Imaginary Education:

Jude the Obscure and Right To Education

By Deniz Esen and Bengi Aktaş

Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure is a novel that bears traces of Victorian social life and tells the life of Jude Fawley a young, lower-class man who dreams of getting a university education in Victorian England. The bildungsroman was published in 1895 and it is considered a bleak masterpiece by Hardy that often hurts our hearts. Jude Fawley is the character that we accompany through his every thought and dream as he lives in Marygreen and works as a stoneworker. He dreams of becoming a scholar in Christminster modeled after Oxford and suffers through hardships and problems that reflects the 19th century. Hardy throws us into the character of Jude’s life to give us a glimpse of the social class discrimination of the period and wanted us to watch his struggles.

Jude who grew up with a love of academic self-development is also influenced by Phillotson portrayed as an idealistic teacher in Christminster. Jude thinks of Christminster as the center of science and religion, believing that he will be happy if he goes there and gets an education. In Jude’s thoughts, this place will make a person competent and respected, and it is his only dream to go there and get an education that will do justice to the books he has read through his efforts. But when he goes to Christminster, he encounters class discrimination and this separation allows us to witness the worst moments of his life. Jude, who struggles with his social and economic class for his education, is rejected by the university he applied for because he has a lower-class status. The academic university education that he dreamed hindered by prejudiced administrators. This situation, which can also be described as an epiphany in terms of raising awareness of freedom of education in the reader allows us to see the foundation of the novel on the lack of education along with Jude’s poverty.

Jude The Obscure is the story of a child who was born into the lower class and humiliated throughout his life, even deprived of his right to education and freedom, leaving him with unfortunate events and relationships, which shape his life. The staple of being a low class shapes his life, as he wastes the potential he sees in himself. Jude was disappointed that his dream of the right to education, which he believed in, was not accepted by the university. Social class discrimination, a brutal reality that the author himself believes in, is described by the destruction of Jude’s dream of education. The story of Jude Fawley, who dreams of academic education and status, is let down by society’s worst attributes; the poverty, discrimination, and corruption told in the novel mirrors the era’s harsh social conditions and portrays the importance of the right to education. Education affects one’s quality of life and helps shape human life, and therefore Jude’s regret for not having an academic education experience persisted throughout the novel.