recently, i watched the film again. jude and sue are responsible for all those tragedies. remember, even nowadays, cousins are not allowed to be married. they let their passion go too far.
shareRead the book and you'll end up loving Arabella...
shareWell if you, you better do. But what are you trying to prove by writing it here. This is not your blog that you can pour your emotions over here. Just to tell you, message boards is for movie discussion, not for your emotion.
Grow up!
First cousins are allowed to be married. There may be a few states in the US where they aren't, but most allow it. Actually, it was very commonplace for first or second cousins to marry for much of history.
And FDR and Eleanor were not first cousins, they were like 2nd cousins or twice removed or something like that.
But, anyway, just because they were cousins isn't why they had all those problems. Firstly, they were not married to each other. Jude was still married to Arabella and Sue was still married to Richard. Victorian society was not open minded about people living together "in sin" - which the children proved they were doing. So, yes, on one level it was their "fault" for living together as man and wife when they were not married, but that is part of the (radical at the time it was written) point of the story. Should we really outcast people becuase their mores are different from ours, if their mores have no direct negative impact on our own lives? Sue and Jude were labeled as being bad and outcast from good society because they went against the standards of the day. While what they were doing really had no direct impact on society, society had a direct negative impact on their lives.
The fact that they were cousins is really incidental.
L, U, E? 42.
I think that all the uproar over the "cousin" issue is a prime example of judging the actions of a different era by the accepted moral standards of today. Historical adaptations are, most importantly, historical. It is only over the past 75 years or so that the marrying of cousins has become taboo. If you are going to watch or read historical films or books, you must be ready to view the events through contemporary eyes.
"You keep using that word...I do not think it means what you think it means..."
<,I think that all the uproar over the "cousin" issue is a prime example of judging the actions of a different era by the accepted moral standards of today. Historical adaptations are, most importantly, historical. It is only over the past 75 years or so that the marrying of cousins has become taboo. If you are going to watch or read historical films or books, you must be ready to view the events through contemporary eyes. >>
Excellent point. It's funny, actually. Today, two people who weren't married who live and have children together is no big deal. No one asks. No one cares. Such a family would not be thrown out of their homes or lose their jobs. The thing that was most shocking to Hardy's contemporaries means nothing to us. However, the thing that meant nothing to Hardy's contemporaries -- cousins marrying -- shocks us. It's all perspective, isn't it?
I used to find the idea of cousins marrying repulsive when i was younger.........however i have a different view now.........
everyone freaks out over the thought of that but if there are cousins who did not meet until years later.........i suppose it is only natural for them to have feelings........after all it is only in modern times that people are so bothered by it.........
<<recently, i watched the film again. jude and sue are responsible for all those tragedies. remember, even nowadays, cousins are not allowed to be married. they let their passion go too far.>>
Cousins were allowed to marry then. Queen Victoria married her cousin, after all. It was rather common for cousins to marry in Victorian and Regency England. Ever read Jane Austen? Cousins marrying cousins was accepted and in certain cases expected. It was no big deal. A man, however, could not marry his deceased wife's sister, however. That was considered incest and there was a law against. Make sense? It shouldn't, but it has a New Testament precedent. Anyway,the point is that different societies have different rules. You are also wrong about cousins not being allowed to marry nowadays. They are. Cousins can still marry in many parts of Europe and even certain states in the U.S.
cousins can get married....nothing wrong with it
most cousins who do marry arent even first cousins, but distant/removed cousins...
i dont see anything wrong with it...cant see why it is wrong
Regarding the not marrying the dead wife's sister, this is something I worry over a little. You see, back in 1827 my great-great-great grandfather Thomas married a woman called Charlotte. They had a couple of kids and I believe Charlotte died. But then Thomas went and married Sarah, Charlotte's little sister, and they had my great-great grandad. So I wonder if there was a dispute in the family over this.
Then again, on another branch of the family, my maternal great-grandparents were first cousins already when they married in 1903.
Oddly enough, yesterday there was something on the news about a brother and sister who had been adopted (I think) and then ended up marrying each other before they found out they were related.
And I think back then it was more likely that you might end up marrying a relative purely because many families never moved away from the place they were born in. In the place where the above Thomas and Charlotte lived, his family had lived there since the 1760s. There was at least one case where a distant cousin married another cousin and there were descendants of the original family line still living in that village in about 1910. In little places like that, I suspect there were a lot of known and unknown inter-family marriages because they couldn't travel. Then some people were lucky to have a horse, now I am part of a four-person family and we have three cars between us.
"If we go on like this, you're going to turn into an Alsatian again."
cousins ARE allowed to get married, and that's only secondary in this beautiful tragedy. The reason why everything goes wrong for them is that they aren't married ... they were ahead of their time.!
shareI think you're right. If people hadn't been so reluctant to accept that two people could live together unmarried (although I suppose this attitude was just a product of the times) they would have been happier. I think it was just that people found it morally suspect that Jude and Sue were living together unmarried and producing this huddle of illegitimate children.
If they had pretended to be married, they might have not been noticed. It was probably the fact that they didn't that caused people to be concerned. (Or nosy.)
"If we go on like this, you're going to turn into an Alsatian again."
... In what planet do you live in?
share