SOURCE: "The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 2, 1983, pp. 189-213.

In the following essay, Goetz explores elements of Jude the Obscure that form a critique of marriage.

Matrimony have growed to be that serious in these days that one really do feel afeard to move in it at all. In my time we took it more careless; and I don't know that we was any the worse for it!

—the Widow Edlin in Jude the Obscure

When Jude the Obscure was published in 1895, it was interpreted in many quarters as Hardy's contribution to the growing contemporary debate on the "marriage question." The prominence of the public debate, as well as Hardy's candid and even sensational treatment of marriage and sex in his novel, tended to draw attention to this aspect of the work rather than to the other theme that...