Jude was better off when obscure

Good news for Jude - it appears, though Hardy is very circumspect about this, that his partner, Sue Bridehead, is pregnant! So apparently they are no longer living in monkish celibacy. As noted in yesterday's post, there is a lot of evidence that Sue is asexual, homosexual, afraid of or repulsed by sex, and possibly a victim of abuse - so to know that she and Jude are now involved in a sexual relationship is good, at least for Jude, at least kinda. There's still a very weird quality to their relationship: Sue never responds to Jude's constant diminutive endearments, which makes us wonder: Is she really in love with him? Does she find him, in some way, as oppressive as her ex-husband? Sue is an odd contradiction: uptight and moralistic, but in another way a true free spirit. She clearly is the one who resists marriage, as an unequal bond between man and woman. At last Sue and Jude head off to London where they are ostensibly married - but Hardy carefully does not show their marriage, so we can assume that the the trip was all for show: they want to appear to be married because they are jointly raising Jude's son. It doesn't work. Up to this point, Jude had truly lived an "obscure" life - he hasn't achieved his lofty ambitions of scholarship and service, but he gets along and makes a living and nobody bothers him or about him. But now he and Sue are seen as weirdos and outcasts; business dries up, and they are unable to make any ties to the community. They sell all their meager belongings at auction (isn't there a similar auction scene in Casterbridge?) and prepare to move on, into what will be a lonely, peripatetic existence. The son is a strange character as well and it would certainly help the kid's case if somebody gave him a name; he's always called Father Time, because of his preternaturally calm demeanor. Today we would suspect that the child, quiet and withdrawn, is on the autism spectrum. Sadly, rather than draw him into a community - through a network of teachers, classmates, friends, neighbors - the son seems to bar them from social interaction. Jude was better off when obscure; now he's an object of scorn.