Jude the Dark and Social Darwinism Jude the Dark is indeed a lesson in cruelty and despair; the inevitable by-products of Social Darwinism. The book's main characters are controlled by the "binding arm of extraordinary muscular power"(1) of fate, feebly resisting the influence of their own sexuality, as well as the society and nature around them. Jude's world is one in which only the strongest survive, and he is clearly not equipped to be among the fittest. In keeping with the strong Darwinian undercurrents running through the book, a kind of “natural selection” ensures that Jude’s offspring will not survive to procreate either. Their death by murder and suicide is just one of many grisly examples of cruelty in the novel, and there are many others (such as the cruel revelation that Latin is not simply "decodable" in English, this which shatters Jude's naive pretensions about learning this language and Jude's rejected college application, without even having the opportunity to be tested, and Sue's overthrow of all her ideals; and decisions upon the death of her children, which she considers a sort of divine warning, and her subsequent return to Phillotson, to name a few). Hardy's view of all this cruelty is told with a dark irony that is evident in Jude's death scene. While the celebrations of the outside world continue in unconscious mirth, Jude himself quotes morbid poetry: "May the day perish that I was born, and the night that it was said, A man child is conceived." ("Hooray!")(2)This ironic commentary on the cruelty of life continues at Jude's funeral; Jude's aspirations for a college education never came to fruition, and yet...in the middle of paper ......s; they are at the mercy of indifferent forces that manipulate their behavior and their relationships with others" (5). This manipulation of fate, and the resulting disparity between human goals and what is actually achieved, makes the lesson taught in Jude the Obscure largely about the cruelty of nature and society. Endnotes: (1) Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985, p. 41 (I.-vii). (2) Ibid., p. 426 (VI.-xi).(3) Ibid., p. 430 (VI.-xi).(4) Ibid., p. 65 (I.-x).(5) Abrams, MH, ed. ., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., Vol. 2., Norton, New York, 1993, p. 1692. Bibliography: Abrams, MH, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., Vol. 2., Norton, New York, 1993. Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, Oxford University Press, Oxford., 1985.