INTRODUCTION

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), novelist and poet, is one of the representatives of English critical realism at the turn of 19 century. His principal works are the Wessex novels. The novels describes the characters and environment of his native countryside.（378) He vividly depicts the impoverishment and decay of small farmers. The author shows great mercy for seeing the deterioration of the patriarchal mode of life in rural England. This was one of the reasons accounting for the growing pessimistic vein which runs throughout his novels. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy’ s masterpiece tells the tragic life story of a beautiful country girl. This paper intends to study Thomas Hardy’ s fatalism through the analysis of the tragic fate of Tess. Hardy lives in a special period when it is the transition from capitalism to imperialism. To some extend, capitalism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it boosts the development of British economy. On the other hand, it deepens the poor people’ s plight. Especially after 1870s, the intrusion of capitalism in rural areas, the patriarchal society in rural area completely collapsed. Hardy witnesses the bankruptcy of small farmers resulting from the invasion of capitalism. He depicts miseries of farmers with sympathy. He also endeavors to find a way to solve these problems but in vain. But his thoughts are experienced a complex process of change. He once put his faith in God primitively, however he throws god out ultimately. He accepts Darwin’s theory of evolution and Spencer’ s theory, and then affect the acceptance of Schopenhauer’ s inner strength, finally forms his own evolution meliorism and meliorism. This series of changes in the array of thinking fail to ensure him to find a solution to those social problems. On the contrary, they make him become a pessimist, as well as his novels with a strong pessimism and fatalism. Tess of the D’Urberviles gives expression to the changes of his mind. The heroine Tess’ s tragic life embodies his fatalism profoundly. The arrangement of the plot structure reflects the fatalism, therefore every step of the tragedy of the protagonist is depicted as an inevitable event. In addition, the author is also adept at rendering the inevitability of character’s fate through mysterious omens, and curses. What’s more, various detailed descriptions of ancient customs and rural scenery can be found in his novel for the author’ s nostalgia for the patriarchal society in rural area. Hardy’ s works are famous for their unique tragic narrative art in the late nineteenth Century. The most crucial feature of Hardy’ s works is the coincidence of events and the tragedy of the fate of the characters. He describes the uncertainty and tragedy of the fate of the characters through the description of the incident. His novels are broadly pided into three categories: the novels of character and environment, romance and fantasy novels, and the structure of the novel. The first category is the most important includes Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude The Obscure. They are generally considered as the most mature works of Thomas Hardy. The so-called fatalism is that humans are unable to control for their own destiny, let alone predict the fate of mankind which is caused by a series of events, that is to say, in the universe there is a kind of the original power which will not change with people’s will. This power takes control of the destiny of human beings. And the event is the embodiment of the mysterious power, which always chasing those who should have had ended up with good luck. People living in the harsh world, always hope to achieve happiness through their own efforts. Therefore, people persist in fighting with the fate. However, even they fight with it bravely they still unable to shake off the control of various accidental factors. On the contrary, in many cases, the resistance is inclined to accelerate people’s demise. Hardy believes that this will of the universe dominates the fate of human beings. Faced with it, people ultimately end up with the inevitable tragedy. The Return of the Native is an important symbol of hardy’ s creation of tragedy. The work is full of sadness, describing a successful jeweler Clement, a series of life course of his returning from Paris back in Egdon Health. He met a women returning from overseas called Eustacia who was a vain person. She was eager to leave the wilderness, as a result ,she abandoned her lover Wildeve, and married Clement. However, Clement was tired of glamorous life in Paris, and decided to settle down in his hometown. Therefore, Eustacia, who was a wantonly and vein women abandoned Clement. She was reconciled to her old lover wilderness who had just inherited a large property. They decided to elope but in vein. They were drowned in the floor. The work depicts a picture of the tragedy of the world. At the beginning of the work, the author uses a lot of words to describe Egdon Health. This is not a simple description, but has a deep meaning. The wasteland is original and barren having a symbolic meaning. It symbolizes a mysterious and irresistible force of nature that takes control of all things in the world and all people’s fate. The author lets the people involved in such a desolate pathos environment through the description of the wasteland, which laid the fatalism tone of the whole work. The Mayor of Casterbridge shows the tragic features of coincidence and accidentalism. The protagonist Henchard was so fond of drinking in youth that he sold his wife and daughter to a seaman Mr. Newson. Twenty years later, Michael Henchard became a very powerful businessman, even became the major of Casterbridge. In order to compensate for his guilty, he married his wife again, however, his wife died soon later. At this time, a Scotland young man Donald Farfrae came to Casterbridge , they became a business partner coincidentally. Since then, the fate of Michael Henchard suffered great reversal. He was a failure when he competed with Donald Farfrae. What upsets he most was that he thought that Elizabeth Jane was his biological daughter, however, she turned out to be the seaman’s. In the end, Donald Farfrae married Elizabeth Jan, while Henchard was the same as twenty years ago, died in grief with nothing belonging to him. At the beginning of the novel, Michael Henchard sold his wife and daughter in a public occasion. In the end, he wrote in his will that no one will remember me. From first to last, he was faced with the cold and ruthless society. A series of chance and coincidence events pushed him to the tragic fate. Jude The Obscure also depicts the tragic experience of the hero, which is full of tragedy. Many scholars believe that this work is the most pessimistic of all Hardy’ s works. In this work, the inner strength which is unfailing and cannot be explained has been taking control of the fate of Jude, and continues to obstruct Jude. Whenever Jude wants to take a step forward, as if there is an invisible hand pulls him back. Jude is obscure at the beginning of the novel, he is still obscure in the end. The author’s emphasis on the "inner will" is not only mainly to increase the tragic atmosphere, but also to enable readers to feel fatalism in the whole work. Tess of the D’ Urbervilles is one of the most outstanding works of Hardy, scholars from domestic and foreign countries have done tremendous research on this novel. Foreign scholars mainly study from the following aspects: Firstly, from the aspect of the ideological value and artistic skills of the works, the domestic scholars have made a high evaluation of the content of the work and the author’s writing skills while not all foreign scholars agree with statement. Chapman, a British scholar, criticized Hardy for showing off which can be demonstrated vividly in the end of the novel. Moreover, he thought that Hardy described the country life with the poor journalistic style in Victoria era which was really unnecessary. Second, from the perspective of the theme of the novel: In 1953 the British contemporary literary critic Arnold Kettle had a special discussion on Tess of the D’ urbervilles said that the novel was more of a kind of social literature, which reflected the process of the disintegration of the peasantry with the expansion of capitalism, Tess’ s experience is the inevitable result of the historical process. Most of the domestic researches mainly analyze Tess’ s  tragic fate from the following aspects. First, they appreciate the novel from the consciousness of tragedy. Bingxuan analyzes from the perspective of social tragedy and personality. Tess’ s  tragedy is not accidental but the true portrayal and typical representative of the miserable life of peasants at the end of the nineteenth Century when bourgeois rural economic collapsed. Her tragedy is a microcosm of the whole capitalist society, as well as the inevitable outcome of the development of capitalist society. Secondly, to appreciate the novel from a religious aspect. For example, Ma Shikui, and Zhu Shidong think that the prototypes of the main characters in the novel are available from the Bible . Zhu Lin analyzes Hardy' s creative concept from the perspective of religious archetypal criticism. There are a lot of discussions on the causes of Tess’ s tragedy at home and abroad. This paper will focus on the analysis of the tragic fate of Tess from the aspect of fatalism. Usually we can taste the tragedy from three aspects: social tragedy，personality tragedy and the tragedy of fate. Everything is not isolated, it’s happening, development is inextricably linked with other things, the causes of the tragedy of Tess is multiple.