tom Hardy is a better fit for the city. The novel is a dense and depressing read. However, I’ve been obsessed with this app called Serial Reader, which delivers 10-20 minute sections of a classic a day and it makes these tomes of classics much more manageable and less intimidating than holding up a four-hundred page classic with size 9 font. It took me almost an entire month to read, but it was well-worth it even, if some sections are obnoxious between Sue and Jude (oh Sue! You sexless spirit. Oh Jude! You long suffering saint). That’s one of Tom Hardy’s talents though, for the protagonists of this story are extremely unlikable, but you still feel bad for them and want things to work out.
I can see why Jude the Obscure was scandalous and not well received in its time, for it heavy handedly criticises the Christian sanctity of marriage and the prestigious godliness of universities. It takes bravery to pick at societally dominant institutions like that, particularly for an established author who injured his reputation in a similar way to his most sympathetic character in the Novel, Mr. Phillotson (having a hot young wife just isn’t worth it), by bringing up what might be deemed societally wrong, but morally correct. This is a novel that destroys its characters for wanting to live outside of convention; which makes it a tragedy on par with Dickens or Shakespeare.
I don’t know enough about Thomas Hardy’s life if the city of Christminster is directly based on Oxford, but it might as well be. As a huge university nerd, I adored my time in college but have since come to recognize that universities are not beacons of pure knowledge but also profit-greedy businesses. Seriously, imagine any other thing in your life where you spend a hundred grand to acquire it and they then send you letters asking for donations? The healthcare system is a mess, but at least they aren’t asking for an additional donations post-surgery.
The American University is very different from the British ones though. Had this been an American novel, Jude would have instead been readily accepted into one of the lesser funded universities on the outskirts of Christminster and then looked down upon by the old ivy universities in town and consequently drowned in debt-poverty. American universities don’t have gates. They are laid out like large bear traps enticing anybody inside, its lawn green greedy for money green.
Oxford has gates.
It is a beautiful stone city packed with institutions, but most of it is hard to see from the street, for the university buildings are walled nearly everywhere and, if you are to take a peek, it can only be done by standing on your tippy toes and jumping to glance the rooves and upper windows on the other side before falling back to the sidewalk. I can understand how Jude must have felt with only a wall separating him from his dreams, and yet what a thick and tall wall. He spends his life as a stone mason, chipping away and carving, but he never breaks through to the other side. He’s Sisyphus with a wall that grows thicker as he bevels.
Oxford was just as closed to me as it was to him, since every gate was locked and whenever one could go in, it was behind a paywall (apart from the Natural History museum, which was as impressive as it was made up of stolen finds). Even the Thames was section off behind gates and backyards. This surprised me, living along the Rhine, which has miles of open walkway for anybody to travel from town to town. I had wanted to walk the Thames; what I found instead were small parks that just barely skirted it and were hard to get into, for even they had walls with only a few access points.
So much of the city is hidden. You can see C.S. Lewis’ love for wardrobes and how one small door can lead to an entire world of marvel, if only one can locate it. You can see Tolkien’s laborious journey of twists and turns in the spider cave, only to be blocked by a bridge guarded with a statue-esque monster, saying you cannot pass. And, like Tolkien’s ending to the Trilogy, only the birds can freely travel the city.
Oxford is beautiful in its exclusivity, don’t get me wrong, but it is still exclusive.
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