Three Unhealthy Family Generations in 'Jude the Obscure'.

 Academic Information :

Name : Dangar Rinkal Nathabhai

Roll no.20

Enrollment no.4049206420220007

Batch : M.A (2022-24)

Paper Name : Literature of the Victorians 

Paper code : 22395

Paper no.104

Topic : Three Unhealthy Family Generations in    'Jude the Obscure'

Submitted to : S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.U Bhavnagar 

Submitted on : 07/11/2022

Three Unhealthy Family Generations in 'Jude the Obscure'.

As we are of the Psychology that many factors like Cultural,Social,Education are responsible to the behavior of a person or it shapes the personality.

Here in the novel there is the only reason for mental instability in characters because they are having unhealthy family relations and it has developed the chain of three generations.

Let's have an introduction of the writer of 'Jude the Obscure'

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England. He was an excellent satirist, English Novelist and Poet. 

Like many writers of the late nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy was continually striving towards understanding the human condition with a particular interest in Psychology.

Many of his novels explore a wide range of aspects of the human mind and emotions.

'Jude the Obscure' Novel Introduction 

• Jude the Obscure is a novel written by Thomas Hardy,published in 1895, Hardy had written about relationships and how outer Norms can affect an Individual.

• Thomas Hardy's last finished novel, Jude the Obscure, tells the story of Jude Fawley, a working-class man who dreams of becoming a scholar, and of his doomed relationships with the seductive Arabella Donn and the true love of his life, Sue Bridehead.

• Of Course that novel is about love, marriage and relationships but it seems devoid of a stable family,we can find that the root of all of Jude's problems is that he is surrounded too much by the specters of his family.

Introduction of Characters of the Novel

• Jude Frawley

The novel's protagonist, a poor orphan who is raised by his great-aunt after his parents divorced and died. Jude dreams of attending the university at Christminister, but he fails to be accepted because of his working class background. He is a skilled stonemason and a kindly soul who cannot hurt any living thing. 

Jude's "fatal flaw" is his weakness regarding alcohol and women, and he allows his marriage to Arabella, even though it is unhappy, to distract himself from his dream. He shares a deep connection with his cousin Sue, but their relationship is doomed by their earlier marriages, society's disapproval, and bad luck. Jude starts out pious and religious, but by the end of his life he has grown agnostic and bitter.

• Sue Bridehead 

The novel's other protagonist and Jude's cousin. Sue's parents were divorced and she was raised in London and Christminster. She is an extremely intelligent woman who rejects Christianity and flirts with paganism, despite working as a religious artist and then teacher. Sue is often described as "ethereal" and "bodiless" and she generally lacks sexual passion, especially compared to Jude. Sue marries Phillotson as a kind of rebuke to Jude for his own marriage to Arabella, and is then repulsed by Phillotson as a husband. She is portrayed as inconsistent and emotional, often changing her mind abruptly, but she develops a strong relationship and love with Jude. 

Though she starts out nonreligious, the death of her children drives Sue to a harsh, legalistic version of Christianity as she believes she is being punished for her earlier rebellion against Christianity, and she returns to Phillotson even though she never ceases to love Jude.

• Arabella Donn

Jude's first wife, a vain, sensual woman who is the daughter of a pig farmer. She decides to marry Jude and so tricks him into marrying her by pretending to be pregnant. Arabella sees marriage as a kind of entrapment and as a source of financial security, and she uses whatever means necessary to get what she wants. After Jude fails to provide for her, Arabella goes to Australia and takes a new husband there. She is often contrasted with the pure, intellectual Sue, as Arabella is associated with alcohol and sexual pleasure. When she wants Jude back she gets him drunk and forces him to marry her, and when he dies (or even just before) she immediately starts seeking a new husband.

• Richard Phillotson

Jude's schoolmaster at Marygreen who moves to

Christminster and fails to be accepted at the university there. Phillotson remains as a teacher, and he later hires Sue and falls in love with her. They marry, but Sue finds she cannot live with Phillotson as a husband. Though Phillotson is a conservative man, he finds that letting Sue leave him feels like the most moral decision, and he sticks by it even when he is punished by society for his disgrace and loses his job and respectability. Phillotson is a kindly, ethical man, but Sue's lack of love for him causes him great torment.

Little Father Time 

Jude's son with Arabella, he was born in Australia and sent to England to live with Jude years later. The boy was never named or given love, and his nickname is "Little Father Time" because he seems old beyond his years. Jude and Sue christen him as "Jude," but his old nickname sticks. Little Father Time is a world-weary, depressed child who lacks any curiosity or joy. He is portrayed as a result of the divorce, lovelessness, and bad luck in his life, and in this he acts as a symbol as well as a character. Little Father Time ultimately takes Sue's depressed words to heart and kills himself and Sue's two children in order to try to free Sue and Jude from their burdens.

These are the characters of the novel who are affecting each other's behavior and developing obscurity.

Three Unhealthy Family Generations in 'Jude the Obscure'

There are three generations which are being developed with the plot of the novel.

• Parents of Jude and Sue,

• Jude and Sue and 

• The Little Father Time and his Siblings

1.As I have introduced characters of the novel that Jude and Sue's parents are siblings and how their life made them obscure that both Jude's father and Sue's mother were been separated from their life partner is affecting their children's lives that Sue's mother left her husband and Jude's mother was no longer alive.

         When the novel begins Jude and Sue's father's are also dead but that sequence is affecting protagonists.

2.When there are two different protagonist that Jude is Religious and Sue is atheist but at the end they are converting their beliefs.They both live together without marriage which created difficulty for themselves and their children because Sue loved Jude though she didn't married him and returned to him with the permission of her husband.

As they were mentally unstable that they won't be able to deal with their financial crises, people who were against of their relationship and also in inspiring their own children also.

Now the third one is the generation which got a disastrous result of Unhealthy Family Relationships.

Little Father Time 

 

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.

Conclusion : That is how, Unhealthy Family Generations became dangerous for the growth of mental health of characters which ended with the death of innocent children,that how disastrous it can be.

The Analysis of Selected War poems

 Name: - Rinkal Dangar 

Roll No: - 18

Semester: - 2(Batch 2022-24)

Enrolment number: - 4069206420220007

Paper No: - 106

Paper name: : The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War II

Paper code: - 22399

Topic: -  The Analysis of Selected War poems

Submitted to: - Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Date of Submission:- 31/03/2023

Email Address: - dangarrinkal0609@gmail.com

Introduction:

• 

  Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon as War Poets

Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon were both war poets who wrote about their experiences in World War I.

Ivor Gurney was a British composer and poet who served in the war from 1915 to 1917, when he was wounded and sent back to England. His poems often focused on the soldiers' experiences in the trenches and the psychological toll of war. Some of his notable poems include "To His Love," "The Silent One," and "Severn Meadows."

Siegfried Sassoon was also a British poet and soldier who served in the war from 1914 to 1917. He became a vocal critic of the war and its leaders, and his poetry often reflected this disillusionment. Some of his notable poems include "The General," "Counter-Attack," and "Suicide in the Trenches." Sassoon's writing was influenced by his close friend and fellow war poet Wilfred Owen.

Both Gurney and Sassoon were deeply affected by their experiences in the war and used their poetry as a means of expressing their emotions and opinions. They both wrote vividly about the horrors of war and the impact it had on those who fought in it. Their poetry remains an important record of the experiences of soldiers in World War I and a reminder of the devastating consequences of conflict.

• “The Hero”

“The Hero” by the English poet Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967), is one of the many notable lyrics Sassoon wrote in response to World War I. Sassoon himself was a war hero, known for his unusual bravery, but eventually he turned against the conflict which he came to consider as pointless and badly managed. This poem reflects his disillusionment with the war.

The poem was first published in 1917 in Sassoon's collection "Counter-Attack and Other Poems." It reflects the disillusionment and bitterness felt by many soldiers who were sent to fight in the war, and the way in which they were often idealized and glorified by those who had never experienced the horrors of the battlefield.

The first stanza sets the scene by describing the soldier's death. He is killed by a shell, and the narrator describes the impact of the explosion in vivid detail. The second stanza describes the soldier's funeral, which is attended by mourners who view him as a hero. They believe that he died bravely and honorably, and they are proud of him.

However, in the third stanza, the tone shifts, and the narrator begins to question the idea of heroism. He suggests that the soldier's death was not heroic at all, but rather a meaningless and pointless waste of life. He questions the value of the soldier's sacrifice, asking "What candles may be held to speed them all? / Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes / Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes."

In the fourth stanza, the narrator imagines the soldier's mother grieving for her son. He suggests that she will not see her son as a hero, but rather as a victim of war. The final stanza concludes the poem by suggesting that the true heroes are not those who die in battle, but rather those who survive and continue to fight against the injustices of war

“ ‘We mothers are so proud / Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face bowed.”: The mother speaks as if for all British soldiers: perhaps the consolation that she finds in doing so is in subsuming herself in the collective loss of all the mothers of the nation. At any rate, these words do seem more sentimental than authentic: their clichéd expression helps to repress, perhaps, the great grief of the women.

Again, it's a satire of the Glorified War that the motherland is proud of the Dead Soldiers for the Bravery shown by them, doesn't matter that they lost their life for the meaningless War.

"The Hero" is a powerful poem that subverts the traditional idea of heroism in war. Sassoon uses vivid imagery and stark language to convey the brutal reality of war, and to challenge the idea that soldiers who die in battle should be celebrated as heroes. Instead, he suggests that the true heroes are those who fight against war and its devastating consequences.

• "The Target"

"The Target" is a poem by Ivor Gurney, a British poet and composer who served in World War I. The poem was written in 1917, during Gurney's time serving as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment on the Western Front.

The poem is a meditation on the nature of warfare and the human cost of conflict. It begins by describing a distant hillside, where a group of soldiers are firing their rifles at a target. Gurney describes the crackling of the shots and the smoke rising from the guns, creating a sense of tension and violence.

As the poem progresses, however, Gurney shifts his focus to the human cost of the soldiers' actions. He writes of the "souls" of the men who are firing, and the way that their lives are being consumed by the violence of the war. He also speaks of the "unseen dead," the soldiers who have already been killed in battle and who are now haunting the landscape.

The poem ends with a haunting image of a single bullet that has missed the target and struck a tree. Gurney suggests that this stray bullet represents the randomness of war and the way that innocent lives can be caught up in its violence. He writes, "The tree stands there, and weeps, and weeps, and weeps."

Overall, "The Target" is a powerful anti-war poem that highlights the human cost of conflict. Gurney's vivid descriptions of the soldiers firing at the target are juxtaposed with his somber reflections on the toll that the war is taking on the men and the landscape. The poem is a poignant reminder of the need for peace and understanding in times of conflict.

"All's a tangle. Here's my job.

A man might rave, or shout, or sob;

And God He takes no sort of heed.

This is a bloody mess indeed".

First person narrator – an ordinary soldier explaining why he killed a German and how he now feels about it

“This is a bloody mess indeed.”

The line is significant here that at the end Soldier is able to understand the true meaning of War that war is nothing but the "Bloody Mess"

Yet God keeps still, and does not say/A word of guidance any way.”

The idea of god doing everything better and looking at everything is being criticized here as if he is looking at everything then why don't he do anything or at least speak anything?

Structure of the Poems 

"Target" is a three-stanza poem with irregular meter and rhyme scheme. The first stanza describes the scene of a soldier preparing to fire his rifle at a distant target. The second stanza shifts to the soldier's thoughts and emotions as he takes aim, including his fear and the brutal nature of his task. The final stanza concludes with the soldier firing his rifle and the target falling, but the poem's final lines suggest a sense of futility and emptiness.

The structure of "Target" reinforces the idea of fragmentation and dislocation that characterized much of the poetry of the First World War. The irregular meter and rhyme scheme mirror the chaos and unpredictability of the battlefield, while the fragmented narrative structure mirrors the shattered lives and minds of soldiers who were often unable to make sense of their experiences.

"The Hero," on the other hand, is a sonnet with a traditional meter and rhyme scheme. The poem describes a soldier who dies in battle and is praised as a hero for his sacrifice. However, the final lines of the poem reveal that the soldier was actually terrified and did not want to die. The sonnet form, with its strict rhyme scheme and meter, contributes to the ironic contrast between the soldier's true feelings and the heroic narrative that is imposed upon him

Conclusion: That is how in a Ordinary language of soldiers, Poets have been trying to show us the very ugly face of war rather than glorifying the deaths and bravery of Soldiers using it for the "Mother land" which is not itself.

However, "Target" and "The Hero" use their unique styles to convey the complex emotions and experiences of soldiers during World War I, and to challenge the traditional narratives of heroism and glory that were often used to justify the conflict.

Thank You!

Symbols in 'Rape of of the Lock'

 Academic Information 

Name : Dangar Rinkal Nathabhai

Roll no.20

Enrollment no.4049206420220007

Batch : M.A (2022-24)

Paper Name : 

Paper code : 2239

Paper no.102

Topic : Symbols in 'Rape of of the Lock'

Submitted to : S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.U Bhavnagar 

Submitted on : 07/11/2022

Symbols in 'Rape of the Lock'

Before we go for Introduction of Symbols in 'The Rape of the Lock' let's have an introduction of writer and the poem itself.

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translation of Homer.

Pope was inspired by classical Greek writer and was writing in a great satirical way.

Rape of the Lock 

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope.One of the most commonly cited examples of high burlesque, it was first published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems as a five-canto version  accompanied by six engravings. 

Pope boasted that this sold more than three thousand copies in its first four days. The final form of the poem appeared in 1717 with the addition of Clarissa's speech on good humor. The poem was much translated and contributed to the growing popularity of mock-heroics in Europe. 

This poem is a satire on the aristocratic people of Augustan age.

Characters of 'Rape of the Lock'

Poem is developed by its characters Ariel

Character Analysis

• Ariel 

Belinda's guardian sylph. At the opening of the narrative, he explains to Belinda through a dream that he is tasked with protecting her beauty and chastity. He feels that some great disaster is looming in the near future and warns her to "beware of man." Later, as Belinda is sailing to Hampton Court, Ariel calls up an army of sylphs to defend various parts of her, including her hair, her earrings, and her fan. In the vital moment before the Baron snips off Belinda's lock of hair, however, Ariel gives up helping Belinda. When he gains access to her inner thoughts at this moment, Ariel spies "An earthly lover lurking at her heart," meaning she is perhaps not as chaste as she ought to be. Even though Ariel seems to want to protect Belinda, there is definitely something a little sinister about him, too. If he is so interested in Belinda's chastity, why does he choose to send her a dream at the beginning which includes a young man.

• Baron 

The antagonist of the poem. Based on the historical Lord Petre, the Baron snips Belinda's lock on account of his infatuation with her remarkable beauty and refuses to give it back. Readers learn that, earlier that day, he created a bonfire to the god of Love made out of, among other things, books containing romantic stories, love letters, and tokens from past romantic attachments, in order to pray for success in winning Belinda in some way, and settled on "raping" her lock. And while his cutting of the lock is not equated with rape in the modern sense in the context of the poem, it means "theft" or "pillaging"-Pope is still using the word to connote injustice, and to unequivocally state that he has taken what he had no right to take. The fact that the Baron is only referred to by his title, revealing his masculinity and his station but nothing else, or else is satirically figured as a "knight," the height of courtly masculinity, allows Pope to metonymically cast a kind of witty judgment over all noblemen, and to question the contemporary assumption that they were the intellectual and moral leaders of their day.

Thalestris 

A courtly lady who befriends Belinda, and laments the loss of the lock with her. Like Belinda, she is subject to the "Sighs, sobs, and passions" dumped out of Umbriel's bag, which prompts her to take to the fight to regain the lock so aggressively. However, her name does recall that of the mythological queen of the Amazons, a group of fierce female warriors, which suggests that Pope might be teasing the reader here again with the question of how much the characters' actions are their own. Thalestris's name suggests she might herself be innately war-like, even without the influence of Umbriel.

The Queen of Spleen

Queen of the subterranean Cave of Spleen. A personification of the concept of spleen itself, she bestows hysteria, melancholy, and bodily dysfunction on women. She provides Umbriel with a bag of "Sighs, sobs and passions'' and a vial of "fainting fears, / Soft sorrows, melting griefs, and flowing tears," which he pours over Belinda and Thalestris, allowing Pope to once again suggest that the mortals are not really in control of their own feelings or actions.

Clarissa 

A lady at court who lends the Baron her scissors to chop off Belinda's lock of hair. She later finds the whole incident frustratingly trivial and delivers a speech about how physical beauty is ultimately fleeting and that instead women should concentrate on being as morally upright as they possibly can. Looks might prove attractive to the eyes, Clarissa declares, but virtue is most attractive to the soul. While her speech obviously makes good sense, it is typical of a more traditional style of poem which would be primarily concerned with didacticism, or simply telling the reader what the moral is. Pope subverts the conventions of this style of writing by refusing to end the poem here and instead concluding with the absurdity of the courtly battle. But Clarissa's name, meaning "clarity." hints that the reader might do well to take her wise advice.

⚫ Symbols in ' The Rape of Lock'

an artistic and poetic movement or style using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions, and states of mind. It originated in late 19th-century France and Belgium, with important figures including Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Redon.

• Belinda's Lock 

Belinda's lock of hair comes to symbolize the absurdity of the importance afforded to female beauty in society. Pope offers a hyperbolically metaphorical description of the two locks in Canto II, humorously framing the locks as alluring enough to virtually incapacitate any man who looks at them. The locks are "labyrinths" in which Love "detains" "his slaves" by binding their hears with "slender chains," thus poking fun at the idea that Belinda's beauty is truly powerful enough to make such a deep impact. This absurdity only grows as the poem progresses and after the Baron has snipped Belinda's lock. Under the influence of Umbriel,Thalestris laments the loss of the lock as the symbolic loss of Belinda's reputation in society, exclaiming. "Methinks already in your tears survey,/Already hear the horrid things they say." In Pope's day, the respectability of a woman in society depended upon her having a spotless reputation and being perfectly virtuous, and, in particular, sexually pure. Thalestris then is essentially saying that the loss of Belinda's lock is a rupture which damages all of the rest of her beauty, and the Baron's having taken it in so intimate a fashion compromises the idea that she is chaste, and that people will think she in some way allowed him to violate her body. 

Obviously, this makes very little sense, allowing the Pope to satirize the idea that beauty and virtue are so closely related. 

The lock's final ascension into the heavens is the most absurd part of the whole thing, and Pope's choice to cap off the whole poem with the transparently silly idea that the lock is too precious to remain on earth. that no mortal deserves to be so "blest" as to possess it, emphasizes the ridiculous amount of emphasis placed on female beauty in society.

• Playing Cards 

In the poem, the playing cards that Belinda, the Baron, and another gentleman use in their game of ombre symbolize the trivial nature of life at court. Pope describes the playing cards in the terms of an epic battle, where kings, queens, and nobles battle one another, accompanied by "particolour'd troops, a shining train, Draw forth to combat on the velvet plain." While epic heroes engaged in huge battles, where real kings, queens, and nobles' lives would have been at stake, this trio of modern figures at court-Belinda, the Baron, and the other gentleman-only come as close to epic battle as a game of ombre, where the cards make for a silly substitute for the lives which might be lost in a real battle. By infusing the card game with mock-seriousness, Pope consequently suggests that life at court for Belinda and her peers is likewise empty, trivial, and mockable.

• The Bodkin

Near the end of the final battle, Belinda draws "a deadly Bodkin from her side" and threatens the Baron with it. A bodkin is a pin for putting up hair. Like in the epics of the Greek poet Homer (9th or 8th century BCE), this weapon has a history. 

Belinda's great-great-grandfather wore rings that were melted down after his death to make "a vast Buckle for his Widow's Gown." It was reformed again into Belinda's "infant Grandma's Whistle." Then it became the bodkin it is now, which was first worn by Belinda's mother. Therefore, the bodkin symbolizes the storied swords and spears used by heroes in epic poems. 

• Rape 

The eighteenth century is an age of psychological insight. Every writer as well as his work is being analyzed in psychological terms. Modern psychology has proved that it is the sex psychology which determined the superiority of a sex. Sex is the nucleus of human life and its all activities. It is not the product of conventions, rather, it is just a natural instinct, which is reduced to some discipline by accepted social convention, morals, laws, etc. Sex is at the root of all moral and physical health. So it may be disciplined, but if it is curbed and suppressed, it leads to drastic consequences.

The lock in "The Rape of the Lock" is a symbol of the female organ and the rape of the lock symbolizes the rape of Belinda by the hands of Lord Peter. In fact, the poem projects a synthesis between sex and religion. The boys and the girls were allured to have relations and were in favour of free sex but religion did not allow it. Besides, they were also afraid of their social disreputation. So they had to suppress their natural instinct sometimes. 

Resultantly,established relations with others secretly. Belinda's grief was not the loss of chastity but her social disreputation. That's why she repented that Baron had cut the lock of hair.

Conclusion : 

That is how symbols are affecting the poem even the name Clarissa is itself significant which means clarity and Clarissa is the only one character with the mind in overall poem and all other characters events are also having their own meaning in the poem 'Rape of the Lock'.