摘 要

托马斯·哈代是英国维多利亚时期最杰出的诗人和小说家之一，他的人生历程波澜起伏，时代的影响和生活环境的变化在他的思想中烙下深刻的印记，而这些特点在他的作品中得以充分体现。从哈代的时代以来，对于哈代作品研究最多的是关于女性以及悲剧主题的分析，且公众的目光最多的放在《德伯家的苔丝》上。哈代的生活中充满了跌宕起伏，他的作家之路也并不是一帆风顺，在维多利亚时期的大背景下，他从一个建筑家成为了一个作家和诗人，从描写田园风光转向对现实的揭露批判，这其中除去了个人因素，也有时代的影响。《还乡》是哈代“人物性格和环境”小说中的第一个杰作，是哈代转向悲剧写作的第一步。本文对哈代《还乡》中的背景和人物进行分析，探讨哈代如何在这部作品中展示时代风貌和特征。通过对《还乡》的研究，本文将时代背景和哈代的写作历程以及他的作品特色结合起来，清晰展示三者之前的紧密联系。

关键词：托马斯•哈代；维多利亚时代；还乡；时代特征

Abstract

Thomas Hardy was one of the most important figures during the Victorian Age as a poet and novelist. His life was full of ups and downs. The influence of this special age and the change of living background had deeply affected his thoughts, the characteristics of which had been fully presented in his works. Since his own age, the study about Hardy’s work was mainly the analysis of woman features and tragic theme, with the public attention focused largely on his most famous work Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Hardy’s career as a writer was not smooth at all. During the Victorian Age, he began his career as an architect then as a novelist. His works changed from the description of countryside to the revealing and criticism of reality. Apart from his personal factors, the age had contributed to such change. The Return of the Native was the first masterpiece of “character and environment” genre as the symbol of Hardy’s turning to tragedy writing. This article analyzes this work in terms of background and characters and discusses how Hardy represented the reality and characteristics of that time in the novel. Through the study of his work, this paper combines the times background with Hardy’s writing experience and his work so as to display an explicit inter-relationship between these three elements based on The Return of the Native.

Key Words: Thomas Hardy; the Victorian Age; The Return of the Native; era characteristics

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Literature Background 1

1.2 The organization and methodology 2

2 The Distinctive Victorian Age 4

2.1 Intrusion of the Industrial Civilization 4

2.2 Turmoil of Religious Belief 5

2.3 Prevalence of Capitalism 6

3 Thomas Hardy’s Career As A Writer 7

3.1 Hardy’s Early Enlightenment 7

3.2 The Exploration as a New Writer 8

3.3 The Struggling and Choice In Face of Reality 9

4 Characteristics in The Return of the Native 11

4.1 The Unmerciful Setting of Egdon Heath 11

4.2 The Overall Pessimistic Fatalism 13

5 Conclusion 16

References 18

Acknowledgements 19

Analysis of Era Characteristics of Thomas Hardy's Works--based on The Return of the Native

1 Introduction

Thomas Hardy was one of the most famous figures during the Victorian Age. His whole life crossed two different ages, which could be the root of distinctive time characteristics in his works. He started his career as an architect at first but he dreamed to be a writer. Due to an occasional chance he got his name known by an editor and since then he gradually dedicated himself to writing. In his preliminary stage Hardy concentrated on the description of village view. However, the society was undergoing great changes thus his thoughts suffered an impact. On the one hand, he tried to stick to his own belief by writing about kindness and truth in his novels. On the other hand, he had to undergo the shock of a new age in his mind. During the struggling between contradictory ideas and lifestyle, he attempted to find a way out. His novels were not only about the beautiful view or harmonious life in village; instead, there were signs of tragic features in his works. With the gradual maturity of thought, Hardy began to reflect the true face of real life in his own works. The Return of the Native is an important work in the transformation of Hardy's writing style. In this novel, Hardy still depicted the tranquility of pastoral life, but through the fate of the protagonists, he showed how the patriarchal countryside was influenced by industrial civilization and capitalism. This idea was closely related to his own time.

1.1 Literature Background

For Hardy’s greatness and his huge influence on both literacy and other famous writers such as D.H Lawrence, John Cowper Powys and so on, the study of Hardy himself and his works has always been the concentration for various scholars. During his time, there appeared numerous books and articles about Hardy’s life and works. Hardy’s wife published The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928, which was regarded as the official biography of Hardy. Other scholars were still eager to get more details about Hardy. Douglas Brown (1954) in his book Thomas Hardy made a clear presentation of Hardy’s life and works. He stated that there was a common model in Hardy’s fictions: the protagonists, usually being strong and tough from village, would fall in love with someone outside village. Zhang Chengping (2012) compared two novels of Hardy and concluded that character’s self-judgment and narrator’s judgment influence the characters’ lives directly. Kashavarz and Ghasemi (2012) studied one major theme—marriage-- in this novel. They pointed out that in this novel marriage becomes a means through which social mobility, individual ambitions, class distinctions, family relations, social conventions, and some other concepts are portrayed. Rachel Worth (2013) represented how social and economic changes helped account for the disappearance of traditional features of rural dress. Naveen K Mehta (2013) made a closer analysis of the heroine Eustacia in The Return of the Native. He stated that Eustacia was the most impressive heroine among Hardy’s heroines. The weaknesses of her character and her opposition to her environment were due to forces beyond her control.

Not only do foreign litterateurs have great admiration for Hardy, but also domestic scholars and learners try to get more close to him through the study of his works. Wang Bo and Wu Qiong (2009) considered Thomas Hardy as a keen observer of nature and people. Qu Nini (2012) mentioned in analyzing the tragic description of The Return of the Native that the tragedy of the works reflects the tragedy of real life in the Hardy era. Li Nana (2014) believes that the theme of Hardy's works has something in common—pessimism, which is closely related to the social and cultural ethos of the late 19th century. Lv Can (2015) also expressed the same view. He linked the social status of Victoria in the middle of the period to the theme of Hardy's work, and believed that its tragic roots were influenced by his own living environment. Wang Xinfang (2017) interprets the female images in Hardy's works. She deemed that through female characters Hardy showed the status of women at that time in society and marriage. Luo Yuan (2018) made a deeper analysis of Hardy's view of women and nature in The Return of the Native, and explored how Hardy presented women, nature and the relationship between the two.

Even though the present studies of Thomas Hardy count numerously, it is believed that the less mentioned work of Hardy deserves a deeper exploration and the intrinsic relationship between the age and his works need to be presented clearly.

1.2 The organization and methodology

This paper will respectively analyze the current society of the Victorian age and part of Hardy’s writing career, thus it will hold a general view of the social influence on Hardy and the change of his view on society. A specific look will be taken on The Return of the Native in order to make an in-depth exploration of the influence of time represented in his work. At last, the interconnection of the Victorian Age society and his work will be made explicit.

In the course of the study, research approaches such as literature research method and comparative analysis are mainly adopted. This paper requires reading and summarizing a lot of literature materials. During this process, this paper has to refer to various articles so as to extract the valuable ideas and make original comments. The comparative analysis is employed when studying different works of Thomas Hardy in order to find out common points and differences in The Return of the Native. With such methods, the author can base her idea on the reliable previous studies and represent a distinctive result.

2 The Distinctive Victorian Age

The Victorian Age was the period when Queen Victoria came to power from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. These 63 years was a long period of great prosperity in economy and culture for Britain with the overwhelming industrial revolution. In the meantime the size of the country grew exceedingly. It was said that “the sun never sets on England” because somewhere in England would get sunshine no matter what time it was. More and more people got access to education as well as the right to vote, which contributed to the liberation of people’s thoughts.