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Houria Baqir

(0325-BH-ENG-2015)

Dr.Sajjad Ali Khan

22 December 2017

Adverse effects of domestic life on a child’s psychology: Does Thomas Hardy succeed in

justifying Father Time’s character?

Argument:

Domestic life is not just the epitome of a perfect life as considered by Victorians.

Sometimes it proves to be the worst thing that can happen to a child’s mind especially in lower

classes. The domestic life depicted in Jude the obscure gave birth to the domestic violence that

made an adverse effect on Father Time’s mind.

Proposal:

In this essay I propose that the domestic life that is not really in its stable state leaves an

unfortunate impact on the mind of a child. Victorians laid quite an emphasis on domestic life and

encouraged large families but large families, especially in poor households, lead to a disaster.

This essay focuses on how a child’s mind is too sensitive to bear the troubles of this life.

First part of this essay will deal with the negative side of the domestic life, focusing on

the large and poor families. The second part will present the intensity with which a child

perceives certain things. It focuses on how something that is not really a great deal for adults
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may become a matter of life and death for a child. The third and last part will deal with Hardy’s

depiction of a sensitive and innocent child and how the quarrels and divorce of Father Time’s

parents evoked him to commit a suicide.

Jude the Obscure, the last completed novel by Thomas Hardy, began as a magazine serial

in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. He was one of the greatest

writers of the Victorian era. This novel focuses on the negligence of the state towards its people

and how it affected Jude and his Domestic life. Thomas Hardy was considered as a man who was

ahead of his time due to his liberal ideas. England maintained strict laws regarding marriage and

divorce which Hardy criticized both publicly and in his fiction. Due to these reasons, his work

was highly criticized by the audience. In his novel Jude the obscure, he not only discussed the

errors of Victorian age.

Domestic life is considered as the ideal form of living in most parts of the world. In upper

classes, may be this way of living doesn’t cause much problems and it actually is a source of

fulfillment and love but if we talk about the poor class, then this often leads to disaster. Every

child is a gift and a joy. But when income is scarce and a family is already struggling, why do

parents expand their families? A child who is a member of a poor domestic family does not get a

chance to live his life in a normal manner. He is not even able to have the basic necessities of

life. Domestic violence is not always in the form of physical violence. Sometimes parents

unknowingly subject their children to domestic violence that affects them mentally. The lack of

attention from parents makes a child emotionally unstable. It harshly affects their developmental

growth. When the environment around them is not stable and full of miseries, they began to

question their own existence. Children often suffer an emotional and psychological trauma from

living in homes where they don’t get the love they deserve, where there is a lack of resources and
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basic needs. They become creatures full of fears and insecurities or they just become numb. A

family with 5 to 6 children will at least have one child, who will not be emotionally fine. So the

domestic life of poor people is usually unstable. A behavioral scientist and economics professor

talk in this issue as “So if you want to understand the poor , imagine yourself with your mind

elsewhere. You did not sleep much the night before. You find it hard to think clearly. Self-control

feels like a challenge. You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day. On

top of the other material challenges poverty brings, it also brings a mental one… Under these

conditions, we all would have (and have) failed.”

When a child is born, he is just like an empty notebook and it is the society and the

environment that start writing on it. We are all much more sensitive to the world around us then

we usually like to imagine ourselves as beings. Childhood is the phase of life where a child

grasps information from his surroundings to the highest level. They feel things much more

deeply, they make little decisions by keeping the happenings around them in their minds. So if

something that affects you in your childhood in a really deep manner, then that thing will surely

not leave your mind for the rest of your life. Experiences of childhood live with you forever.

People who suffer from abusive childhood never really get a chance to get rid of it throughout

their lives, in their minds, it’s always there, haunting them. Emotional abuse, including ridicule,

intimidation, rejection and humiliation, is experienced by about one third of children worldwide,

according to the World Health Organization.

The character of Father Time in Jude the obscure, by Thomas Hardy represent such a

child whose environment made him take a decision that destroyed everybody’s life. Throught his

little life, he had been rejected by everybody around him. His grandparents, his mother Arabella,
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his Father, all of them failed to give him the love he deserved. The domestic issues of Jude’s

household resulted in the death of his child. Children take everything way too seriously because

they are too sensitive. When Father Time noticed that he was rejected by every single person he

goes too, he began to consider himself as a burden. In the novel, Father Time cries to Sue, “I

oughtn’t to have come to ‘ee – that’s the real truth! I troubled ‘em in Australia and I troubled

folk here. I wish I hadn’t been born!” Since his birth, almost everything around him was

pessimistic. He suffered a life time of miseries in just some early years of childhood.

Keeping in mind the fact that how sensitive the mind of a child is, we can assume why

Little Father Time took such a big step. A child, who since he gained consciousness considered

himself a burden got scolded by his step mother who complained about her large family in

anger, found out a way to lessen their burdens. He wanted to make himself of some worth, that is

why in order to help his parents and prove himself as not a burden but a blessing killed his

siblings and hanged him. His innocent mind couldn’t think of a better way to deal with the

problems. So he did what the environment around him taught.

Mind of a child is not something that adults are supposed to take granted for. Even

Thomas Hardy himself was influenced by something in his early years of growth that affected

him for the rest of his life. “In his early years, he saw two men hanged from a tree which made a

strong mark upon his plastic brain. He it is said never missed a funeral though he rarely attended

a marriage party”

I will conclude my essay with the truth that a child’s mind is extremely sensitive and the

problems of large and poor domestic families can affect them in a way that can’t be cured.
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Through the character of Little Father, Hardy showed us the sensitivity of children’s mind and

how the society can harm their thoughts and feelings.

Works Cited:

● McConnell, James. Understanding Human Behavior. 1980. Print.

● Hardy, Thomas. "Jude the Obscure." By Thomas Hardy. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Dec. 2017.

● Saxon, Jill, and Robert S. Siegler. How Children Develop, 3rd Edition. New York: Worth,

2010. Print.

● Burt S. A., McGue M., Krueger R. F., Iacono W. G. (2005). How are parent-child conflict

and child externalizing symptoms related over time? Results from a genetically

informative cross-lagged study. Development and Psychopathology, 17, 145–165.