西方文化(英文)

The symbolism of the natural images in Tess of the d’Urbervilles Abstract: In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy uses a lot of natural images and symbolism, which exaggerates the atmosphere of tragedy, profoundly portrays the personalities of the characters and their inner world, sets off the themes of the destiny by contrast. The paper described the definition of image and its symbolism. And it interpreted how Hardy manifested Tess’s tragic destiny more distinctly and vividly by means of using di fferent images.

Key words: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, natural images, symbolism

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorchester Dorset of southwest England, a small village where once a British ancient Wiessee Alex founded the kingdom. Hardy named many of his novels a s “Wiessee Fox novel”. In Hardy’s novels, the nature of Wiessee Fox has a vitality. Nature and characters inosculate as a whole. Nature reflects the characters’ appearance and spirituality, symbolizes the spirit of the character as well as the ideological content of the character. “Hardy’s masterpiece, Tess of the d’Urbervilles took Wiessee Fox as the background.”[1] Therefore, In this novel, he uses the more subtle but rich symbolic images to show the deep meaning of tne novel, to reveal the theme of the n ovel, and to arouse the reader’s emotions. The next paper will select three types of natural images and its symbolism appeared in high frequency to analyze Tess’s tragic fate..

一、the red image

Red image in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" appeared frequently, as a representative image of the whole novel, which shocks the bottom of the reader's hearts strongly and plays an important role in shaping Tess’s tragic image. At Beginning of the novel, Tess and his brother Abraham drove the horse "Prince" that her family earned a living on to market to sell cellular. On a dark road at night, The postal car drove into her horse. Suddenly, "blood was pouring out from the wound, falling on the ground with the hissing sound. Tess used hands to cover the wound, but the result was " from head to toe, she was yet red with blood. It is precisely because Prince’s death, Tess was forced to go to Urbervilles to work with guilty in order to make up her faulty and support the family. Eventually Alec had the chance to tarnish Tess, resulting in Tess's tragedy. When Tess was forced to get close to Alec, his two thick lips were red and smooth; when he went to the garden with Tess, he kept feeding Tess with the red strawberry and putting red roses on Tess's body. Here are a series of images: Alex's red lips, red strawberries in the garden, red roses on