Hardy combined characteristics and environment in his novels。 In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy created three main roles: Tess D’Urbervilles, Alec D’Urbervilles and Angel Clare。 These three characters all have their true characteristics inside their heart, and a kind of external characteristics built by the complex social network’s development, extension, transformation, and even distortion。 The environment contains not only the connection between people and people, but also the social value orientation at that time。 These two factors repeatedly appeared in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which made the story became more vivid and touching。 More than a hundred years had past by, the traditional image of Tess still lives in people’s hearts。 This is not only because people wanted to surpass the traditional moral, but also they were shocked by the heroine’s personal charisma。

Since that many scholars had already done a lot of research about Hardy’s realistic principle, these researches will be taken as the base of the study to support the view of this thesis。Thenwith the aid of qualitative method and some reference books and articles, the reason why Hardy used realistic principle when shaping the characters in Tess of the D’Urbervilleswill be explained。 Some mainly introduction of the three main characters in the novel will be made。 文献综述

2 Realistic Principles

Since the realistic writing style is the most important feature and the mainly method Hardy used to describe the story, this section will trace back to the background of the formation of realistic principle and introduce how the realistic principle influenced Thomas Hardy’s writing styles。

2。1 The Background of the Formation of Realistic Principles

In 1850, the French writer Sanford Rory first used the concept of realism in literature field, and it first appeared as a name of a kind of literature genres and thoughts。 But the name didn’t get a general and dignified acknowledgement like today。 Before that, Hegel (2011:134)pided the art into three formation developed from conception: symbolic type, classical type, and romantic type。 And Lecture on Art, which was published during 1865 and 1869, also mentioned Balzac’s “realistic literature”, but the book didn’t attach importance to its literature merit and moral value。 On the contrary, the founder of Marx doctrine took the realistic literature seriously。 As early as 1859, Engels (2008:583) pointed out in his letter to LaSalle “we should not abandon realistic things for the conceptual ones。” And after another 20 years, Engels highly appreciated realistic literature, and took Balzac as “the greatest victory of realism”。 Engels keenly observed realism, accepted it forwardly, and gave high priority to it。 And the fundamental cause of it was that the reality of proletarian revolution struggle didn’t allow any thoughts or practice that was out of earth。 The revolution was severe and realistic; it needed an accurate analysis towards the class relations and the contrast between powers。 Because of that, the literature that portrayed real depicts of connections became the code word of the best literature with no doubt。 

If the “realistic principle” Engels respected was just a kind of literature develop form that was worthy of recognition, it had almost no difference with natural principle in European literature thoughts in the nineteenth century。 Although it was ignored at the present literary theory circles, it was one of the terminologies of western literary and art theory。 Then, the realistic principle as a mode of artistic creation was the product of the early twentieth century。 No matter in the past or now, it was not accommodated or demonstrated by western bourgeois literary theory and esthetics。 At the first 10 years of last century, Russia won October Revolution。 Some new but immature questions were put in front of the revolutionaries: If the proletariat could gain power, why there could not be the proletariat culture? If we could create the culture and literary arts, why there should not have a mode of artistic creation for the proletariat? After being debated for several times, people realized that the proletariat culture could not be created out of nowhere and the mode of creation should not be “the mode of creation of dialectical materialism” as called。 After all the fuzzy cognitions got clarification, the mode of creation was retained, and became the terminology of Marx theory of literature and art。 Finally, the concept of realistic principle came into existence。