Dreams Derailed by Desire — Jude the Obscure

On a warm Saturday afternoon, nineteen-year-old Jude walks home from Alfredston with his tools at his back and his mind running in Latin. He rehearses his intellectual progress methodically: two books of the Iliad, Euclid through Book Twelve, the Greek Testament, a smattering of Hebrew, the Church Fathers. He sees his path to Christminster clearly within a year or two. The inner monologue rises into fantasy: D.D. first, then archdeacon, perhaps bishop, a bishop who would give away four-fifths of his income and live sumptuously on the rest.

Hardy lets the reverie run at full stretch, twice interrupted by laughter from behind a hedge that Jude does not register. A piece of pig offal hits him on the ear and lands at his feet. Three young women are washing pig entrails in a brook on the other side of the hedge. The boldest, Arabella Donn, catches his eye immediately. Hardy's description is deliberate and unflattering: she is a complete and substantial female animal, nothing more and nothing less. Jude retrieves the offal and meets her on a plank bridge above the stream. Arabella performs her practised dimples by a small suction maneuver that Jude does not notice; a wordless flash of recognition passes between them that Jude registers as instinct rather than choice. She tells him her name, mentions there is nobody else courting her at present, and she might be available by Sunday.

Jude agrees to call. Shouldering his basket, Jude walks on. For a brief, clear moment he perceives the incompatibility between Arabella and everything he has built toward, Hardy compares it to seeing an inscription by the light of a falling lamp before darkness returns. The lamp goes out almost immediately. On the far bank, Arabella's friend Anny delivers a flat, accurate assessment to the others: he is as simple as a child, has never looked at a woman before in his born days, and is to be had by any woman willing to set herself to catch him the right way. The chapter that opened with Jude rehearsing his Latin ends with Arabella's friends doing a colder kind of calculation.