Society in Daisy Miller and Jude the Obscure

The environment has played a great role in the formation of these two realists, because Wessex is not New York and Britain is not America though they share the same language. James wanted to correct mistakes existing in his society by comparing it to Europe and its values, which led people to hate him and call him a traitor. Hardy’s daring and audacity, took him to end up his prose career earlier than he expected. But, in general their works are masterpieces and will help generations to come discover realism in literature.

Both Henry James and Thomas Hardy wrote stories on characters challenging their societies; the 1st one was focusing on appearances without paying attention to the inside of the characters and that’s very obvious in Daisy Miller’s reality that the readers get to know she is innocent till the end of the story. While the 2nd one pays attention to what his characters feel more on their morality, because in fact Jude and Sue are wrong in their love story but for Hardy their intention is built on a strong path which is happiness.

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Another thing is that James does not give a great importance to the financial side of the characters i.e. all the characters in this story are rich; but Hardy pictures the struggles a poor man can face in order to build his life, and as Edith Wharton says “the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it” (wharton, 1920).

Furthermore, the darkness in Jude the obscure is very patent because it is the society’s creation whereas the darkness in Daisy Miller is the author’s production; because the harsh ending Daisy had, was evitable because she was the most innocent girl a man could meet, her fault she was open-minded. The serious question to be asked in Jude the Obscure is the following: how is it possible for a student (who admires his teacher) falls in love with his teacher’s wife? The answer can somehow difficult, since it is impossible to guess what Hardy’s sick mind was thinking about. Both writings are amazing in terms of treating the psychological aspects of the characters and the morality of the society, but Hardy encourages the challenge of the society while James does not tolerate it at all. James was not a big fan Hardy “Henry James, who regarded hardy as a poor imitator of George Eliot” (bloom, 2005).

In Jude the Obscure (1895), Thomas Hardy was in fine fettle and intrepid in excoriating marriage as a public institution and religion as a tool controlling this institution. The author in this novel did not pay attention to morality, because the love that Jude had for Sue did not pay respect for the society’s principled (morals). The novel portrays the miserable destiny of the hero; in a way the writer wants us to have sympathy for Jude (the hero), who loses his mother after committing suicide because no feeling for her husband (Jude’s father). In this point, the author wants his readers to fall in emotion-reason conflict to see how it is very hard for an orphan to live such distressed existence. The same thing with Sue who was living hellish existence, because she was married to a person, she did not love. Even though, she left him for her lover Jude but she was still living in sorrow, seeing as the society excluded her and rejected her because for them she was a sinner. The novel pictured the psychological pain that men and women could face in their lives, if they dare to challenge the society and its norms.

Henry James’ Daisy Miller which is described by many critiques as an outrage to American girlhood; it has an international theme enclosed in the American-European conflict. In this novella, the writer wanted to show to his readership that there are two types of rich people in the American society; the first type they are rich (Europeanized) but they have morals, and the second one they are rich (newly), they can travel to Europe, but they do not know how to behave, they lack education and culture though they have money. So, from this point a deduction is to be made, Henry James used this theme in order to show men and women confronting the complex society. Another important feature in this masterpiece is the central consciousness, in which the characters are seen from different angles i.e. the story is more vivid and the reader can get to know the events from a central observer point of view, in this case the audience discover Daisy from what Winterbourne thinks of her, if like Winterbourne is the audience’s eyes and ears inside the story.

Moreover, James wanted to convey a clear and strong message through this story, the characterization has a great importance and for him a strong plot with a weak combination of characters is needless, the thing he argued in his essay Art of Fiction «no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind” (James, 1884). Another amazing aspect of this novella is the use of scenic episodes through unveiling how the characters conduct. The intention of the writer behind writing this work can be interpreted in two different ways; the first one by writing this novella which was pointed for juvenile American girls, James wanted to give them a lesson in order to be more refined and sophisticated, because he was interested in his country and its image. The second one which many critiques agree on is that the main reason for writing this novella is to censure young American girls, because for the writer “if you lose reputation you lose life” (james, 1878 ). All in all, James wanted us to discover the American society from different point of views identified in the different way of thinking the characters have.

Realism in literature is a movement that came as a reaction against romantic lore. It started to emerge when writers wanted their works to be a bona fide and tangible representation of their societies. It appeared for the 1st time in France with Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, then in Russia with Ivan Turgenev and others; afterwards it was spread in Europe and the whole world. In Britain, this genre appeared within the industrial revolution and the shift of people from a rural atmosphere to urban places. The British realists were portraying the problems of social ranks and privilege in the country at that time; among these writers there are George Eliot who sees realism as “the faithful representing of common things (Eliot, 1883); another very famous realist is Thomas Hardy who was fearless and daring, wanted his works to pragmatic and lifelike, this is very patent in his novel Jude the Obscure (1895). Whereas, realism in America emerged after the end of the civil war when writers started to write about people becoming quickly rich without caring for morals, and this is the main theme Henry James used for his 1879 novella Daisy Miller.