| This paper is intended to explore the tragic qualities of Tess of the d'Urbervilles from various aspects.Tess of the d'Urbervilles can be regarded as one of the greatest tragedies in prose in the history of English literature. Though Hardy mainly writes about the common country people in Wessex, southwestern part of England, he shows grandeur and dignity in his tragedies similar to what we find in Greek tragedy and his grave and elaborate style contributes to the tragic sense of life. Hardy is remarkable for his tremendous power of producing tragedies comparable to classic tragedies.The tragedies Hardy write are unfolded in Wessex, the background against which the tragedy happens. Wessex is more fully and ambitiously conceptualized in Tess of the d'Urbervilles than in any other novel, whose ranges are specifically laid out for the actions of the book. Hardy wrote Tess during what turned out to be nearly the last years of a massive but complex shift in the nation's economic forces. Agriculture was especially hard hit with the invasion of industry and modern civilization. Unemployment and poverty marked every village in the countryside. These years witnessed the disintegration and destruction of the English peasantry. Tess's family, without exception, was poverty-stricken. Her father's inability and too many young children cause the family to be always in an economic strait. It depends, to a large degree, on Tess to support its members. So in her short life, Tess is impelled by the economic pressure from her family to seek job here and there; and it is her family that makes Tess return to Alex in the last. The last years of the nineteenth century were the Victorian period. Victorian morality imposed rigid norm on women, which demanded women to be pure. The loss of virginity is a fatal blow to Tess as she is turned against and crushed by the social convention, and consequently, suffers endlessly till she loses hope in retrieving her virginity and is forced to reach her self-fulfillment in her own way. Thus Tess's tragedy takes place in such a particular historical and social background. And therefore the bankruptcy of agriculture and the destruction of the peasants are the very root of thetragedy around less and her family.The tragic components are explored through the respective components of the narrative structure: the tragic focus on the heroine, the tragic flaws in the heroine, two destructive figures Angel and Alec, the relation between Tess and Nature, and other elements like the fatal color, the movement of the heroine, the opposing universe, the influence of the heroine's past on her present, folk magic, the achievement of tragedy through structure. The tragic atmosphere is built up step by step and eventually permeates the book as the exploration of the tragic components is expanded. Each component is expanded into full detail to help state that Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a mighty tragedy with Greek grandeur, whose protagonist, though only a simple country girl, emerges larger than life and with the position of a tragic heroine, the position usually occupied by kings, princes, generals in traditional tragedies. But all this is to be attained by Hardy's superb art of writing interweaving every description or meditation into a tragic story.Tess of the d'Urbervilles is an elaborately mighty tragedy attained through Hardy's superb craftsmanship which unfolds before the readers, with Greek tragic grandeur, the inevitable doom of the protagonist resisting against fate under the particular historical circumstances and social atmosphere. The tragedy of the protagonist, Tess, a simple country girl, is elevated to an extraordinary level endowed with increasing grandeur similar to that of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, which gives it unparalleled pathos and reverberation. A careful examination of the background, the components, and the prevailing tragic atmosphere of the tragedy will offer an access to the evaluation of such a mighty tragedy with its special tragic grandeur and dignity. |
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