Análisis Constitucional de la Participación

The most famous child to die by suicide of the Victorian era is, like most famous Victorian children, a fictional one. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, took the figure of the death-obsessed, death-desiring, “old-fashioned” child to its logical and horrific conclusion in the character of “Little Father Time,” Jude’s nine-year-old son who murders his half-siblings, then kills himself. It’s hard to resist reading Little Father Time metaphorically—after all, this is a child to whom anyone who wants to write about or discuss him must refer, repeatedly, as “Little Father Time,” the only name that he apparently knows when he comes to live with Jude and Sue. Bizarrely, Sue doesn’t even ask her partner’s son his name until the day after Little Father Time moves in with them. The child’s name is so unimportant that his mother never mentions it in her letter to Jude, and Jude and Sue do not initially think to ask him (244). Jude and Sue officially name the boy Jude, but typically call him “Little Time,” and the narrator often refers to him simply as “the boy” (the reason that he doesn’t have a name, incidentally, is both in anticipation of his

death and in protest against the Victorian cult of mourning—his mother never had him christened, since if he “died in damnation, it would save the expense of a Christian funeral”) (244). Susan Zeiger compares the weirdly aged Father Time to Paul Dombey, another “old-fashioned,” or prematurely aged, child, and offers him up as an example of Jack Halberstam’s “queer time.” cx

Franco Ferrucci sees Little Father Time as an answer to all of the rest of the texts that appear in this dissertation, imaging him taking literary vengeance for all of his fictional brothers and sisters who were “murdered” by authors over the past century in service of the Victorian cult of childhood. “Who are the ‘too menny?’” Furrucci wonders. “Perhaps the sacrificed children?” (129).cxi I’m

inclined to agree with both of these readings, but I also want to take Little Father Time and his incredibly violent actions literally. Father Time is a plot device, certainly, but he’s a device that reacts to real-world political and economic constraints.

Sally Shuttleworth writes that Jude the Obscure’s murder/suicide “scene acts as a direct assault on the reader, a deliberate attack on our novel-reading sensibilities, where children customarily represent hope for the future, a promise of continuity and development” (335).cxii

While Shuttleworth is correct that the scene is clearly meant to assault the reader’s senses, late nineteenth-century audiences were not used to looking at children as symbols of futurity in precisely the same way that early twenty-first-century audiences are. While Little Father Time’s suicide and murder of his siblings was certainly shocking to contemporary readers, his death probably wasn’t. Little Father Time is coded, in the same ways that Dickens’s Little Nell and Paul Domby are, as an “old fashioned” child who is going to die. Hardy doesn’t invent a new type of child, he takes a very familiar Victorian figure of the child to its logical conclusion, making that child’s agency in his own death explicit. Father Time’s stepmother, Sue, remarks after his death that “It was not unreasonable for him to die; it was part of his sad nature” (301), linking Father

Time to other well-known child characters who “like to die.” Little Father Time may have a somewhat darker personality than Little Nell, but his desire for death and his precociousness are actually very similar to hers. Father Time, though, has not yet learned to love death, as Nell does, but merely to find life pointless and depressing. While Nell spends her time in a chapel full of tombs, thinking about how lovely and peaceful it would be to be dead there (Old Curiosity Shop 392-393), Father Time can’t quite move beyond his own over-the-top morbidity to find the beauty and joy that his contemporaries do in death—“I should like the flowers very very much,” he explains to his parents “if I didn’t keep on thinking that they’d be withered in a few days” (Hardy 262). Hardy’s note of “sympathy” to a friend who had lost a child, in which he admitted that “to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one considers what he has escaped” (Shuttleworth 347), also feels like a darker echo of Dickens’ and comfort book authors’ admonishments that one should be glad of having an eternal (dead) child. The “reasonable” and expected conclusion to Father Time’s story is that he would die—it is his agency in this death, and his insistence that his siblings join him in death, that is so shocking.

Certainly, some contemporary reviewers were disturbed by Jude the Obscure in ways that they were not by more conventional tales of children enduring poverty and wanting to die. The staff of the Glasgow Evening Post, in particular, seem to have been deeply offended by the book: an early review suggested that fans of Hardy’s earlier work should buy the book—to burn it. (November 7, 1895). Later, another review declared that it had “been . . . universally condemned” (November 21, 1895), and, still later, a third review was published to remind readers that Jude was “a titanically bad book” (December 14, 1885). The Post’s claim that the book had been “universally condemned” was dubious, at best—most other contemporary reviews of Jude the

The Manchester Courier was impressed by the “force and art of the story,” even if they found its

content “repugnant” at times (November 11, 1895). Many critics, however, apparently found the brutal murder/suicide depicted in Jude as laughable as Oscar Wilde found Little Nell’s death in

The Old Curiosity Shop. The Morning Post reviewer found the book “pretentious,” and ridiculous

in its overwhelming melancholy (November 7, 1895). The review published in the Pall Mall

Gazette (of “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” fame) describes the plot satirically—“And

so in due course an unblessed family appears; and soon early and later infants are attracting momentary attention by hanging each other with box-cord on little pegs all round the room”— before “turn[ing] from laughter to tears” at the very end to beg “Mr. Hardy” not to “disappoint us again.” The title of the Pall Mall Gazette’s review is “Jude the Obscene,” but the obscenity in question has more to do with the book’s depiction of sexuality outside of marriage than with the murder and suicide of the children, which the reviewer treats as a joke.cxiii That these reviewers

apparently found the book both laughable and obscene, though, hints at a discomfort behind the laughter—Jude the Obscure is, at times, undeniably ridiculous in its pathos, but the scene in which Jude and Sue find their three children dead by murder/suicide is also genuinely surprising and disturbing. Why, then, would the appropriate response to the murder/suicide of several children be laughter? What might this laughter be covering over?