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consciousness or even unconsciousness. These states, which might include the instinctual reactions of sexual desire, fear, hunger, warmth, or cold, come from the realm of the unwilled. For example, the narrative, in describing the way in which Jude singles out Arabella from her two companions, notes that he does so “for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters, unconsciously received” (p. 40). The description of the force that pushes Jude to keep his appointment with Arabella, despite his decision to spend the day in study, is equally suggestive of a drive rather than a decision: “In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him—something which had nothing in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to care little for his reason and his will” (p. 45).
    A second characteristic of literary naturalism is the depiction of the world in constant dynamism: The naturalist novel charts a series of vertical movements, risings and falls, that seem inevitable as well as extreme. One might think here of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, with its concomitant rise of Carrie from shopgirl to Broadway star and the fall of Hurstwood from club owner to the depths of the Bowery’s poverty. A third characteristic of literary naturalism is its interest in what we might call the “essential processes” of life: work, sex, and death. Instead of an interest in social interaction and the complexity of social arrangements, the naturalist novel focuses its attention on the essential or even biological facts of life. The topics of pregnancy, sexual drives, labor, and dying are depicted with a vividness not previously seen in the English novel.
    A prominent characteristic of literary naturalism is perhaps the one that pertains most crucially to Jude the Obscure. Sexual reproduction in literary naturalism, and especially in Jude the Obscure, has a firmly Schopenhauerian slant. Arthur Schopenhauer’s best-known and most influential work, The World as Will and Idea ( 18 18, 1844) exerted a tremendous pull over late-nineteenth-century European literary culture, although it exerted very little influence over professional philosophy. According to Schopenhauer, the universe is a cruel, hostile, and even wicked place, and any attempt through our own will—be that the will to exist or the will to know—to improve the world will inevitably increase our suffering; to Schopenhauer, suffering is the intrinsic fact about human life.
    As a result of this condition, what a person can do is try to reduce his or her will to almost nothing; he advocates doing this through fasting, voluntary poverty, and chastity. He defines the good person as someone who has recognized the universal quality of suffering and who, in withdrawing his or her will, refuses to participate in the perpetuation of that suffering. The crucial consequence of this thesis is that chastity is the ideal, for sexual procreation introduces into the world another suffering creature. Schopenhauer goes on, however, to acknowledge the difficulty of chastity because of what he sees as nature’s trap: Nature, which he sees as cleverer than any individual person, devised a trap so that life will be perpetuated, and that trap is sexual desire. In Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, sexual intimacy is nature’s way of tricking or trapping the individual into reproducing, perhaps even against his will. One can see the relevance of Schopenhauer’s ideas to Hardy’s novel, where sexual desire entraps various characters into actions or circumstance that will turn out badly for everyone. If Hardy’s novel is deeply sensuous, it is a sensuality riddled with a Schopenhauerian pessimism.
    The final characteristic element of the naturalist narrative bespeaks the influence of perhaps the most towering intellectual influence of the latter