|
|
|
 |
自然风光下威塞克斯人的命运 |
 |
时间：2009-8-8 16:56:54 来源：不详
|
|
|
his novel, the key word “Native” not only characterizes Clym but also provides the first description of Eustacia, which is ironic yet succinctly. Moreover, “Native” also signals the great significance of the environment where the events take place: the topography of Egdon Heath presents an all-encompassing situation. It appears boundless spatially and unchangeable temporally. It is peculiarly stable and self-sufficiently isolated. And it exerts a powerful influence on the characters throughout. The setting here is not just a space marker. It topographically delineates and furthers the novel’s characteristic unity of place. The novel’s first chapter elevates the heath from setting to situation in a tragic sense and maps the field of human activity.
“The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.”[5] The people who live on barren Egdon Heath have a great feeling for the great underlying reality of Nature, which is always there although human lives, and human civilizations, come and go. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Nature was a positive and on the whole a friendly force; while in this novel, on the contrary, it is something that you have to put up with.
The people in this novel can roughly be divided into two groups, two fates, according to the characters`different attitudes towards Nature and their different responses to it.
The first group—characters who have hatred towards Nature, the heath. People who refuse to adapt to the heath will be broken. Hardy shows us two characters, Eustacia, the heroine, who yearns for a life of luxury in Paris, and the gambler and compulsive flirt Wildeve, both of whom are forced to live on the heath, but hate it. “Do you mean Nature? I hate her already”; “I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster to me.”[6] In the end they both die, drowned in the flooded weir on a night of wind and storm.
The other group—people who own a fervid love to Nature, the heath. The hero, Clym`s attitude towards Nature is, “To my mind it is most exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world.”[7] People like Clym who accept the heath and understand its moods can live on it without too much trouble. This is also true of the sweet and unsophisticated Thomasin, who brings her baby out on to the heath quite happily, and the reddleman Diggory Venn. This weird character, although he appears to have come from a realm outside Nature, is actually very much like Oak in Hardy`s another novel. He is essentially kind and unselfish. And like Thomasin, thoroughly well adapted to life on the heath. At certain times, particularly in the remarkable scene where he plays dice with Wildeve by the light of glow-worms, we feel that he has powers, which aren’t quite human. Nature seems to work on his side, because he understands and knows how to relate to it. At last, he has his reward, when most of the other characters are broken or die.
The motivating force of the tragic action is, the conflict between Clym`s aspiration to reform society through education, and “Eustacia`s to enlarge her spiritual world by means of escape from the cramping Egdon Heath.”[8]
The gloomy Egdon Heath is used as the setting of this novel. The air of it suggests the “tragic possibilities.” No action directly presented in the novel takes place outside the boundary of this heath. It is also the witness of history, for “when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis----the final Overthrow.”[9] Upon this Nature scene appears the humanity, along with trouble: Thomasin returns with the bitterness of an abortive marriage; Wildeve and Eustacia are involved in a relation of doubtful Nature; Eustacia longs to fly away from the wilderness of the heath to give free play to her soul in the vanities and grandeurs of Paris life. Everything seems to have been brought to the edge of tragedy.
Hardy`s tragedy is more than personal and social. The natural world, namely, the Egdon Heath, plays a not insignificant part. Suggesting its immense, and potentially destructive, power, the heath’s titanic form contrasts markedly with the frailty and Vulnerability of human “form”, so Hardy`s heath is endowed with distinctly anthropomorphic qualities. It is so personated. With its crooked, crisscrossing paths and lonely dwellings separated by acres of furzy wilderness, the heath provides an almost perfect setting for chance meetings and tragic misunderstandings. For example, Mrs. Yeobright, the hero`s mother journeys across its burning face in August, only to be turned away by the closed door of her son’s cottage and to be stung to death上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] 下一页
|
|
| |
|
