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5.1 Tess’s rebellion consciousness 12
5.2 Tess’s own weakness in personality 13
Chapter Six Conclusion 16
Works Cited 17
A Study of the Four Important Factors of Tess’s Tragic Destiny
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of Thomas Hardy
1.1.1 Thomas Hardy and his life experience
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a famous poet and one of the greatest critical realists in Britain in the nineteenth century. Hardy was born in a village called Drossier, which was located in the southwest of England and later became the famous “Wessex” in many of his novels. His father was an escrow officer in architecture, and Hardy was expected to turn architect by his parents. Then he was trained as an architect and worked in London for years, in the meanwhile, he began to be interested in literature and philosophy. He developed the literary traditions of the Victorian Age—during which great changes had happened in the history of western civilization, and was regarded as “Shakespeare of British novels”.
1.1.2 Hardy’s fatalism and his works
In 1867, Hardy returned home, and began his writing career as working as an architect. In 1871, Hardy published Desperate Remedies, the success of which made him leave architecture for writing. Hardy was gifted in writing and his main works were Wessex edition, such as Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure. These works took the southern agricultural region in England as background, which truly described the poor conditions and falters of farmers at that time. Witnessing painfully the decline of the small-scale peasant economy in British villages, Hardy showed his tragic consciousness in his works. No matter how hard people worked or resisted against their fates, they couldn’t snap out the domination. Everything in his novel led to one unavoidable tragic ending. One’s personality determined one’s destiny, thus the characters in Hardy’s novels mostly were parochialism, tinted with the features of rural people, that is, passionate like fire, innocent and narrow-minded, which no only make them lovely and deserve sympathy, but contribute to their tragedy.
1.2 Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
It is well acknowledged that Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel that described the tragic experience of a beautiful countryside girl Tess, is the most famous novel of Thomas Hardy. Tess, a peasant girl, who was born in a poor farmer’s family, had lived a poor but peaceful life. However, Tess’s father John D’Urbervilles knew that they were offspring of the D’Urbervilles that was an ancient family once noted in British. So Tess’s mother persuaded Tess to get a touch with the remaining D’Urbervilles, so that Tess could marry a gentleman and then all their families would get out of poverty. At the very beginning, Tess was unwilling to do that, however, when she knew their old horse— the only means to make their living dead, Tess had to come to the D’Urbervilles, where Tess met Alec D’Urbervilles, who was fascinated with Tess’s beautiful appearance and always attempted to seduce her. Tess’s tragic destiny began.
Not long after, Tess was raped and lost her virginity. Soon Tess had a baby but died young, which shocked those narrow-minded people, so that Tess had to leave hometown for a distant meadow to work as a milkmaid. There Tess met Angel, the son of a priest, who had eliminated the traditional family ideas for his dreams. The two young soon fell in love with one another and were betrothed to be married. On their wedding night, Tess confessed to Angel her past unfortunate experiences. Though Angel admitted to run with many women, he finally couldn’t understand Tess and deserted her. Soon he went to Brazil. However, poverty and misery came to Tess again. After her father’s death, her family was on the point of starvation. And at that time, Alec had become a preacher. Tess once wrote to beg Angel for returning to her for many times, but it’s to no avail. Therefore, Alec possessed Tess again. When Angel came back from Brazil to repent of his cruelty for Tess, finding Tess went to Alec again, which made Tess who had dropped to desperation kill Alec. Then Tess enjoyed a short happiness with Angel in the forest, and was arrested and sentenced to hang.