SOURCE: “Women or Boys? Gender, Realism, and the Gaze in Adam Bede,” in Women's Writing, Vol. 3, No. 2, June, 1996, pp. 113-27.

[In the following essay, Levine analyzes the importance of the gaze as it questions the relationship between looking and loving in Adam Bede..]

In the past two decades, critics from Laura Mulvey to Mary Louise Pratt have concerned themselves with the politics of looking.¹ They have compelled us to recognize that vision is not passive, but active—even constitutive. The world is not simply given to sight: it is shaped through the interested eyes of the tourist, the artist, the colonizer, the ordinary man—and yes, it may well be a man—on the street. Suddenly we find that it is crucial to consider who is looking, and how; who is seen, and for what reasons.

Looking, in Adam Bede, is an activity which reappears with startling persistence. From the anonymous stranger in the opening pages of the novel, whose only role is to gaze, to the famous treatise on realism, with its focus on visual art, we are repeatedly confronted with the surprisingly conspicuous act of seeing. And this is no accident: vision, Eliot tells us, is an integral element of an ethical education. She illustrates this point with her memorable example of Dutch painting, which offers us visual images of the homely and the ordinary, and thus invites us to focus sympathetically on the life around us, on “real breathing men and woman.”² Images of the ideal are less beneficial: pictures of the lofty and sublime actually teach us to feel intolerant of the real, indifferent toward our “every day fellow-men” (p. 164). We learn to love our neighbours, then, by looking at certain pictures and disregarding others. Eliot's narrator urges us to dismiss the ideal and to pass—via representational realism—from looking to loving.

But the passage from one to the other is no simple matter when it comes to the narrative proper, where the vision of the beloved is problematic, if not downright dangerous: Hetty is much looked at, and meets only with catastrophe; Adam looks at Hetty and is perilously misled by her loveliness; Dinah stares at apparitions and absent faces, but becomes suddenly responsive to romantic love when she knows herself to be keenly observed by Adam Bede. All of this suggests that this text—“undoubtedly the most scopophilic of George Eliot's novels”³—is busily posing the same question in a number of ways: namely, what is the proper link between looking at the world and feeling love?

It will be my contention, here, that George Eliot's theory of ethical realism, with its paradigm of Dutch painting, is intertwined with a theory of gender. Both are concerned with the connection between aesthetics and ethics, between looking and loving. While critics have often considered the problem of female beauty in Adam Bede, they have failed to frame the problem as a question of visual aesthetics. Taken as a problem of aesthetics, it becomes clear that femininity occupies the same theoretical ground as the novel's explicit concerns about ideal beauty and sympathetic realism in chapter XVII. Beauty and sympathy are at odds for the women characters just as they are in the famous essay on aesthetics: Hetty's constant knowledge of her own visual beauty is a dangerous extreme of femininity, allowing her no room for an ethical recognition of the other, while Dinah's unconsciousness concerning her own appearance allows her to be sympathetic but, as we will see, perilously unfeminine. Judith Mitchell has written that George Eliot, in Adam Bede, identifies with a masculine narrator, and “basically endorses the idealization of beautiful women”⁴; while Nancy L. Paxton points out that “Eliot's treatment of Hetty's narcissistic sexuality … has often been read as an expression of her neurotic envy of the female beauty she did not personally possess.”⁵ These diametrically opposed readings—one based on an interpretation of a masculine narrator, the other on biographical speculation—have neglected to take account of the potentially polemical force of Eliot's two antithetical examples of femininity in Adam Bede: neither the unselfconscious Dinah nor the excessively self-conscious Hetty, taken alone, can stand for Eliot's normative view of femininity. Critical of both examples, Eliot suggests that women, on display, must learn to negotiate their femininity through their roles as both subjects and objects of vision. In this context, ethics and the aesthetics of feminine beauty emerge as significantly related concerns: how can women, so much the beautiful objects of vision, become active, seeing, ethical subjects, capable of the kind of moral vision taught by Dutch painting?

Weaving together the strands of gender and aesthetics, I will argue, here, that Eliot's particular theorization of the link between ethics and vision allows her to launch a sophisticated critique of formalist aesthetics and the detached, impersonal eye—known to us as the “gaze.” I am referring not to the explicitly gendered “male gaze,” but rather to the term as it is employed by Norman Bryson, who argues that the gaze is predicated on a denial of the “locus of utterance”: “the disavowal of deictic reference … the disappearance of the body as the site of the image.”⁶ This definition is concerned with an impersonal, generalized eye, and this model of vision, I will argue, is the object of Eliot's critique in Adam Bede. She urges, throughout the narrative, that we pay close attention to the particular embodiment of the spectator, located in time and space.

The refusal to accept the impersonal vision of the gaze is, as we will see, integral to Eliot's double critique: it is as essential to her rejection of an aestheticized feminine beauty as it is to her dismissal of an idealist aesthetics. And perhaps most importantly, it is fundamental to her unconventional theory of ethical realism, articulated through the model of Dutch painting. Realism and the gaze alike have been attacked for their pretensions to objectivity: as Bryson argues, the subject of the gaze always intends to be disembodied, aiming at a pure, universal perception, untroubled by the situated identities of bodies in all of their varied particularity; realism, too, has come under attack for its supposed goal of a universal, culturally uncontingent perspective. But Eliot's particularized realism repeatedly refuses the model of disinterested objectivity, and favours instead a careful self-consciousness about who is looking, and from what limited, embodied perspective each pair of eyes sees.

BOYS TO WOMEN

Critics have rarely noticed that Dinah Morris is a spectacle. She is not only heard, after all, but looked at, and with real interest—a kind of visual curiosity. Everyone, from Arthur Donnithorne to Wiry Ben, has something to say about Dinah's appearance.⁷ For all the talk, though, Dinah remains unruffled by the crowd of gazes that surrounds her. Her unselfconsciousness is one of her most marked characteristics, and one that surprises the many who gaze at her. Surely she knows how much attention she attracts? As Reverend Irwine asks: “‘And you never feel any embarrassment from the sense … that you are a lovely young woman on whom men's eyes are fixed?’” (p. 83). Dinah responds firmly in the negative: “‘No, I’ve no room for such feelings, and I don’t believe the people ever take notice about that’” (p. 83).

But of course they do. Dinah is innocently wrong about how much notice is being taken of her, and it is worth bearing in mind that she is entirely mistaken about the extent to which the world is interested in her appearance. Importantly, too, it is not only her beauty, but also her unselfconsciousness that is apparent to all, perceptible even to those who have never seen her before. “The stranger was struck with surprise as he saw [Dinah] approach and mount the cart—surprise, not so much at the feminine delicacy of her appearance, as at the total absence of self-consciousness in her demeanor” (p. 17). Dinah's principal visual impact on a stranger is not her femininity: it is that she seems not to know that she is being looked at.

To see Dinah is to see a woman unaware of being seen—and this, it would seem, is strange in a woman. Adam Bede is likewise unaware of his appearance⁸, but this is not marked for us as surprising: the text implies that unselfconsciousness is perfectly in keeping with a healthy masculinity. Most intriguing, perhaps, is that at two moments, Dinah's unselfconsciousness actually renders her boyish. “Dinah walked as simply as if she were going to market, and seemed as unconscious of her outward appearance as a little boy” (p. 17). As unconscious of her appearance as a little boy: in the realm of looks, unselfconsciousness belongs to boyishness. The second instance registers in Dinah's voice, which rings with “unconscious skill”: “The simple things she said seemed like novelties, as a melody strikes us with a new feeling when we hear it sung by the pure voice of a boyish chorister” (p. 22).

Eliot's references to boys here are as perplexing as they are suggestive. It is not clear, in 1859, that little children are considered gendered subjects, and boys are certainly not the budding archetypes of hardy, intrepid, and vigorous masculinity that they will become by the end of the century. In fact, it is precisely in this period that the gendering of children seems to have been taking place, manifested in a growing institutional emphasis on the distinction between boys and girls. “After the passage of the 1870 Education Act, a child's experience of school was increasingly likely to be shaped by gender … The Board School curriculum was increasingly organized along sexist lines, with girls being taught domestic subjects such as home economics, sewing, cooking and child care, while boys were offered new options such as animal physiology, algebra, chemistry, and physics.”⁹ Similarly, children's books and stories generally specify an exclusively male or female readership only after 1870, with the publication of periodicals like the Boy's Own Paper.¹⁰ It is not until the 1880s, according to some scholars, that a “tradition of … male-oriented juvenile fiction” is really in place.¹¹

On the other hand, there is no question that Eliot, in 1859, is deliberate about her use of the figure of the boy for Dinah; she does not, as she well might have done, liken her character to a child or a girl. And we can draw from clear evidence in The Mill on the Floss, published just a year after Adam Bede, that Eliot was interested in the gendering of children. Tom Tulliver seems uncannily patterned on the enormously popular Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), widely cited as the first example of the boys' fiction that would become standard by the end of the century.¹² Indeed, Eliot's picture of Tom Tulliver might be read as an exploration of the model of boyhood espoused in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Tom, aptly named, comes home from school in good Tom Brown fashion, filled with ideals of fair play (“I hate a cheat”), physical prowess (“I gave Spouncer a black eye, I know—that’s what he got for wanting to leather me”), and honour (“Tom Tulliver was a lad of honour”), and entirely confident about the distinction between boys and girls. “Tom … was of the opinion that Maggie was a silly little thing; all girls were silly—they couldn’t throw a stone so as to hit anything, couldn’t do anything with a pocket knife, and were frightened at frogs.”¹³ These boyhood traits are of course in tune with Tom's rigid and exacting punishments of Maggie, which will last into adulthood, and The Mill on the Floss might be even read as a critique of the principled, manly boyhood represented in Tom Brown's Schooldays.

To return to Adam Bede, we can begin to contextualize Eliot's curious choice of a boyish model for Dinah. It is between the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays in 1857 and the passage of the 1870 Education Act that boys become strictly associated with a masculine ideal, and thus Adam Bede is published at a transitional moment, a moment in which boys are being increasingly understood as those “who will be men.”¹⁴ In 1859, boys may not be strictly or prototypically masculine—with the connotations of physical strength, honour, and mastery that this term will come to imply—but they are a focus of gendered interest, and we know that Eliot will be concerned with this very question by the time she writes The Mill on the Floss in 1860. And, most importantly for our purposes, Dinah, in her unselfconsciousness, is likened neither to women nor to girls. At the very least, then, we can conclude that Eliot is dissociating Dinah from conventional femininity, and, in comparing her to boys rather than to children or girls, implies that Dinah crosses gender boundaries. Moreover, it is only in the context of her unselfconsciousness that Dinah seems so like a boy. It would seem that femininity and unselfconsciousness do not belong together.

Mentions of Dinah's unselfconsciousness reappear with almost alarming frequency in the first chapters of the novel. And it is telling, for our purposes, that her obliviousness informs Seth Bede that she is not in love. He looks for signs of reciprocated affection, only to find Dinah entirely unconscious of herself and of his presence: hers “was an expression of unconscious placid gravity—of absorption in thoughts that had no connexion with the present moment or with her own personality: an expression that is most of all discouraging to a lover” (p. 27). As we have seen, unselfconsciousness is typically masculine, but it would appear that it is also at odds with love: thus, lovers and women are self-conscious, while boys—and Dinah—are not.

At this point, we might come to a couple of eccentric conclusions. Firstly, we might say that Dinah, here, is too much like a boy to accept Seth Bede's love. Read thus, Eliot's text can be seen to reinforce a heterosexist norm in which love exists only between a man and a woman, and the woman must become sufficiently feminine for this love to emerge. Secondly, if Dinah is boyish because she is unselfconscious, then in order to shift from boyishness to mature womanhood she will have to become aware of her own appearance. And since such self-consciousness is also the stuff of love, she will then become a perfect candidate for romance—which is, of course, precisely what happens.

THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF TRUE LOVE, OR HOW TO BLUSH PROPERLY

Our conclusions about gender and self-consciousness have led us directly to the end of the narrative, where Dinah reaches adequate self-consciousness and falls in love with an equally self-conscious Adam Bede. Blushing furiously, each is transformed when beheld by the loving gaze of the other.

Blushing, as Margaret Homans has pointed out, is not just any signifier: in Adam Bede, it is the telling marker of sexuality.¹⁵ It works as a revealing contrast between Hetty and Dinah: blushing is precisely what Hetty does with perfect complacency¹⁶, and what she fails to do when she thinks of Adam, “Her cheeks never grew a shade deeper when his name was mentioned” (p. 90); but it is Dinah's only sign of sexuality, appearing only when she feels herself to be seen by Adam.¹⁷ Indeed, the blush functions as the very first signal to the reader of a possibility of romantic love between these two, coming as a total surprise to Dinah when Adam first looks at her:

Dinah, for the first time in her life, felt a painful self-consciousness; there was something in the dark penetrating glance of this strong man so different from the mildness and timidity of his brother Seth. A faint blush came, which deepened as she wondered at it. (p. 107)

The erotic suggestion of this passage would be hard to overlook, but it is important to recognize the place of the eye in the gendering of this scene: Adam's way of looking, marked as strong and penetrating, is clearly more masculine than that of his brother, and literally transforms Dinah from her boyish unselfconsciousness into a blushing femininity. The male gaze, we might conclude, is crucial to the construction of a feminine sexuality.

But then, Adam too blushes with self-consciousness. When he is first introduced to the idea that Dinah may be in love with him, “The blood rushed to Adam's face, and for a few moments he was not quite conscious where he was; his mother and the kitchen had vanished for him, and he saw nothing but Dinah's face turned up towards his” (p. 461). Reddening, he sees nothing but the image of Dinah, and it is a memory of her looking at him. Whether masculine or feminine, it would seem, consciousness and self-consciousness are bound up in the mutual look of romantic love. For Eliot, a reciprocal gaze is apparently fundamental to a mature sexuality in men and women alike.

Adam's love for Hetty remains remarkably unselfconscious and entirely unreciprocated, in both ways unlike his blushing love for Dinah. And it has nothing to do with consciousness, whether of self or other: it is an explicitly impersonal love of the beautiful. The narrator explains:

For my own part … I think the deep love [Adam] had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music?—to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate … The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty... and for this reason, the noblest nature is the most often blinded to the character of the one woman's soul that the beauty clothes. (pp. 326-327, emphasis in text)

“Blinded” by the impersonal nature of the aesthetic experience, Adam's noble nature fails to “see” and love anything in Hetty but beauty itself, a beauty as contentless and disinterested as a love of music. The separation of Hetty's impersonal beauty from her consciousness is clearly a serious obstacle to reciprocation. And Adam's love, it would seem, is entirely the affair of the spectator, gazing at the impersonal object of his vision. Adam's sentiment may be noble, perhaps, but it is not the stuff of true love and fruitful marriage. Or so the end of the narrative, with its rather different love, would have us believe.

It is tempting to argue that Adam's love for Hetty is Kantian, his love for Dinah Hegelian. Kant's theorization of the experience of the beautiful is that it is always impersonal, requiring no particular self-interest, no particular embodiment. It is a disinterested experience, occurring spontaneously within every human subject, and focused on the beauty of form. Kant writes: “The beautiful is that which pleases universally. …”¹⁸ For Hegel, by contrast, the self is absolutely incapable of ethical judgment, community, or knowledge without a recognition of and by the other. This mutual acknowledgment is an absolute precondition of culture, political community, and ethical action. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”¹⁹ From Kantian aesthetics to Hegelian self-consciousness: this movement could be said to describe the trajectory of Adam's Bildung, as he shifts from the love of Hetty's impersonal beauty to the reciprocal acknowledgment that comes with Dinah's love. Both are framed in terms of the visual: Kantian aesthetics “blinds” Adam, rendering him incapable of seeing Hetty's character and meeting Dinah's gaze.

If the end of the story is anything to go by, Eliot falls firmly on the side of a Hegelian self-consciousness; for her, proper love is distinguished by the reciprocal acknowledgment of self and other. And, in keeping with the novel's insistence on the visual, this self-consciousness is represented by a shared gaze, in which each party is both subject and object of vision, conscious of the other and conscious of the self through the eyes of the other. By stark contrast, the admiring sight of Hetty's “impersonal” beauty causes ethical blindness, blocking a real consciousness of the other and, consequently, of the self.

THE LIMITS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

With Adam and Dinah as our paragons of love, we begin to see that Eliot favours a love governed by a reciprocal self-consciousness, in which masculine and feminine, self and other, come to recognition through the gaze of the other. Thus, love is impossible between Dinah and Seth, since she is oblivious to his presence, and between Hetty and Adam, since he recognizes only her impersonal beauty, and without reciprocation.

But then, what is wrong with the love between Arthur and Hetty? By contrast to Dinah, Hetty is self-conscious indeed. There is no question that she is aware of her own appearance, and aware that others are conscious of her beauty. And she and Arthur are even given to reciprocal blushing when face to face: “If Arthur had had time to think at all, he would have thought it strange that he should feel fluttered too, be conscious of blushing too” (p. 119). Moreover, Hetty is clearly made more self-conscious by Arthur's attention, just as Dinah is by Adam's: “The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return” (p. 138).

The obvious obstacle to true love between Hetty and Arthur is class. But it would be naive to assume that there is no more to it than that. It is clear that theirs is not a love story destined to tragedy only by the differences in their social standing: such a tale would make Adam Bede a more radical text than it is.²⁰ Rather, the narrator insistently implies, Hetty is so self-conscious that she is incapable of love, and certainly of simple compassion.²¹ She is explicitly resistant to sympathy (“as unsympathetic as butterflies sipping nectar” [p. 92]), and her heart is certainly far from warm: “Hetty would have been glad to hear that she should never see a child again; they were worse than the nasty little lambs that the shepherd was always bringing in … for the lambs were got rid of sooner or later” (p. 142). She rejects tenderness, compassion, and affection—all the emotions focused on the other. Indeed, her imagination is filled almost exclusively with visual images of herself. The narrator says: “of every [imaginary] picture she is the central figure, in fine clothes” (p. 141). Even when she thinks of Arthur, she sees herself through his eyes: “Captain Donnithorne couldn’t like her to go on doing work; he would like to see her in nice clothes …” (p. 138). Concerned entirely with the reflected image of her own image, Hetty sees herself in precisely the same way that Adam and Arthur see her—as an object of visual beauty. She and her admirers alike are intent on looking in a single direction: at the “impersonal” beauty of Hetty herself.

Importantly, too, Eliot is careful to point out that Hetty's beauty appeals not only to the masculine eye, but to everyone: “there is one order of beauty which seems to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women … Hetty Sorrel's was that sort of beauty” (p. 75). Even Mrs Poyser is transfixed: “continually gaz[ing] at Hetty's charms by the sly, fascinated in spite of her self” (p. 75). Hetty's beauty, in good Kantian fashion, is universally pleasing, appealing regardless of the particular interests and character of the spectator. Her image appeals not to particular eyes, but to the eye in general—including even her own gaze, directed at herself. Consequently, she is incapable of seeing outward—toward the other—and equally incapable of recognizing herself as a seeing subject, able to look out on the world. It is clear that the gaze, internalized by Hetty and ignored by Dinah, has significant consequences for feminine subjectivity.

In this context, it will not be surprising that the mirror appears as Hetty's closest companion, mentioned even the first time we encounter her, part of the description of Mrs Poyser's immaculate house:

Hetty Sorrel often took the opportunity, when her aunt's back was turned, of looking at the pleasing reflection of herself in those polished surfaces, for the oak table was usually turned up like a screen, and was more for ornament than for use; and she could see herself sometimes in the great round pewter dishes that were ranged on the shelves above the long deal dinner-table, or in the hobs of the grate, which always shone like jasper. (p. 65)

In polemical contrast to Dinah's boyish unselfconsciousness, Hetty's love of mirrors puts her at an opposite extreme. The mirror is Hetty's opportunity to gaze admiringly at her own beauty, but it also reveals her total identification with her own visual image. When we first encounter her before her bedroom mirror, she is admiring her own prettiness, consumed with the joy of self-regard. But later, when Arthur Donnithorne writes to tell her that their affair is over, the image is transformed: “when she looked up … there was the reflection of a blanched face in the old dim glass … Hetty did not see the face—she saw nothing—she only felt that she was cold and sick and trembling” (p. 307). A moment later, “she caught sight of her face in the glass: it was reddened now, and wet with tears; it was almost like a companion that she might complain to—that would pity her” (p. 307). Thus, Hetty's mirror image is, first, a delightful picture; second, total blankness, reflecting her virtual annihilation by Arthur; and third, a second self, a sympathetic other. It would seem that the mirror offers us our best access to Hetty's self-consciousness: her own reflected image is not only her greatest source of pleasure, but reflective of her whole vision of herself. It is suggestive that while Hetty loves her mirror, Dinah loves her window. At the very same moment that Hetty is dressing up before her bedroom mirror, Dinah is looking outside: “Dinah delighted in her bedroom window … the first thing she did, on entering her room, was to seat herself … and look out on the peaceful fields …” (p. 144).

An excess of self-consciousness, clearly, turns out to be no better than a deficit. We are faced with two striking extremes: Dinah, filled with ethical love from the outset, is not capable of romantic, sexual love until she sees herself through the eyes of Adam Bede; Hetty, self-conscious and demonstrative of a coquettish sexuality from the beginning, fails to feel love for any of those who surround her. It is a revealing contrast: Dinah must become self-conscious in order to fall in love, marry, and multiply, while Hetty's self-consciousness seems to make her incapable of loving anyone—Adam, Arthur, even her own child. Dinah is too boyishly unselfconscious for romantic love; she is so consumed with visions of the other that she fails to recognize herself; Hetty is so focused on the image of her own appearance that her only concern with others is her reflection through their eyes. If Dinah is too boyish then Hetty, perhaps, is too feminine.

The trajectory of the narrative brings us to a normative middle ground, where Dinah manages to reach the perfect combination of ungendered sympathy and feminine self-consciousness. But how, precisely, do these two reach their happy fusion? It is my contention that the crucial difference between Hetty's awareness of herself and Dinah's blush under Adam's keen stare is that Hetty responds to a generalized gaze, while Dinah answers to a specific pair of eyes. Adam, remember, is the only one who can make Dinah self-conscious. The same is not the case for Hetty. It is true that she blushes when beheld by Arthur Donnithorne, but he is not the only one whose eyes matter: “those other people didn’t know how he loved her, and she was not satisfied to appear shabby and insignificant in their eyes even for a short space” (p. 231). Hetty is so dependent on a universal gaze of admiration that she sees the world only as that gaze, reflecting her back to herself. If this self-consciousness gestures to a proper, mature femininity in Dinah, it is only, it seems, because Dinah's responds in this way to a single gaze; Hetty, by contrast, is given to a kind of promiscuous self-consciousness, an internalization of the impersonal gaze of all others. Hetty's sense of herself, all too feminine, is constructed through the indiscriminate gathering of looks that come her way, and this is perilous indeed; Dinah, by contrast, becomes feminine through the gaze of the single beloved.

In this context, Eliot's ideal turns out to be a bourgeois model par excellence, embracing the notion that a proper feminine sexuality appears only in the context of a single heterosexual couple: the woman is only feminized when faced with the dark, penetrating gaze of a particular man. Her foil, the woman who internalizes the generalized gaze of admiration, seeing herself as she is reflected in the eyes of all who look at her, meets only with catastrophe.

OTHER BEAUTY

The impersonal beauty of the Kantian aesthetic begins to look dangerous indeed, whether for spectator or for spectacle. This conclusion conveys us back to chapter XVII: after all, Hetty's beauty distracts Adam's attention from the reality of her character, much as idealist painting, in Eliot's disquisition on realism, deflects the viewer's attention away from the worthy but prosaic realities of everyday life. Perhaps impersonal beauty itself represents a dangerous distraction from the ethical life. In the famous treatise on painting, the reader, like Adam, is urged to put aside an admiration for formal beauty. In place of this idealist aesthetic, we are presented with the paradigm of Dutch painting:

All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. (p. 164)

Here, we are invited to favour that “other beauty”—human sympathy, which has nothing to do with perfect forms, and focuses instead on the virtuous but irregular realities of the world. Thus, “monotonous homely existence” (p. 163), “commonplace things” (p. 164), and “the common labourer” (p. 164) take the aesthetic place of the divine beauty of perfect proportions. Prompting us to “remember [the] existence” of “common, coarse people” (p. 164), Dutch pictures are best because they offer us the opportunity to see and therefore to know and contemplate the reality of the other, as vision and ethics are fused into a single experience. Significantly, too, this “other beauty” is not gendered: it is explicitly called human sympathy, and is directed, in chapter XVII, at images of both men and women alike.

In such a way, the narrative affirms a possible female gaze—a way for women to look out at the world. Dinah, always looking lovingly on her fellow beings, is sensitive to the “other beauty”: in this context, the ethical gaze is clearly a look which women themselves can perform, no longer impersonal objects of vision but rather sympathetic, seeing subjects. Dinah's eyes themselves register this facet of her person: “they looked so simple, so candid, so gravely loving …” (p. 18). And this gaze is ultimately presented as if it transcended the gender barrier: readers and characters, masculine and feminine—all are urged to learn to look with love at the realities of the world, and thus to embrace an alternative model of the beautiful.

It is worth pausing to note that the phrase “other beauty” can be read in two ways. Sympathy is the “other” aesthetic: it is both an alternative to the beauty of form—another kind of beauty—and an aesthetic of the other, an attention to the beauty of the other. No wonder, then, that Dutch painting becomes a paradigm for the ethical realism of the text: “other beauty” has connotations at once both aesthetic and ethical. And Adam's shift from Hetty to Dinah can be seen in this context as a neat transformation from sensuous beauty to that “other beauty,” from the ideal form of Hetty's appearance—a conventional aesthetic—to the intertwined consciousness of self and other—an aesthetic of the other.

In this context, the shift from a Kantian aesthetics to a Hegelian ethics is entirely framed under the larger rubric of aesthetics, the question of beauty. And it is formulated as a specifically visual problematic, Hetty's beautiful appearance and the “other beauty” of Dutch painting. Of course, vision is clearly a metaphor for a more general problem of consciousness, particularly ethical consciousness: seeing means illuminating, clarifying, comprehending the real. But it is not just any metaphor: it is the organizing problematic of this text. Under the aegis of the visual we find vanity, gender, love, ethics, realism—in short the many prominent thematic strands of this narrative.

THE AESTH-ETHICS OF REALISM: PARTIAL, PARTICULAR VISIONS

Our look at looking brings us to a series of conclusions, all having to do with the serious consequences of the visual in Adam Bede. Firstly, the generalizing gaze is responsible for Hetty's downfall, while the particular look of a specific man is the key to Dinah's sexual maturity. Feminine fortunes are thus contingent on the ways that women respond to their roles as seeing subjects and visual spectacles. Secondly, as we learned from Dutch painting, the universal admiration of perfect beauty is detrimental to an ethical appreciation of the imperfect reality of the other. And thirdly, both aesthetics and ethics are framed in terms of visual beauty—the one formal, ideal, and universally pleasing, and the other, well, simply other.

Taken together, these conclusions suggest a profound suspicion of the impersonal, universal eye—the disembodied gaze. When it is the basis of feminine sexuality, the gaze constructs a limited, self-absorbed, catastrophic consciousness; when it is the basis of art, it directs attention away from the world in which we live. This aesthetic diversion of our sympathies has tangible consequences: “you,” the reader, will learn from idealist representations to “turn a harder, colder eye” on “real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice” (p. 162). Representations not only refer to the world, they also operate in that world: “you” are implicated by them, trained by them, prompted by them to act with coldness or with sympathy and fellow-feeling. The aesthetic thus emerges as an ethical agent in the world.

We have seen that realism is identified with “human sympathy” and called an “other beauty.” It is an alternative to the impersonal beauty of form, and an ethical one at that. We should recall, too, that realism claims a peculiar, ambivalent position in the history of aesthetics: it is a theory of art which repudiates artfulness, a deliberately unaesthetic aesthetic. It might seem odd, therefore, that Eliot frames it very deliberately as a species of the beautiful, to be understood as an alternative aesthetic, set against the formalist beauties of harmony and proportion. But read polemically, Eliot's visual model suggests a calculated critique of Kantian aesthetics: as we have seen, the impersonal beauty of form prompts the spectator to be blind to the reality of character, while ethical realism, focused on the reality of the other, is all about persons, about “human sympathy.” Thus, a Kantian aesthetic allows women to be perceived not as persons but as forms—indeed, it blinds the spectator to their personhood—while a Hegelian ethics transcends the gender divide and invites men and women alike to look and be looked at in full recognition of self and other. Eliot displaces formalism as an unethical aesthetic, and pointedly supplants it with a radically unaesthetic aesthetic, the “rough,” “stupid,” “squat,” and “ill-shapen” beauty of the other (pp. 163-164).

The consequences of this polemic against impersonal formalism are striking indeed when it comes to the novel's own realist practice. Most importantly, Eliot is absolutely scrupulous about locating vision—that crucial metaphor for consciousness—in persons. No visual impression is presented as an impersonal gaze: the seeing subject of realism in Adam Bede is always embodied, located in time and space. Thus, Eliot constantly affirms that it matters who is looking, and from what standpoint. What is striking about this choice is that it is not only an anti-conventional aesthetics, but it is also a surprising realism, suggesting that the real is not grasped by a detached, objective consciousness; it is in the domain of seeing persons, of embodied subjects whose vision is both partial and limited.

This point is best demonstrated by the voice of the narrator, who draws attention even to the specificity of “his” own perspective²², frequently referring to “himself” as a particular, delimited consciousness. “I confess I have often meanly shrunk from confessing to these accomplished and acute gentlemen what my own experience has been,” “he” claims (p. 168). And “he” presents opinions as if they belonged to a specific character: “For my own part … I think …” (p. 326). Descriptions of the novel's scenes are presented as if from a precise location in time and space: “We will enter very softly and stand still in the open doorway, without awaking the glossy-brown setter who is stretched across the hearth, with her two puppies beside her” (p. 47). In another example, the description of the Poysers' dairy is first presented as if from a neutral standpoint. The chapter begins: “The dairy was certainly worth looking at: it was a scene to sicken for … in hot and dusty streets” (p. 74). This voice then switches to speak for the eyes of Arthur Donnithorne, who has just come on the scene. The description breaks off: “But one gets only a confused notion of these details when they surround a distractingly pretty girl of seventeen … Hetty blushed a deep rose-color when Captain Donnithorne entered the dairy” (p. 74).

In the context of this careful embodiment of vision, it might seem peculiar that the text, like Hetty herself, is closely allied with the figure of the mirror. In good realist fashion, the novel poses as a mirror of the world it portrays: “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader” (p. 1). But what kind of a mirror is it? In one of the best known passages in the novel, the narrator claims “to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind” (p. 161). And this mirror is far from perfect: “The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused” (p. 161). Eliot's mirror is an image of the world, yes, but one explicitly located in the narrator's own mind, and “doubtless” reflecting imperfectly. This is indeed a curious realism, relying as it does on the mind of the subject, and refusing to promise either clarity or accuracy. But the reader will remember that Hetty's mirror, too, reflected the particularity of her own mind rather than a perfect, flawless reflection. It gave her back an image of her own absorbed self-consciousness. Thus, the apparently incongruous parallel between Hetty's unethical self-consciousness and the ethical realism of the narrative is ultimately a good one: both attest to the limited particularity of the spectator, refusing to claim universal, neutral, or impersonal status. And the difference between Hetty's mirror and that of the narrator is telling indeed: while Hetty sees and admires herself, the narrator reflects the other—“men and things.” Notably, the novel's mirror also reflects the world for the other—that is, for the reader—in the interests of instructing us to see the world differently, with human sympathy. If Hetty's admiration of herself is circular, showing her to herself alone, the narrative's reflection traces a far more circuitous, productive, and social path: it travels from “men and things” to the mind of the narrator; from the narrator to the reader; and—with any luck—from the reader back to the world, with sympathy.

FROM LOOKING TO LOVING

True love, the end of the novel suggests, requires that a woman be able to see a man as an individuated, particular subject, rather than, as Hetty does, a generalized, impersonal eye—and also that she see herself through the eyes of that singular other. Similarly, the realist artist rejects the ideal and the typical in favour of the varied specificity of the real, and acknowledges the embodied particularity of the visual. In the end, Dinah, Adam, and the realist come to share the “proper” connection between looking and loving: they recognize the personhood of the other and recognize themselves, too, as seeing subjects. They repudiate impersonal form in favour of the visual aesthethics of “human sympathy,” an appreciation of “that other beauty,” which operates regardless of gender.

But we must not forget that Dinah is also feminized through her self-recognition in the eyes of Adam Bede. Love, whether sexual or ethical, may require an embodied spectator capable of appreciating the beauty of the other, but Eliot's ideal of heterosexual, bourgeois love also calls for the reciprocally (en)gendering gaze, masculine and feminine alike spellbound in the mutual recognition of self and other.

However, it must be said that this gendering of the eye, though strictly heterosexual, is not merely conservative; it also reveals radical undertones in Adam Bede. After all, there is an understated gesture toward equality in Eliot's model of sexual love: Dinah sees Adam as fully as Adam sees Dinah; the mutual look of true love is based on an equal interchange of gazes, requiring that both man and woman be at once spectator and spectacle. It is possible, too, to read Hetty's destruction as subversive: the story of her seduction and infanticide condemns the gaze, denouncing the impersonal vision of women as objects of aesthetic beauty and implying that this unidirectional admiration of feminine beauty poses a significant danger to women's self-consciousness. It is clearly crucial to Hetty's downfall, both moral and material, that she is incapable of considering the other, and this ethical failure is at least in part a product of the ways that she sees and is seen as an object of “impersonal beauty.” Moreover, considered in the context of other representations of femininity, Hetty's destructive self-consciousness is all too obviously political: it implies that the beautiful heroine of fiction, myth, and even nineteenth-century science²³ is a cultural construct with potentially dire moral and social consequences.

If her own ideal had been less bourgeois, Eliot might perhaps have envisioned—pardon the pun—an embodied gaze which was not so entirely contingent on the individual, or on the opposition of masculine and feminine. She might have conceived of an erotic gaze, which, like her ethical gaze, acknowledged the other in his or her particularity, regardless of the strict gender dichotomy of heterosexuality. Or she might have theorized ways of seeing which belong to the group: the collective gaze, neither impersonal nor strictly individual, but culturally embedded, social-political. Falling short of such radical formulations, Adam Bede nonetheless launches an ethical critique of Kantian formalism and pushes its readers toward a recognition of the partial, embodied nature of the visual, pointing to the real consequences of the idealizing, impersonal gaze. Falling short of a revolutionary radicalism, perhaps, the textual exploration of the relations between aesthetics and ethics nonetheless reveals that Adam Bede is very much in tune with a critical understanding of the politics of looking.

Notes

1. See, for example, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14-26; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), especially pp. 201-219.

2. George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1859), p. 162. All subsequent quotations will refer parenthetically to page numbers from this edition.

3. Judith Mitchell, The Stone and the Scorpion: The Female Subject of Desire in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 97.

4. Ibid., p. 96.

5. Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 59.

6. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 87, 89.

7. “‘I’m half a mind ta’a look at her to-night … a uncommon pretty young woman,’” says Wiry Ben in the first pages of the novel (p. 4). “‘She looked like St. Catherine in a quaker dress,’” says Arthur, “‘It’s a type of face one rarely sees among our common people’” (pp. 55-56).

8. “Adam, unconscious of the admiration he was exciting, presently struck across the fields” (p. 8).

9. Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children's Fiction in Britain, 1880-1910 (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 23-24.

10. See Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 53-64.

11. Murray Knowles & Kirsten Malmkjaer, Language and Control in Children's Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p.9.

12. Both Bristow's Empire Boys and Reynolds's Girls Only? cite Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays as the first major text of boys' fiction.

13. George Eliot (1860) The Mill on the Floss, Ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 45, 30, 33, and 35.

14. The epigraph to Tom Brown's Schooldays includes this phrase, apparently taken from the Rugby Magazine. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays (Cambridge: Macmillan and Company, 1857), title page.

15. Margaret Homans, “Dinah's Blush, Maggie's Arm: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot's Early Novels,” Victorian Studies, 36, (1993), pp. 155-170.

16. “Hetty blushed a deep rose-color when Captain Donnithorne entered the dairy and spoke to her; but it was not at all a distressed blush, for it was inwreathed with smiles and dimples, and with sparkles from under long curled dark eyelashes” (pp. 74-75).

17. “Dinah's sexualization is limited to blushing,” Homans, “Dinah's Blush,” p. 168.

18. Immanuel Kant (1790) Critique of Judgement, tr. J. H. Bernard (London and New York: Hafner, 1951), p. 54.

19. G. W. F. Hegel (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 111.

20. Homans makes a highly persuasive argument that the novel favours the marriage between Adam and Dinah as the realization of middle-class ideology, which Eliot “universalizes … by making its peculiar characteristics appear natural, generically human ones,” Homans, “Dinah's Blush,” p. 156.

21. Both Arthur and Adam are said to be “beguiled” when they see Hetty as “a dear, affectionate, good little thing” (p. 141), and the narrator tells us that it is “wonderful how little she seemed to care” about her family (p. 142).

22. I am using the masculine pronoun to describe the narrator in Adam Bede, following J. Hillis Miller, who writes: “I say ‘his’ to remind the reader that the putative speaker … is not Mary Ann Evans, the author of Adam Bede, but a fictive personage, ‘George Eliot,’ who narrates the story and who is given a male gender.” J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 66.

23. Paxton offers a forceful case that Eliot's representation of Hetty is a polemical response to Herbert Spencer: “By describing Hetty's ‘impersonal’ beauty, Eliot questions Spencer's unexamined assumption that perfect beauty reflects intellectual perfection in men but moral virtue in women. Hetty's beauty, indeed, disguises the private and various secrets of her inner life.” Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer, p. 47. This chapter as a whole considers the problem of beauty: “Beauty, Sexuality, and Evolutionary Process: Adam Bede and ‘Personal Beauty’” (Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer, pp. 43-68).