Form and content are inseparable. Story depends on technique, de? pends, Henry James claimed, on "every word and every punctuation point."1 Although Thomas Hardy could be expected to resist his contem? porary's strict attention to minutiae, James's broad point about the in? terdependence of idea and form nonetheless helps explain problems in Hardy's Jude the Obscure and particularly in that elusive character, Sue Bridehead, who is a touchstone for many of the difficulties posed by Hardy's final novel. Critics have called this character childish, selfish, sadistic, masochistic, narcissistic, and frigid, all in explanation of what has been defined as her dominant trait: inconsistency.2 But these conclu? sions have not satisfied even their authors, among whom Irving Howe is representative in cautioning: "Yet one thing, surely the most important, must be said about Sue Bridehead. As she appears in the novel itself, rather than in the grinder of analysis, she is an utterly charming and vibrant creature."3 Perhaps a character can be so fluid and complex that she eludes the combined critical efforts to capture her. But, before despairing of analysis altogether, we should consider Sue's inconsistency and elusiveness in light of formal difficulties in Hardy's last novel. That Sue Bridehead has resisted satisfactory analysis points both to problems in the formal conception o? Jude and to the inadequacies of its point of view in conveying a growing sensitivity to other versions ofthe novel's central experiences. An omniscient narrator, such as Hardy offers in Jude, should be a guarantee of reliability, but Hardy's final narrator eludes and evades. And, for the first time, Hardy lets the perspective of a single character, Jude Fawley, dominate the story. To complicate matters further, it is not clear to what extent Jude's perspective is judged by the narrator, or even, as criticism has made clear, to what extent Hardy

中文翻译：

---

一个人的视角：托马斯·哈代和难以捉摸的苏新娘

形式与内容密不可分。故事取决于技术，德？亨利·詹姆斯声称，“每一个词和每一个标点符号都悬而未决。”1 尽管可以期望托马斯·哈代会抵制他的蔑视？porary 对细节的严格关注，James 的宽泛点在什么地方？尽管如此，思想和形式的相互依赖有助于解释哈代的《无名的裘德》中的问题，尤其是在难以捉摸的角色苏布里德黑德中，他是哈代最后一部小说所带来的许多困难的试金石。评论家称这个角色幼稚、自私、虐待狂、受虐狂、自恋和冷漠，所有这些都是为了解释她的主要特征：不一致。2 但这些结论呢？甚至连他们的作者都不满意，其中欧文·豪 (Irving Howe) 的代表警告说：“还有一件事，当然最重要的，一定要说到 Sue Bridehead。当她出现在小说本身而不是分析的磨砺中时，她是一个非常迷人和充满活力的生物。”3 也许一个角色可以如此流畅和复杂，以至于她无法通过综合批判性努力来捕捉她。但是，在此之前完全绝望的分析，我们应该考虑到苏在哈代最后一部小说中的形式上的困难的前后矛盾和难以捉摸。传达对小说中心体验的其他版本越来越敏感。像哈代在《裘德》中提供的无所不知的叙述者应该是可靠性的保证，但哈代的最终叙述者却躲避和逃避。而且，哈代第一次让裘德·福利这个单一角色的视角主导了整个故事。更复杂的是，目前尚不清楚叙述者在多大程度上判断了裘德的观点，甚至，正如批评所表明的那样，哈代在多大程度上