Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of Thomas Hardy’s representative works, which depicts the tragedy of an innocent girl on the countryside. Hardy, sharing the romantic and impressionist pictorial features in his literary texts, employs the techniques of the picturesque, such as using light, colour and layers, to demonstrate his tragic vision. This study examines the picturesque and its aesthetic value on the construction of characters, whose location within a specific geography symbolizes the social entrapment. With the protagonist Tess as a case study, this paper finds that Tess’s doomed destiny is prefigured by the depictions of landscape and her portraits in it, revealing that she is imprisoned by her geographic and social realities. The employment of the picturesque in the novel, therefore, embodies Hardy’s deep understanding of genres of realism and tragedy.

Huiying Xue. The Picturesque and the Tragic Vision: Thomas Hardy’s Landscape and Female Images in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Frontiers in Art Research (2022) Vol. 4, Issue 3: 58-62. https://doi.org/10.25236/FAR.2022.040312.

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