Abstract

Thomas Hardy is the last excellent critical realist writer in the 19th century. He focused on the poor man’s fate and revealed the evil of society. Tess, a daughter of a poor villager who discovered that he was the descendent of an ancient family, was persuaded by her parents to claim kindred with D’Urbervilles and was seduced by the master, Alec. This paper presents the three main causes of Tess’s tragedy, aiming to show that Tess is the victim of the bourgeois society and capitalist invasion into the English peasantry by analyzing the current social background, the fatalist thoughts of the author and the heroine’s own character flaws.

Keywords: Tess’s tragedy，social background，character flaws, fatalist thoughts

摘要

  托马斯·哈代是19世纪最后一位杰出的批判现实主义作家。他关注穷苦人民的命运，揭露社会的黑暗。苔丝是一个贫穷农民的女儿，她父亲偶然间得知他们是一个古老家族的后裔，于是就劝说自己的女儿去本家认亲戚，结果苔丝被德伯家族长子玷污了.本论文着重陈述了造成苔丝悲剧的三方面原因。论文通过分析当时社会背景，作者的宿命论思想和女主人公自身的性格缺陷，旨在说明苔丝是资产阶级社会的受害者，是资本主义入侵英国农村的受害者。

关键词：苔丝的悲剧；社会背景；性格缺陷；宿命论

1.    Introduction:
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was the last important novelist of the Victorian age. Born into an architect’s family, he was expected to become an architect, but his real interest was in literature. His most famous novels are Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896). In his novels, he vividly and truthfully described the tragic lives of the tenants in the last decade of the 19th century, ruthlessly and profoundly revealing the sins of capitalism. His novels, which reflected the Victorian society with all its idiosyncrasies, were perceived as irreligious. Neverthless, current scholars believe Hardy to be one of the greatest tragic novelists of English literature.