Since Tess of the d’Urbervilles was published in 1891, it received extensive attention of readers and critics. Critics have used different theories to explain this novel. The comments at home and abroad mainly focus on two aspects: one is the origin of the heroine’s tragic fate and the other is the feminist in the novel. Scholars attribute Tess’ tragic fate to ruthless capitalism, unjust laws, protagonist’s personality defects.  

   Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a tragic novel. In the novel, Hardy doesn’t illustrate in detail how poor Tess is, but expresses Tess’ tragic life by a variety of symbols and reveals the miserable life of Tess deeply and the theme of the novel by some symbols, which is worth to have a research. This paper studies the Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ symbolic images in descriptions of the environment based on the symbolism, and then discusses the relationship between the descriptions of the environment and the tragic fate of Tess. First of all, the author introduces the writer and the novel. Then, the author introduces the definition and the development of the symbol and symbolism. After that, the author analyzes the symbolic significance of the environment and reveals the tragic fate of Tess through some symbolic images, such as, the colors, the natural objects, transference of places and so on. In the last part, the author will draw a reasonable conclusion.