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n the tragedy of Tess for a long time. Only a few scholars made researches for the tragedy of its hero Angel Clare. He was a contradictory unity –he was bold in struggling with the traditional view but in the meantime he could not break the shackles of feudal ideas. This paper will see the society from this perspective –Angel Clare, the hero’s tragedy and discuss the causes of Clare’s tragedy from his social background and psychology. Chapter2 A brief account of Tess of The D’urbervilles It seems that the fictional works do not concern with the real world. But we know that before the writers begin to create their works, it can be said that their social experience may be their primary material for creation. Some writers created the roles and environments in order to revolt against the worldly prejudice of their ages. These kinds of words are expected to tell people the truth of a society. In many cases, the social background of the novel is the writer’s background. Before analyzing the roots of Clare’s tragedy, this paper will discuss two aspects of this novel, namely “the writing background” and “the writer and his works” from which we can see the background of this novel. 2.1 The writing background Thomas Hardy was the last important novelist of the Victoria ages. The Victorian age was an age of realism rather than of romanticism –a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral and physical diseases as they are. Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represented the reality and spirit of this age which was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. Hardy, who also shown the truth of this age had a high place in Western literature which came from the agitation of life and fatalism of human being. His tragedies in the history of Western literature were no an accident for the tragedy consciousness. Hardy’s tragic novels has sprung from and developed this tragic idea in form and connotation. The tragedy consciousness in Hardy’s novels originated from Western traditional tragic spirit which was full of rationalism and profound reflection on the contradictions of human society. And it also revealed an ineluctable and inevitable cond itionality of fate. That is to say, the heroes or heroines would slip into the tragic path of life in the end in Western literature no matter whether they liked or not, or where they hided. Tragedy was their final arrangement. Thomas Hardy studied Greek tragedies and Shakespearean tragedies all his life. And he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s tragedy consciousness. Schopenhauer was a famous philosopher who believed that life was a tragedy –life was filled with desire. If a person had a desire but could not gain his desires, he would feel painful; however, when he could gain his desires, he would become insipid. This was another torment. Schopenhauer grouped tragedy into three types: the tragedy caused by those who committed heinous crimes, the tragedy led by the irony of fate and the tragedy caused by misunderstanding and distrust between persons in everyday life. In his opinion, the last tragedy was the most terrible one which we can see in Hardy’s works. Hardy began to creating the novels in the early 1870s. In the late 1890s, he turned to write poetry. The Britain in this period was undergoing a transition period from laisser-faire capitalism to imperialism. The capitalism thought that the social system