Collision And Reconciliation:On The Inevitability Of Tess’s Tragedy From The Perspective Of Hegel’s Theory Of Tragedy

Tess of the D ’Urbervilles,authored by the British novelist Thomas Hardy,tells the tragic story of Tess.Critics interpretate the novel with different theories,but few studies use theory of tragedy to analyze this tragedy.Thus,this thesis adopts Hegel’s theory of tragedy to study the collisions and reconciliation in the novel.The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters.The first chapter introduces three collisions in Hegel’s theory of tragedy and their reflections in the novel:the accident of Prince reveals the decline of peasantry;Angel leaves Tess for Brazil,showing his idealism,Tess’s internalized inferiority and gender bias;Tess’s fatalism is presented by her murder of Alec.The second chapter points out the reasons of three collisions:the first is caused by the conflicts between capitalists and peasants;the second is caused by the struggle of Angel about his instinct love and social convention;the third is caused by the opposition between Tess’s pursuit of purity and legal system.The third chapter explains the reconciliation of three collisions:the death of Tess’s son is a destructive reconciliation,which cannot solve the social conflicts in fact;though Angel comes back to Tess,his awakening cannot stop the tragedy from going on;the death of Tess ends the story with her inner reconciliation as well as tragic destruction.The final reconciliation logically recovers Hegelian "eternal justice";however,it cannot realize Hegel’s effect of tragedy given its ignorance of individual struggle.By studying the collisions and reconciliation in Tess,the thesis,displaying the achievements as well as some flaws of Hegel’s theory of tragedy,holds the opinion that the destiny of Tess is a doomed individual tragedy and an inevitable social tragedy at the same time.