A Reading of Alec in <i>Tess of the D’Urbervilles</i> from Eysenck’s Personality Theory

Thomas Hardy, a renowned English novelist, is a literary master who spans multiple centuries. Among Hardy’s many works, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of his most important representative works. The novel tells the tragic story of a beautiful rural girl named Tess. From the age of 16, Tess went to the house of Alec d’Urberville as a worker and was seduced by the ill-intentioned Alec, which opened the prelude to Tess’s tragedy. As one of the main factors leading to the tragedy of the novel, Alec d’Urberville has important research significance. This paper will interpret one of the main characters Alec d’Urberville in Tess from a psychological perspective. Based on Eysenck’s Personality Theory, this paper will analyze Alec from the following three aspects: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. It will mainly analyze Eysenck’s specific performance within the novel in terms of the specific performance characteristics of the three dimensions above. At the end of this paper, Alec’s main personality characteristics will be summarized.