On Hardy’s View on Marriage Through the Marriage of Jude and Arabella

Thomas Hardy is regarded as the last important novelist of the Victorian age and also in many ways the father of modern English literature. As a novelist, he wrote 14 novels and four collections of short stories. The theme of love and marriage dominates Jude the Obscure, the last and also the most controversial novel by the renowned British writer Thomas Hardy. In the book, Hardy mainly portrays three relationships: The marriage between Jude and Arabella, Sue’s marriage to Phillotson and the union of Jude and Sue. Jude the Obscure tells the story of the relationship among three couples of lovers and also emphatically describes Jude and Arabella’s marriage besides the description of Jude and Sue’s bonds of romance. The thesis will further demonstrate Hardy’s deep pessimism and fatalism to the institution of marriage at that time.