Thomas Hardy is exalted as one of the mostprestigious novelists at the end of the 19^th century. Bombarded withepochal changes in the Victorian age, Hardy’s novels are also brimmed withtransitional characteristics, which endow his masterpieces ever-lasting charm.Different from male-dominated novels prevailing at that time, Hardy takes upthe gauntlet and places his spotlights on the clash between feminineunremitting pursuit and their tragedy-destined fates. Moreover, rather thanchaste and obedient images, female characters he molded swell with rebelliousspirit and strive to shrug off shackles of conventional demands on a fair lady. Far fromthe Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native and Tess of the D’Urbervilles are three crucial novels of Hardy and characters of which have distinctivetraits. Probing into the persistent pursuit of Eustacia, Tess andBathsheba for Paris, true love andindependence respectively is conducive to fathom women’sneeds and desires more comprehensively. Meanwhile, their ultimate disillusionment thattally with Hardy’s consistent style contributes toexplore his tragedy consciousness and fatalism. It also provides readers with abird’s-eye view on British invidious social environment and entrenchedprejudices towards women.

Domestic researches on Thomas Hardyoriginated from 1920s as Xu Zhimo introduced Hardy’s poems on The EasternMiscellany, but not until nearly twenty years has it come to maturity. Ingeneral, researches on Hardy’s fictions center on its tragedy consciousness aswell as its novel “square dance” structure of narration, also the comparisonsbetween Hardy and other writers such as Shen Congwen, Faulkner in the field ofcomparative literature studies. Recently, emphasis on the new female imageportrayed by Hardy, which is a far cry from tradition values, is garneringwaves of attention. In the aspect this paper tries to explore, there is alsopioneering scholars make great contributions. Ma Xian analyzed a series ofwomen characters in terms of society, history, politics and moral customs inher paper On the New-Woman Image in Hardys Novels(2004),concluding that they all shared the same mixed personalityof rebellion and subservience. In APerspective to the Matters of Gender in Thomas Hardy’s Works (2003), Wang Guiqin uncovered Hardy’s view onfemale that women always depend on external power instead of their own, which inevitablyspell restriction and oppression in a patriarchal society.

Different from domestic researches whichmainly appreciate Hardy’s representative works like The Return of the Native and Tess of the D‘Urbervilles, western researches broadened the scope ofstudies on Hardy after 1980s. They paid more heed not only to his minor works,but also his biographies. Among Hardy’s unobtrusive works, studies on his firstpublications Desperate Remedies is the biggest breakthrough, whichunveil the sprout of his inclination to female-centered narration style. In it,Patricia Engham (2003) perceived that Hardy had already realized a gulf yawningbetween the female images set up by society and women themselves in his introductionto Desperate Remedies. Meanwhile,modern researches developed new analysis methods and perspectives. JoannaDevereaux analyzed heroes and heroines Hardy created from theoretical viewpointof gender politics in his paper Patriarchyand Its Discontents: Sexual Politics in Selected Novels And Stories of Thomas Hardy (2003), pointing out Hardy’s distinct attitudes towards gender between hisearly works and later works. In The Representation of Womenin Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (2016),S.A.H. Shakury pinpoints that Hardy portrays women affected by the pressure saddledon them by the environment and heredity.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper mainlyfocuses on the extreme pursuits of three female characters in Thomas Hardy’snovels respectively. Firstly,this paper will give a brief introduction to Hardy’s life and expound on hispreference to leverage the fate of female characters to express the motif andconsummate skills to mold them in his writing. Second part, the main body ofthe paper, will revolve around the inexorable hankering of Eustacia for Paris,the unremitting pursuit of Tess for true love, the unswerving craving ofBathsheba for independence. Probing into three masterpieces, Far from theMadding Crowd, a great coup in Victorian literature, The Return of theNative, the signal marked Hardy’s maturity in writing and Tess of the D’Urbervilles,the most influential and paramount one, this paper elaborates on how theyindulged themselves in their pursuits and what they sacrificed to swap, whichwill interweave with text analysis to be directly and fully presented.Considering that they all culminated in tragedy, this paper then pinpointslurking reasons combined with women survival predicament in the Victorian ageand Hardy’s tragedy consciousness and ascribes their failures to thediscrepancy between character and environment.

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