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自然风光下威塞克斯人的命运(1)学毕业论文

2013-09-06 01:12

[Abstract] The description of Nature in Hardy`s Wessex novels is characteristic of Hardy`s style. The description of Nature not only serves as a setting, but also becomes a vital part of Hardy`s novels. He focuses on the interrelations between human, Nature and society. Nature in his novels is personated and melted with the characters together. Hardy believed firmly that man was part of Nature, a guardian of Nature and should always remain true to their closeness with Nature. In all Hardy`s Wessex novels, the characters, who can live in harmony with Nature all deserve a good ending, while those who cannot are by all means go ruining. The conflict between man’s aspirations and his environment is the central unifying force of Hardy`s tragic novels. It stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature.
[Key Words] Hardy; Nature; Wessex people; fate; harmony

【摘 要】哈代的威塞克斯小说中的自然景物描写风格独特。自然景物的描写在他的这些小说中已不仅仅起着舞台背景式的作用，而是成为小说中的一个有机组成部分。他的小说侧重于探讨人、自然、环境及其相互间的关系。在他笔下，自然被人格化了，并和人熔为一体。在其威塞克斯系列小说中，凡能与自然和谐相处的人物都能获得一个美好的结局;反之，都无一例外地走向毁灭。主人公心中的抱负和其所处环境的矛盾是促成哈代悲剧小说的根源所在。哈代坚信人类是自然的一部分，是自然的守护者，且应总是和自然同存共进。他强调人应该与大自然和谐共存。
【关键词】哈代; 自然; 威塞克斯人; 命运; 和谐

1. Introduction

The world of Nature, for Hardy, is just that: a society, in which exploitation, solidarity, and the struggle for survival are experienced quite as keenly as they are in urban settings. The interpretation of the novels will focus on their obeisance to pastoral convention.
Hardy`s “Wessex,” as he himself explains, was taken from an old English history; he gave it to a district that was once part of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is generally confined to the area of Dorsetshire. It was more than just a location for him; he prized the manners and customs that formed a part of its social order. He mourned the passing of these native customs and the changing character of the villages during England’s rapid industrialization. He found a way to preserve the old order by capturing it in his novels. His novels achieve a high degree of universal significance through his keen discernment of the intimate relations between character and Nature. In most of his Wessex novels, Nature is personated and melted with characters, and is pictured as a hard, unrelenting force. On the one hand, the characters who can live in harmony with Nature all deserve a good ending; while those who can not are by all means go ruining. What’s more, the development of the plots in these novels are set in the environment without exception and shown by their attitude towards Nature. On the other hand, they were all disturbed and confused by their surroundings, natural and social environments. Hardy regards Nature as something that provides people with a permanent source of strength and stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature. （科教范文网http://fw.ΝsΕΑc.com编辑）
This is the central theme in The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d`Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. These four tragic novels, compared with Hardy`s earlier novels, which on the whole, are of a happier tone in Nature description, are typical so far as the description of Nature is concerned. The four novels make full use of the Nature description as the setting of the characters` life and activities. In them, Hardy tactfully presents how Nature influences the forming of the characters` tragedy. So, the following is an exploration of Hardy`s four tragic novels, showing how Hardy`s description of Nature influences the characters` fate.
To begin with, it is necessary to learn about this great novelist—Hardy`s life and his intimate relationships with Nature.
 
2. Influence of Nature on Hardy and his novels

2.1 Hardy`s Life 
Thomas Hardy (1840—1928) was born into Victorian England, in a small thatched cottage in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton three miles from Dorchester. It was a picturesque place. There were several quaint-looking houses with trees, clipped hedges, orchards and white gate-post-balls, in the avenue of cherry trees which led to the cottage, and behind it stretched the vast expanse of Egdon or Puddletown Heath. So Hardy is always considered a Victorian novelist. With the selection of Wessex as the setting for his novels, Hardy assured his success as a novelist. The area was familiar to him from his childhood. His walk to school took him along country lanes, and so he became familiar with rustic scenes. The “Wessex” includes those southern countries from Surrey in the east, to the Bristol Channel and the Dovenshire—Cornwall border on the west. It is rich in legend in the history of England.
Even as a boy and a young man Hardy was being modified by his reading of English literature, the classics, and history, by his careful study of architecture, by his interest in pictures and in acting, by his disturbing contacts with Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and by his puzzled study of the Oxford Movement theologians and their opponents. As a man he became more and more uneasy with innovations that were displacing rustic customs and with social ideas at variance with the older codes of life. He found evils aggravated by the intolerant judgment of society, as if there were not enough that are beyond human control and inherent in human life.

The most powerful of all the influences on Hardy, however, was the spirit of the age in which he lived. It was an age of transition, disturbing in itself for a sensitive mind. The old agricultural England was in the process of being devoured by the industrial development. Old ties were breaking and population was shifting from country to town. Hardy was not in any sense opposed to the world that was passing. The rural England to which he was attached by every tie of early, adolescent sentiment was crumbling before his eyes. It was really regrettable that what had seemed so secure was disappearing so irrevocably. Life seemed to Hardy to be precarious. By his novels, Hardy comes over as one who wanted to protect and preserve it. Moreover, he is in search of, “how people can develop a deeply intuitive relationship with their surroundings that can give meaning and purpose to their lives.”[1]

2.2 Hardy and Nature
To figure out what Nature means to Hardy; what Hardy says of Clym Yeobright, walking on Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, might have been said of himself:
“If anyone knew the heath well, it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, with its odors. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images of his memory were mingled; his estimate of life had been colored by it. His toys had been the flint knives and arrowheads which he found there, wondering why stones should “grow” to such odd shapes; his flowers the purple bells and yellow gorse; his animal kingdom the snakes and croppers; his society its human haunters.” [2]
   Here we can find Hardy`s fervid love and respect towards Nature. In his Wessex novels, Hardy believes that “man is not belong to himself”, but part of Nature. This is embodied as the above.
Hardy`s perception of the world of Nature is very accurate; small details, like the buttercups which stain Bellwood’s boots as he walks through a field on a spring day, show us how wide-awake Hardy`s senses were to external impressions of Nature. （科教作文网 zw.nseac.com整理）
In addition, he is deeply interested in man’s relationship with his natural environment----in his case Wessex (actually Dorset). He believed strongly that man was a guardian of Nature and had a responsibility to look after the animal kingdom (like Gabriel Oak) and to pass it on undamaged to future generations. He always stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature. Like Wordsworth, he writes about men and women living in constant communion with Nature, shepherds, for example, tramps, or rural workers, and he feels that Nature provides these people with a permanent source of strength.

2.3 Hardy`s style
Hardy`s novels, all written before 1900, are Victorian novels. But they make at least three outstanding differences:
Firstly, Nature by Hardy, is not only used as a setting, but plays a vital part in the characters` life and the developing of the plots. Nature is a relenting determining order.
Secondly, Hardy`s novels are poetic. He fully utilizes his poetic talents in the descriptions of Nature. They incorporate the description of Nature into their thematic structures. “His language becomes poetic as he describes the beautiful dawn and spring days.”[3]
Thirdly, Hardy`s stories, by the setting of Nature he provided, are always moving and bewitching. “They touch hearts not so much by means of their plots (which are very good) as through the pathos of the emotional tangle.”[4] His structure is essentially an organism in which action is unified by his preoccupation with the conflict between man and Nature. All his heroes always have to fight a losing battle against an environment that is bent on ruining his aspirations in life. This conflict between man’s aspirations and his environment is the central unifying force of Hardy`s novels.
In a word, the description of Nature is characteristic of the style of Hardy`s Wessex novels.

3. Nature, character and fate

The following is an illustration of Hardy`s four tragic novels, one by one. The stories are all set in the fictional southern England region that Hardy named Wessex, and have become known as the “Wessex novels.” All these books have a lot of natural descriptions, which in turn exert a great influence on the characters and serve as a foil of the development of the plots.

3.1 The Return of the Native (1878)

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The book’s title—The Return of the Native, gives readers the first indication of a close, and potentially disastrous, affinity of situation, event, and character. In this novel, the key word “Native” not only characterizes Clym but also provides the first description of Eustacia, which is ironic yet succinctly. Moreover, “Native” also signals the great significance of the environment where the events take place: the topography of Egdon Heath presents an all-encompassing situation. It appears boundless spatially and unchangeable temporally. It is peculiarly stable and self-sufficiently isolated. And it exerts a powerful influence on the characters throughout. The setting here is not just a space marker. It topographically delineates and furthers the novel’s characteristic unity of place. The novel’s first chapter elevates the heath from setting to situation in a tragic sense and maps the field of human activity.
“The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.”[5] The people who live on barren Egdon Heath have a great feeling for the great underlying reality of Nature, which is always there although human lives, and human civilizations, come and go. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Nature was a positive and on the whole a friendly force; while in this novel, on the contrary, it is something that you have to put up with.
The people in this novel can roughly be divided into two groups, two fates, according to the characters`different attitudes towards Nature and their different responses to it.
The first group—characters who have hatred towards Nature, the heath. People who refuse to adapt to the heath will be broken. Hardy shows us two characters, Eustacia, the heroine, who yearns for a life of luxury in Paris, and the gambler and compulsive flirt Wildeve, both of whom are forced to live on the heath, but hate it. “Do you mean Nature? I hate her already”; “I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster to me.”[6] In the end they both die, drowned in the flooded weir on a night of wind and storm. 内容来自www.nseac.com
The other group—people who own a fervid love to Nature, the heath. The hero, Clym`s attitude towards Nature is, “To my mind it is most exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world.”[7] People like Clym who accept the heath and understand its moods can live on it without too much trouble. This is also true of the sweet and unsophisticated Thomasin, who brings her baby out on to the heath quite happily, and the reddleman Diggory Venn. This weird character, although he appears to have come from a realm outside Nature, is actually very much like Oak in Hardy`s another novel. He is essentially kind and unselfish. And like Thomasin, thoroughly well adapted to life on the heath. At certain times, particularly in the remarkable scene where he plays dice with Wildeve by the light of glow-worms, we feel that he has powers, which aren’t quite human. Nature seems to work on his side, because he understands and knows how to relate to it. At last, he has his reward, when most of the other characters are broken or die.
The motivating force of the tragic action is, the conflict between Clym`s aspiration to reform society through education, and “Eustacia`s to enlarge her spiritual world by means of escape from the cramping Egdon Heath.”[8]
The gloomy Egdon Heath is used as the setting of this novel. The air of it suggests the “tragic possibilities.” No action directly presented in the novel takes place outside the boundary of this heath. It is also the witness of history, for “when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis----the final Overthrow.”[9] Upon this Nature scene appears the humanity, along with trouble: Thomasin returns with the bitterness of an abortive marriage; Wildeve and Eustacia are involved in a relation of doubtful Nature; Eustacia longs to fly away from the wilderness of the heath to give free play to her soul in the vanities and grandeurs of Paris life. Everything seems to have been brought to the edge of tragedy.

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Hardy`s tragedy is more than personal and social. The natural world, namely, the Egdon Heath, plays a not insignificant part. Suggesting its immense, and potentially destructive, power, the heath’s titanic form contrasts markedly with the frailty and Vulnerability of human “form”, so Hardy`s heath is endowed with distinctly anthropomorphic qualities. It is so personated. With its crooked, crisscrossing paths and lonely dwellings separated by acres of furzy wilderness, the heath provides an almost perfect setting for chance meetings and tragic misunderstandings. For example, Mrs. Yeobright, the hero`s mother journeys across its burning face in August, only to be turned away by the closed door of her son’s cottage and to be stung to death by an adder. Eustacia wanders in distraction under its heavy storms, only to be drowned in the weir. By now, the heath is not only the gloomy setting for the tragic drama, but also an agent participating actively in the destruction of the main characters. Nature takes part in the characters` activities, according to their attitudes towards Nature itself and plays an important role in the development of the plots, as described above.

3.2 The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Mayor of Casterbridge, is a novel much more eventful with a relatively more complicated plot. It is successful from the action of the plot. Hardy founded his plot upon the university—observed conflict between different interpretations of Nature’s impact upon the characters. Such evocation must be simple at its heart, and so it is here.
The portrayal of the rural, in conjunction with the town forms the perfect image of a complete society:
“Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block upon a cornfield. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chessboard on a green tablecloth.”[10]
 The uncompromising conflict between the hero, Henchard and Nature lies at the heart of Henchard`s tragedy. This is also the main driving force of the story. The Nature’s effect in this novel can be divided into two main parts. On the one hand, in the early sections of this novel, the hero achieves his success in his harmony with Nature. On the other hand, a sharp change arises. This conflict happens because the hero’s humanity turns bad and becomes out of harmony with Nature.   （转载自http://www.ＮＳＥＡＣ.com中国科教评价网）

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