Hardy's passage detailing the marriage of Jude and Arabella is as saturated in ironies as it is in harsh social criticism. In wryly paraphrasing the terms of their marriage contract, Hardy has substituted “feel” and “desire” where “love” and “honour” appear in the Book of Common Prayer's solemnization of matrimony. It is carnal passion, not love, that has united the couple, an ill-fated alliance whose numbing monotony is accentuated in the deforming repetition of the marital vow. Society has consecrated “desire” (misrecognizing it as “love”) as the basis for marriage when it should comprehend desire as shortlived. In Jude the Obscure it is not so much the familiar Hardyesque elements “nature” and “fate” that ensnare his restless protagonists but the ludicrous laws that require marriage to solidify momentary escapades into lifelong commitments. With Jude the inhabitable microcosm that Jane Austen's fictionmade out of love-consecrated marriage becomes at the century's end a prison-house.

In writing with such acerbity Hardy anticipates a distinction that animates literary critics attending to Victorian fiction a century later. For of all the reconceptualizations in the 1980s and 1990s, none has been more influential than the deployment of “desire” where once “love” or “courtship” had demarcated intimate relations in fiction. The value of “desire” as an animating concept arises from its subtlety and allusiveness, encompassing a range of impulses and fantasies, enacted or not, and whether or not they find institutional substantiation.