著者

唐戸 信嘉

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.6, pp.125-132, 2014

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When Thomas Hardy published Jude the Obscure, it was bitterly criticized by reviewers chiefly for its unconventional discourses on "marriage," "family," and "sexual instinct." Although it is, as critics have agreed unanimously, obvious that an antagonistic attitude to Victorian domestic ideology provoked the reader's antipathy, a more accurate analysis of the socio-cultural context in which Jude was written and read would be needed to clarify what the radicalism of "the marriage question" in the text was. This paper first gives a brief outline of the institution of marriage which was strongly conditioned by social evolutionary theory. This theory identified the patriarchal and monogamous family as one of the most important achievements of evolutionary advance. While evolutionist anthropologists formulated the late Victorian norm of marriage, the 1890s marked a turning point in the interpretation of marriage as a result of the publication of Edyard Westermarck's The History of Human Marriage; it rejected the evolutionist theory of primitive matrimonial anarchy and cast a doubt upon the patriarchal tradition inimical to the idea of sexual equality. Accepting a new historical point of view through which the contemporary institution of marriage loses its historical legitimacy, Jude redefines marriage as a private act whose duration depends only on the couple's will, and also revolts against the evolutionist ideology which, looking on a family as the social unit, coerces people into compulsory monogamy. In the process of analysing matrimonial conventions, the text discloses their exclusive structure and detects that they arise from the desire to monopolize wealth. While symbolizing the historical shift of the idea of "marriage" in the 1890s, Jude's attack on the hypocrisy of the middle-class ideology was, we can conclude, premature (only four years after the publication of Westermarck's book) and drew heavy criticism from many readers.