James Eli Adams (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: “Gyp's Tale: On Sympathy, Silence, and Realism in Adam Bede,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 20, 1991, pp. 227-42.
[In the following essay, Adams examines the limits of the human ability to express emotion through language in Adam Bede.]
In Chapter 21 of Adam Bede, the narrator remarks upon the quiet “drama” of three laborers learning to read: “It was almost as if three rough animals were making humble efforts to learn how they might become human” (281). Commentators on Eliot's...
Source: Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, ©2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
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