Adam Bede

Eliot, George.  Adam Bede.  New York: Signet Classics, 2004.

Adam [. . .] had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again.  Do any of us?  God forbid.  It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness.  Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy. [. . .] Desire has chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering.

- from George Eliot’s Adam Bede

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Though rife with insight into human folly and heartbreak, George Eliot‘s Adam Bede (originally published in 1859) gets off to a slow start.  Eliot sets her novel in the English village of Hayslope in 1799 and devotes the first 300+ pages of her novel to character development, presenting an expansive cast of characters in which everyone has his or her foil.  The meticulous and hardworking carpenter, Adam Bede, stands in stark contrast to the wealthy and flippant Arthur Donnithorne, who joins the army only to preoccupy himself until he can inherit his fortune from an elderly uncle.  The Methodist preacher and mill worker, Dinah, reaches out to those living the most dreary and desperate lives, while Mr. Irwin, the Anglican clergyman, enjoys a comfortable life and offers little religious guidance.  Mrs. Poyser, the garrulous yet dedicated dairy mistress, is the opposite of her beautiful yet vain niece, Hetty, who spends her nights modeling her jewelry in front of the mirror.  Adam loves Hetty; Hetty desires Arthur; Arthur longs to be liked by everyone.  Adam’s brother, Seth, loves Dinah; Dinah loves the Lord.  In the beginning, Adam Bede is a slow-moving story of laborious and often unrequited love.

Eliot reveals her penchant for drama in the latter part of the novel, where we see the extent to which Eliot understated Hetty and Arthur’s earlier involvement.  Hetty, now engaged to Adam, finds herself pregnant by Arthur, who is in Ireland receiving military training.  (No one notices the pregnancy, as Eliot frequently describes Hetty as pleasantly plump even before the pregnancy.)  Hetty sells her jewelry and burns through her savings in an effort to reach Arthur, only to discover that travel is more expensive and Arthur farther away than she had anticipated.  Arthur is a wealthy landlord; Hetty is an orphan and a peasant.  She lacks money and options, and all she can look forward to is shame.  Therefore, Hetty commits the crime she hoped would save her but which instead destroys the lives of those who love her — she commits infanticide, shaming the Poysers, and devastating Adam, and horrifying all of Hayslope. 

Adam Bede thus becomes a novel about healing and surviving.  While Hetty goes to prison, the Poysers remain on their farm and endure her humiliation.  Arthur, despite inheriting his uncle’s estate, enters a voluntary exile, ironically finding life safer in the army than among his own tenants.  Adam works, expands his house, and cares for his mother.  Time passes.  And through his pain Adam grows, emerging a wiser man capable of choosing a wiser love the second time around.  Adam Bede is a novel that every high school girl should read, for it teaches us that our youthful heartache has a purpose and that our pain transforms us into better people.

Yet the story’s more uncertain moral, if we can even call it that, centers on what constitutes a good Christian.  Everyone in the novel is a Christian in the vague sense of the word.  Hetty attends church every Sunday, though she absorbs none of what is said.  Mr. Irwin is amiable but apathetic, giving short sermons and saying little about God, even while speaking at Arthur’s coming-of-age party, a perfect opportunity to impress his young friend’s Christian duties upon him.  Only Dinah, the travelling preacher woman, the aberrant Methodist, embraces the true essence of Christianity, reading her Bible rather than having it read to her, visiting Hetty in prison while her family shuns her, and coaxing Hetty to confession through patient prayer.  Dinah chooses to live among the poor, for it is the poor and despondent who need her most.  And yet, ironically, this model Christian is hindered at the novel’s end when the Wesleyan Conference outlaws female preaching.  In Adam Bede, good clearly triumphs over evil in matters of the heart, but the novel’s spiritual tensions remain unresolved when patriarchal tradition trumps Dinah’s selfless and all-inclusive Christian love.  While the novel opens with Dinah’s sermon, it closes with her submission and silence.

Adam Bede is thus a bittersweet story, for it questions as it soothes.  While blatantly “bad” characters are punished (or punish themselves) in accordance with their crimes, the lives of the righteous and good are far from easy.  The difference — the comfort, I suppose — is that the good at least learn from their pain, and while they do not overcome it, they build on it, and prosper.

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