SOURCE: "Hardy's Jude: The Pursuit of the Ideal as Tragedy," in The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic-Epic-Tragic, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984, pp. 307-18.

In the following essay, Abdoo maintains that Jude the Obscure is a tragic novel in the classical tradition.

All tragedy is grotesque. (Thomas Hardy, Life, August 13, 1898)

Introduction

Virginia Woolf's tribute to Thomas Hardy was written shortly after his death on January 11, 1928. In it she said: "if we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists." She goes on to assert that although it is "the most painful" and "pessimistic" of his novels, Jude the Obscure "is not tragic." Hardy, himself, in the 1895 Preface to the First Edition of the novel referred to Jude as "simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions … not of the...