SOURCE: “Infanticide and Respectability: Hetty Sorrel as Abandoned Child in Adam Bede,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. IX, No. 2, June, 1983, pp. 177-96.

[In the following essay, Harris examines the character of Hetty Sorrel and her place in the larger narrative of Adam Bede, and discusses the realism of her despair and flight.]

Adam Bede has usually been enjoyed and interpreted as a celebration of pastoral community, a loving backward look at a long-vanished rural world. Yet much of this novel's interest, especially for the modern reader, lies in its combination of nostalgic retrospect with “modern” problems not usually found in a pastoral. In particular, Hetty Sorrel's unwed pregnancy, desperate flight, abandonment of her child, and trial for its murder, seems to many readers the most striking episode in the novel. Eliot's vivid depiction of Hetty's flight has attracted some excellent criticism: both Barbara Hardy and Ian Adam analyze the remarkable way in which the narrator merges with Hetty's consciousness to bring us the immediate experience of a confused and inarticulate character.¹

Our admiration for Eliot's achievement here, however, has tended to raise questions about Hetty's relation to the novel as a whole. The modern reader is likely to be put off by an apparent harshness in Eliot's commentary on Hetty throughout much of the novel—a harshness which seems oddly in contrast to her sympathy during the flight episode; some have seen Hetty's fate as a severe punishment for sexual love. Most serious, because most threatening to the novel's integrity, is the influential view that the realism of Hetty's “Journey in Despair” simply does not belong to the rest of the novel. In his well-known essay, “The Two Worlds of Adam Bede,” Ian Gregor argues that most of the novel is old-fashioned pastoral, while Hetty's flight represents the intrusion of a modern “fiction of moral and philosophical inquiry” incompatible with the pastoral tradition.² If we accept this conclusion then we must consider the character at the centre of the plot and the modern reader's interest an inspired accident, and relegate the rest of the novel to a charming but obsolete literary genre. The vital issues raised by Hetty's disaster become irrelevant to Eliot's depiction of the world of Hayslope, and her fall seems a matter of private sin played off against a background of “immemorial” rustic virtue.³

The real question lies not in the rather abstract matter of genre but in the novel's sense of community, especially in the opposition between Hetty and her aunt and uncle Poyser, who represent the best aspects of the respectable tenant farmers of Hayslope. Despite the fine studies of Hetty's flight, surprisingly little criticism has been directed to her relation to the Poysers, and this is the area we must explore if we are to get beyond the inhibiting view of her as a separate case. Only if she belongs to the Poysers can she be shown to belong to the novel as a whole.

In his convincing interpretation—published a quarter of a century ago and still one of the most important essays on Adam Bede—J. R. Creeger takes the novel out of the realm of “pastoral” (in the simple sense intended by Ian Gregor) when he demonstrates that Eliot's admiration for the Poysers is not unqualified, and that Dinah's Methodism provides a critical perspective on the world of Hayslope.⁴ Hetty is usually seen as quite different from the apparently warm-hearted Poysers, but in emphasizing the difference between their values and Dinah's Creeger suggests that Hetty does indeed belong to Hayslope: she is “a perfect representative of the Loamshire-Hayslope world: she has its fertility, and she has its beauty, which nevertheless conceals an essential hardness.”⁵ He argues that the effect of her “ordeal is to externalize the hardness which has hitherto been concealed.” Although the inhabitants of Hayslope refuse to forgive her crime and thus cannot help her, “they are implicated in her condition.”⁶

Perhaps Creeger's insights have not been followed up in any clear way because of the confusing effect of Eliot's ambivalence both towards the Poysers, who are presented so warmly early in the novel but who later repudiate their erring niece, and Hetty, whom the narrator frequently disparages and yet depicts as sympathetic despite her undeniable crime. Finally, Eliot's affection for the Poysers triumphs in a happy ending which gets rid of Hetty and seems designed to make us forget the shortcomings of Hayslope.

Despite these difficulties, Hetty's role deserves further consideration. She is one of the most convincing depictions of a fallen woman in Victorian literature; as we shall see, she is also a crucial instance of the problems of the relation between individual and community in Eliot's fiction. Criticism has had difficulty in recognizing her full significance because of the mistaken assumption that Eliot intends a complete moral polarity between the novel's community and its main character. If the Poysers are seen to represent an ideal familial togetherness which stands for their whole community, then in her lack of family feeling and her most unfamilial crime Hetty can only be seen as an alien threat which tests the coherence of the community. Since Hetty accomplishes this through sexual indiscretion she can also be seen as the heroine of an erotic idyll set in total contrast to the Puritan virtues of the Poysers, and cruelly punished by an equally Puritan author.⁷

The view of Hetty as a sinful intruder on pastoral innocence involves a misunderstanding of her nature as a character—a misunderstanding which in turn obscures her most obvious link with the Poysers. If we look beneath Eliot's sometimes annoying commentary we will discover that she presents Hetty not as an adult sinner but as a confused child, and that it is through her role as child that her relation to her community can best be understood.

Hetty devastates the traditional family life of the Poysers by killing her child; because of this crime we tend to forget that she is herself an orphaned child for whom they have a parental responsibility. Their unthinking adherence to tradition may have something to do with her failure to grow up, and certainly provides the values which motivate her disastrous flight. In her blind respectability she rejects all possibility of rescue, hiding her child in a forest in a compulsive attempt to recover her position as the Poysers' child. As we shall see, the state of mind in which she commits the “murder” reveals a young child's inability to handle inner conflict. Childishly dependent on the values of her community, she remains trapped in a world which cannot recognize the isolated individual; yet her anguished confusion provides the novel's most intense portrayal of individual experience. As lost child, Hetty also acquires a central, if difficult, role in Eliot's preoccupation with moral education through experience, a concern which itself arises out of the breakdown of community.

In attempting a comprehensive study of Hetty's role, we encounter an interesting problem which may help to explain why such a fragmented picture of her is to be found in criticism. There may be some difficulties in perspective in approaching a character who is thematically at the centre of the novel, but psychologically isolated by her narcissism from all the other characters: to understand her as a character we must study her in relation to her own very narrow world, but to understand the full significance of her role in the novel we must see her in relation to a much larger world of which she has no comprehension—a problem made more difficult by her abrupt disappearance from the story after her confession to Dinah.

To accommodate this dual aspect of Hetty, my essay will move through two stages. I will first concentrate on her relation to the Poysers and her psychological motivation, viewing her abandonment of her child and subsequent mental collapse as a comment on the limitations of the communal world she shares with her foster parents. Then, taking a larger perspective, I will consider her in relation to other characters and the main themes of the novel, finally asking why the author herself abandons the pathetic child for whom she has won so much sympathy. A fuller understanding of the psychological and social aspects of Hetty's role will reveal that Eliot's shift from “pastoral” to “realism” is not a break in the novel's continuity but a result of its natural development. Only in the happy ending do we find a pastoral incompatible with Eliot's realism.

II

We first encounter Hetty as a very self-centred and naive girl competently performing her tasks at the Poysers' farm, but without affection for her foster parents or their way of life. It is the editorial commentary here which offends the modern reader; many have assumed that Hetty is being presented as a monster of egotism, especially in Chapter Fifteen, where she is seen in contrast to her Methodist cousin Dinah, who works in a factory and ministers to the poor in industrial Stonyshire, and occasionally visits the Hall Farm, but refuses to live there because she cannot accept the Poysers' complacent prosperity.

In terms of the novel's Wordsworthian values, Hetty does seem rather unwholesome. The narrator tells us that she hates young animals and children, especially those belonging to the Poysers. We should note, however, that the way the narrator describes Hetty suggests that her problem lies in extreme immaturity rather than in wickedness. Despite her distaste for babies and the natural world she is frequently compared to small and young animals: she has a “beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks … or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief—a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you”; here Hetty seems just at the infantile beginning of consciousness.⁸ “She was like a kitten, and had the same distractingly pretty looks, that meant nothing, for everybody that came near her” (xix, 213). Hetty's “look” can mean nothing because it has no recognition of the subjective reality of others. Both her admirers seem attracted by her resemblance to small animals: Adam observes her bad temper with “a sort of amused pity, as if he had seen a kitten setting up its back, or a little bird with its feathers ruffled … the prettiest thing in the world” (xxiii, 269), and, when she weeps, Arthur finds her irresistibly like “a bright-eyed spaniel with a thorn in its foot” (xiii, 138).

Before condemning Eliot for moral intolerance towards Hetty, we must remember the problem Eliot faced in retaining the sympathy of a Victorian audience for this character. By criticizing Hetty early in the novel Eliot expresses beforehand the disapproval her audience might be expected to feel later, and also, by the very nature of her criticism, implies that Hetty's problem is really psychological, more deserving of sympathy than harsh judgement. Mentally she is a child, a case of arrested development, not responsible for her actions, and thus a victim no matter what she may finally do. Dinah foreshadows the “Journey in Despair” when she compares Hetty facing a woman's destiny to a “child hugging its toys in the beginning of a long toilsome journey, in which it will have to bear hunger and cold and unsheltered darkness” (xv, 160). Later, Adam repeatedly excuses Hetty on the grounds that “‘She’s all but a child’” (xxviii, 308). Clearly we are invited to do the same; the more Eliot emphasizes Hetty's childishness the better case she has for sympathy later on.

In considering the Poysers' role as Hetty's foster parents, we should remember that despite Eliot's nostalgia for Hayslope she had a sharp critical understanding of the class to which they belong. As prosperous English yeomen, the Poysers represent the very best of the peasant class Eliot describes in her sociological essay, “The Natural History of German Life,” but their world-view reveals that predominance of tradition over individual consciousness which she finds characteristic of the peasantry: with the peasant, “Custom holds the place of sentiment. … The peasant never questions the obligation of family ties—he questions no custom [but] with him general custom holds the place of individual feeling.”⁹ Mr. Poyser habitually displays a “predominant after-supper expression of hearty good-nature” (xxv, 285), but towards a man of whose farming methods he does not approve he is “as hard and implacable as the north-east wind” (xiv, 145). Mrs. Poyser constantly criticizes the housekeeping of neighbouring wives, and her frequent tirades against Hetty and the servants are associated with that compulsive cleanliness which Eliot finds less of a virtue when inflicted on Maggie by the Dodson aunts in The Mill on the Floss. Mrs. Poyser berates Molly, the all-purpose maid, for having been hired “without a bit o’ character” and kept despite her filthy ways (vi, 73-74 and xx, 231-32). It would seem that in her first novel Eliot made humour out of certain characteristics of the respectable peasantry (the origins of her own family) towards which she actually felt ambivalent—if we are to judge by her next novel.

Some bitter remarks by “old Martin,” Mr. Poyser's father and Hetty's grandfather, reveal that before Hetty's parents died they disgraced themselves through improvident farming. The senior Poyser has never forgiven his daughter, Hetty's mother, for marrying a poor man against his will; he retains “a long unextinguished resentment, which always made [him] more indifferent to Hetty than to his son's children. Her mother's fortune had been spent by that good-for-nought Sorrel, and Hetty had Sorrel's blood in her veins” (xxxi, 344). The Poysers scrupulously acknowledge their obligation to take care of their niece, but their rigid values might well have a stunting effect on a girl dispossessed at the age of ten when her parents died in poverty. Mrs. Poyser means well towards Hetty, but often berates her along with the servants; it would not occur to her to treat the orphan niece as an equal to her own children. Though they wish the best for Hetty in marriage, the Poysers do not see her as “a daughter of their own,” but as a “penniless niece. For what could Hetty have been but a servant elsewhere, if her uncle had not taken her in and brought her up as a domestic help to her aunt?” (ix, 98). Hetty occupies an ambiguous position below the Poysers' children, yet partaking of the Poyser respectability, and thus above the more easygoing world of the servants and farmhands.¹⁰ Despite the contrast between the Poysers' good intentions and Hetty's narcissism, she can be seen as a product of their world—a possible outcome of the narrowness and complacency of their values along with their somewhat impersonal attitude towards her as a “domestic help.”

Hetty's state of mind can be consistently interpreted as a case of childhood narcissism accompanied by intense sibling rivalry: having lost her own position as daughter she hates the Poysers' children as rivals and does not care much for the parents who produced them. Chapter Fifteen provides a comprehensive account of Hetty's attitude towards the Poysers' family life. She has no “loving thought of her second parents—of the children she had helped to tend—of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood even” and “did not understand how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people. And as for those tiresome children … Hetty would have been glad to hear that she should never see a child again.” She also hates “the nasty little lambs” brought in for special care, but at least the lambs, unlike the Poysers' children, “were gotten rid of sooner or later.” This seems a death-wish; Mrs. Poyser complains that she showed no feeling when the infant Totty was missing and assumed drowned. Hetty's attitude towards young animals suggests repulsion towards anything suggestive of birth or the maternal: “Hetty would have hated the very word ‘hatching’ if her aunt had not bribed her to attend the young poultry” (xv, 156-58). She resembles the four-year-old Totty in preoccupation with clothing, in her interest in getting presents, and in being compared to young animals by the narrator. We shall see that, despite her lack of affection, Hetty is actually very dependent on her family.

While Mrs. Poyser rails at Hetty and the servants she constantly coddles Totty: she admits, Totty is “spoiled shameful … being the youngest, and th’ only gell” (vii, 87, italics mine). Hetty particularly dislikes this child, who was born after she came to the Poysers. The absence of any attachment to the present or fondness for the past suggests a disturbance associated with that past; Hetty's fantasies deny the existence of time. As we have seen, she hates the thought of birth and babies of any species. When Eliot compares her to young animals she implies that babies do not like other babies, and that a woman who has remained a child is not likely to be a sympathetic mother. Hetty's gentlemen admirers are quite mistaken when they imagine, “How she will dote on her children! She is almost a child herself, and the little pink round things will hang about her like florets round the central flower” (xv, 154).¹¹

In her obsession with costume, Hetty is not a temptress but a little girl. She projects her childhood interest in clothes and rivalry into adult relationships, thinking of marriage as an occasion “when she would have a silk gown and a great many clothes all at once” (xxxi, 342). She is preoccupied with dressing better than Mary Burge, daughter of the owner of the local timber yard. Her main interest in both Mary and Adam seems to derive from the fact that Mary likes Adam, while Adam has eyes only for herself: “she felt nothing when his eyes rested on her, but the cold triumph of knowing that he loved her, and would not look at Mary Burge” (ix, 99). At the height of her affair with Arthur she still pauses to give Adam one of her “brightest smiles” because “she knew Mary Burge was looking at them” (xxii, 256).

Hetty's feeling for Arthur is just a Cinderella-fantasy in which he plays a god-like handsome prince who will magically elevate her above all rivals, especially Mary Burge. The extent to which her fantasies about Arthur involve infantile dressing up should dispel any belief that sensual love or romantic passion is involved here. As she parades “with a pigeon-like stateliness” before her bedroom mirror, she dreams of Captain Donnithorne, who thought her “prettier than anybody about Hayslope … and prettier than Miss Bacon, the miller's daughter, who was called the beauty of Treddleston … he would like to see her in nice clothes, and thin shoes and white stockings, perhaps with silk clocks to them … of every picture she is the central figure in fine clothes … and everybody else is admiring and envying her” (xv, 152-56). Critics are mistaken who assume that Eliot attacks sensual love in having this affair end in disaster; Hetty is infantile from the beginning, and Arthur likes her that way. Hetty's problem is not sin but a regressive narcissism which, with its concomitant naiveté, sets her up as Arthur's victim and then, given the bad luck of his transfer to Ireland, becomes, along with her intense respectability, the driving force behind her crime. In her case criminal justice seems both cruel and irrelevant.

As we have seen, Hetty projects her feeling of dispossession into very naive fairy-tale aspirations; despite her hostility to her family and longing to rise above it she cannot perceive any reality outside her family life. Thus, when she runs away to hide her shame, her dark journey does not represent an advance in experience of the outside world, but a blind, regressive drive to reassert the respectability she possessed when she lived with the Poysers. In this state of mind she acts out a grim parody of their values.

An important comment on Hetty's motivation links her narcissism with the Poysers' sense of respectability. After reading Arthur's letter putting an end to the affair, she resolves that “nobody should find out how miserable she was. … They would think her conduct shameful; and shame was torture. That was poor little Hetty's conscience” (xxxi, 343). The full force of her narcissism is focussed on being seen by others in terms of the respectable standards of her community: “Hetty had a certain strength in her vain little nature: she would have borne anything rather than be laughed at, or pointed to with any other feeling than admiration” (xviii, 202).

The emphasis on being “laughed at” or “pointed to” reveals shame-culture at its most basic. Hetty's obsession with maintaining her respectability is related to the distinction, important to both Eliot and G. H. Lewes, between shame and the sympathetic imagination as the basis of morality—also a distinction between primitive and civilized world-views.¹² The Poysers and their community are still mainly at the level of shame-culture, manifested in extreme form in Hetty's case, while Dinah, the self-denying Methodist from industrial Stoniton, combines the sympathetic imagination with an Evangelical disregard for social status, and thus is able to “save” Hetty when the community condemns her. The parallel Eliot suggests between Mr. Poyser's rejection of his niece and Hetty's child-murder indicates the need for a more conscious morality than that of tradition-bound Hayslope.

Early in her flight Hetty displays a social attitude characteristic of the Poysers' world: “she was most of all afraid of … becoming so destitute that she would have to ask for people's charity; for Hetty had the pride not only of a proud nature but of a proud class—the class that pays the most poor-rates, and most shudders at the idea of profiting by a poor rate” (xxxvi, 379). Later she is quick to assure the innkeeper that “I belong to respectable folks” (xxxvii, 389). At the beginning of the “Journey in Despair,” Eliot describes Hetty's dread of shame as a class-attitude in a passage which brings some central themes together:

She thought of a young woman who had been found against the church wall at Hayslope one Sunday, nearly dead with cold and hunger—a tiny infant in her arms; the woman was rescued and taken to the parish. “The parish!” You can perhaps hardly understand the effect of that word on a mind like Hetty's, brought up among people who were somewhat hard in their feelings even towards poverty, who lived among the fields and had little pity for want and rags as a cruel inevitable fate such as they sometimes seem in cities, but held them a mark of idleness and vice—and it was idleness and vice that brought burthens on the parish. To Hetty the “parish” was next to the prison in obloquy; and to ask anything of strangers—to beg—lay in the same far-off hideous region of intolerable shame that Hetty had all her life thought it impossible she could ever come near. (xxxvii, 386)

Here Hetty partakes of the conviction, already enuciated by Mrs. Poyser in her criticism of Methodists (viii, 94), that if you’re poor it’s your own fault—“idleness and vice” are the leading qualities of those who choose to live at the ratepayers' expense. With the Poysers this attitude is natural because they “live among the fields” where Dinah finds “a strange deadness to the Word” (viii, 92). As Dinah admits, her religion flourishes only in cities; it is through contact with the industrial poor that she has been able to develop her democratic vision of poverty as a “cruel inevitable fate” rather than a comment on one's moral character (viii, 92). For Hetty and her class, people who are not respectable, and thus have no place in the social order, cease to exist morally. “Charity” denotes not Christian love but something so degrading that those who receive it have lost all claim to be considered human. No significant distinction can be made between being on the “parish” and imprisonment for a crime.

When worried about possible eviction by the old Squire, the Poysers think of moving twenty miles away to the next parish as a kind of death: “we shall … die o’ broken hearts among strange folks” (xxxviii, 359). After Hetty's disaster this move seems necessitated by a loss of status felt quite literally as worse than death. Repeatedly insisting on the Old Testament view that their children and grandchildren must suffer for Hetty's disgrace, the Poyser father and son play the role of Pharisee, while the lost sinner can only be saved by Dinah, whose religion emphasizes forgiveness and universal suffering represented by Christ as the “Man of Sorrows”:

the Hall Farm was a house of mourning for a misfortune felt to be worse than death. The sense of family dishonour was too keen even in the kind-hearted Martin Poyser the younger, to leave any room for compassion towards Hetty. … Hetty had brought disgrace on them all—disgrace that could never be wiped out. That was the all-conquering feeling in the mind of both father and son—the scorching sense of disgrace, which neutralized all other sensibility; Mr. Irwine was struck with surprise to observe that Mrs. Poyser was less severe than her husband. We are often startled with the severity of mild people on exceptional occasions; the reason is, that mild people are most liable to be under the yoke of traditional impressions. (xl, 423)

The intensity of feeling which Mrs. Poyser manifests in her role as sharp-tongued defender of Hayslope morality can also grant her a certain independence from that morality: though she thinks on conventional lines she can sometimes experience as an individual. If Martin is more tradition-bound because he has less feeling, then we can conclude that Hetty, who has no feeling for others, is the most likely to be “under the yoke of traditional impressions.” With his sensibility “neutralized,” Mr. Poyser temporarily enters a state of mind which is permanent with Hetty. Weeping “hard tears” he says that he will pay for her defence at the trial, but “I’ll not go nigh her, nor ever see her again, by my own will. She’s made our bread bitter to us for all our lives to come, an’ we shall ne’er hold up our heads i’ this parish nor i’ any other” (xl, 423). Mr. Poyser's attitude here is more excusable than Hetty's crime, but both repudiate a child because they equate disgrace with death.

Dinah's implied criticism of Hayslope is dramatized by Hetty's flight. Hetty enjoys fantasies of rising above the Poysers, but her behaviour in the flight reveals that she is childishly dependent on her environment and thus blindly follows its values; she possesses no inner consciousness to oppose the compulsion of respectability. Alienated from family life and isolated by her narcissism, she reproduces the Poysers' values without their feeling for kin and community. Of course, this is a distortion of their world-view, but the analogy between her abandonment of her child and her uncle's attitude towards her implies a repudiation of the human on both sides.

Despite Hetty's “resolute air of self-reliance,” her actions during the “Flight in Despair” are completely irrational; like a young child, she can only express conflicting drives in contradictory behaviour. She flees from Hayslope to escape “discovery and scorn” before “familiar eyes,” but refuses all offers of help on the journey because she takes the outside world as an extension of her community. She seeks a pool in which to drown herself—a pool deep enough so that her body will not be discovered until summer, by which time no one will be able to recognize her. Yet as she searches for such a pool she maintains a respectable appearance, takes care with her money, and travels back towards home.

When she finds a pool she postpones suicide to eat “eagerly” and fall asleep, awakening terrified in “cold, and darkness, and solitude—out of all human reach” (xxxvii, 395). By contrast she thinks of the Hall Farm: “The bright hearth and the voices of home,—the secure uprising and lying down,—the familiar fields, the familiar people” (xxxvii, 395). This antithesis between lethal solitude, the outcome of her flight from human vision, and home perceived in terms of light, heat, the sound of voices—the impersonality of unvarying routine and “familiar people”—presents an extreme form of communal identification. She seeks to return to no particular relationship, but to merge into a total pattern which will be static and therefore absolute.

After recovering from her panic, she feels “exultation” at still being alive and, in an uncharacteristic display of emotion, kisses “her arms with passionate love of life” (xxxvii, 395). Yet this inherent vitality, evoked by her rejection of suicide, cannot extend to a sense of the value of life in general, not even that of the child to which she will soon give birth. The next morning her “passionate joy in life” (xxxvii, 397) succumbs to a moralistic peasant who calls her a “wild woman,” renewing her sense of disgrace so that “she felt that she was like a beggar already” (xxxvii, 395-97).

Hetty passionately loves her own flesh, yet passes sentence of death on her pregnant body. She can resolve this dilemma once the child is born by killing it in order to return to the only life she can imagine—unquestioned acceptance in the community. Hetty resists with her whole being the disruption of her infantile dependence on her kin by the child to which she has given birth; there is only room for one infant in her world and that is herself. Later she tells Dinah of her plan to drown the baby so that she could be once more “safe at home”: “I thought I’d find a pool, if I could, like that other. … I thought I should get rid of all my misery, and go back home, and never let ’em know why I ran away. … I longed so to be safe at home. … I seemed to hate the baby—it was like a heavy weight hanging round my neck” (xlv, 462-63). Yet as Hetty resolutely takes the baby into the woods she experiences for the first time a counter-movement of feeling for it. This can only find expression in tactile terms: “the baby was warm against me … its crying went through me, and I daredn’t look at its little face and hands” (xlv, 463). Instead of experiencing the baby only as a “heavy weight” she recognizes the existence of a face by refusing to look at it.

The child is not saved by this feeling, but Hetty's longing to express it will prompt the confession which returns her to humanity.¹³ At present the impulse to kill the child still dominates; rather than weighing alternatives Hetty commits the act, but does it in a way that expresses her ambivalence (xlv, 463-64). By covering up the baby in a hole under a bush in the woods Hetty leaves it to almost certain death by exposure, and signifies her lethal intentions by describing the hole as a “grave”; the child is so well hidden that, as we learn at the trial, a man who searched the spot after hearing it cry couldn’t find it (xliii, 444-45). Yet by also leaving an opening for it to breathe she expresses the wish that it “wouldn’t die.” She thinks only now of abandoning the child so that it might live; yet she had a good opportunity to do this earlier after giving birth in the house of a sympathetic woman. At that time, however, when she was actually in contact with another person, her flight from shame demanded a lonely murder in the woods. By burying the child, but not completely, Hetty tries both to kill it and to let it live, and of course the result is death.

Only after she abandons the child does her feeling for it begin to get the upper hand. At this point most Victorian novelists would have presented a scene of melodramatic remorse, but Eliot is too good a psychologist to let Hetty depart from character. Since her consciousness cannot accommodate conflict, her maternal feeling finds expression in auditory hallucination and a compulsive return to the scene of the crime. Miles away she hears the baby crying, a literal expression of the wish that it might still be alive. The “crying” finally overcomes her flight from shame, forcing her to return to the place where she hid the baby: “I’d left off thinking about going home—it had gone out o’ my mind” (xlv, 464). Hetty could never have made this confession had she not finally been able to forget her drive to return home.

Since she has no inner consciousness, this feeling appears only after the fulfilment of her drive towards isolation and murder, and then only as hallucination, paralysis of the will, and psychic fragmentation—she never rejects her original goal but only notes later that it had “gone out” of her mind. It seems that she can experience feelings that conflict with her narcissism only as external forces compelling action against her will. Ironically, her belated feeling for the child brings about her arrest and a disgrace worse than unwed motherhood. Unable to face real suicide, she responds with psychotic withdrawal from humanity. During the “Journey in Despair” her features have already become petrified and petrifying “like that wondrous Medusa face, with the passionate, passionless lips” (xxxvii, 393);¹⁴ now her whole being follows suit: “My heart went like a stone: I couldn’t wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there for ever, and nothing ’ud ever change. But they came and took me away” (xlv, 465). Here “heart” and time freeze in a repudiation of life-processes.

Her psychic suicide seems another parallel to her uncle's attitude towards her. He casts her out of the family, while she “will not confess her name or where she comes from” (xxxix, 418)—in Hetty's kinship-oriented world to have neither place nor name is to be dead. Mr. Poyser will act as though he never had a niece while Hetty “denies that she has had a child” (xl, 427). Killing one's own child, whether in metaphor or fact, is an extreme way of denying the narrator's assertion that we should “help each other the more” because “we are children of a large family” (xxvii, 298).

We have seen that the experience of abandoning the child opens, for the first time, a breach in Hetty's narcissistic world; confession of this experience to Dinah is a step outside herself which earlier would have been impossible. Dinah attributes this change to divine grace but it really arises from the therapeutic value of confession itself.¹⁵ Hetty cannot conceptualize her experience, but in the course of the confession the persistent “crying” and her return to the child change from hallucination and compulsion to an image of guilt linking the present to the past. In tribute to the honesty of Eliot's characterization, however, we must note that Hetty's account of her new feelings is limited to very concrete terms: “that crying and the place in the wood,” which she hopes God will “take away” as though it were a physical pain (xlv, 564). Her confession can only be seen as the beginning of consciousness.

III

Hetty's confession is the emotional climax of the novel; nowhere else do we approach such intense involvement with any of the characters. Yet the confession is also the focal point of our problems with the novel, for we are never to see Hetty again, and thus all the questions raised by this climactic scene remain unanswered. Eliot first turns away from Hetty to concentrate on the sympathetic concern felt for her by other characters, and then, having rescued her from the gallows and shipped her off as a transported convict, forgets her altogether—except for a few cold references in the final Book of the novel, where the sole purpose of the narrative is to celebrate the Poysers' harvest supper and lead towards the happy marriage of Adam and Dinah.

The difficulty presented by Hetty's exile can be seen more clearly by comparison to the easier time Eliot has with her fellow sinner, Arthur. Since both Arthur and Hetty have fallen from the rustic community, any sense of reconciliation on their part must come from self-understanding and a sense of reconciliation with humanity in general. Arthur achieves this in Chapter Forty-Eight, where he reestablishes his friendship with Adam, declares his intent to sacrifice himself by leaving for India so that no one else need leave town, and makes Adam promise to persuade the Poysers to stay. His exile is a healing of his relation with the community: he accepts his guilt, does the best thing for others, and thus prepares for his happier return seven years later.

Arthur's capacity for self-understanding, and his resources as officer, gentleman, and landlord, provide the basis for a conventional expiation. Hetty's exile, however, is not a matter of choice; while we trust she has made a beginning we have yet to see how she will deal with guilt and shame, especially as a transported convict.¹⁶ In this context, Eliot's refusal to say anything at all about Hetty's further development seems unforgivable. When, after Arthur has been welcomed back in “The Epilogue,” Dinah rather glibly remarks that “the death of the poor wanderer, when she was coming back to us, has been sorrow upon sorrow” (549), we can only take this as a rather cheap way for the author to fudge unfinished business; it would seem that death is after all the only permissible fate for the fallen woman.

Fortunately, this failure occurs too late to inflict fatal damage on the novel. Despite the incompleteness of her story, Hetty stands out, in the very difficulties she creates, as one of Eliot's great heroines. Her flight from Hayslope brings together the problems of community and individual development, and pushes them to the limits of Eliot's realism. The crime led up to by her journey, coldly investigated at her trial, and finally explained in her confession, is the true centre of the novel because its social and psychological causes include so much of the novel's reality. I will show how the main themes of the novel move towards a climax in her flight and confession, and then are defused by her exile.

The nostalgic affection with which Eliot regards the Poysers, especially on our first tour of the Hall Farm, has blinded many readers to the fact that this novel deals with two problems characteristic of her fiction: the difficulties of growing from confused adolescence to moral maturity, and the virtues and limitations of a tradition-bound community. These concerns are closely related because it is a breach in the community which necessitates individual development, and to learn to think for oneself one must transcend the limitations of one's community.

Although Eliot lovingly depicts the tranquil life of the older generation, represented by the Poysers and their Anglican shepherd Mr. Irwine, the novel is really about the problems of three confused children: Arthur and Hetty, both orphans living with relatives, and Adam, a virtual orphan who assumes responsibility for a drunken father and a foolish, querulous mother. In each case, the moral deficiencies of the child are related to an absence of parental guidance and to feelings of resentment towards inadequate parent-figures: Adam responds to his father's disgrace by incorporating Hayslope's “hardness” into his moral independence, while Arthur compensates for his grandfather's hostility and greed by dreaming how, upon inheriting the estate, he will become an ideal Squire, paternally bestowing largesse on his tenants and beloved by them in return. Both must achieve maturity by learning to see beyond the limitations of their class, Arthur much more painfully than Adam. (Dinah is also an orphan, but we are never shown the experience through which she achieves her sympathetic vision. If she seems too good to be true, this may be because Eliot has not confronted the psychological problems inherent in her ascetic religion—as she does later with Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke.)

Hetty becomes the most interesting of the orphaned children because she presents the most serious threat to the respectable community and the most extreme case of the difficulties of growing up. Eliot's failure to complete Hetty's story indicates that these problems have not been resolved in the novel. With Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of her next novel, [The Mill on the Floss,] Eliot presents a more explicit version of conflict with family and community, but Maggie's sympathy and intelligence also make it easier for Eliot to develop and analyze this conflict within the moral context of the novel.¹⁷ Never again does Eliot give such a central role to so intractable a character as Hetty.

On the psychological level, Hetty is an effective portrayal of a dark aspect of childhood experience; she seems both attractive and alarming because we recognize in her a stage through which we all have passed. Her tragedy reveals the consequences of failure to grow out of childhood, thus incidentally commenting on masculine idealization of childishness in women. The fact that Hetty represents childhood experience is relevant both to the defensive criticism of her early in the novel, and to Eliot's ability to identify with her in the flight. As we leave Hetty on the road at the end of Chapter Thirty-Seven we abruptly return to the sympathetic distance of mature adult vision—“My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on weary feet” (xxxvii, 397)—but parental concern on the part of the narrator, Dinah, and Adam is not in itself an adequate way to deal with the character who emerges from the “journey” and the confession.

Adam provides the moral of the story when he overcomes his own version of Hayslopian hardness and agrees to accompany Bartle Massey to Hetty's trial: “I’ll stand by her—I’ll own her. … They oughtn’t to cast her off—their own flesh and blood. We hand folks over to God's mercy and show none ourselves. … I’ll never be hard again” (xlii, 439). Since Hetty's anguish is, however, more interesting than Adam's, most readers are unwilling to view her fall primarily as payment for his education; whatever the quality of his insights, we really want to know the outcome of her experience. Adam's moral improvement can be taken for granted; the most interesting problem at the end of the novel is how a character as regressive as Hetty can develop at all—a problem made all the more interesting by the fact that her confession does suggest the possibility of change. Eliot's religion of humanity depends on the replacement of Christian revelation with moral education through experience, and it is the confused Hetty, not the clear-headed Adam, who provides the real test case for this. Despite Hetty's lack of sympathy and intelligence, we respond more to the nightmare confusion of her aimless journey than to the morally lucid experience of Adam and Dinah.

While Hetty presents an unanswered challenge to Eliot's moral psychology, she also leads us to the most complex aspects of the novel's social vision. Both the classes which dominate the novel, landowning aristocracy and respectable tenant farmers, are implicated in her crime. The first of these is easier for Eliot to deal with than the second; the indolent young Squire and his miserly grandfather threaten the rustic community from the outside, reinforcing its values by way of contrast, while Hetty, the embarrassing product of this community, threatens it from within. We need not invoke the pastoral tradition to explain Eliot's fondness for Hayslope, for she was here describing the origins of her own family.¹⁸ As the daughter of a man who, like Adam, rose from carpenter to estate-agent, she might well admire hardworking artisans and farmers while feeling a certain hostility towards lazy landlords (of whom we see more in Silas Marner). Yet Dinah's rejection of Hayslope implies a reservation about the Poysers, and this expands as the novel develops; as we have seen, the shortcomings of Hayslope become a major theme after Hetty takes over from Arthur as leading character.

Mrs. Poyser complains that the tenant farmers must sweat on fields which others own (xxxii, 353), but we discover that they in turn are “hard” towards the dispossessed proletariat to which Dinah ministers and into which Hetty falls, sinking all the deeper through her compulsive respectability. Her flight puts her community in a colder perspective; the Poysers are now seen as members of a “proud class,” which despises those who “profit” by the poor-rates. Though still sympathetic characters, they are no longer protected by their virtuous role in the enclosing world of Hayslope; after Hetty's flight we see them in ambiguous relation to a larger reality. If Hetty is a case of arrested psychological development, it is also true that the class to which she belongs displays a primitive social vision, in contrast to Dinah, whose moral maturity includes a sympathetic understanding of the industrial poor, and social outcasts in general.

We have seen that a conflict between self and community is implicit in Eliot's portrayal of Hetty (a conflict more clearly developed in her later fiction, but always rendered difficult by her nostalgia for community). In Adam Bede, one manifestation of this conflict appears in the difference in realism between the early chapters and Hetty's flight—a problem fatally oversimplified by Gregor and others. Ian Adam has demonstrated that this novel contains a variety of “realisms” (see note 1). I would add that there is a logical transition between the very different “realisms” of our first visit to the Hall Farm and of Hetty's anguish and flight, and that the contrast between these is an important aspect of the thematic structure of the novel.

The pleasant pastoral of our first visit to the Hall Farm in Chapters Six and Seven is mainly the result of narrative distance; both narrator and reader are assumed to be tourists from the city enjoying a visit to a rural world remote in time and space: “The dairy was certainly worth looking at: it was a scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture in hot and dusty streets” (vii, 82). At this point we can appreciate the cozy sense of community because we are not threatened with personal involvement.

Eliot encourages us to enjoy the “pastoral” as an entrance to the novel, but does not allow us to remain permanently in a mood which depends on not identifying too closely with the feelings of any one character. As we settle down in the world of the novel, we become aware of something slightly oppressive about the Poysers' way of judging everyone by kin, cleanliness, and farming methods. Adam seems more independent than they, but then he moralizes excessively at his fellow workmen, feels little sympathy for his father, and consoles himself for the latter's death by meditating on the accuracy of arithmetic: “the nature o’ things doesn’t change. … The square o’ four is sixteen” (xi, 116). The impersonal, collective quality of the novel gradually becomes less our way of enjoying the characters and more a potentially confining manifestation of the Hayslope world-view.¹⁹ In this clearly illuminated, orderly landscape there is no place for the subjective self. The external quality of this world becomes not only the narrator's way of looking at it, but the confines of the world itself, out of which the narrative now seeks to emerge.

In the imagery of dream, vision, and moonlit darkness associated with Dinah in Chapter Fifteen, Eliot suggests an imagination founded on Wordsworthian feeling, but the subjective self becomes located inside Hayslope only through Dinah's moral opposite, Hetty, who, as the literal-minded product of her community, has no imagination at all (in the Wordsworthian sense). Hetty is no longer seen as an alien in the rural world, but, by the beginning of her flight, as a human reality concealed beneath it: “a human heart beating heavily with anguish … hidden behind the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn” (xxiv, 371).

By undergoing inner conflict with no sense of an inner self, Hetty reveals the deficiencies of the Poysers' world, while the literalness with which she takes everything on her journey parodies their unquestioning common sense. Her flight is not a break in the novel's reality but a meaningful shift in perspective; the community we once saw from the outside as an organic whole is now experienced subjectively from the inside by a character with whom the narrator temporarily merges in unqualified identification. In Hetty's confession the objective world which seemed so solid dissolves into conflicting fragments and hallucination—a borderline madness which is also her truest way of seeing. Since Hetty acts out in extreme form problems we have all experienced, she becomes the novel's most impressive representative of the subjective self—a fact to which the narrator's intense identification with her has already attested.

The communal world, which has so far provided the novel's objective reality, now becomes a prison in which the self is condemned to death, and we feel the need for an inner transformation which will free Hetty from her past and reveal, to her as well as to the reader, a larger world of human possibility.²⁰ Eliot gives this experience instead to Adam, who has always had an unquestioned place in the community. Paradoxically, Hetty disappears into the outside world, while Eliot, through Adam's happy marriage, invites us to take as the repository of human values a community which has never acknowledged anything outside itself.

We have seen what an important role Dinah's independence of Hayslope plays in the thematic structure of the novel. Now our consolation for Hetty's exile is to see her virtuous cousin inherit her position as Adam's fiancée and the Poysers' niece, along with that trousseau of linen Mrs. Poyser has been laying up for Hetty's marriage. When Dinah gives up preaching to merge with Adam's prospering career and the Poysers' respectability, the values of Hayslope become, for the first time, the unchallenged standard of the novel. Yet the gradual but persistent development of the novel has been away from warm pastoral towards a vision of the limitations of Hayslope and of the need for a more comprehensive sense of humanity. Thus the reconstructed, Hetty-less pastoral of the ending seems to refute the whole process of the novel.²¹

When Adam finally becomes the main character, his enlightened patriarchal authority encourages us to forget the problems of fallen women and the class divisions of Hayslope. In his rather idealized nobility, the mature Adam seems entirely removed from Hetty in character and situation. Eliot's emphasis on his regenerative suffering is not an effective way to incorporate the burden of her experience into the novel, especially when we consider that her fall saves him from the worse suffering of marriage to her and clears the way for an ideal “second love.”²² Adam, unlike both Hetty and George Eliot, can grow up without leaving home, while the girl who has to leave is never heard from again—except for a brief obituary. Yet we know that despite the title, our main character is not the hero but the heroine. In the dark wood of Hetty's ambivalence we find the living centre of the novel, and the problems which point beyond the false pastoral of the ending. Eliot's first novel has many virtues, but owes both its unity and its enduring interest to the mystery of Hetty Sorrel.

Notes

1. Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (London: Athlone Press, 1963), pp. 25-27, and Ian Adam, “The Structure of Realisms in Adam Bede,” NCF [Nineteenth Century Fiction], 30 (September 1975), 141-48. Since Hardy and Adam have discussed Eliot's technique in depicting Hetty's flight, I will concentrate on Hetty's psychological motivation.

2. Ian Gregor and Brian Nicholas, The Moral and the Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 29. Jerome Thale sees Hetty's flight as “the most compelling thing in Adam Bede and one of the high points of nineteenth-century fiction,” but argues that it is a twentieth-century addition to a Wordsworthian pastoral (The Novels of George Eliot [New York: Columbia University Press, 1959], pp. 30-33).

3. Neil Roberts argues that “In Adam Bede George Eliot creates the illusion of a stable and immemorial rural world” where Hetty's fall becomes a “static moral drama” (George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975], pp. 63-67). I have disputed this view in an article previously published—“Arthur's Misuse of the Imagination: Sentimental Benevolence and Wordsworthian Realism in Adam Bede,” English Studies in Canada, 4 (Spring 1978), 41-59.

4. George R. Creeger, “An Interpretation of Adam Bede,” ELH, 23 (1956), 218-38.

5. Creeger, p. 266.

6. Creeger, p. 230.

7. Critics who assume that Eliot is making a Puritan attack on sensual love—David Cecil, Victorian Novelists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)—or that this affair is a genuine pastoral idyll—Ian Gregor (see note 2) or Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (Charlotsville: University Press of Virginia, 1974)—make the mistake of taking Arthur's high-flown view of Hetty at face value. I have discussed this problem in an article previously published (see note 3). The most recent view of Eliot as Puritan moralist is Nina Auerbach's “The Rise of the Fallen Woman,” NCF, 35 (1980), 29-52. Auerbach says that “George Eliot seems to condemn Hetty Sorrel's ambitious sexuality with unyielding austerity” (p. 40). Auerbach sees Hetty as “lush and sensuous” (p. 40), but also remarks that “for all her sexuality … Hetty is oddly devoid of erotic life. George Eliot reminds us constantly that she is ambitious, not passionate” (p. 49). Much difficulty about Hetty's “sexuality,” and the author's attitude towards her, arises from the assumption that she has both the feelings and the moral responsibility of an adult. In my view Hetty becomes “subversive” to her community not by achieving the status of a rebel, but by acting out a naive version of its values. I will argue that her pathetic social aspirations are akin to childhood rivalry, and that her “sensuality” is self-directed narcissism.

8. George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1948), Chapter vii, p. 83. All subsequent references will be from this edition. Hetty's dream-world is described in water-imagery combining a womblike absence of weight with self-reflection and plantlike passivity, which also suggests a regressive narcissism.

9. George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 279-80.

10. Eliot compares Hetty to two girls of lower social status: Molly the housemaid, whom the children always “called on for her ready sympathy” (xviii, 195), and the “unsoaped” Bessy Cranage, the blacksmith's daughter, who is Hetty's equal in trivial vanity but has the advantage of her “in the matter of feeling” (xxv, 281). Neither has to maintain the Poysers' pretensions to respectability.

11. In this rather bitter editorial aside Eliot accuses both Arthur and Adam of idealizing Hetty's childishness, and implies that Adam wants his wife to be his intellectual inferior (xv, 154). Eliot does not pursue this theme, insisting instead on the nobility of Adam's misplaced love. Hetty's seduction could be seen as a fortunate fall which saves him from the much worse fate of marriage to her. In Middlemarch Lydgate takes a view of Rosamond very similar to that suggested in the above-mentioned paragraph, and discovers his error through marriage.

12. See G. H. Lewes, The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (Boston, 1879), p. 150. I discuss this concept in “Arthur's Misuse of the Imagination: Sentimental Benevolence and Wordsworthian Realism in Adam Bede,” English Studies in Canada, 4 (Spring 1978), 54.

13. Ian Adam is the only critic to note how the events of the journey prepare Hetty for confession to Dinah—in addition to the essay cited in note 1, see Adam's “Restoration Through Feeling in George Eliot's Fiction: A New Look at Hetty Sorrel,” Victorian Newsletter, 22 (Fall 1962), 9-12. I agree with Adam that Hetty is intended to fit into Eliot's concept of moral regeneration, but differ in my view of her actual impact on the novel.

14. In Greek art Medusa was traditionally portrayed as a hideous demon, but Hellenistic artists gave her a pathetic beauty. Eliot shows that she is aware of the dual nature of the Medusa when she remarks, in her review of Adolf Stahr's Torso. Kunst, Künstler und Kunstwerk der Alten (Brunswick, 1854), that in an early sculpture “the Medusa is a hideous caricature; how far from the terrible beauty of the Medusa Rondanini!” (Saturday Analyst and Leader, 6 [17 March 1855], 257). The Medusa Rondanini is a sculpture fragment representing Medusa's head, in a museum in Munich.

    During the composition of Adam Bede Eliot transcribed in her notebook a paragraph from Stahr's book giving two accounts of Medusa's transformation into a Gorgon: “Medusa … dared to compare herself in beauty to Athena, and the goddess, thereby enraged, changed the girl into a horrible monster. According to another version of the story … Medusa's fate was yet more undeserved. … Poseidon raped the incomparably beautiful princess in Athena's temple. … Athena's punishment … fell on the innocent victim, because she was powerless to punish the guilty god.” See Joseph Wiesenfarth, “George Eliot's Notes for Adam Bede,” NCF, 32 (September 1977), 148-49 (Wiesenfarth's translation). Both the punishment for rivalry, and the unjust punishment which should have fallen on the male, seem relevant to Hetty's case. Hetty turns herself to stone, but her uncle also reveals the “hardness” of Hayslope in his response to her crime.

15. In his analysis of the secular meaning of religious experience, Ludwig Feuerbach gives special importance to the psychological benefits of Confession (The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot [New York: Harper, 1957], pp. 78-79 and 122-24).

16. Hetty would certainly be exposed to temptation in a situation where prostitution was taken for granted and also offered escape from heavy labour in appalling conditions. When the female convicts arrived, the officers, soldiers, and farmers (the latter released male convicts) chose the prettiest women as “servants”; also the peculiarly unpleasant life of those not chosen was hardly conductive to virtue—see Margaret Weidenhofer, The Convict Years: Transportation and the Penal System, 1788-1868 (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1973), pp. 74-77 and 93-96. Despite Eliot's emphasis on realism, her imagination does not follow Hetty to Australia.

17. The heroine of The Mill on the Floss combines the hostility towards family life, the Evangelical religion, and the struggle for moral maturity which are here divided between Hetty, Dinah, and Adam; she also winds up in the painful position of having a moral sensibility like Dinah's while being in disgrace like Hetty. Though Maggie is less of a threat to Eliot's values than Hetty, the flood does seem an abrupt end to her moral education. Perhaps Eliot also had difficulty in imagining Maggie's maturity.

18. See Eliot's account of the novel's origins in “History of ‘Adam Bede,’” The George Eliot Letters, ed Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-55), iii, 502-04. Margharita Laski discusses the relation of the novel, in locale and characters, to Eliot's family in George Eliot and Her World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 64-66.

19. Raymond Williams complains that in Adam Bede Eliot presents the rustic characters collectively “as a landscape … a kind of chorus” which “can emerge into personal consciousness only through externally formulated attitudes and ideas” (The Country and the City [London: Chatto and Windus, 1973], p. 206). I argue here that this collective quality is not a defect in Eliot's vision, but an attempt to recreate the world-view of Hayslope and enable us to experience both the pleasant and confining aspects of living there.

20. My discussion of Eliot's realism is indebted to Peter Rees's suggestive argument, in an essay constituting part of an unpublished thesis, that the novel's conclusion requires, but fails to provide, a transformation in Eliot's social vision. Peter Rees, in “The Defective Mirror of Adam Bede: The Hall Farm and George Eliot's Unnatural History of English Life” (Simon Fraser University, 1980), agrees with Williams that Eliot's pastoral springs from a defective vision of the Poysers' class.

21. Only at this point does Eliot's ambivalence towards community produce a break in the novel's reality. In an essay relevant to all of Eliot's fiction, Carole L. Robinson has noted that in Romola “There is no recognition, much less reconciliation, of the disparity between the idealization of ‘community’ and the more realistic appraisal of the community itself. (At the heart of the failure of The Mill on the Floss is a not dissimilar contradiction)” (“Romola: A Reading of the Novel,” VS, 6 [1962-63], 35). The ending of Adam Bede is an example of the same problem, though I would add that the failure of an ending is by no means to be considered the failure of the novel as a whole; otherwise there would be few successes in Victorian fiction.

22. For a more favourable view of the capacity of Adam's crisis and the novel's conclusion to assimilate Hetty's suffering, see Jay Clayton's suggestive essay, “Visionary Power and Narrative Form: Wordsworth and Adam Bede,” ELH, 46 (1979), 645-72. Clayton sees a transformation, beginning with Hetty's confession, from a narrative driven by grim consequences to a Wordsworthian visionary mode governed by sympathy rather than cause and effect. This essay provides important insights into Eliot's relation to Wordsworth but does not resolve the question as to whether such a conclusion would be appropriate to the novel; a sudden shift in reality could be taken as evasion in a novel so committed to psychological realism. In my view the grimness of Hetty's story arises not from the narrator's values, but from Hetty's consciousness and the values of her community, and can only be dealt with in terms of its source.