SOURCE: “Dutch Painting and the Simple Truth in Adam Bede,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 366-80.

[In the following essay, Gunn examines Eliot's discussion of Dutch genre painting and its relationship to realism in Adam Bede.]

When George Eliot compared her fiction to the work of Dutch genre painters in chapter 17 of Adam Bede, admiring the “rare, precious quality of truthfulness” in these “Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise” (1:268), she did more than simply announce her intentions as a realist writer.¹ She also marked off a conventional space for “common coarse people” (1:270) in her novel, using a conspicuous visual precedent to define and imagine the rural artisans and tenant farmers she had chosen to represent. The Dutch painting analogy begins as a gloss on the Reverend Irwine's moral weakness, but it quickly opens into an apology for the presence of characters whose class would traditionally have excluded them from serious treatment in art—“old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands,” for example, or “your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife” (1:270, 271). In this essay, I want to examine Eliot's references to Dutch art from the perspective of these figures, concentrating on the relation between aesthetic and ideological meanings in the famous metacritical aside. By placing her working-class characters inside the frame of a Dutch genre painting, I will argue, Eliot paradoxically both dignifies and degrades them, admitting them into the universe of representation but simultaneously keeping them at a distance and cleansing them of threatening social meanings.

1

Eliot was right, certainly, to assume that many “lofty-minded people” did not share her affection for Dutch art in 1859. From the eighteenth century on, neoclassical standards of taste had placed the work of Dutch and other genre painters near the bottom of the scale headed by history painting and “the grand style.” Painting was supposed to purify and elevate the spectator, drawing him gently away from what was base and vulgar in nature by concentrating his attention on the ideal and the sublime. The Dutch genre artists of the seventeenth century, who had painted tavern brawls and kitchen scenes with scrupulous accuracy, seemed almost perverse in their refusal to elevate the soul, and their work was considered inferior as a result. As Peter Demetz puts it, “only by painting shells or still-life compositions could one sink even lower.”² For Sir Joshua Reynolds, the complaint against the Dutch was two-fold: they confined themselves to copying nature, merely “deceiving the eye” instead of “animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur” and thus appealing to the mind; and they chose to represent low and ignoble subjects, thereby placing themselves at a great distance from the exalted and generalized beauty which is the object of art. Reynolds acknowledges that “the painters who have applied themselves more particularly to low and vulgar characters, and who express with precision the various shades of passion, as they are exhibited by vulgar minds … deserve great praise.” “But,” he adds, “as their genius has been employed on low and confined subjects, the praise which we give must be as limited as its object.”³

Although Dutch art had its defenders throughout the nineteenth century, a position descended from Reynolds still exerted considerable influence at the time Eliot was writing Adam Bede. For example, a critic reviewing a large art exhibition for the Manchester Guardian in 1857 wrote that, in the work of the Flemish and Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, “art was confined to the most grovelling employment of its rare gifts”: “A power of painting seldom equalled, and never surpassed, was lavished on pots and pans, on hedge alehouses and fish-markets, on the quarrels of boors, or the amours of troopers and burghers, almost as coarse and sensual. Nature is never vulgar. But Dutch nature comes as near vulgarity as nature can come.”⁴ Even John Ruskin, the aesthetic theorist whom Eliot admired most, and from whose work she gleaned the doctrine of “realism,” that “truth of infinite value,”⁵ had little use himself for a style of painting which limited itself to representation of the sensible world and which wandered so far from the beautiful. In Modern Painters (1843-1860), he admitted that he had “never been a zealous partisan of the Dutch School.”⁶ The imitation of detail for its own sake in Dutch painting was “the lowest and most contemptible art” (1:xxxii), and the “collectors of Gerard Dows and Hobbimas may be passed by with a smile” (3:18). After disparaging “the professed landscapists of the Dutch school,” Ruskin proposed that “the best patronage that any monarch could possibly bestow upon the arts, would be to collect the whole body of [Dutch landscapes] into a grand gallery and burn it to the ground” (1:92).

By confessing that she “delight[s] in many Dutch paintings” (1:268) in chapter 17 of Adam Bede, then, Eliot contradicts a well-established tradition of aesthetic opinion. Certainly she does so in part because she anticipates conventional aesthetic objections to the social and moral inferiority of her characters; she adopts a position in the discourse of art criticism in order to defend, by analogy, what she knows will be perceived as unfashionable in her own practice as a novelist. In fact, one complaint about Adam Bede, cast in the language of art criticism, had already come by the time Eliot wrote this passage. In a letter commenting on the first fourteen chapters of the novel, which he had read in manuscript, John Blackwood, Eliot's publisher, wrote nervously about her depiction of the Reverend Irwine. “The Vicar is a capital fellow,” he says, “and the visit to the sick room is very touching, but I wish for the sake of my Church of England friends he had more of ‘the root of the matter in him.’ However I hope he is to sublime as the story goes on.”⁷ By using the word “sublime,” Blackwood allies himself with the painterly aesthetics of grandeur and nobility outlined by Reynolds and Burke. He seems to hope that the Reverend Irwine, who is rather indolent, will somehow turn into a more thoroughly exemplary and admirable figure, who will produce in the reader appropriate feelings of awe and exaltation. Writing her first novel, Eliot was unusually sensitive to criticism, and Blackwood's complaint emerges in a cartoonish form at the beginning of chapter 17: “‘This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!’ I hear one of my readers exclaim. ‘How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon’” (1:265). The reference to “beautiful things” is telling here; the spiritual is seen as an aesthetic category, and the imagined critic faults Eliot for failing to meet the standards of ideal beauty. By invoking and defending Dutch painting, which has been repeatedly criticized on similar grounds, Eliot means to challenge the claim that only what is aesthetically pleasing as object, what is somehow inherently sublime, picturesque, or beautiful, physically or spiritually, deserves the dignity of representation.

Eliot's defense through the language of painting is thus primarily an argument about the subject matter of art—about the second of Reynolds's two strictures against the Dutch. When she praises the “truthfulness” of the Dutch painters, she means to indicate not their scrupulous depiction of detail and surface, but their decision to depict that “monotonous homely existence” which is the “fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence” (1:268). Dutch art, for Eliot, tells the representative truth about human existence—something other paintings have failed to do because they have concentrated on “pomp” or “indigence,” on “a world of extremes” (1:270). In between these extremes, Eliot claims, are “common coarse people” (1:270), “the majority of the human race” (1:269), excluded from representation because they have no conventional aesthetic appeal. As Eliot describes these potentially excluded figures, it is clear that she has their class and their association with labor very much in mind:

[D]o not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. (1:270)

These genre images stand, in Eliot's argument, for the “common coarse people” who are represented in Adam Bede: carpenters, factory workers, tenant farmers, laborers.⁸ Like the morally weak clergyman, socially inferior characters without picturesque appeal would be “banish[ed] from the region of Art” by conventional aesthetic theory.

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As we have seen, Eliot uses the example of Dutch painting to argue against this exclusion. For her, Dutch painting seems to represent a kind of art whose subject matter is intrinsically neither beautiful nor sublime—in other words, an art which is not, by ordinary cultural standards, recognizably art-like. Since Eliot wants to define her own subject matter in Adam Bede as that which has been confined to the margins of culture, in a world far from London and middle-class experience, the marginal status of Dutch art in traditional aesthetics is paradoxically helpful to her. Eliot wants to defend the aesthetic dignity of her common rural characters, to show that they are worthy of representation and sympathy, in spite of the prevailing cultural standards. However, talking directly about the situation of marginalized and rural figures is difficult for her in this chapter, despite her intense sympathy, since the easy narrative discourse shared by author and reader in Adam Bede is situated at the very center of metropolitan culture, in a community acquainted with Sartor Resartus and the Foulis Aeschylus, crinolines, silk boots, shepherds in Arcadia, learned men arguing about Hebrew, pictured Madonnas, frustrated actors with monosyllabic parts, Centaurs, statues of Ceres, boyish choristers and musical instruments.⁹ The reference to Dutch painting, an art which is not an art, a cultural artifact which is very nearly excluded from culture, enables her to insert rural laborers and artisans uneasily into this discourse. This is an argument made to museum-goers; pointing to a Dutch genre piece is a way to gesture toward the unfashionable rural world while still remaining inside of the museum.

The presence of Dutch pictorial images in chapter 17 is also helpful in that it gives Eliot a relatively simple way to define and embody her marginal subject matter. Throughout the passage, she collapses social, moral, and intellectual marginality into a single aesthetic category—ugliness—which she then represents (and defends) by describing pictures. The problem is that ugliness, like realism, is a kind of negation. It is the deformation of some previously imagined ideal figure—the human figure as painted by Michelangelo and admired by Reynolds, say—and it emerges only through the repeated and violent deformation of that figure, as if it were being defaced. And so we read in chapter 17 of “squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions,” “irregular noses and lips,” “a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride,” “clumsy, ugly people,” “a wife who waddles” (1:268-69). This is description as a physical beating. The problem is acute: because Eliot can only define her characters by reference to figures with which she and her readers are familiar from other representations, and because she genuinely wants to mark the difference between her figures and those which are aesthetically sanctioned, she can only imagine and describe her characters by doing a kind of violence to the conventional figures, distorting them and rendering them grotesque. But when the ugly man is then identified with the laboring man or the village tradesman, when he becomes our principal image for the common men and women George Eliot wants to represent, we are left still with the effects of the abusive description: a broad gap between narrator and character, a rough and disturbing physical presence, a strong sense of the imagined degradation and otherness of these figures. Against all of this, sympathy must labor. Thus the twin projects of first admitting into the sphere of representation what is insistently seen as vulgar, coarse, and stupid, and then engendering sympathy through this same representation necessarily cause Eliot some difficulty. Partly by making use of the analogy to Dutch painting, she has found a way to admit the figures of common men and women into her narrative—as Raymond Williams says, she “restores the real inhabitants of rural England to their places,” filling in some of the gaps left by Austen's loose mesh of “neighboring” families—but she has no narrative or social language which will enable her to make sense of them by any means other than negation.¹⁰

3

I think the presence of the Dutch paintings in this passage helps to mitigate this problem as well as create it, but in order to see how, we will have to place the paintings in another context. By her own account, George Eliot wrote chapter 17 of Adam Bede in Munich. She and George Henry Lewes left England for Germany on April 7, 1858, after having handed over two more chapters (making sixteen in all) to Blackwood, and they arrived in Munich four days later, on April 11. Eliot later recalled that she had started the second volume, which begins with chapter 17, “in the second week of [her] stay at Munich, about the middle of April”—more precisely, some time after April 18—and that work was “slow and interrupted.”¹¹ It is thus likely that Eliot had only recently completed the passage we have been considering when she wrote about paintings at the Neue Pinakothek in a May 13 letter to Sara Hennell:

But alas! I cannot admire much of the modern German art. It is for the most part elaborate lifelessness. Kaulbach's great compositions are huge charades, and I have seen nothing of his equal to his own Reineke Fuchs. It is an unspeakable relief, after staring at one of his huge pictures, the Destruction of Jerusalem, for example, which is a regular child's puzzle of symbolism, to sweep it all out of one's mind—which is very easily done, for nothing grasps you in it—and call up in your imagination a little Gerard Dow that you have seen hanging in a corner of one of the cabinets. (Letters, 2:454-55)

Eliot's juxtaposition of Kaulbach and Dou in this letter provides an instructive gloss on her reference to Dutch painting in Adam Bede. It shows us that at a time very near the composition of the famous passage, Dutch painting meant for Eliot simplicity and “unspeakable relief,” a respite from the interpretive labor demanded by iconographic signification. For she complains not just about the falseness of Kaulbach's “Destruction of Jerusalem,” but about its heavily encoded status: it is a “huge charade,” “a child's puzzle of symbolism.”

Kaulbach's enormous painting¹² is certainly crowded with meanings: sacred texts held aloft by prophets in the sky, angels blowing trumpets and wielding swords, winged demons, a shining chalice, broken columns, praying groups and huddled masses, soldiers leading women into bondage, the city burning in the background. And like the gestures in a game of charades, the images here are arbitrary and conventional symbols, which must be referred at once to their iconographical meanings to be read properly. We read through the images—we decipher them, as if they were elements in a puzzle—hence they do not “grasp” us, as Eliot thinks they should. As is usually the case in such paintings, we read the images only with the conspicuous aid of verbal texts—here the title and inscriptions from Daniel and Luke (once present in the upper corners of the painting but now lost), which refer us to the huge cultural artifact of Christian tradition, which then in turn enables us to collate several different historical enactments of the destruction of Jerusalem (Babylonian, Roman, Apocalyptic) and see them as types of God's awful and righteous indignation and his enduring promise to the chosen.¹³ The “Destruction of Jerusalem” thus opens into a narrative, whose temporality includes not only the separate events which make up a single destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD by Titus—incursion, fear, flight, madness, desolation—but also the story of God's repeated anger at men and women, stretching from the time of the prophets to the final trumpet of the Apocalypse.

Like Lessing, Eliot finds this opening-up into temporality objectionable. In the same letter to Sara Hennell, she complains that since the success of his “Battle of the Huns,” “Kaulbach has been concocting these pictures, in which, instead of taking a single moment of reality, and trusting to the infinite symbolism that belongs to all nature, he attempts to give you at one view a succession of events, each represented by some group which may mean ‘whichever you please, my little dear’” (Letters, 2:455). In the sardonic mimicry of this last phrase, there is a real impatience with the indeterminacy and caprice of iconographic art, which seems to authorize multiple and layered meanings, this and that and “whichever you please,” especially when “a single moment of reality” is transcended.¹⁴

After this surfeit of convention and arbitrary signification, Eliot finds it an “unspeakable relief” to “sweep it all out of one's mind” and “call up in your imagination a little Gerard Dow you have seen hanging in a corner of one of the cabinets.” As Hugh Witemeyer has pointed out, Eliot may be thinking here of “The Spinner's Grace,” one of several Dous she might have seen in Munich in 1858, and a painting which she seems to describe in chapter 17.¹⁵ As Eliot turns to this canvas, or one like it, the phrase, “sweep it all out of one's mind,” refers us to a gesture of impatience and radical simplification. Eliot wants to wipe out the elaborate symbolic system suggested by Kaulbach's painting and begin anew, in some fresh and purified realm presumably outside of convention, where there is no puzzling iconography, no surfeit of arbitrary meanings, only a simple Dutch interior: woman, table, chair, bowl and jug, spinning wheel, curved and polished surfaces made to catch the light. In the context of such a gesture, Eliot's preference for Dou over Kaulbach seems to entail a rejection of all signification beyond what occurs at what Erwin Panofsky calls the level of “pre-iconographical” description, in which objects are identified as objects and seen in spatial relation to one another.¹⁶ The Dou is a relief because it does not, Eliot thinks, have to be read, it is just there, content and sufficient unto itself.

In the light of this letter, it seems clear that Eliot's extended description of Dou-like paintings in chapter 17 of Adam Bede carries with it suggestions which go far beyond her sympathy for their vulgar subjects. Dutch painting implies for her an aesthetic of simplicity, in which representation is seen as unmediated by the artificial conventions of art and thus untroubled by superimposed meanings.¹⁷ Eliot recognizes, like Ruskin, that any representation is mediated by the consciousness of the artist; in fact, she thinks such mediation is all to the good, since the consciousness of the artist infuses the material with dignity and shows us what is beautiful in it.¹⁸ However, she insists in “The Natural History of German Life” that mediation by artistic convention or tradition constitutes a serious flaw. An artist should not rely on types and symbols from earlier representations, Eliot claims; instead, she should represent what she has actually seen, presumably without reference to the artificial history of literary and pictorial depictions. Consider, for example, these complaints about conventional depictions of English peasants:

But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features … treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and pre-possessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the checquered shade and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well-acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry.¹⁹

It is worth pointing out, I think, that even in her own essay Eliot can only approach “actual ploughmen” by inverting the idyllic images she finds inadequate—ploughmen are not jocund, not merry, they have not always “a row of sound teeth”—or by resorting, as she does a few lines later, to the metaphor of “that melancholy animal the camel,” whose form gives her a way to imagine the “slow gaze,” “slow utterance,” and “heavy slouching walk” of the peasant. But whether her project is realizable or not—and I think it is not—Eliot means to articulate an aesthetic in which the representational or mimetic image—the figure of a rural laborer in a novel, say, or of an old woman saying grace in a painting—can function on its own, by means of a direct relation to nature, without having to derive its force from a created system of artificial correspondences bound to a particular time and place. She holds up “direct observation” and the personally seen “truth of rustic life” as her models, in direct contrast to “idyllic literature” and “the influence of traditions and prepossessions.” What I want to stress is that this position tacitly releases the artist from the burden of creating meanings in the process of representation. If the image is just there, a faithful report of what the artist sees (however fuzzily) in nature, then no additional meanings are necessary. In fact, they will only produce falseness and distortion: the opposite of the natural sign, for Eliot, is the sign bent, like Kaulbach's, on pursuing some arcane symbolism of its own, instead of “trusting to the infinite symbolism that belongs to all nature.”

4

George Eliot's invocation of Dutch painting in chapter 17 is thus consistent with what might be called the cult of simplicity in Adam Bede. Distant from the readers of the novel in time and space, the artisans and tenant farmers in Adam Bede seem to exist in a pared down and purified world, surrounded by unusually clean and polished surfaces. The windows at Jonathan Burge's house are “bright and speckless,” and the door-stone is “clean as a white boulder at ebb-tide.” On the door-stone stands “a clean old woman, in a dark-striped linen gown” (1:14). Lisbeth Bede is “an anxious, spare, yet vigorous old woman, clean as a snow-drop,” with her hair “turned neatly back under a pure linen cap” (1:54). After the saddler tracks dirt, Mrs. Poyser has her kitchen floor “perfectly clean again” in a matter of hours—

as clean as everything else in that wonderful house-place … Surely nowhere else could an oak clock-case and an oak table have got to such a polish by the hand: genuine “elbow polish,” Mrs. Poyser called it, for she thanked God she never had any of your varnished rubbish in her house. Hetty Sorrell 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. (1:105-06)

This emphasis on the clean and well-scrubbed marks the presence of what Eliot wants to imagine as a simple and uncomplicated way of life, a clean and sharply defined world, one which, unlike our own, need not be fussed over and interpreted, as if it were some kind of allegory. At Arthur Donnithorne's birthday dance, the narrator nostalgically recalls the “simple dancing of well-covered matrons” and the “holiday sprightliness of portly husbands,” which she sees as opposed to “low dresses and large skirts, and scanning glances exploring costumes, and languid men in lackered boots smiling with double meaning” (1:429).²⁰ Earlier, in a conversation with the narrator, Adam describes his dawning conviction, as a young man, that the complexities of religious doctrine might be swept out of one's mind:

“I thought I could pick a hole or two in their notions, and I got disputing wi’ one o’ the class leaders down at Treddles'on, and harassed him so, first o’ this side and then o’ that, till at last he said, ‘Young man, it’s the devil making use o’ your pride and conceit as a weapon to war against the simplicity o’ the truth.’ I couldn’t help laughing then, but as I was going home, I thought the man wasn’t far wrong. I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o’ their own will to’t, was no part o’ real religion at all. You may talk o’ these things for hours on end, and you’ll only be the more coxy and conceited for’t. So I took to going nowhere but to church, and hearing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said nothing but what was good, and what you’d be the wiser for remembering.” (1:276)

When it is opposed, as it is in these passages, to “double meaning” and “weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means,” simplicity takes on an epistemological value. It represents the position that knowledge and truth come not from created human meanings, from argument and human discourse, but from some intuited natural source, with which Irwine, the nondoctrinal preacher, is somehow in touch.²¹ As we have seen, Eliot associated this position with Dutch paintings like the one she describes in chapter 17. Her gesture toward the pictorial is thus part of a general tendency throughout most of the novel to repress overt signification in favor of the “simple truth.”

It may seem ironic that Eliot should use a collection of works of art—Dutch paintings—to argue for the importance of fidelity to simple nature rather than to the complicated conventions of art. Even as she is decrying the influence of conventional precedents, she is herself invoking a graphic precedent to justify and explain her own practice. Here again, though, the marginal status of Dutch art helps to disguise the contradiction, just as Irwine's marginal status as a clergyman helps to disguise the fact that he is creating particular kinds of human meanings himself. Because Dutch art has been excluded from the culturally privileged canons of representation precisely on account of its excessive regard to nature, Eliot can use it as an emblem of “truthfulness.” But because it is still art, after all, however marginal, because there is still the presence of the frame and a tradition of viewing, it both authorizes her practice and gives her readers a conventional context within which to place the artisans and laborers in Adam Bede. In this second capacity, too, the reference to Dutch painting works to suppress the ascription of cultural meanings to figures, because, as a pictorial context invoked in the course of narrative, it has a necessarily stilling and harmonizing effect, even as the narrative tries to destabilize it. Cultural meanings are at home in narrative, in language, where they are created and understood. We supply them to paintings by telling stories about them, by reading images in the light of texts, as we read Kaulbach's “Destruction of Jerusalem.” When painting and narrative are brought together, as they are in chapter 17 of Adam Bede, they have diametrically opposing effects on one another: the narrative tries to discover the cultural significance of the painting, to unpack it by telling a story; but the painting tries to still and defuse the cultural significance of the narrative, by repressing the impulse toward story, holding it in check.²²

If we return to Eliot's difficulty in representing figures for whom she has no adequate narrative language, the function of this kind of repression in Adam Bede can be seen quite clearly. By establishing a pictorial context for her figures in the crucial passage in chapter 17, with meaning and narrative suppressed, and then associating that context with nature and simplicity, Eliot is able to depict her artisans and laborers, and even comment on them directly, without fully responding to their disruptive social presence. The sublimating effect of an invoked pictorial context on verbal representation can be seen in microcosm in Eliot's description of the old woman in Dou's “The Spinner's Grace,” who is “eating her solitary dinner, while noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her” (1:268). The implied presence of a frame here changes our response to what is described in words, just as it does in a poem about a photograph, or in Homer's description of the pictures on Achilleus's shield. It is almost as if the ontological status of the represented world changes; the ordinary temporal impulse of narrative is stilled, for a moment at least, and the old woman exists in a timeless pictorial world, where we do not ask the kinds of questions we might otherwise ask: why is this dinner solitary? why should the woman be limited to “cheap common things,” the “necessaries of life”? where does she sell what she spins, and at what price? By moving explicitly into the realm of picture, the description represses and deflects these questions, and with them the cultural and ideological significance of the woman. We are invited to concentrate on the quality of the “noonday light,” which makes no distinction between the woman's mob-cap and a stone jug, and which gives the scene a static, impersonal repose, something pure and clean, beyond the ordinary concerns of narrative.

This kind of sublimation is important in Adam Bede because the narrative as a whole insistently returns to the questions which must be suppressed here. When Arthur says casually to one of his grandfather's tenants, “Do you know, Mrs. Poyser, if I were going to marry and settle, I should be tempted to turn you out, and do up this fine old house, and turn farmer myself” (1:117), it is impossible not to feel the injustice of the social division which makes such a remark possible. The implied threat is eventually put into practice by Arthur's grandfather, who tries to change the condition of the Poysers' rental against their interest in order to attract a desirable new tenant. But the remark points more ominously to the central action of the novel, Arthur's seduction of Hetty Sorrel, in the course of which he uses his position for gain with the same unconsciousness he demonstrates in his remark to Mrs. Poyser. With its tragic consequences—child murder, transportation, the blighting of Adam's love—Arthur's action might be read allegorically, in a narrative repeatedly marked by enclosure plans, poaching incidents, talk of labor and rent, and uneasy glances across the harvest table, as a critique of class division and its effects. In fact, Adam tries to read it that way, in the days following Hetty's arrest, when he is full of vengeance. “Ah, and it’s right people should know how she was tempted into the wrong way,” he says. “It’s right they should know it was a fine gentleman made love to her, and turned her head wi’ notions” (2:18). But Eliot's whole tendency, as we have seen, is to sweep out of her mind meanings which seem so bound up with culture in favor of what she would see as the simple, natural truth, which is significantly personal rather than social. Her real message, articulated by Irwine after Adam is soundly rebuked, is that there are many “evil consequences … folded in a single act of selfish indulgence”—anyone's, presumably, mine, yours, the King of England's—and “evil spreads as necessarily as disease” (2:204-5). That this moral is drawn from Aeschylus and not nature should come as no surprise; in Eliot's novels, as elsewhere, the appeal to what is natural masks a submerged cultural and ideological project of its own, which must have its textual roots someplace.²³

Overtly artificial signification has its moment, toward the end of Adam Bede, but only in a scene which masks Adam's class affiliations almost completely, thereby suppressing the social and political tensions which are present elsewhere in the novel and which make the cult of simplicity necessary. Eighteen months after the trial, Adam has turned the room built for Hetty in the Bede cottage into a kind of study, a place with a table and papers and rulers and an open desk, where he writes and draws plans. When he disturbs Dinah dusting there, he might be a Victorian gentleman, standing in the doorway of his gloomy private room. For a moment, the man whose ordinary language in the novel has been a rough country dialect becomes capable of “What! You think I’m a cross fellow at home, Dinah?” and “You don’t know the value I set on the very thought of you” (2:308-09). In this comfortable and familiar scene, sophisticated reading is possible: “Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “star,” “music,”—words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than “chips” or “sawdust:” it is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful” (2:310-11). By emphasizing the arbitrary character of the “soul's language,” which affixes “unspeakably great and beautiful” meanings to words as unimposing as “chips” and “sawdust,” Eliot suggest that the business of signification may not always be simple or natural after all.²⁴ But this acknowledgement of conventional meanings and interpretive play takes place only when the class tensions at work throughout Adam Bede have been surreptitiously removed to allow for a conventional love scene. Under the ordinary conditions of the narrative, the values of simplicity and naturalness prevail.

Indeed, as I have tried to argue, these values are a necessary consequence of Eliot's ideological position in Adam Bede. In order to create the illusion of natural and universally applicable meaning, she must keep in check the narrative's impulse to emphasize social division and its effects on individuals. But her representational intent, announced in chapter 17, is to include figures who highlight social division by their very presence and their resistance to a narrative discourse situated at the center of culture. This is where the famous gesture towards Dutch painting has a crucial function in the novel. By placing the artisans and laborers inside of a frame which suppresses cultural significance at the moment when their presence is most explicitly in question, and by further defining the subject matter of their world as simple and untroubled by meaning, the Dutch painting analogy allows Eliot to clear a small place in Adam Bede for the working inhabitants of Loamshire, without acknowledging them, as she might have, as a threat.

Notes

1. References to Adam Bede follow the Cabinet Edition of George Eliot's works (Edinburgh: Blackwood's, n.d.), with volume and page numbers cited parenthetically in the text. Largely on account of this passage, Dutch painting has served frequently since the publication of Adam Bede as a convenient way of imagining George Eliot's “realism,” particularly in the early novels. The tendency has been to highlight the exactness and fidelity of Eliot's descriptions and their concern with minute details, as if her work aspired to duplicate the phenomenal world. However, Darrel Mansell, Jr., and Hugh Witemeyer have argued convincingly that Eliot's attitudes toward representation and Dutch paintings are far more complicated than this standard account would suggest. See Mansell, “Ruskin and George Eliot's ‘Realism,’” Criticism 7 (1965): 203-16, and Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 106-07.

2. “Defenses of Dutch Painting and the Theory of Realism,” Comparative Literature 15 (1963): 99.

3. Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 50-51.

4. A Handbook to the Gallery of British Paintings in the Art Treasures Exhibition (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857), p. 16. Witemeyer (p. 216n) identifies the author of this pamphlet as George Scharf.

5. Rev. of Modern Painters, 3, Westminster Review 65 (1856): 626. Quoted in Mansell, “Ruskin and George Eliot's ‘Realism,’” p. 203.

6. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1887), 3:5. The quotations below follow this edition, with references to volume and page number cited parenthetically. Demetz (p. 105n) also concludes that the Dutch are “definitely disparaged” in Modern Painters, citing the last of the quotations listed here. In The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), George Levine points out the paradoxical character of Ruskin's aesthetic judgments in this area: “Ruskin, of course, was not a great admirer of the Dutch school, and he was correspondingly unsympathetic to the best fiction written in his lifetime—even when it was written in what the authors might well have felt was a Ruskinian spirit” (p. 208). Levine's entire discussion of “the landscape of reality” (pp. 204-26) is helpful in illuminating the aesthetic context for Eliot's comments in Adam Bede.

7. John Blackwood to George Eliot, March 31, 1858, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), 2:445. Further quotations from this edition will be cited as Letters in the text, with references to volume and page.

8. In George Eliot (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), a book written primarily for students which nonetheless contains important and original commentary, Simon Dentith observes with some justice that the figures described in chapter 17 do not very closely resemble the characters with whom we are meant to sympathize in Adam Bede (pp. 35-36). (See also Gillian Beer, George Eliot [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986], p. 65). However, it is not accurate to conclude, as Dentith does, that Eliot's interest in Adam Bede is in “classes decidedly more respectable” (p. 36; my italics) or that the passage is “little more than a rhetorical flourish in the novel as a whole” (p. 35). Regardless of their good looks or attractive personal qualities, Adam, Seth, Hetty, and Dinah are all, by virtue of their family situations and the work they do, members of the same social and economic class as the figures described in chapter 17, and their presence at the center of Adam Bede is thus very much in question when those figures are invoked. (Only the Poysers aspire to anything approaching a “middle-class” condition, and they are, in spite of their ability to hire a few laborers, still finally tenants who are threatened with arbitrary eviction during the course of the novel.) The gap between noble, hard-working Adam and coarser figures like Wiry Ben or the Poysers' laborers suggests not a refusal to extend sympathy to members of a certain class but rather a difficulty in representing them adequately, as I suggest below.

9. Kenny Marotta notices this same tendency toward sophisticated narrative reference in “Adam Bede as a Pastoral,” Genre 9 (1976): 67-68. “Art,” he says, “is what the narrator knows and the characters don’t”; the narrator reminds us of “his superiority in experience, in philosophy, and even in social class to his subjects” (p. 68).

10. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 168. For further discussion of Eliot's presentation of common people and the ambiguous political substance of Adam Bede, see William J. Hyde, “George Eliot and the Climate of Realism,” PMLA 72 (1957): 147-64; Ian Gregor, “The Two Worlds of Adam Bede,” in The Moral and the Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 13-32; John Goode, “Adam Bede,” in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), pp. 19-41; Marotta, “Adam Bede as a Pastoral”; Dentith, George Eliot, pp. 30-55; Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 83-88; and Mary Jean Corbett, “Representing the Rural: The Critique of Loamshire in Adam Bede,” Studies in the Novel 20 (1988): 288-301.

11. George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, ed. J. W. Cross (New York: Harper and Bros., 1885), 2:50-51. See also Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 255-60.

12. See Horst Ludwig, ed., Münchner Maler im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Brückmann, 1982), 2:286.

13. The inscriptions were in Latin. I cite them here (from the reproduction in Ludwig, Münchner Maler) along with English translations from the King James Bible: at the upper left, “et civitatem et sanctuarium dissipabit populus cum duce venturo, et finis eius vastitas, et post finem belli statuta desolatio, dan ix xxvi” (And the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined—Daniel 9:26); at the upper right, “et cadent in ore gladii et captivi ducentur in omnes gentes, et jerusalem calcabitur a gentibus donec impleantur tempora nationum, luc xxi xxiv” (And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled—Luke 21:24).

14. Eliot may be mocking a response made by Kaulbach himself; she had visited his studio on April 27 (Cross, George Eliot's Life, 2:23).

15. George Eliot and the Visual Arts, p. 108. Witemeyer credits Norma Jean Davis and Bernard Williams with identifying the painting in unpublished dissertations (p. 217n).

16. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 5.

17. I don’t mean to suggest that Dutch paintings actually are unmediated by artistic convention; what is in question here is the view of Eliot and her contemporaries. In a development which would doubtless greatly have surprised them, art critics have begun to argue that Dutch genre paintings are in fact heavily laden with symbolic and allegorical meanings. See, for example, Otto Naumann's reading of Dou's “Girl Chopping Onions” in Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, ed. Peter Sutton (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), in which “the hanging dead bird symbolized the sexual act … the empty bird cage is associated with the loss of virtue … even the vegetables being prepared [in this painting and another] can be interpreted sexually” (p. 184). Svetlana Alpers argues for a simpler reading of Dutch art in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983).

18. Mansell, “Ruskin and George Eliot's ‘Realism,’” pp. 205-07. See also Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 77-78, 225-30, for comments on the relation between consciousness and the objective world in realist fiction.

19. “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), p. 270.

20. Of course, as Marotta points out (“Adam Bede as a Pastoral,” p. 62), there are smiles with double meanings in the pastoral scene Eliot is describing here—and it is worth noting that in the passage quoted above Hetty uses Mrs. Poyser's “polished surfaces” as mirrors. In both cases, the corrupting and complicating presence of sexuality shows itself to be in tension with Eliot's idealizing vision of the “simple” rural world.

21. In “Silence in the Courtroom: George Eliot and the Language of Morality in Adam Bede,” Essays in Literature 13 (1986): 43-55, Timothy Pace notes that “one imaginative impulse [in Adam Bede] depicts the deep truths of man's spiritual and moral experience—truths that define how a society can be united in a shared vision of right moral conduct—as essentially beyond the reach of language” (p. 43).

22. Although I do not think he would put the matter in precisely these terms, Martin Meisel often suggests a tension between narrative and pictorial elements in representational art in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983). About a meeting between Arthur and Hetty in Adam Bede, for example, he writes: “In George Eliot's scene, a developing relationship is crystallized in a situation, an eloquent tableau, isolated from the flow of time, or rather concentrating that flow into a charged stasis” (p. 60). See also his interesting discussion of the political implications of narrative and pictorial elements in David Wilkie's paintings and the melodramas based on them (pp. 142-65).

23. For comments on the Aeschylean theme in Adam Bede, see F. R. Leavis, Introduction to the Signet Adam Bede (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. x-xi. On Eliot's preference for individual rather than social morality, see Williams, The Country and the City, p. 180, and Goode, “Adam Bede,” p. 29. Dentith points out suggestively that “in the act of recognition, in the act of seeing ‘someone like me’ beneath those ‘superficial’ class differences, their fundamental, material importance can be cancelled” (George Eliot, pp. 53-54).

24. Dianne Sadoff treats this passage from a different perspective in “Nature's Language: Metaphor in the Text of Adam Bede,” Genre 11 (1978): 411-12. See also Pace, “Silence in the Courtroom,” p. 45.