Combined with the approach of ethical literary criticism, this article is using three genres of songs: folk song, secular song and carol and the respective singing of them from Tess, Alec and Claire introduced in the singing texts as the starting point, to develop a systematic study on the formation of Tess's tragic fate. It focuses on how Tess constructed a moral cognition of love and marriage through her mother's folk songs, how she broke the ethical taboo under the temptation of Alec's secular songs and how she failed to seek the blessing an...
