This 1895 novel produced such a scandal that it drove Hardy away from writing novels at all and pushed him into the safer arms of poetry for the rest of his days. Considered then a frank treatment of sexuality and extramarital liaisons, this novel cruelly indicts the limitations of late-Victorian society: its imperfect adoption of modernity (Sue’s modern temperament is not accommodated and ends up in religiosity, the only option that will forgive her for her sexuality), the lack of social mobility, the inaccessibility of education (Oxford is unbearably but permanently closed to the low-born stone-mason), the prudery (if Jude had been educated or less stiff about sexual morals, he wouldn’t have been trapped by the local flirt; and if they hadn’t rejected the lovely Sue and their children, they could have supported themselves), and the interconnections among these elements that damn the family and prevent them from surviving. Jude can certainly be shown to have a caste, an inflexible social identity that he is not allowed to transcend. The horrifying ending (the suicide of the children) makes it the most naturalistic novel of his production, and a continuation of the themes explored in Tess of the D’urbervilles—except in that the villain in the latter was an unscrupulous rake (a CHARACTER is at fault) and in the present work it is society at fault.
Perhaps the most radical element is its cynicism towards marriage as an institution. Jude and Sue do not marry because of their apparently superstitious but empirically accurate observation that marriage tends to ruin relationships. That they both end up going back to their spouses (Phillotson and Arabella) shows that the institution, despite Sue and Jude’s modern temperaments, still maintains a very strong hold over even the most radical members of society, even if only through its connection with material manipulations (ie, causally it’s because Jude can’t keep a job b/c of his immoral household that the kids get killed and everything falls apart).
Overall, I can call it an allegory of incomplete modernization.