领域：学术论文 · 人文科学

Abstract: Literature is a mirror of real life which can reflect all aspects of people’s lives. More and more scholars have begun to study a country from the roots of economy, politics and culture. As early as ancient Greece, there were some creations of tragedy. Tragedy is a kind of literary creation, which is not a simple artistic form or technique but the repeat of real society. It can depict the piteous, sad, distressing and sentimental plots by describing some tortuous or complicated events. The British famous writer Thomas Hardy was one of the excellent novelists of the Victorian age. He delineated a lot of characters of tragedies, showing various persons’ enchantment. Besides providing the dignity of life tragedy to the readers, the novels contains the profound rationalism of the writer and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles reflected his real society. Hardy succeeded in portraying the image of heroine Tess and revealing the hypocritical ethics and morals of bourgeois society. This paper will discuss the causes of Clare’s tragedy from the hero –Angel Clare’s social background and psychology.  
  
Key words: Thomas Hardy, tragedy, Angel Clare  
  
Chapter1 Introduction  
  
Literature is not only an art but also a mirror of real life. When studying a literary work, scholars actually study history. Nowadays an increasing number of scholars have begun to study the history of a country’s economic, political and cultural forms from the perspective of literature because through different kinds of literary works, we can see all sorts of feelings such as joy, anger, sorrow and various truths. The manifestation of literature is manifold, one of which is tragedy. The writers often want to show the piteous, sad, distressing and sentimental plots by describing some tortuous or complicated events. In the tragedy, it is inevitable that the heroes or heroines should suffer a setback or disadvantage, cover themselves in dishonor, experience tribulation or even fail or die though they have reasonable motivation, wishes, ideal, or passion which may indicate a victory or success. But finally they will either die or get mad. With a bad ending, tragedy often contains a certain philosophy of life  
. There are lots of tragedies in western literature such as Oedipus, Prometheus Bound, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Faust, etc. And the famous tragedians are also legion like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, etc –Thomas Hardy for one. He was a prolific and excellent writer, publishing fourteen novels and four volumes of short stories. His works were noted for the intense tragic spirit and sense of fortune, from which we can feel the atmosphere of tragedy brought by fortune deeply.  
  
“Tess of the D’urbervilles” is one of the Hardy’s tragedies, a masterpiece which brought him into a number of literary critics notice. It reflected the writer’s real society and its social system and morals; therefore studying this novel can help us to know about the history of his age. But many papers showed that most of critics used to research the writing background from the tragedy of Tess. Many scholars have always put emphasis on the tragedy of Tess for a long time. Only a few scholars made researches for the tragedy of its hero Angel Clare. He was a contradictory unity –he was bold in struggling with the traditional view but in the meantime he could not break the shackles of feudal ideas. This paper will see the society from this perspective –Angel Clare, the hero’s tragedy and discuss the causes of Clare’s tragedy from his social background and psychology.  
  
Chapter2 A brief account of Tess of The D’urbervilles  
  
It seems that the fictional works do not concern with the real world. But we know that before the writers begin to create their works, it can be said that their social experience may be their primary material for creation. Some writers created the roles and environments in order to revolt against the worldly prejudice of their ages. These kinds of words are expected to tell people the truth of a society. In many cases, the social background of the novel is the writer’s background. Before analyzing the roots of Clare’s tragedy, this paper will discuss two aspects of this novel, namely “the writing background” and “the writer and his works” from which we can see the background of this novel.  
  
2.1 The writing background  
  
Thomas Hardy was the last important novelist of the Victoria ages. The Victorian age was an age of realism rather than of romanticism –a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral and physical diseases as they are. Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represented the reality and spirit of this age which was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. Hardy, who also shown the truth of this age had a high place in Western literature which came from the agitation of life and fatalism of human being. His tragedies in the history of Western literature were no an accident for the tragedy consciousness. Hardy’s tragic novels has sprung from and developed this tragic idea in form and connotation. The tragedy consciousness in Hardy’s novels originated from Western traditional tragic spirit which was full of rationalism and profound reflection on the contradictions of human society. And it also revealed an ineluctable and inevitable cond  
itionality of fate. That is to say, the heroes or heroines would slip into the tragic path of life in the end in Western literature no matter whether they liked or not, or where they hided. Tragedy was their final arrangement.  
  
Thomas Hardy studied Greek tragedies and Shakespearean tragedies all his life. And he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s tragedy consciousness. Schopenhauer was a famous philosopher who believed that life was a tragedy –life was filled with desire. If a person had a desire but could not gain his desires, he would feel painful; however, when he could gain his desires, he would become insipid. This was another torment. Schopenhauer grouped tragedy into three types: the tragedy caused by those who committed heinous crimes, the tragedy led by the irony of fate and the tragedy caused by misunderstanding and distrust between persons in everyday life. In his opinion, the last tragedy was the most terrible one which we can see in Hardy’s works. Hardy began to creating the novels in the early 1870s. In the late 1890s, he turned to write poetry. The Britain in this period was undergoing a transition period from laisser-faire capitalism to imperialism. The capitalism thought that the social system of this period  
could not be changed. But Hardy’s works exactly clashed with it, which reflected the tremendous changes of society due to the invasion of industrial capital to the village. With one remark he had ripped away the mask of British society.  
  
2.2 The writer Thomas Hardy and his work  
  
Literature is reflection of life. Almost all writers created their novels according to his social background. We can see many literary works written on the basis of their ages. They wanted to bring out the social facts by their works. It should be such a free way that they could rebuke the dark society. People can feel the society of the writers from their works and then identified with the writers. The writers hoped that they could let the people know the dark aspects of the government and then fine an echo from them by their works. To some extent, a novel should be a history. From the introduction of Thomas Hardy and the main content of Tess of The D’urbervilles must be helpful to show us the background of Clare’s tragedy.

翻译考点：
考点1：“agitation of life and fatalism of human being”推荐译为“人生的动荡与宿命观”
考点2：“are expected to tell people”推荐译为“旨在向人们揭示”，不可直译为“期望告诉人们”
考点3：“Introduction”在论文中必须译为“引言”