SOURCE: "Sue Bridehead and the New Woman," in Women Writing about Women, edited by Mary Jacobus, Croom Helm, 1979, pp. 100-13.

In the following essay, Goode concentrates on the character of Sue Bridehead as he examines Jude the Obscure in terms of late nineteenth-century feminism, and explores the means by which the novel exposes the mystifications of ideologically structured reality.

I

Criticism of Jude the Obscure usually takes it to be a representation; hence, however hard such analysis tries to come to terms with the novel's radicalism,-it is inevitably ideological. Criticism of this kind necessarily dissolves the specific literary effect of the text, the author's 'production', into its component sources which are situated in 'reality'—that is to say, the ideological structure of experience by which we (including Hardy) insert our-selves into the hegemony. But Jude is such a truly radical novel precisely because it takes reality apart...