SOURCE: "A Perspective of One's Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XII , No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 12-28.

In the following essay, Langland investigates Hardy's portrayal of Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, concluding that she is an "unevenly conceived character" riddled with inconsistencies, but that these flaws point to the novel's "distinctly modern" narrative sensibility.

Form and content are inseparable. Story depends on technique, depends, Henry James claimed, on "every word and every punctuation point." Although Thomas Hardy could be expected to resist his contemporary's strict attention to minutiae, James's broad point about the inter-dependence of idea and form nonetheless helps explain problems in Hardy's Jude the Obscure and particularly in that elusive character, Sue Bridehead, who is a touch-stone for many of the difficulties posed by Hardy's final novel. Critics have called this character childish, selfish, sadistic, masochistic, narcissistic, and...