Although the key issues of Jude the Obscure involve the hopeless sense Hardy has of modern marriage as an institution desperately in need of reform and of the complicity of Church and state in perpetuating an institution Hardy sees as inimical to human happiness, what is remarkable about this novel in the Hardy canon is its lack of emphasis on determinism.
While its most horrid moment, the murder of the children and suicide by Father Time, the wretched son of Jude's and Arabella's marriage, carries the overtone of fatalism, in the main this novel is a narrative of choices. It can of course be argued that our choices are based on our innate dispositions, and that choice is therefore an illusion—that, for example, Jude had no choice except to become intimate with Arabella because of.....
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