Rinaldo

I had read Jude the Obscure long long ago, and didn't remember a whole lot about it, but did remember the events of this chapter (let's face it, they'd be hard to forget), so I was wondering how Michael would handle it, given his frequent repetition of what he hoped for as a culminating event in the book. He rose to the occasion, and dealt with it with the gravitas it deserves. To the best of my knowledge, this is pretty much the most horrible and devastating incident in all of English literature, if not beyond. Incidentally, one matter from last week (figuring that nobody will be reading a week-old topic): as to Jude and Sue marrying, we were told only that they went to London for a few days, and upon returning let the neighbors know that they'd tied the knot. But we the readers didn't know it directly, and Hardy never affirmed it himself.

Thank you for this excellent episode of one of my favorite podcasts. Two interesting topics that get tangled up in this story are "cousin marriage" (which has a whole history and remains legal in most of the world including most of the US) and the British university system, which was and is so different from ours -- no community college, no signing up for just a course or two, in fact no courses as such. It really was an exclusionary system designed for the upper classes, but it's confusing because it uses familiar words (college, scholarship) with quite different meanings. I look forward to each new chapter!

As the cousin thing isn't going to go away in this book, a look at an article on Cousin Marriage like the one in Wikipedia can be helpful for historical perspective. Though we (yes, including me) see it as odd or distasteful now, the feeling against it is relatively recent and in fact was surfacing precisely at the time shown in the book, with mild statements like "It is not good for cousins to marry." The practice used to be fairly common: in times and places where people had to marry within their social class, and seldom left the village where they were born, choice was sometimes limited. Marrying a first cousin remains legal (and thus not classified as incest) in much of the world today, including a majority of the states of the US.