论《还乡》作品中哈代的角色意识

Introduction 1
is of the Novel…………………………………………………..2
1.1Brief Introduction...................................................................................................2
1.2 Particular Elements………………………………………………………………3
1.3 Main Characters……………………………........................................................4
1.4Conficts between the Charaters and Their Causes…………………… ………...6
viewpoint from Hardy’s Life and Social Background………7
2.1 Life Background about Hardy…………………………………………………...7
2.2 Social Background……………………………………………………………….9
2.3 Causes of Tragedy Writing………………………………………………………9
Tragic Consciousness of Hardy in The Return of the Native……………………………………………………………………10
3.1 The Tragic Consciousness in the Weather and Time Depictions………….......11
3.1.1 Weather………………………………………………………………… ..11
3.1.2 Time……………………………………………………………………....12
3.2 The Tragic Consciousness Depicted in the Dialogs ………………………….13
4. Conclusion……………………………………………………………14
Bibliography…………………………………………………………….16

 
Introduction 
Thomas Hardy(1840～1928)，is the last and one of the greatest of Victorian novelsts. He is famous for his depictions of the imaginary county " Wessex " . Hardy's works reflect his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life. The Return of the Native is his representative novel. Before its publication, The Return of the Native had once been rejected by Leslie Stephen, the editor of the prestigious Corn-hill Magazine. Stephen objected to the hint of extramarital sex and found it inappropriate for a family magazine. The serial ran in Belgravia, which, according to Desmond Hawkins, Hardy found it to be an inferior publication. Later when the novel was published in 1878, some commentators praised Hardy's vivid descriptions of the geographical landscapes, especially those in the first chapter. Others felt that his portrayal of the local characters was shallow and unconvincing. Yet some critics objected to the sexual relationships in the novel. A review in Athenaeum deemed it "distinctly inferior to anything of his novels we have yet read." The reviewer also took issue with the language used by the characters, which seemed "pitched throughout in too high a key to suit the talkers." That same month critic W. E. Henley reviewed the book in The Academy. The charge that he wrote about sexual relationships purely for sensationalism hurt Hardy to such a degree that he quitted writing novels by 1895, although he continued to live another thirty three years.（Thomas Hardy, 1997）
This paper mainly studies Hardy’s representative novel The Return of the Native, with the aim to analyse the character conflicts of the main characters in the novel and their tragic causes, mainly to analyse the tragic consciousness of Hardy from his life experiences and social background, so as to help better understand the literature value and social significance of the novel.

1. Analysis of the Novel
1.1 Brief Introduction
The novel opens with the action of the plot already underway. The reddleman Diggory Venn rides onto the heath with Thomasin Yeobright i n the back of his wagon: her marriage to Damon Wildeve is delayed by an error in the marriage certificate, and Thomasin collapses. He is infatuated with Eustacia Vye, and is, at least to some extent, using Thomasin as a device to make Eustacia jealous. When Venn learns of the romance between Eustacia and Wildeve, his own love for Thomasin induces him to intervene on her behalf, which he will continue to do throughout the novel. But Venn's attempts to persuade Eustacia to allow Wildeve to marry Thomasin, like his own marriage proposal to Thomasin, are unsuccessful.
Into this confused tangle of lovers comes Clym Yeobright, Thomasin's cousin and the son of the strong-willed widow Mrs. Yeobright, who also serves as a guardian to Thomasin. Eustacia sees in the urbane Clym an escape from the hated heath. Even before she meets him, Eustacia convinces herself to fall in love with Clym, breaking off her romance with Wildeve, who then marries Thomasin. Chance and Eustacia's machinations bring Clym and her together, and they begin a courtship that will eventually end in their marriage, despite the strong objections of Mrs. Yeobright. Once Wildeve hears of Eustacia's marriage, he again begins to desire her, although he is already married to Thomasin.
In marrying Eustacia, Clym distances himself from his mother. Yet distance soon begins to grow between the newlyweds as well. Eustacia's dreams of moving to Paris are rejected by Clym, who wants to start a school in his native country. Wildeve inherits a substantial fortune, and he and the unhappy Eustacia once again begin to spend time together: first at a country dance, where they are seen by the omnipresent observer Diggory Venn, and then later when Wildeve visits Eustacia at home while Clym is asleep. During this visit, Mrs. Yeobright knocks at the door. She has come hoping for a reconciliation with the couple. Eustacia, however, in her confusion and fear at being discovered with Wildeve, does not allow Mrs. Yeobright to enter the house: heart-broken and feeling rejected by her son, she succumbs to heat and snakebite on her walking home, and dies.
Clym blames himself for the death of his mother. He and Eustacia separate when he learns of the role that Eustacia played in Mrs. Yeobright's death, and of her continued relations with Wildeve. Eustacia plans an escape from the heath, and Wildeve agrees to help her. On a stormy night, the action comes to a climax: on her way to meet Wildeve, Eustacia drowns. Trying to save her, Wildeve drowns as well. Only through heroic efforts does Diggory Venn save Clym from the same fate. The last part of the novel sees the growth of an affectionate relationship, and an eventual marriage, between Thomasin and Diggory. Clym, much reduced by his travails and by weak eyesight brought on by overly arduous studies, becomes a wandering preacher, taken only half-seriously by the locals.
1.2 Particular Elements
In The Return of the Native, Egdon Heath is the first "character" introduced into the book. From the first description of Egdon Heath until the close of the story, this dreary and unfertile waste seems to symbolize the indifference with which Nature views the pathetic fate of human beings. Occasionally the reader is likely to look upon the long-enduring barrenness and apparent purposelessness of the heath as a sign of its kinship to man, to feel that it is like man, slighted and enduring.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen,the earth with the darkest vegetation ,their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour stood distinct in the g upwards ,a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work: looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home .The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in face of the heath by its mere complexion added half-an-hour to eve: it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity. The storm was its lover; and the wind was its it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecongnised original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams till revived by scenes like this.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday, Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness --“Bruaria.”Then follow the length and breadth in leagues; and,though some uncertainty exists as to the extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. “Turbaria Brua ria ”-- the right of cutting heath-turf-occurs in charters relating to the district. “Overgrown with heth and mosse ,” says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.
1.3 Main Characters
Hardy uses slight witch imagery when describing his strong female characters because, according to Gayla Steel, “he is hiding his examination of their independence and sexuality within these images”. For example, Hardy calls Eustacia "Queen of the Night" and describes her as having a "dark beauty." Because these women are strong, passionate, and set apart from society, their neighbors denounce them as witches. An example occurs when Susan Nunsuch accuses Eustacia as being in league with the "dark one." As retaliation against the supposed witch, Eustacia, Susan pricks her in church and creates a wax effigy in her likeness. Susan pricks Eustacia to see if she bleeds; it is said that if a woman does not bleed when pricked, she is a witch.
Eustacia Vye, born in the busy port town of Budmouth and transplanted to Egdon Heath to live with her grandfather Eustacia, despises the heath, and searches for a way to escape. However, even as she hates the heath, Eustacia seems in her deep, brooding passion, to be a part of its wild nature. She has an amorous relationship with Damon Wildeve, but enters into a tragic marriage with Clym Yeobright when she realizes that he is the more interesting, and urbane, of the two men.
Thomasin is Clym Yeobright's cousin and Mrs. Yeobright's niece and ward. She is an innocent and goodhearted, if somewhat vacuous, woman who seems genuinely to care for Damon Wildeve--who, however, is merely using her to make Eustacia Vye jealous. She eventually marries Wildeve--over the objections of her aunt--and has a child, which she names Eustacia. At the end of the novel, she marries Diggory Venn, who has long loved her.
Mrs. Yeobright is Clym Yeobright's mother, and Thomasin Yeobright's aunt and guardian. A proper, class-conscious, proud woman, she objects to the marriage of both her charges; as it turns out, she is entirely correct. She dies when, exhausted, she is bitten by an adder on the heath, believing that Clym has utterly rejected her. The daughter of a parson, Mrs. Yeobright considers herself--and is considered--of a higher class than the local laborers.
Clym is the son of Mrs. Yeobright and the cousin of Thomasin Yeobright. He goes abroad to work as a diamond merchant in Paris, but comes home when he realizes that his ambition is not towards material wealth. He is pursued by Eustacia Vye, and eventually marries her, but their marriage turns sour when her ambition to move to Paris conflicts with his plan to stay on Egdon Heath and teach school. Clym is intelligent, cultured and deeply introspective. He is patient and generous, but also deeply determined, and fierce when angered: it is this determination that leads to his eventual split with his mother, and separation from Eustacia. At the end of the novel, weakened by a degenerative eye condition and by the trauma of losing his mother and Eustacia--for whose deaths he blames himself--he becomes an itinerant preacher, sermonizing about simple moral topics.   
Damon is a local innkeeper, described as a "lady-killer." At the start of the novel, he puts off his marriage to Thomasin Yeobright in order to pursue a relationship with the woman he truly wants, Eustacia Vye; when he is jilted by Eustacia, however, he marries Thomasin, and has a daughter with her. He drowns at the end of the novel just before making an escape with Eustacia. He is interested throughout in possession rather than love.
Diggory Venn works as a semi-nomadic "reddleman": he travels throughout the region selling the dye that farmers use to mark their sheep. As a consequence of his exposure to the dye, his entire body and everything he owns are dyed red. Entirely red, camping out on the heath in his wagon, and emerging mysteriously from time to time, Venn functions as an image of the heath incarnated. He watches over Thomasin Yeobright's interests throughout the novel, but also preserves his own interests: he has long been in love with her, and at the end of the novel they marry. Venn is very clever and insightful, and can be a devious schemer.
1.4 Conflicts between the Characters and Their Causes
The Return of the Native is one of Thomas Hardy's “Novels of Character and Environment”. The heath proves physically and psychologically important throughout the novel: characters are defined by their relation to the heath, and the weather patterns of the heath even reflect the inner dramas of the characters. Indeed, it almost seems as if the characters are formed by the heath itself: Diggory Venn, red from head to toe, is an actual embodiment of the muddy earth; Eustacia Vye seems to spring directly from the heath, a part of Rainbarrow itself, when she is first introduced; Wildeve's name might just as well refer to the wind-whipped heath itself. But, im portantly, the heath manages to defy definition. It is, in Chapter One, "a place perfectly accordant with man's nature." The narrator's descriptions of the heath vary widely throughout the novel, ranging from the sublime to the gothic. There is no possible objectivity about the heath. No reliable statement can be made about it.
This works mainly deals with the conflicts between the main characters in the novel and the “ Environment ” ----Egdon Heath, especially the conflict between Eustacia and the Heath. The Heath as a physical object is described as “inviolate”, untouchable and unalterable by man, as a symbol it is highly flexible: it becomes what the various characters want to make of it. Clym, as has been noted, represents to the mind of the narrator the typical modern man: he is philosophically and intellectually progressive, but he is also portrayed as stoical and largely joyless. From this vantage point, Clym's physical misfortune could be said to be his psychological and moral salvation: when he loses his eyesight, he responds with more than his characteristic stoicism--as the title of the second chapter has it, "He Is Set Upon by Adversities; but He Sings a Song." Clym is a scholar, not a singer. Until this point in the novel, sobriety in all things has been his golden rule. But it seems as if, by resigning himself to his fate, he has developed a kind of joy that was previously foreign to him: "a quiet firmness, and even cheerfulness, took possession of him." （林志凯.1997）
It is ugly for Eustacia, beautiful for Clym, comforting for Thomasin, and home for Venn. And it is described differently by the narrator at different times, depending on the perspective of the character being focused on. Besides, Egdon Heath itself is the oldest character. Eustacia hates the Heath and wants to escape from it, Clym wants to change it; while Thomasin and Venn are faithful to it; but for Mrs. Yeobright, she neither loves it nor hates it, she is like a denizen. Whoever you are, if you want to rebel against the Heath, more or less, you will get punishment; on the contrary, you will be happy on the Heath. 
 
2. Tragic Viewpoint from Hardy’s Life and Social Background
2.1 Life Background about Hardy
Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset on June 2,1840, in the centre of the Wessex country which later figured in his works. Both his mother and his father ( a builder), came of Dorset stock, and Thomas early learned to love the country ways and speech around him. He was a precocious boy but reserved, because his health was delicate. He was educated at home until he was eight, and then went to the village schools in the nearby town of Dorchester. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a local architect. In 1862 he left for London to continue his work as an architect, an occupation he practised until his marriage.
In the meantime he had found what was to be the chief love of the rest of his life: poetry. He tried unsuccessfully to publish his poems, but even after they were rejected he continued writing. In 1867 poor health forced his return to Dorset, where his work as an architect supported him so that he could write in his leisure. Hoping that it would sell better than poetry, he turned his hand to fiction, and after his return to Dorset he began his first novel: The Poor Man and the Lady. He submitted it to George Meredith, then a reader for Chapman and Hall, who advised him to concentrate on plot. Hardy, completely humble about his own talents, promptly and regrettably destoyed the manuscript. Desperate Remedies, (1871), his first published book, is a contrived, melodramatic murder story, the result of following Meredith’s advice; but it had bad reviews and failed to earn its publication costs. After this, most of his novels made their first appearance in periodicals. Hardy still preferred poetry to fiction, but he feft compelled to write stories to support himself, for he had married and given up architecture in 1874. Encouraged by his success with Far from the Madding Crowd, his next works, The Hand of Etbelberta, (1875-1876), is a “social” novel in which the reader misses the elemental strength of the Wessex tales.
In The Return of the Native, (1878), he looked again to the land as a source of his power: the two major “characters”are Eustacia Vye, who broods with a tragic passion over the health on which she lives, and the health itself, which symbolizes the blind forces of nature against which she rebels. After moving to Max Gate house in 1885, Hardy gained plaudits among the aristocracy and in literary circles, though reviewers of his books typically condemned the bleakness of his outlook and his works' "immorality". Hostile criticism reached a head with the Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) - which was initially rejected for publication - and Jude the Obscure (1895), which outlined the difficulties of his marriage and was referred to cruelly by G. K. Chesterton as "the village aesthetic brooding over the village idiot". Neither of these novels, in spite of their undoubted strengths as literature are terribly optimistic tones. As such Hardy gave up writing novels. In later years he concentrated on writing poetry (which he valued more highly) to limited applause and wrote a blank verse and prose drama entitled The Dynasts (1904-8). His wife died in 1912, and Hardy married Florence Dugdale in 1914. His literary friendships included such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He died of a cold on January 11,1928, and his ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried with his first wife in Dorset. In his quieter last decade, numerous public honours including the Order of Merit were bestowed upon him and he gained honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was even nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, though he did not win. Since his death, his poetry has been as influential as his prose. Like Wordsworth, he attempted to write in common language and with the simplicity of speech, an aspect of his poetry greatly admired and regularly imitated by later twentieth century poets such as Larkin. His themes, though, followed those of his novels: death; cruel ironies in life and romance; and the struggle of man against his own desires and the perils of an advancing civilization.
2.2 Social Background
At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, England came from free capitalism to monopolize capitalism, which was inside and outside embarrassment, crisis surrounding and nearing his ends. Farmers lost their glebe. Many women and children bacame machine slaves. These austere true life broke the bourgeoisie civilization and opened out the anomy. Poverty, lag, hunger, and death came into being vivid contrapose with the literature for use of  Victorian advocacy  of “optimism”.
Thomas Hardy's long literary career witnessed and encompassed the most important artistic and literary changes of the modern era. From his birth in 1840 near Dorcester, England to his death in 1928, at the age of 87, the genre of the Victorian novel had flowered and faded, and the erstwhile avant-garde movement known as modernism dominated the English literary landscape. In his ornate, wordy style and his sensitivity to issues of class, Hardy seemed a characteristic Victorian novelist. But his writing increasingly revealed a sensibility and a moral code that seemed to discard the strict Victorian social and sexual mores, and that tended towards atheism and subjective morality rather than an absolutist Christianity. His philosophy was out of place in Victorian England, and presaged the coming social and cultural upheaval of modernism.
2.3 Causes of Tragedy Writing
In the beginning, Hardy wrote eclogue, happiness and peripateticism, ebullient to describe English countryside peaceful did he change to write tragedy as “the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath” ? His predecessors, Charles Dickens, Thackeray and so on, had present idealism prelude. But Hardy walked other way to play the sorrowful tune, thus he obtained the name “pessimism”. The causes may be explained as follows:
Firstly, the source of his thoughts of destiny came from the great influence f rom his mother and grandmother in his childhood and the child memories greatly affected his future writing. In his diary, Hardy said: “mother’s viewpoint is my viewpoint: one holds high arm and stands ahead. Whenever we walk towards possible successful way, she immediately pulls us back.” Hardy’s mother and grandmother often said, “this is doom to explain difficulty, unhappy and frustration .” （孙亚明.2003）
Secondly, in his youth, Thomas Hardy had been greatly influenced by some liberal thinkers such as Darwin and John Stuart Mill. In his novels, Hardy incorporated many of these themes in order to portray a real world. Darwin's challenge led Hardy to lose faith in Christianity, and this lack of faith gave his novels their tragic, bleak element. And ancient Greek tragedies played a key role in the literary education he had got. The characters in his novel are quite different from those in ancient Greek tragedies, but they both have strong tragic flavor, no escape from destiny and strong sense of fatalism.
Thirdly, the social causes of the thoughts of tragic destiny in Hardy’s novels are explored as follows: the dark society, the gap between the poor and the rich and the invasion of capitalism into countryside driving many poor peasants into bankrupcy and plights. So the unchangeable social reality and the social vicious power forced him into believing in fate and made him a t ragic fatalist .

3. The Tragic Consciousness of Hardy in The Return of the Native
To sorrow I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind. I would deceive her,
And so leave her,But ah!she is so constant and so kind.
-----------（by John Keats, Endymion.）
The poem implies desolation raid of human nature .Thomas Hardy uses this stanza to settle next foundation. Maybe he wants to tell readers something about the book by the stanza, which replies special meaning to the main characters in the novel.

3.1 The Tragic Consciousness in the Weather and Time Depictions
3.1.1 Weather
The heath is a "vast tract of unenclosed wild," a somber, windswept stretch of brown hills and valleys, virtually treeless, covered in briars and thorn-bushes: "the storm was its lover, and the wind was its friend." It is characterized by a "chastened sublimity"--impressive but not showy grandeur--rather than any obvious aesthetic appeal. The heath is described as "a place perfectly accordant with man's nature... like man, slighted and enduring... It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities." It is an ancient space shaped by nature, seemingly impervious to the efforts of man. （http://ard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity. The storm was its lover; and the wind was its friend. It became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecongnised original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams till revived by scenes like this.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday, Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy ,furzy ,briary wilderness ,-“Bruaria.”Then follow the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. “Turbaria Bruaria ”-the right of cutting heath-turf-occurs in charters relating to the district. “Overgrown with heth and mosse ,” says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.
On the night of the sixth of November, Eustacia decided to leave with weater was so bad. The wind rasped and scraped at the corners of the house, and filliped the eaves-droppings like peas against the panes. Here Wildeve waited, slightly shelthered from the driving rain by a high bank that had been cast up at this place. Along the surface of the road where lit by the lamps the loosened gravel and small stones scudded and clicked together before the wind, which, leaving them in heaps, plunged into the heath and boomed across the bushes into darkness. Only one sound rose above this din of weather, and that was the roaring of a ten-hatch weir a few yards further on, where the road approached the river which formed the boundary of the the heath in this direction. This stanza explains the tragedy of the story.
3.1.2 Time
The role of time and the effect of its passage are major themes in the novel. As the story spans eighteen months, the landscape of the heath remains unchanged—that consistency is reflected in the people who live on the heath for generation after generation. They are creatures of tradition, following the same wedding rituals, the same harvest rituals, the same holiday traditions and the same folk remedies (such as the traditional cure for an adder's bite) that has been handed down to them.
Sometimes traditional beliefs lead to hostility, like the fear of Eustacia Vye being a witch, not just in shaping the culture and attitudes of the local peasants but also in motivating the main characters and even in shaping the outcomes of crucial events. Mrs. Yeobright dies of exposure due to the ruggedness of the heath; Damon Wildeve and Eustacia Vye are drowned during one of the frequent storms that sweep the heath.
3.2 The Tragic Consciousness Depicted in the Dialogs
At the beginning of Chapter Five, of adducing any rational proof of Eustacia's unsuitability; indeed, in the course of the argument, she becomes increasingly jealous and irrational, essentially asking Clym to choose between a marriage and his mother. Love, for many of the people thro ughout this novel, is more accurately characterized as possessiveness. And it is evident that Mrs. Yeobright, as much as Eustacia, wants to possess Clym. "You give up your whole thought--you set your whole soul--to please a woman", she complains to Clym. And she is shocked at his correctness when he inverts her complaint: "I do. And that woman is you." There is a striking similarity between their argument and a lover's quarrel: "You think only of her," Mrs. Yeobright complains, "You stick to her in all things." The idea that Clym can love only one person is a jealousy typical of love affairs, not of family relationships; but Mrs. Yeobright cannot reconcile herself to sharing Clym's love, and she eventually proclaims "I wish that you would bestow your presence where you bestow your love." The reader will recall that the first book in the novel is called "The Three Women," a parallel between Eustacia, Thomasin and Mrs. Yeobright that becomes clearer by this point in the novel, with the revelation that Clym's mother, like the two younger women, is inserting herself into a love triangle, and is consumed, as the others are, with possessiveness and jealousy.
()
When Mrs Yeobright came back from her son’s home, she met a boy and made a talking. “What is it you say?” “Never again –never .Not even if they send for me!” “You must be a very curious woman to talk like that .” “O no –not at all,”she said returning to the boy’s prattle. “Most people who grow up and have children talk as I do .When you grow up your mother will talk as I do, too.” “I hope she won’t; because  this very bad to talk nonsense.” “Yes,child; it is nonsense I suppose. Are you not nearly spent with the heat?” “ not so much as you be .” “How do you know?” “Your face is white and wet, and your head is haging-down-like.” “Ah, I am exhausted from inside.” “because I have a burden which is more than I can bear.”…...She drew from the small willow reticule that she carried in her hand an old-fashioned chine teacup without a handle :it was one of half-a-dozen of the same sort lying in the reticule, which she had possessed ever since her childhood, and had brought with her to-day as a small present for Clym and Eustacia. The dialogue covered up foreshadowing to Mrs Yeobright’s dead. As the reader well knows, the tragedy is not really anyone's fault. The worst of which Eustacia can be accused is confusion and misunderstanding: she honestly believed that Clym would open the door for his mother. And she could not have known that the consequence of not opening the door immediately would have been Mrs. Yeobright's death.

4. Conclusion
In The Return of the Native, Hardy proves a dismal view of life in which coincidence and accident conspire to produce the worst of circumstance due to the indifference of the Will to issues of equity and justice.
The novel also reflects Hardy's preoccupation with social sense of hierarchy that continues through his novels. Hardy had connections to both the working and upper class, but felt that he belonged to neither. He felt that rising in the society was like a "double-edged sword": "in rising, one must leave others behind and in a sense comprise one's beliefs; yet, by failing to rise, one does not fulfill one's potential"(Sally Mitchell. 2001 ). This accounts for the clean evidence of Hardy's frustration and pessimism toward social mobility and the class structure in his works for Hardy's works focuses almost exclusively on his native Dorset and its environs in other counties in the western country.
 

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all those who helped me during the writing of this thesis. I gratefully acknowledge the help of my supervisor Ms. ShangYing. It is my honor to be her student. She has devoted her precious time to my paper and given me generous help to revise my thesis time and again. She is amiable, patient and serious. Without her senior insight on the subject, I would not have made such an academic success. In addition, I would like to thank all my teachers in our school for their contribution to my education. Still, I would like to thank all my friends in that they have shown their concern for me and assisted me in completing the investigation. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their ever-lasting support, understanding and love.

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