The Horror of Aging

Abstract

When Sue Bridehead’s older husband, Richard Phillotson, accidentally enters her bedroom instead of his own and begins to undress in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sue wakes, cries, and promptly jumps out of her second floor bedroom window. Running outside to her aid, Richard finds that she has not “broken her neck,” and though she is dazed by her fall onto the gravel, she accounts for her drastic actions: “‘I was asleep, I think!’ she began, her pale face still turned away from him. ‘And something frightened me—a terrible dream—I thought I saw you—’” (181). Sue breaks off because waking does not resolve her nightmare, yet Phillotson is a dubious monster. Hardy takes care to stress that Sue’s dramatic flight was unnecessary; at least on this occasion, it was not sexual desire but rather Phillotson’s scholarly “preoccupation” in thinking of “Roman antiquities” that led him to Sue’s room. He is understandably “horrified” by Sue’s action, which she commits “before he had thought that she meant to do more than get air” (180), and he injures himself on the banister in his haste to help her. Nonetheless, the idea of marital relations with Phillotson inspires a Gothic horror so terrific that it causes a young bride to leap out a window. And although Phillotson is distressed that he has inadvertently caused her panic, he finds he cannot separate her horror from himself.