In this story, Tess is a paragon of innocence。 What she asks for life is simple enough: to be loved and happy, but she fails because she is at the mercies of the odds against her。 This novel is a mirror for the spirit of that time。 Hardy describes his critical attitude towards the unjust treatment of women and his denunciation of the hypocrisy of the social structures and moral codes of Victorian England。

1。2。 Reviewing the Researches both at Home and Abroad

Since the later nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy and his works have received much concern for a long time。 Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and Hardy’s fictional masterpiece, Tess of the D’Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared in 1891, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England。 On its publication, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is highly focused by the scholars, many foreign and domestic scholars have studied Tess of the D’Urbervilles from various aspects。

There are many foreign experts paying their attention on the study of the novel。 Lionel Johnson’s The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894) was one of the earliest critical appraisals of Hardy’s fiction discussed in terms of the discrepancy between urban discord and rural order。 The critic provided evidence of kinship between Hardy’s rural heroes and Shakespeare’s rustics。 Early criticism also included a few works which deal with the philosophical and psychological perspective in Hardy’s work。 Lascelles Abercrombie’s Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (1912) provided a blend of biographical information and critical analysis of Hardy’s tragic conception of the world。 Abercrombie observed that the obvious quality of Hardy’s tragedy is that it does not begin in the persons who are most concerned in it; it is invasion into human consciousness of the general tragedy of existence, which thereby puts in living symbols。

A number of critical studies on Hardy’s fiction and poetry were published in the 1940s and 1950s。  Some post-war critical studies on Hardy’s work concentrated on his pessimism, others tried to show his humanism。 Harvey C。 Webster claims in On a Darkling Plain: The Art and Thought of Thomas Hardy (1947) that Hardy’s pessimism was mainly shaped under the influence of Leslie Stephen’s determinism。 He sees Hardy as an artist who combined successfully the function of a thinker with that of a writer。 According to the scholar, the main themes in Hardy’s novels are chance, social conditions and sexual determinism and Hardy’s later novels are largely a critique of social ills。 From the social perspective, Arnold Kettle devoted an essay on Tess of the D’Urbervilles in An Introduction to the English Novel (1951)。 He argued rather unconvincingly that this novel has a quality of a social document whose chief aim was to present the disintegration of the English peasantry in fictional form。文献综述

A number of studies in the 1970s have been devoted to the use of the tragic form in Hardy’s fiction, e。g。 Dale Kramer’s Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (1975) and Jeannette King’s Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (1978)。 Kramer argues that Tess of the D’Urbervilles exemplifies the most pure form of the Aristotelian notion of tragedy。 The latter study examines the relationship between the modern concept of tragedy and Victorian fiction。 King provides a valuable introduction to Hardy’s six major novels and points out that each of them can be seen as a tragedy, emphasizing the similarity between Hardy's novels and Greek tragedy。