On Tess of D’Urbervilles —Analysis of the Tragedy.doc

on tess of durbervilles analysis of the tragedy关于“德伯家的苔丝”悲剧的分析contentsacknowledgements.abstract.摘要1 introduction.11.1 introduction to the author and the novel.11.2 previous study of tesss tragedy and the problems.22 the authors concept on fate and the heroines tragedy.43 analysis of tesss tragedy.63.1 analysis of tesss family.63.2 analysis of the social background.83.3 analysis of tesss character.123.4 analysis of the male factors in tesss tragedy.144 conclusion.16references.1818abstractthomas hardy was once called “shakespeare in british novel.” he looked at the life in the vision of tragedy; he experienced and described peoples suffering under the fierce impact of two civilizations in a tragic method and unique male way; he described the poor tesss short and unfortunate life in an epic way. tess, a daughter of a poor villager who discovers that he is the descendent of an ancient family durbervilles is persuaded by her parents to claim kindred with a more prosperous durbervilles and is seduced by the master, alec. and then she has to return home in disgrace. after giving birth to a child who dies in infancy, she meets angel clare, son of a clergyman, and she fails in love with him and marries him. on their wedding night tess and angel tell each other about their past. angel who gets the hypocritical morality deserts her because of her seduction by alec; then poverty makes her come back to alec again and tragedy happens. the tragedy of tess is both the social tragedy and simultaneously also the disposition tragedy. her tragedys origin is not only objective, moreover is also subjective. this paper tells us that tess is the victim of the bourgeois society and capitalist invasion into the english peasantry. by analyzing the familys poverty, the social background, her own character, injustice and hypocrisy, the male chauvinism factors, the authors concept on fate, etc, this paper presents the main causes of tesss tragedy.key words: tess; tragedy; social background; character; victim; law; morality关于“德伯家的苔丝”悲剧的分析摘要 托马斯哈代曾一度被评论家誉为“英国小说中的莎士比亚”。他擅长于以悲剧的眼光审视人生，以悲剧性感悟方式和独特的男性话语去体验和刻画两种文明的激烈撞击给人们带来的现实苦难。他用史诗般的文字描写了贫穷的农家女子苔丝短促而不幸的一生。苔丝是一个贫穷农民的女儿, 他的父亲获悉自己本是骑士世家德伯家的嫡系子孙, 于是便派苔丝去附近一个富户德伯家认本家，从而遭遇到亚力克的引诱而失身，苔丝回家以后生下一个孩子，不久后夭折。在农场做工的时候，他遇到了安琪儿一个牧师的儿子，两个人很快坠入爱河并且订了婚，新婚之夜，苔丝向安琪儿坦白了自己的遭遇，可是安琪儿却未能原谅他，反而离开了他。后来，贫穷再一次迫使苔丝回到了亚力克身边，于是悲剧发生了。苔丝的悲剧不仅是社会的悲剧同时也是性格的悲剧。他的悲剧不仅是客观的 更是主观的。这篇论文告诉我们苔丝是资产阶级社会和资本主义入侵农村的受害者。导致主人公苔丝悲惨命运的原因是多方面的，如家庭、社会、宗教、不公平的法律、传统的伦理道德及自身的弱点等。这篇论文通过分析19世纪的英国社会背景，苔丝的家庭背景，男权主义，苔丝自身的性格以及作者哈代的宿命观来挖掘造成苔丝悲惨命运的主要原因。关键词：苔丝；悲剧；社会背景；性格；受害者；法律；道德1 introduction1.1 introduction to the author and the novel:thomas hardy is an outstanding reality writer in victorian era. he has superior intelligence and traditional feelings, but his view is gloomy and melancholy. he is convinced that the conflict between human nature which is internal, external and subjective and nature or the social environment which is objective is inevitable. son of a mason, thomas hardy was born near dorchester, the area that later became the famous “wessex” in many of his novels. at 16, he was apprenticed to a local architect, but architecture was never his desired profession. so he changed to write poetry. when that failed, he began to write novels. most of his novels are set in wessex which is fictional primitive and crude rural region. they are known in an agricultural setting menaced by the forces of invading capitalism. tess of the durbervilles: a pure woman, published in 1891, is one of the best and most popular works by hardy. it tells a love tragedy of a seduced rural girl. tess, a poor peasant girl brought up with the traditional idea of womanly virtues, persuaded by her mother, she goes to claim kindred with a more prosperous branch of the durbervilles family. and there she is seduced by the young master of the house, alec, and then has to return home in disgrace. after giving birth to a child who dies in infancy, she meets angel clare, son of a clergyman, and she fails in love with him and marries him. on their wedding night tess and angel tell each other about their past. after hearing tesss confession, angel leaves her abruptly for brazil. poverty forces tess to work at a farm flintcomb ash where she is insulted and ill-treated by master. then her fathers death and the expulsion of her family from their cottage drive her to seek for assistance from alec, and the later now a preacher, soon resumes his former illicit relations with her. angel clare returns repentant and ready to be reconciled to tess, but the girl finds that her living with alec hinders her from returning to ange1. she kills alec and is speedily arrested, tried and hanged. with tesss death the tragedy ends (chen, 2000: 69).through the molding of tess, hardy shows the females tragic fate under the rule of male and exposes the hypocrisy of moral and religious in british society of 19th century, also shows strong humanitarian spirit and strong sense of pessimism.from a close study of the novel, we can find: tess is beautiful, pure, honest, kind-hearted, hard-working, brave, self-sacrifice and self-resistance. therefore she is a typical victim of that society, its poverty of her family forces tess to claim kindred with alec and finally be seduced. angel who gets the hypocritical morality deserts her because of her seduction by alec; those two men: one robed her virginity and purity, and the other abducted her love in the wedding night and abandoned her, while obviously they are rivals, but together they promote her to the final destruction. then poverty makes her come back to alec again and tragedy happens. the familys poverty, social cruelty, injustice and hypocrisy make her tragic fate. the tragedy of tess is both the social tragedy and simultaneously also the disposition tragedy. her tragedys origin is not only objective, moreover is also subjective. tess is a brand-new woman model which hardy molds. she has the dual dispositions. on the one hand she dares to revolt against the traditional virtues and the false religion; on the other hand she cannot get rid of the traditional virtues thoroughly to own fetters.through the analysis of tesss tragic fate, this paper gives readers a deeper understanding of hardys tragedy critical realism works.1.2 previous study of tesss tragedy and the problemsin many years, the image of heroine tess enjoys popular support and is impressive. the author hardy also became the outstanding reality writer for this masterpiece in 19th-century england and had far-reaching impact on future generations.on the analysis of tesss tragic fate, there are many related articles at home and abroad, for example, in he hongwei and huang mujians paper (2007: 46), they think that in tesss tragedy, angels ruthless; tesss view of love and male chauvinism in victorian era caused her tragic fate. however, they didnt mention the social background and the poverty of tesss family, for that are also very important in tesss tragedy. in the tragedy of the social origins and social mirror of tesss tragedy, yu dongmei wrote that the heroines tragedy is the result of complicated conflict between the character and environment. this principle is also not comprehensive. yu yanhua of daqing normal university (2007: 38) considered that the root cause of tesss tragedy is social factors. however, the benevolent see benevolence and the wise see wisdomdifferent people have different views. but i think that all of their views are not comprehensive, because any formation of a tragedy is impossible to have one or two factors. in the novel of tess of durbervilles, the heroines tragedy have many factors, not only objective factors, such as the social background and the concept of male supremacy, more subjective factors, such as, the greed of tesss parents and tesss own character, besides, the author thomas hardys tragic fate concept is also indispensable.2 the authors concept on fate and the heroines tragedyfatalism is “that view of life which says all actions is controlled by the nature of thing or by fate which is a great impersonal, primitive force existing through all eternity absolutely independent of human will and superior to any good created by man.”(lorrain,1996:12). since hardy spends a great part of his life in the countryside, he sees the decline of the patriarchal mode of life in rural english after the invasion of the industrial capitalism, but he does not understand the root causes of this decline and rules of social development. he attributes the peasants tragedy to blind chance or mysterious fate. hardys thought of destiny are expounded from three aspects. first, the source of his thoughts of destiny came from the great influence of his mother and grandmother in his childhood and the child memories greatly affected his future writing. secondly, ancient greed tragedies played a key role in the literary education he had got. the characters in his novel are quite different from those in ancient greek tragedies, but they both have strong tragic flavor, no escape from destiny and strong sense of fatalism. the readers can taste strong bitterness, pain, helplessness and unreasonable fate. finally, the social causes of the thoughts of tragic destiny in hardys novels are explored as followed: the dark society, the gap between the poor and the rich and the invasion of capitalism into countryside driving many poor peasants into bankruptcy and plights. so the unchangeable social reality and the social vicious power forced him into believing in fate and made him a tragic fatalist (yang, 2007: 6).hardy wrote novels in the 1980s and 1990s era. because the british empire started to decline in the latter part of victoria era, monopoly capital displacing free competition dragged the english into the crisis. as a realist, hardy can make a copy of a vivid reality drawing, but as a thinker, hardy does not understand the laws of social development. he believes that the crisis of the reality and insurmountable contradictions is universes will which is mysterious and unpredictable. before the strong power of the universe, he considered that human is very small. between the conflict of human and environment, human beings are weak and suffer from the fate of its dominance. this led to hardys ideology of pessimism and fatalism. this kind of fatalism is revealed in hardys many works especially in tess of the durbervilles. “hardy gave to the interpretation of the story in accordance with his pessimist and determinist view of the world.” in a sense, tess is the victim of hardys fatalism, and her tragedy is the tragedy of the time when hardy lives.in hardys novels, often the heroes are suddenly dominated by fate or the universe will, the unfortunate coincidence come when they are close to happiness. in this novel, tesss life is full of dramatics, as if in each period of her life, accidental factors come, troubles follow and which push her into the life tragedy step by step. the tragedy of tess is not only because of social factors, but also has close relations with her character and the authors fatalism and pessimism. however, all these factors are related directly to the capitalist society of that time. through the narration of the tragic fate of the heroine tess, the author strongly criticized the bourgeois and decadent and reactionary, exposed how the evil forces of religious destructed human beings and also the hypocrisy of the bourgeois moral. at the same time he sent a deep sympathy to the bottom poor people who have purity qualities, just as tess. this kind of tragedy which joints destiny, social, personality is the result of hardys experience and thinking, and it is also the crystallization in his exploring of the tragedy.hardys philosophy of life and tragic world view are reflected in his works, his philosophy is moving and the tragedy is solemn. hardy is warrior holding a sword; he released his own emotional, spiritual to everyone. from each of his novels, we feel his love to village and his pessimism is born of love. hardys pessimism is not negative, but positive. therefore he cannot change the heros life of his works, only they obey the arrangements of fate (chandra, 1985: 23).3 analysis of tesss tragedy3.1 analysis of tesss familytess is the daughter of a very poor villager. her parents are very benighted. when her father finds he is the descendent of an ancient aristocratic family, durbervilles, he is immensely proud of himself although there is nothing valuable left in his hand. he even goes to hotel and drinks very much until tess and her mother come to look for him. when tess and her mother support his arms to go back home, there is such description:on reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row if three at one moment as if they were marching to london and at another as if they were marching to bathwith produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal home goings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after al1. the two women valiantly disguised there forced excursions and countermarches as well as they could from themselves ; and so they approached by degrees their own door the head of the family bursting suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near; as if to fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence: (liu, 2007: 103)“ive got a family vault at kingsbeer!” (chapter4, 23)“hushdont be so silly, jacky,” said his wife. “yours is not the only family that was of count in wold days. look at the anktells, and horseys, and the thringhams themselves gone to seed almost as much as youthough you was bigger folks than they, thats true. thank god, i was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”“dont you be so sure of that. from your fathertis my belief youve disgraced yourselves more than any ous, and were kings and queens outright at one time.”tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry “im afraid father wont be able to take the journey with the beehives tomorrow so early.”“i? i shall be all right in an hour or two,” said durbeyfield (chapter4, 24).from their conversation and the description of durbeyfields drunkenness, we can see the foolishness of tesss parents, and of course, which is mainly caused by poverty. the author hardy takes some very humorous words to describe their bitterness caused by poverty: all these young souls were passengers in the durbeyfield shipentirely dependent on the judgment of the durbeyfield adults for their pleasures，their mecessities, their health, their existence. if the heads of the durbeyfields household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with themsix helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved being of the shiftless house of durbeyfield (chapter3, 18).under the great poverty, tesss parents become more and more apathetic and vulgar. when they have a more prosperous relative, what they have in mind is to ask tess to claim kindred with alec .tess isnt wiling to go, but she has no idea about her familys poverty. on the day when she is going to visit alec theres such a conversation in her family: her mother expostulated, “you will never set out to; see your folks without dressing up more the dand than that?” (chapter7, 44)“but, i am going to work!” said tess. “well, yes,” said mrs. durbeyfield, and in a private tone, “at first there mid be a little pretence, but l think it will be wiser ofee to put your best side outward,” she added. “very well; i suppose you know best,” replied tess with calm abandonment. and to please her parents the girl put her self quite in joan hands, saying serenely “do what you like with me, mother.” (chapter7, 44)along these lines, we can see a very apathetic father and a vulgar mother, and also a pure girl who is weak and incompetent. why tesss family is so poor? from the novel we find out that the great poverty is not only in tesss family, but also in many families, especially peasants. 3.2 analysis of the social backgroundtess lives in the late 19th century, in which the cruel capitalist exploitation has ruined the english countryside severely; wessx is not immured from the destruction. capitalism brings a great harm to this old, rural and agricultural life of the place. the self-supporting peasants are displaced and impoverished. people are extremely poor and live a very miserable life. they are involved in an unemployed, tragically situation of poverty. in the novel hardy described the industrial civilization of the village at that time the impact of a panoramic painted. tess and her family as a microcosm of individual farmers, who show deep in the material plight of, people who suffering in the struggle. society tragedy is a human tragedy of the conflict with the social environment. tess lived in the victorian era and at that time british capitalist invaded the rural area. as a worker, a poor agricultural worker, she would be the various capitalist society of oppression and humiliation, oppression and humi