Tragic Effect in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.docVIP

PAGE PAGE 19 Tragic Effect in Tess of the D’Urbervilles I. Introduction Thomas Hardy was the last important novelist and poet of the Victorian Age. He started his writing career with poetry and terminated it with poetry. However, his success mainly lies in tragic novels. In his series of major novels, Hardy gradually showed the inner quality of a serious writer. He showed the tendency to attribute his character’s tragic destinies to social institutions and conventions. So he has been called a pessimist, a gloomy and depressing writer. Indeed his picture of human life are not so encouraging, in contrary, Hardy concerning the ideas of man’s fate is the pessimistic vision of human life. In his novels, men and women never have a chance to taste the sweetness of triumph. All they experience while pursuing their dreams and aspiration is the bitterness of catastrophic failures. Because the protagonists in Hardy’s works are often from the low social status, and when they want to realize the personal will, their behaviors in due course conflict with the existing environment and the inhuman forces, such as social ethics, religions, laws, politics and economic systems, which destroy the life of the man. So the end of tragic art and the tragic effect were embodied fully in his tragic novels. The end of tragic art is to produce the kind of emotional effect proper and peculiar to tragedy as a particular art form. This is clearly stated in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as an imitation of an action, which, being serious and complete, will arouse the emotions of pity and fear and in doing so accomplish the proper purgation of these emotions. Despite all the difference in understanding and explaining the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, pity and fear have been generally held to be the ideal effect tragedy produces on an ideal audience. Tragic pity and fear are both the result of a sudden visualization of punishes and irresistibility of the power that controls our fate. Pit