| In this thesis, the tragedy of Tess, the heroine in Hardy's Tess of The D'Urbervilles, has been analyzed from a psychological perspective, which is made possible largely due to Hardy's idiosyncratic narrative. In Tess, by imposing contradictory features on the two heroes as well as their relationships with Tess and even by replacing the traditionally dominant, omniscient narrator with incompatibly different narrating voices, Hardy has contrived of a progress of Tess's maturation, which manifests not only physically but also mentally. Observing such a progress helps to shed light upon Tess's tragic fate from a psychoanalytical perspective, in which way the whole story can be seen as a trajectory of Tess's constructing her gendered identity. In the interval, the original daughter of nature undergoes a psychological socialization and encounters an irreconcilable conflict between natural instinct and psychological attachment to the symbolic injunction. It is just the irreconcilable nature of the aforementioned conflict that makes Tess's ultimate tragedy inevitable. The whole analysis has been accomplished by resorting to the psychological theories on subjection developed by Kristeva, Freud and Foucault. Kristeva's definition on pre-Oedipal disposition has provided a psychoanalytical interpretation of man's attachment to symbolic order. And along with the concept of Oedipus Complex, Freud also introduced in Civilization and its Discontent his discovery of "death instinct" which helps to unfold that man's libidinal drives in the background behind Eros manifest themselves in sadism when directed outwards and masochism when inwards. Once part of the drives is suppressed, it is converted into the agent for the making of super-ego, in which process, man is conditioned to behave or even think in accordance with social and moral laws, and super-ego will all the time present functioning "like a garrison in a conquered city". Michel Foucault,a great French thinker, elucidated the aforementioned progress exhaustively in his book, Discipline and Punishment. He maintained that gendered identity construction must experience a paradoxical course of subjectivation which means that the gaining of identity can only be achieved by subordination of the individual to certain social and moral norms. And the restrictions or the symbolic injunctions do not function by imposing on a person from the outside. Instead society exploits man's inevitable attachment to super-ego construction to accomplish its normative ideal inculcation into his conscience, and, as a result, man inadvertently becomes a "prisoner of his soul". For Foucault, this process of subjectivation is carried out through the corporeal conditioning. That is: by normalizing and regulating the individual's behaviors, one's individuality can become obedient, coherent and totalized.Nevertheless, it is also commonly acknowledged that not all of the libidinal drives can be suppressed and converted and there always exists an instinctual resistance to normalization which stems from the prediscursive body prior to its social inscription and signification. And since the construction of super-ego is quite a long process which needs repetitive enforcement, the bodily multiplicity of instinctual forces renders the individual's breaking through the surface of the body once in awhile to disrupt the regulating practices of cultural coherence imposed on that body by a power regime. Yet, though impossible to be eliminated, the disturbing resistance will ultimately be overwhelmed by the gradual setting up of super-ego working together with the social law.As a transitional literary figure between Victorian and modern period, though unable to frame those psychological issues as they are elucidated by later 20th century theorists, Hardy has demonstrated in his literary works an awareness that they are significant matters worth concern. At the outset of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess, is deliberately designed with an almost prediscursive body waiting to... |
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