Abstract
George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede (1859), has a special appeal. The predominantly rural scenes have the quality of picturesque charm, yet the manipulation of incidents, characters and points of view is so highly intelligent that the reader of the novel finds his or her normal mental life not only extended but surpassed, being prompted all the time to compare, reconsider, question, in an exciting way. Adam Bede is still probably George Eliot’s most popular work, and that is certainly no reason for underestimating it. Various categories such as Pastoral, Romance and Myth have been applied to it to suggest a limitation of its method. But it seems to resist them. There is too much complexity, irony, width of reference and challenging implication for any reductionist interpretation to carry conviction. It keeps curiosity alive, from the opening promise to reveal ‘far reaching visions of the past’ to the last reference to yet another ‘hard day’ for Adam Bede.
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Notes
J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1885), vol. I, p. 5.
W.J. Harvey in The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. 77, regards Dinah as ‘too articulate’ with her Methodist idiom; ‘once she opens her mouth she fails’. But this criticism is based on too simple a realism, for her speech is not designed to succeed as such.
See S. Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 20, on the ‘Feuerbachian saints’ in George Eliot’s novels, who ‘inspire to submission rather than revolt’.
G. Beer, in George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 72–73, criticises the narrative of the Epilogue for feeding the fact that Dinah is now forbidden by the Methodist Church to preach ‘too gratefully into the stabilising and making private’ of the poised close. Noting that Dinah ‘no longer travels’, G. Beer sees her as finally ‘contained within the family, back in the conventional ordering’. Nevertheless, the mention of Arthur’s conviction of Dinah’s exceptionality, suggests that she is not to be excluded from a wider role.
London Quarterly Review, vol. XVI, p. 307 (July 1861); ‘we are merely left to infer some excusing weakness in the fall’. See D. Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 108.
George Eliot’s own considerable experience of butter-making led, as she believed, to one of her hands being specially large. G. S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 28.
E. D. Ermarth, in George Eliot (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1985), p. 75, finds Hetty’s hardness ‘not entirely surprising in a community based on hierarchical social bonds rather than a sense of common ground’.
U. C. Knoepflmacher, in George Eliot’s Early Novels (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 2–3, has Adam Bede ‘located in the tranquil, mythical world of Hayslope’ and finds Loamshire ‘semi-mythical and self-contained’, p. 163.
S. Shuttleworth, in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 37, links Adam’s love of mathematics with Herbert Spencer’s view of society as the ‘aggregate of component parts’ (mathesis) and regards Adam’s progress as sustaining ‘the unchanging structure of Hayslope society’, p. 36. She believes George Eliot uses an a-historic pastoral mode in Adam Bede, her classificatory or static theory of order excluding ‘the dimension of change or progress’, p. 28.
C. Palliser’s essay, ‘Adam Bede and “The Story of the Pas”’, in George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment, ed. A. Smith (London: Vision Press, 1980), is especially perceptive in tracing the way in which our ‘initially satisfied’ literary expectations of a rosy picture of Hayslope life are altered by the enlarged perspective, p. 59. Palliser considers that the balancing of advantages and disadvantages suggests both objectivity and ambivalence. He interestingly analyses the ‘proleptic nostalgia’ involved in the presentation of the characters’ false hopes, pp. 62–63.
I. Gregor’s point that Hayslope is a pastoral world of a different order from the world of moral enquiry into which Hetty has strayed is contradicted by many details in the novel. See I. Gregor and B. Nicholas, The Moral and the Story (London: Faber, 1962), p. 30; ‘the gap between the world of description and the world of analysis is never bridged’. For a strong presentation of the case that ‘George Elio’s comprehension of life cannot allow for the contingent, the incongruous, the unframed, the indefinitely questioned and receding aspects of experiences’,
see J. Bayley’s ‘The Pastoral of Intellect’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. B. Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 201.
A. Welsh, in George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 136–37, in suggesting that gossip and scandal indicate the cohesiveness and closeness of small communities like Hayslope, does not touch on the usefulness of outspokenness and free discussion there. It seems likely that George Stephenson the engineer served as ‘a model for the temperament, intelligence, and affections of Adam Bede’; so suggests J. Wiesenfarth in his edition of George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook 1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1981), p. xxi. See especially p. 20.
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© 1993 Alan W. Bellringer
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Bellringer, A.W. (1993). Country Life: Adam Bede. In: George Eliot. Macmillan Modern Novelists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22810-2_2
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