P-104 Assignment

A Shadow from the Past: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure

Name-Daya Vaghani

Paper-Literature of the Neo-classical Periods

Roll no-07

Enrollment no-3069206420200017

Email id- dayavaghani2969@gmail.com

Batch-2020-22 (MA Sem-1)

Submitted to- S. B. Gardi Department of English,

                Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

 

Significance of little Father Time in "Jude the Obscure"

Little Father Time is Jude and Arabella's son. He is called Little Father Time because, although he is young in body, his spirit is old. He has a strong sense of time as transitory, meaning he is sad that nothing stays the same. For instance, he mourns that he can't enjoy the flowers in their full bloom because all he can see is that they will soon die.

Little Father Time simply can't live in the present: he is always looking to the future, and he is always seeing it as depressing. He represents a grim, almost hopeless outlook on life. Nothing will get better, he thinks. It will, however, get worse.

This mindset causes him to kill himself and Sue and Jude's children because he thinks there are too many of them and that they will be a burden. (To an extent, the pregnant Sue is also responsible for this for complaining bitterly about their economic woes to Father Time.)

Little Father Time as symbol

Little Father Time is a character in the novel, but he also acts as a symbol of coming of age and Hardy’s apprehensive view of the generation to come. Little Father Time lacks personality except as an excessively morbid, unexcitable child, but when he kills himself and Sue’s children it is the climax of the novel. As a symbol, Little Father Time represents the depression and amorality that Hardy sees as the inevitable result of the injustices in his society. Father Time is driven to despair by how poorly Jude and Sue are treated for being unmarried, and by his lack of love from Arabella and her parents. After Little Father Time’s death, the doctor actually diagnoses his murder-suicide as “in his nature” and “the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.” In this way Hardy horrifies his readers and makes his social critiques seem that much more urgent, implying that the injustices of his generation will lead to tragedy in the next.

Little Father time is Hardy's Jude the Obscure who hangs himself and his younger brother and sister, has provoked considerable critical commentary over the years. He has been variously interpreted as a grotesque monster, a Christ figure, a prophet of Doom, the choric voice of History, and a symbol of the Modern Spirit.! He is, to a degree, all of these. But, perhaps more significantly, he is an extension of his father's personality and temperament. In his essential loneliness and isolation, his hyper-sensitivity, his pessimistic outlook, and his suicidal bent, Father Time is clearly Jude Fawley's child. As such, he appropriately functions to advance the plot and to symbolize the significance of the mistakes Jude has made in the past. The similarity between Jude and Little Father Time is readily apparent. Sue is the first to comment on the likeness just after the boy comes to Aldbrickham to live with his father. Noting the resemblance between parent and child, Sue exclaims to Jude, "I see you in him!"2 Though Sue sees Arabella in the boy as well, the resemblance between mother and son is only physical whereas the likenesses between father and son are physical, situational, and psychological.Both Father Time and the young Jude are described by the narrator in similar terms. Jude, as a child, is presented as slender-framed, "puny and sorry"

Difference betewwn Father and Son:

The principle difference between father and son lies in the fact that in Jude periods of depression are offset by hopeful expectations. At the age of eleven, Jude appears "an ancient man in some phases of thought, [yet] much younger than his years in others" (p. 27; italics mine). Despite the overwhelming odds against his admission to a college, the young Jude continues to dream of Christminster and to plan for his future there. Several years after Jude has finally abandoned the goal for himself, he remains forward-looking. He idealistically imagines living out his dreams through his newfound son. Ironically, he makes plans to have the boy christened Jude and tells Sue, "Time may right things. . . . We'll educate and train him with a view to the university. What I couldn't accomplish in my own person perhaps I can carry out through him?" 

Significance of the death of other two children:

Much harder to understand for Sue and Jude-as well as for the reader - are the deaths of the other two children. John Holloway is not alone in condemning the gruesome scene. Holloway considers the hangings "an unparalleled literary disaster," partly "because the whole incident interrupts the novel almost like a digression, since it seems a far more elaborate disaster than any reader needs to prepare him for the only significant result, Sue's fit of remorse."8 Yet, just as Father Time's suicide is in keeping with his character, so too is his hanging the other children. Once again, comparison with his father helps to show the truth of this. Like his father, the boy feels responsible for the misfortunes of those around him. Jude first gives up his dream of Christminster and marries Arabella to protect her honor and then forsakes a secure job and his intention of becoming a clergyman to shelter Sue after she leaves Phillotson. Similarly, Little Father Time sacrifices himself and his siblings, thinking he can thereby alleviate the sufferings of his parents. When manifested in his son, Jude's misfortunes and personal weaknesses become exaggerated. Thus, Father Time's childhood is bleaker than Jude's; his outlook is unrelentingly pessimistic. Jude's attempts to assist others are sometimes simplistic, foolish, and self-damaging; but Father Time's attempt is twisted, bizarre, and self-destructive.

A Shadow from the Past:

Sue accurately describes Father Time as the only "shadow" on her relationship with Jude. His dark countenance does cast an ominous shade over their lives, one that foreshadows the doom of their relationship. As the product of a conventional marriage, Father Time represents the long-term ill effects of blind adherence to social convention. He also, paradoxically, serves as a dismal reminder of social conventions Sue and Jude cannot escape - social conventions which threaten to destroy them from without, in the form of public opinion, and from within in Sue's inability to feel secure in her nonconformity.

 After Father Time's death, Jude and Sue gaze upon the small corpse that embodies these messages:

 "The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died"

Senseless and tragic as the children's deaths are, they are made still more senseless and tragic by their profound effect on the lives of Sue and Jude. Not only does the loss of their children increase their misery, contrary to Father Time's childish intentions, but it also leads to a grim repetition of their earlier mistakes. Sue "voluntarily" gives herself to Phillotson a second time, and Jude is duped into repeating his marriage to Arabella to once more preserve her honor. Sue, transformed by her grief, concludes that she and Jude have been punished for "loving each other too much . . .” The couple cannot see their misfortune for what it is- a lesson from the past, but equally a lesson about the harshness of reality. Determinism accounts for much of the agony Jude and Sue experience. Part of it they unintentionally bring upon themselves, but much of it is unavoidable in a world such as that of the novel where, as Sue tells Father Time,

 "All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!"

David Lodge explains that in Jude the Obscure, life is presented as "a closed system of disappointment from which only death offers an escape."12 Perceiving the truth of this before the adults do, Little Father Time asks Sue, 

"It would be better to be out 0' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"

 After all his sorrows, the "predestinate Jude" shares his son's opinion and welcomes death, longing to "put an end to a feverish life which ought never to have been begun!" . On his deathbed, Jude curses his birth with his last words by repeating the verses from the third book of Job, "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man-child conceived." He closes with Job's question to God, "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?". In Jude the Obscure, father and son have acted out twin roles in a harsh arena where Crass Casualty determines each man's destiny. Sue, Arabella, and Phillotson have all been recognized as projections of Jude. 13 Surely, Jude's own son is as well. Because he "inherits" so many of his father's weaknesses, though in more exaggerated form, Little Father Time is a fitting reminder to Jude of the errors of his own past and of the grim perversity of each nan's fate.

Reference 

• Edwards, Suzanne. “A Shadow from the Past: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure.” Colby, vol. 23, Mar. 1987.

• Thomas Hardy (1949). Jude the Obscure. Macmillan. p. 738. ISBN 978-1-60303-779-2.

• Gordon, Walter K. “Father Time's Suicide Note in Jude the Obscure.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 22, no. 3, 1967, pp. 298–300. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2932443. Accessed 11 Feb. 2021.

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