A Cognitive Study Of Metaphor Of Tess’s Love Tragedy In Tess Of The D’urbervilles

Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’urbervilles describes the heroine Tess’ s short and tragic life.Her love tragedy is the theme of the novel.Researchers conducted analyses of Tess’ s love tragedy from different perspectives.Many metaphors are employed in the novel to imply Tess’ s love tragedy.Lakoff and Johnson(2003)believe that metaphor is a way of thinking and exists widely in our daily life.Language is its expression form.The essence of conceptual metaphor is understanding and experiencing abstract and unfamiliar things through concrete and familiar things.The generation and construction of a conceptual metaphor are based on the systematicity and similarity between the source domain and target domain and they function through the mapping relationship.This study attempts to analyze how this novel expresses Tess’ s love tragedy through metaphors.It aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What types of metaphors are used in the novel to reflect Tess’ s love tragedy?(2)How these typical metaphors in the novel reflect Tess’ s love tragedy?Under the guidance of the conceptual metaphor theory,this study mainly adopts the qualitative research method.It first picks out and sorts out metaphors related to Tess’ s love tragedy,namely season metaphors,color metaphors and biblical figure metaphors;and then it analyzes their respective source domain,target domain and metaphorical meaning and explains the internal mapping relationship of each metaphor by the table;lastly it finds out specific expressions of the three metaphors in the novel and explores how they reflect Tess’ s love tragedy.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)Ontological metaphor,structural metaphor and orientational metaphor are employed to depict tragic images of the main characters and indicate Tess’ s love tragedy.Ontological metaphor includes season metaphors,color metaphors,animal metaphors and plant metaphors;structural metaphor includes biblical figure metaphors and road metaphors;orientational metaphor includes up-down metaphors.Among them,color metaphors,season metaphors and biblical figure metaphors are used most frequently and they best highlight the thematic tragedy.(2)Changes of four seasons are consistent with changes of Tess’ s love tragedy.In the novel,spring,summer,autumn and winter are four seasons which have their respective natural phenomena and obvious time boundaries and they have metaphorical meanings of changes in Tess’ s love experience.Tess’ s love fluctuates with four seasons: developing and maturing in spring and summer,declining and ending in autumn and winter.Changes of colors also suggest Tess’ s love tragedy.Green has the metaphorical meaning of Tess’ s inexperience;white has the metaphorical meaning of innocence;red has the metaphorical meanings of danger and misfortune;black has the metaphorical meanings of terror,evil and death.(3)The biblical figure metaphors have metaphorical meanings of the main characters’ personalities,life experiences,story scenes,religious beliefs and traditional morals in the novel.Tess and Eve have similarities in their life experience,namely they both experience the process of being tempted,committing a crime and getting punishment.Alec and Satan have similarities in their personalities,namely they are both evil,shameless and good at deceiving.Angel and angel have similarities in their personalities,religious beliefs and traditional morals.Tess herself and the two men whom she meets in her life,Alec and Angel,all have important impacts on her love tragedy.This study applies the conceptual metaphor for the analysis of the theme of literary works,which expands the scope of metaphor research and provides rich language facts for metaphor research.The writer hopes this study can have some inspirations to relevant metaphor research.