2010级12班王之宜201005421227Thomas HardyThomas Hardy (1840-1928) is in the last of the great Victorian novelist. Hardy was born in Dorset, southern England. Son of a builder, he became a builder himself. At the age of 22, he began to write poetry. He insisted in studying literature and philosophy by himself. Then in 1867, he began to write novels. While, for the last three decades of his life, he turned back to poetry and became one of the major Victorian poets. Hardy was the most pessimistic novelist of the Victorian Age. Life after 1870s became drastically different with drastic changes in mood and tenor. The age of Emile Zola’s naturalism had arrived. Hardy was apparently affected: the spirit of determinism characteristic of the naturalistic works of the period permeated his later novels as well. But Hardy is not a naturalistic writer. Hardy was a prolific writer. His Victorian novels were divided into 3 groups, novels of character and environment, romances and fantasies and novels of ingenuity. He also wrote short stories and post-Victorian poetry.In his early life, Hardy tried to write some poems but all of them were not published, so he began to write novels. Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and The Lady, finished by 1867, but he failed to find a publisher. With the advices of his friend, he gave up trying to publish and destroy the manuscript. In 1871, he published his first novel Desperate Remedies, and then publishes Under the Greenwood Tree in 1872, A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. Hardy’s greatest nove ls are T ess of the D’Urbervilles,Jude the Obscure. And the former attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes. Unlike the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, Hardy's novels do not beg to be filmed or to be adapted for the stage. Some scholars have suggested that this is due to the absence of flair in Hardy for the overtly dramatic.Naturalism and fatalism can be sensed everywhere by readers in his novels. His works capture the ethos of England, and contain symbolism, allusions as well ascombination of naturalism, realism and symbolism. Hardy is skillful in using nature and landscape to express human feelings. Hardy’s writing features lie in his determinist stance on the nature of life and the cosmos, his sharp sense of the humorous and absurd and his love and observation of the natural world with strong symbolic effect. H ardy’s stories are always moving and bewitching. He deviates consciously from traditional Victorian realism that emphasizes plot more than characterization. It is definitely to his credit that he manages to bring back to fiction a high sense of tragedy, th e Greek sense of fatality. What’s more, Hardy places emphasis on the deeper psychology of his characters. Hardy’s language possesses a silent power and charm. His prose is studded with rhetorical devices and poetic imagery, and is richly connotative. He is also famous for his uneven style. While there are some minor flaws in Hardy’s works-his ideas are not always clear, and his plots may occasionally jump and dislocate.The features in his novels cannot separate from his experience．Firstly，the source of his thoughts of destiny came from the great influence from his mother and grandmother in his childhood and the child memories greatly affected his future writing．Secondly，ancient Greek 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 the bitterness，pain，helplessness and unreasonable fate．Finally，the social causes of the thoughts of tragic destiny in Hardy s novels are explored as followed：the dark society，the gap between the poor and then rich and the invasion of capitalism into countryside driving many poor peasants into bankrupt and plights．So the unchangeable social reality and the social vicious power forced him into believing in fate and made him a tragic fatalist．Tess of the D’Urbervilles is Thomas Hardy’s great work which possesses a very important position in literary history of the world. Since it was born 100 years ago, it has attracted people’s attention and argument, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy's day. The story is about the tragic fate of Tess. Tess is a beautiful and pure girl at first, but her innocence and ignorance of sex caused her seduced by Alecand therefore she has no chastity. When Tess experiences physical, material and spiritual sufferings, Angel comes to Tess, caring her and loving her. He gives Tess great condors like an angel sending good news of God. However, when he knows Tess has been seduced by Alec, his attitude changes very drastically. He cannot forgive Tess and asks to stop the marriage. Then he leaves Tess. The pain he has brought to Tess is much more serious than that brought by Alec, and it is even fatal in some sense. Under the torment of the hate for Alec and the love for Angel, Tess falls into great despair and she stabs Alec and runs away with Angel. But she is finally arrested and hanged.The story reveals the spirit of determinist defeatism and enforces its shibboleth of predestination, and no amount of human effort can alter its design of darkness. Tess is a paragon of innocence. What she asks for life is simple enough: to be loved and happy. But she is not got it because she is at the mercies of the odds against her. (Two men must appear in her life to confuse and distract her. One is totally evil; the other apparently good. The two both serve as the instruments of Chance. So many coinc idences occur in Tess’ life that the hand of Chance is in evidence wherever she goes.) This novel is a mirror for the spirit of the time. Hardy describes his critical attitude towards the unjust treatment of women and his denunciation of the hypocrisy of the social structures a moral code of Victorian England.“Ache of modernism" is one theme of this novel, and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted, portrays "the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them". His works focuses on the representation of the psychic ache that modern civilization brings on to man. They have a grave sense of crisis and bear strong affinity with the modernist literature. Angel's middle-class fastidiousness makes him reject Tess. When he parts from her and goes to Brazil, the handsome young man gets so ill that he is reduced to a "mere yellow skeleton". All these instances are typically interpreted as indications of the negative consequences of man's separation from nature, both in the creation of destructive machinery and in the inability to rejoice in pure nature. However, Marxist critic Raymond Williams in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence questions the identification of Tess with apeasantry destroyed by industrialism. Tess is not a peasant, she is a school educated member of the rural working class: she suffers a tragedy through being thwarted, in her aspirations to rise and her desire for a good life (among which is love and sex), not by "industrialism" but by the landed bourgeoisie (Alec), liberal idealism (Angel) and Christian moralism in her family's village.You can also find sexual double standard in this novel. Hardy criticizes certain social constraints that hindered the lives of those living in the 19th century. It was also moral conflict at that time when women were not allowed to have the same rights as men. Alec’s seduction of Tess destroys her happiness and brings her shame. But n o one thought that Alec was guilty but blamed Tess. Besides, Tess tried to be honest about her unfortunate past before the marriage, but following the order of fate, her husband didn’t read her letter. At the weeding day Angel confess he had done something bad at the past and gain forgive from his wife, while Tess told him her tragedy and gain discard from him. The body hurt from Alec and the physical hurt from Angel make the final tragedy to Tess.References:蔡健，《从女性主义批评解读苔丝的悲剧》，《南京航空航天大学学报》（社会科学版）2009/4。
