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自然风光下威塞克斯人的命运 |
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时间：2009-8-8 16:56:54 来源：不详
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by an adder. Eustacia wanders in distraction under its heavy storms, only to be drowned in the weir. By now, the heath is not only the gloomy setting for the tragic drama, but also an agent participating actively in the destruction of the main characters. Nature takes part in the characters` activities, according to their attitudes towards Nature itself and plays an important role in the development of the plots, as described above.
3.2 The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Mayor of Casterbridge, is a novel much more eventful with a relatively more complicated plot. It is successful from the action of the plot. Hardy founded his plot upon the university—observed conflict between different interpretations of Nature’s impact upon the characters. Such evocation must be simple at its heart, and so it is here.
The portrayal of the rural, in conjunction with the town forms the perfect image of a complete society:
“Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block upon a cornfield. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chessboard on a green tablecloth.”[10]
The uncompromising conflict between the hero, Henchard and Nature lies at the heart of Henchard`s tragedy. This is also the main driving force of the story. The Nature’s effect in this novel can be divided into two main parts. On the one hand, in the early sections of this novel, the hero achieves his success in his harmony with Nature. On the other hand, a sharp change arises. This conflict happens because the hero’s humanity turns bad and becomes out of harmony with Nature.
Nature, here refers to weather, plays a vital part in the development of the plots. “Work is taken in a serious and specific sense; in the symbolic set piece of the storm scene of Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, the reader is still always made aware of how Gabriel’s experience of work enables him to predict the weather or how he goes about saving the ricks.”[11] However, in this novel there is a sharp difference. The readers are apt to “grasp the ‘feel’ of the gloomy weather.”[11] The descriptions are almost to a symbolic level. The descriptions are integral in creating the atmosphere of the events, what’s more, they help the development of the plots to reach a tragic goal. All of these occur in the shadow of Nature.
The hero, Henchard`s tragedy becomes irrevocable only when a great deal of bad luck follows him constantly. Henchard`s worst economic blow comes when he buys enormous quantities of grain in expectations of a bad harvest. But the weather stays good so he has to sell at a low price. Then the weather turns after all, and Henchard is further ruined. Again, he happens to open Susan’s letter, which proves to be a source of profound bitterness, at a juncture when he believes that he has just found a reservoir of happiness. In one word, the root of the hero’s tragedy lies in “the conflict between character and environment, which focus on those social conditions that impact the characters.”[12]
3.3 Tess of the d`Urbervilles (1891)
It is known that Hardy wrote about “West-country life in its less explored recesses”; and he often made his hero a young man who has been cast adrift, in a moral and intellectual wilderness, and there were no fixed rules to guide her, only the drive of her own soul. That is, Tess`s firmly and constantly pursuit towards her so-called happiness.
In Tess of the d`Urbervilles, Hardy focuses on pastoral in order to contrast different ways of life, and different attitudes to Nature, in one narrative situation. The beginning of the story is the wonderfully described Blackmoor, in a descriptive, remarkably visual way:
“Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an enclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colorless. Here in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedge-rows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmooor.”[13]
So far, this is the great beautiful Nature presented by Hardy to the readers. But it means more. Nature in this novel “appears as a powerful presence, manifested by the strong physicality of fertile meadow and summer fogs, as well as by the minutely detailed seasonal round of labors l 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] 下一页
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