Abstract

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of the greatest works of Thomas Hardy which depicts a miserable story about the pure country girl Tess who has a tragic fate. Her disastrous life is determined by the writer’s perspective towards the world that is fatalism. Even though she tries her best to struggle against the difficulties in her life, she still fails to win the battle and dies at a young age.
This paper intends to explore the functions of the setting description in Tess of the D’Urbervilles with regard to helping develop the plot and reflecting people's characters, feelings, and how Thomas Hardy's fatalism can be illustrated clearly.

Key words: Tess, setting, environment, fatalism

摘    要

《德伯家的苔丝》是托马斯哈代最伟大的作品之一，它描述了一个乡村女孩苔丝的悲惨命运。而苔丝的不幸遭遇则是由作者的宿命论决定的。尽管她做出了很多努力，但最终还是逃脱不了哈代为她安排的悲惨结局, 很早便失去了自己的生命。
这篇论文主要是为了探索《德伯家的苔丝》中场景描写在发展故事情节、反映主人公性格、情感以及托马斯哈代的宿命论是如何反映的。

关键词：苔丝；场景描写；环境；宿命论

1. Introduction
Thomas Hardy, last and one of the greatest of Victorian novelists, lives in the center of the Essex country, thus he is very familiar with the nature and the people’s life in this country. This life experience helps him a lot in his later literary career. His novels are called “Wessex novels” for most of the backgrounds of his novels are made in Wessex.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of the most famous works of Thomas Hardy, which is a landmark for novels rich in landscape description. In this novel, Thomas Hardy spends a great deal of time and energy in depicting the natural background and the surroundings, thus provides lots of information for the readers about when and where the story begins, how it develops and what is the ending of the story. Thomas Hardy uses his magic skills to correspond the change of setting with the fate of the protagonist closely. In this paper, the author will make a detailed survey of the setting in the novel with attempts to prove that setting, at first, provides the background of the story and is widely used as a means of providing appropriate atmosphere in developing the plot. Meanwhile, it also helps to reveal Tess’s characters, and indicates the predicaments she meets. Finally, the author makes an analysis on how does the setting change correlate with the heroine’s destiny and how the setting arrangements provide a proper and tragic atmosphere for Tess’s life.