The Tragic Fate of the Protagonist Behind the Change of the Space of Faith in Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Abstract

Thomas Hardy is an outstanding British writer of critical realism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose works focused on the profound influence of the capitalist industrial revolution on the traditional rural society of Britain and the life of peasant class living in the countryside for generations. This paper will take Hardy’s most important novel, his masterpiece from the series of character and the environment novels, Tess of the D'Urberville as the research object which aims to reveal the influence of the change of the space of faith on the tragic fate of the protagonist Tess through the layered analysis of geospatial elements from the perspective of literary geography. Taking the life track of Tess, a typical figure as an example, this paper concerns the pain that the British countryside experienced from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, from the self-sufficient, idyllic agricultural society to the technological innovation-led industrial society with large-scale machine-based production during a period of change