2 The Analysis of the Relevant Findings About Tess    4
2.1 Findings About the Image of the Pastor    4
2.2 Findings About the Author’s Religious View    5
2.3 Other Relevant Findings    6
3 The Analysis of the Image of the Pastors in Tess    8
3.1 Relevant Critical Approaches    8
3.2 Satan in Preacher’s Coat--Alec    9
3.3 The Devout “Father of Angel”--The Old Clare    10
3.4 The Stodgy Mahonin--Cuthbert    11
4 The Interpretation of the Pastors from the Background and the Perspective of the Author    12
4.1 Religious and Social Backgrounds    12
4.2 The Author's View of Religion Reflected in Tess     13
4.3 The Author's View of Virtues and Vices Reflected in Tess    14
4.4 The Author's View of Life and Fate    14
5 Conclusion    16
Bibliography17
1 Introduction
Thomas Hardy(1840-1928) is widely considered as an outstanding novelist and poet in British Literature．As a Victorian realist and a follower of George Eliot who was highly critical in Victorian society，Hardy wrote a series of realistic novels and made a lot of great contributions to the British Literature. His sympathy and mourning over the failures and misfortunes of human beings caused most of his works to reflect his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life, so he is always regarded as the “Shakespeare in English novels”. Living at the turning point of the century, Hardy mainly wrote the time of drastic social changes. Thus, he is also regarded as a transitional writer. When England was making its slow and painful transition from a traditional agricultural nation to an innovative industrial country, the British people were suffering from considerable impacts in all aspects of life. Therefore, in Hardy’s works, he described the social constraints on people who were living in Victorian England, and criticized the contemporary beliefs, especially those related to society and marriage that greatly limited people's lives and caused their miseries. Hardy firmly believed that people’s characters and life can be greatly affected by the environment, particularly for those living in rural areas. Through his numerous works, Hardy expresses his sense of moral sympathy indeed for the lower classes, particularly for rural women. People of today always regard Hardy as a naturalistic and a critical realist writer. And he is well known for his “Novels of Character and Environment” or Wessex Tales. Amongst his novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles(1891) and Jude the obscure(1895) are deemed to be the representation of this kind. 《德伯家的苔丝》中的牧师形象(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_35514.html