from high atop the jack jack memorial reading throne here in the Jill Schwartz

Memorial Library within the wilds of Connecticut.

This is obscure the podcast, in which I read Jude the obscure out loud and comment on it as I go. I am your friend, your boom companion, your

literary Mansplanar in chief and Victorianologist Michael Ian Black.

It is a joy, as always, to undertake this journey with you.

We're galloping towards the end here of the book. It's a wedding day. Jude and Arabella are to be united once again in wetted bliss. And we know just how blissful they were in the previous

incarnation of their marriage, a marriage remembered best for the moment

of executing a pig in the mud. That is what they are returning themselves to through the

machinations of the slippery Arabella.

She has gotten her betrothed into a drunken stupor.

She has extracted promises from him he has no interest in keeping. And yet, as he says,

right before they leave, if I am bound in honor to marry her as I suppose I am.

So help me God.

I have never behaved dishonorably to a woman or to any living thing. I am not a man who wants to save himself

at the expense of the weaker among us. And there is of course a delicious irony in describing himself as stronger than Arabella because who has a stronger will than Arabella Dawn, who, among any of the characters in Jude the obscure has pursued her own self-interest with

more vigor than that little tramp Arabella. She has spent a lifetime at this point, conniving and

cajoling, wheedling and dealing, and now she has wheedled for her old husband to return to her again in his moment of greatest

despair, well maybe second greatest moment of despair.

After all, there was a murder suicide involving his own children.

But Jude is both in a kind of blackness and still in his cups.

And he has agreed to leave the Bacchanal celebration

that is going on in Arabella's home to accompany her to the little church and re-marie.

...