I

BEFORE DISCUSSING the novel specifically, though, we must first survey Eliot's familiarity with Carnival and the carnivalesque. In her essay “German Wit: Heinrich Heine” (1856), she praises Heine's humor for its place in the traditions of “Rabelais,” “Pantomime and the immortal Pulcinello” (222). Heine's “love of the ludicrous,” she states, assumes “a holiday mood” in “shaking off … the yoke of a too exacting faith” (like Dinah's?) and satirizing “the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity” (219, 243). Eliot further delights in Heine's wordplay or “Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles,” including what she calls the Saturnalian “audacity of his occasional coarseness” (221, 224). She even anticipates more dystopian, post-Bakhtinian readings of the carnivalesque by arguing that such a Rabelaisian “wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy, and feeling” may be traced to “the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy” (219). Such “savagery,” which breaks out in the physical battle between Adam and Arthur and even in Mrs. Poyser's hazing or decrowning of the Old Squire, accords with Michael André Bernstein's term “bitter carnival”: “when the tropes of Saturnalian reversal of all values spill over into daily life,” according to Bernstein, “they usually do so with a savagery that is the grim underside of their exuberant affirmations” (6).

Thomas Pinney's introduction to “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) notes that, in this review of two works by Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl, Eliot was “refining … her ideas about the nature and value of realism in art,” and that she would make “literature of just such material in Adam Bede” (266). Eliot's repeated invocation in this essay of what she calls the real “life of the People”–“Art is the nearest thing to life. … All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People” (271)–also prefigures Bakhtin's similarly populist invocations of “the creative life of the people,” particularly the “chorus of the laughing people” that outlasts “the official culture of the ruling classes” as the populace grows more carnivalized and immersed in grotesque realism: “the people become aware of their sensual, material bodily unity and community” (Bakhtin 282, 474, 255). Eliot again anticipates Bakhtin in her preference for what she designates as “the most crapulous group of boors,” those earmarked by gargantuan appetites and Pantagruelian thirsts who, like Pantagruel himself, find creative truth at the bottom of a cavernous bottle: “the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown,” she writes, “exists at the bottom of the third quart pot” (268–69).

Significantly, these rustic clowns–the same suggestively archaic term Eliot will use in Adam Bede–represent for her “the real characteristics of the working-classes,” while her “idyllic shepherds” and “ploughmen” (268–69) actually appear only in pastoral romances and carnivalesque parodies of romances such as Panurge's satiric drowning (and decrowning) of Rabelais's dull merchant Dingdong, his shepherds, and all his sheep (407; bk. IV, ch. 8).³

Goethe also contributed significantly to Eliot's sense of the carnivalesque. Hilda Hollis has persuasively argued that “Eliot recalled Goethe's discussion of carnival when she began work on Romola” (228). (Bakhtin, too, devotes a lengthy section of Rabelais and His World to Goethe's “captur[ing] with great depth and simplicity all that is essential” [244–45] in the carnivalesque.) Goethe emphasizes that “there is nothing quite novel or unique about the Carnival. It is linked quite naturally to the Roman way of life” (447), just as it will be quite naturally in Romola and, in more displaced forms, to the pre-Victorian way of life in Adam Bede. Famously, Goethe concludes that “life, taken as a whole, is like the Roman Carnival, unpredictable, unsatisfactory and problematic” (469), which again seems equally true of Romola and Adam Bede. For all the apparent unpredictability of Carnival, however, Goethe considers it nevertheless to betray “a certain coherence” that he relates both to “the most important stages of human life” (such as, in Adam Bede, Arthur's coming-of-age festivities) and to Demeter's story-telling nurse Baubo, who “profanes” these stages in true caquet fashion (469). Ambiguity too is central to Goethe's conception of Carnival, which in his words “wear[s] a two-faced mask,” so that “nobody knows which is his back and which is his front or whether he is coming or going” (454)–like the Janusian woman who “dress[es] herself fine to sit back-ards on a donkey” (99; ch. 9) in Mrs. Poyser's caquet simile. Most memorably, however, Pulcinella personifies for Goethe the ambiguity of Carnival's praise/abuse dialogic when, “after pretending to accept everything in good faith, [he] casts doubts and aspersions on the hero's tale, and interrupts his rodomontade with puns and mock platitudes” (460). Reincarnated in figures like Old Leisure, the Green Man, Wiry Ben, Tom Saft, and Mrs. Poyser, Pulcinella's carnivalesque energies similarly cast “doubts and aspersions” on Dinah's and Adam's heroic tales in Adam Bede.

Pulcinella's energies run especially rampant, of course, in Romola, which repeatedly emphasizes “the merry spirits of the Carnival” (191; ch. 20), particularly in its three critical carnivalesque episodes: the “mimic marriage” (293; ch. 34) of Tito to Tessa that is conducted by the conjuror Vaiano, Eliot's resident ludimagister; the Bonfire of Vanities, during which “the old debauched Carnival” is scapegoated and Lent, masquerading as “the new Carnival,” paradoxically becomes “a sort of sacred parody of the old” (408–09; ch. 49); and the ironic “comedy of the Trial by Fire” with its proposed scapegoating of Savonarola and his brand of Lenten asceticism.⁴

Romola also features the caquet tradition, as personified in Monna Brigida, Romola's primary female confidante. Indeed, Monna Brigida rails with “rattling lengthiness” against officialdom's “mak[ing] rules for us women,” while sanctimoniously condemning females as “lumps of flesh, and wantons, and mischief-makers” (122–23; ch. 12), just as Mrs. Poyser rails against Bartle Massey's similarly misogynistic monologism and Dinah's anti-carnivalesque asceticism. In this sense, Fat Tuesday seems to vanquish Ash Wednesday, just as the “triumph of the fat popolani over the lean” (85; ch. 8) signified on the political banner of the Guelf party. On the other hand, “the Piagnone Carnival” (423; ch. 31) of somberly dressed mourners celebrating the Bonfire of Vanities also ironically celebrates the victory of Lent over traditional Old Carnival, thereby externalizing Romola's pivotal interior monologue in which she adopts “the strict and sombre view of pleasure which tended to repress poetry in the attempt to repress vice” (411; ch. 49). But just how ironic, or how conclusive, is this apparent Lenten victory? Indeed, how much should the reader make of Romola's final Lenten cautions to Tessa's son Lillo when she soberly chastises his carnivalesque desire for “having a good deal of pleasure” (565; Epilogue) since, ambivalently, she also “bless[es] that” climactic “incident of the Carnival” (552; ch. 70), which returned her to Tessa and Lillo?

II

WHILE THE ANSWERS to these questions are too complicated to address here, Eliot's preoccupation with them in Romola, published four years after Adam Bede, indicates beyond a doubt that Carnival frames and informs issues central to her thought. Her concern with the carnivalesque may challenge–it certainly qualifies–the dominant critical tradition that sees her as preoccupied primarily with a kind of spiritual Bildungsroman: the personal story of a heroic individual, like Maggie Tulliver or Dorothea Brooke, who struggles to develop from egoism through renunciation to sympathy.⁵

In Eliot's fiction, the carnivalesque tradition blooms fully, if darkly, in Romola. In Adam Bede, it is more subtly at work in ludic forms, appearing in country fairs, like “Whissuntide” (216; ch. 20) and “Treddles'on fair, where folks only go to see shows and get fairings” or Carnival trinkets (166; ch. 16), and in “The Health Drinking,” “The Games,” and “The Dance” chapters (24–26) of Arthur's “Birthday Feast.”⁶

An effective way to trace carnivalesque tropes through the text is to follow Bakhtin's lead in examining “series [rjady] of the most varied types, which are at times parallel to each other and at times intersect each other,” like food, drink, clothes, the body, sex, death, and even the “defecation series” (The Dialogic Imagination 170)–the latter suggesting that “a knowledge of manures” may indeed outweigh “a knowledge of the classics” (168; ch. 16) in Adam Bede. These series are grounded in the “material bodily principle” (or fertilizing, lower-world values of grotesque realism), which, as Bakhtin explains, “is offered in its all-popular festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social, and bodily elements are given here as an indivisible whole. And this whole is gay and gracious. … The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance” (19). Such grotesque values clearly appear in the “millennial abundance” (87; ch. 7) of the Poysers' Hall Farm, with its well-stocked cellar (228; ch. 20), as well as in Martin Poyser's “portly figure” (142; ch. 42) and gargantuan sons, who look “as much like their father as a very small elephant is like a very large one” (187; ch. 18).⁷

Chapter 17, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” justifies Eliot's realist aesthetic, which rejects representing an angelic “face paled by the celestial light” or “a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory.” Instead, like Heine and Riehl, Eliot embraces “those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house” (180). Her aesthetic would consequently also seem to reject the otherworldly Dinah, who is frequently compared to an angel, while instead embracing “real” rustics like Mrs. Poyser or Wiry Ben, who is “often full o' drink” and who cautions Adam with a traditional Rabelaisian chiasmus: “Ye may like work better nor play, but I like play better nor work” (9, 13; ch. 1).⁸

While in chapter 17 Eliot ironically seems to oppose (sympathetic) Carnival and (egoistic) Lenten values, the body of her text more often dialogically overlaps such values, just as it does the conventions of realism and romance, and of fact and fiction. For example, the “rather too corpulent” Rector Irwine personifies grotesque realism in opposition to the doctrinaire and dogmatic idealist Mr. Ryde, who “was severe in rebuking the aberrations of the flesh” and “the Christmas rounds of the church singers,” which “promot[ed] drunkenness and too light a handling of sacred things” (181; ch. 17). Consequently, Mrs. Poyser chatters in caquet fashion, contrasting carnal and anti-carnal economies: “Mrs Poyser used to say– you know she would have her word about everything–she said, Mr Irwine was like a good meal o' victual, you were the better for him without thinking on it, and Mr Ryde was like a dose o' physic, he griped you and worreted you, and after all he left you much the same” (183; ch. 17). At the same time, though, the narrator's playful ruse here of an extratextual, real-life Mrs. Poyser overlaps fiction with fact. Similarly breaking down barriers among characters, author, and audience, “Carnival,” as Bakhtin insists, “does not know footlights,” but “belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play” (7). Accordingly, Eliot's gossipy narrator (who claims to have actually talked to Adam Bede, who himself talked to Mrs. Poyser) soon adds that “any one moderately acquainted with French literature”–such as the grotesque realism of Gargantua and Pantagruel–would likewise recognize “the fleeting nature of our illusions” (184) regarding Ryde's Lenten renunciations and ideals. Indeed, Eliot suggests, “divine beauty” may be well and good for romance aesthetics, but “that other beauty” of the grotesque aesthetic, “which lies in no secret of proportion,” rather requires and reveals “the secret of deep human sympathy” (180). Since the mid-Victorian world is marvelously monstrous for Eliot, her readers should resist any allegorical Romance which “make[s] believe it is not quite such a mixed, entangled affair” (177) and “weep[s] over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions” (40; ch. 3). Readers should rather conclude that real-life “human nature is loveable,” especially those laughable, ungainly peasants “in pantaloons or petticoats” (185).

Bakhtin repeatedly emphasizes that the grotesque series of “laughter, food, and drink defeat death” (229). Along the way, they also defeat what Rabelais terms the “agelast” or personification of living death, “a man who does not know how to laugh and who is hostile to laughter” (Bakhtin 267), like the self-centered Old Squire and even sanctimonious, spartan Adam (as he remains for much of the novel). The dialogic between “the laughing people” and Lenten agelasts begins immediately in chapter 1 of Adam Bede, during the debate over the value of drink and laughter, when Adam, like a young Pantaloon, cannot join the “loud roar of laughter from the other three workman” but only manages “a slight smile” (which will eventually broaden), while the Clown Wiry Ben comically charges that Adam “set[s] up [his] bristles at every bit o' fun” (10, 12).

III

BEFORE EXAMINING some individual series, though, we should discuss their crucial convergence in chapter 20. This chapter significantly suggests the inextricable links among the series, thereby illustrating Julia Kristeva's dialogic point that the “carnival first exteriorizes the structure of literary productivity, then inevitably brings to light this structure's underlying unconscious: sexuality and death” through traditional carnival “dyads” like “high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laughter and tears” (78–79). Indeed, the entire chapter seems structured around “the comic” and “the terrible” dyad, with its responsive “laughter and tears,” so that after Hetty's quacchero apparition as Dinah, Mrs. Poyser would “sooner cry nor laugh at the sight o' that poor thing's cap” (229). Various comparative doubles or dyads, like “the double cluster of [drinking] vessels” (226), also significantly inform and integrate the entire episode. These include Lisbeth's opening fear that Adam will marry Hetty, and Mrs. Poyser's closing hope concerning such a union; Lisbeth's opening concern over Adam's “turnin' worki' day into Sunday” (215) by visiting the Hall Farm, and old Martin's closing concern over staying up late on a work day as “warna a marr'in', or a christenin', or a wake, or th' harvest supper” (231); Totty's “innocent” cherry picking and Hetty's less “innocent” currant picking as a potential “fallen woman”; the different “falls” involved in these twin garden scenes and then comically repeated in Molly's beery pratfall and the fall of Mrs. Poyser's jug of ale; and the central carnivalesque contrasts between Hetty's colorful and Dinah's drab costumes. Moreover, the chapter is riddled with specific carnivalesque references to fairs and wakes, not to mention the “wonderful sight” of “caves” (223) and repeated beer calls underground to “the cellar” (227), all of which underscore the subversive, gnostic values of Eliot's grotesque realism. As the Priestess of the Holy Bottle contends in Gargantua and Pantagruel, “here underground [in the Subterranean Palace] there are vast treasures and wonderful things” (621; bk. V, ch. 48). In fact, chapter 20 serially compares and contrasts several rival heteroglossia, notably Classical carpe diem, Christian Lenten, and Carnival gnostic epistemologies.

Several factors suggest, furthermore, that Eliot ultimately celebrates grotesque realism and thus carnivalesque gnosticism in this chapter, in a manner that previews the novel's climactic “Harvest Supper.” Eliot's unabashed celebration of Carnival in chapter 20 is evident not only in the “tittering explosion” of laughter when Molly “fell with a crash and a splash into a pool of beer” (even the rhyme relays narrative joy) and echoed when Mrs. Poyser drops the ale jug after criticizing Molly's clumsiness (227–28). It is also evident in how “full of life” the farmyard is, as signified by the monstrous overlapping between animal and human species (for example, “screaming geese” and scolding Mrs. Poyser), as well as the exhilarating flow of present participles–“screaming,” “provoking,” “hissing,” “groaning,” “dealing,” “watering,” “barking” (225)–that glorify shared, spontaneous participation in present time, much as Mrs. Poyser's time-transcending eight-day clock does. Eliot's delight in the carnivalesque is further apparent in the series of carnivalesque containers–baskets, jugs, mugs–that punctuate the chapter, especially Mrs. Poyser's scheme for a “movable kitchen cupboard, which was to be capable of containing grocery, pickles, crockery, and house-linen, in the utmost compactness, without confusion” (230). In fact, the chapter is animated with various movable examples of what Bakhtin calls fluid “gay matter” (335), such as “the crockery [which] seems alive” (228), a carnivalesque version of the dish running away with the spoon. Carnival's egalitarian leveling of all categories of being is further evident in “the master and servants [enjoying] their supper not far off each other” (225) as well as the older and younger generations equally enjoying carnivalesque mirth together. The “checkered pattern” of Mrs. Poyser's tablecloth (225) even seems talismanic of Carnival values, since it reproduces Harlequin's motley and establishes a caquet “pattern t'all the farmers' wives in the country” (218). As we will see, the quacchero “pattern” (224) of Dinah's costume, featured here, also figuratively follows Mrs. Poyser's “pattern,” as Dinah learns to share in her aunt's carnivalism.

Eliot's unmistakable celebration of the carnivalesque in this chapter might seem to counter, or at least qualify, Hollis's cautionary reading of the Carnival in Romola: “while carnival laughter is liberating, for Eliot it can also be frightening if the individual is forgotten and annihilated in the carnival rush to destroy reifications of the absolute” (231). Other elements of chapter 20, however, bear out Hollis's contention that Eliot considers Carnival to be potentially dangerous. Totty's pinafore, which is “red-stained” from “sucking her cherries” and even “receive[s] the promised downfall” (219) of forbidden fruit, anticipates Hetty's Edenic downfall and later loss of her hymeneal pink handkerchief–as well as, perhaps, the concupiscence and moral fall of fruit-sucking Laura in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. When Adam surprises Hetty in her garden, she, vainly anticipating Arthur, blushes “deep red” before Adam, who, vainly (and figuratively) anticipating deflowering her someday, gives her a large rose that he has picked. Hetty's consequent capering and mugging with Adam risks seeming morally damning as well (though not as much as her fall with Arthur), as Eliot's double entendre suggests: “[Hetty's hands] were dyed and damp with currant juice” (231). Altogether, the putative “joy of childhood” (221) in this Edenic scene both recalls the putative “golden age of childhood” (129; ch. 12) evoked in Arthur's pagan, Classical seduction of Hetty, and ironically anticipates Hetty's subsequent suicidal hysteria (374; ch. 36). Such seduction scenes, whether engineered by Hetty or Arthur, render the Carnival again uncannily abject and bitter in keeping with Freud's commentary: “The explanation of the ‘clownism’ in Charcot's formula of [hysterical] attacks lies in the perversion of the seducers who, under a compulsion to repeat dating from their youth, obviously seek their satisfaction to the accompaniment of the craziest capers, somersaults, and grimaces” (Origins 182).

IV

IN SPITE OF such ominous foreshadowing, chapter 20 primarily celebrates Carnival values and, in so doing, clarifies several carnivalesque series that are in play in the novel. The food or prandial series is clearly evident in the “carnivorous affability” at the Hall Farm, where “cooking a feast” (72, 83; ch. 6) seems almost an everyday event despite the hard work required. While Lisbeth Bede cautions the spectral Dinah to balance fasting with feasting and “take the food and drink she so much needed after a day of hard work and fasting” (111; ch. 10), Mrs. Poyser grows more ironically caustic and cautionary after Dinah rejects a “life of [bodily] ease and luxury,” including gargantuan helpings of “bread and butter,” at the Farm: “nobody shall ever say I don't provide enough and to spare, but if there's ever a bit o' odds an' ends as nobody else 'ud eat, you're sure to pick it out” (478; ch. 49). Mrs. Poyser's demiurgic parody of divine providence here not only celebrates the Hall Farm as a carnivalesque cornucopia but satirizes Dinah's anti-carnal, if not masochistic, brand of asceticism. Generally, though, Mrs. Poyser's table talk comically links culinary and courting appetites: “I'm no friend to young fellows a-marr'ing afore they know the difference atween a crab an' a apple; but they may wait o'er long … if you go past your dinner-time, there'll be little relish o' your meat” (145; ch. 14). Mrs. Poyser utters her feasting philosophy most fully in chapter 32, “Mrs Poyser ‘Has Her Say Out,”’ when she verbally decrowns the Old Squire and then condemns agelasts young and old: “There's no pleasure i' living, if you're to be corked up for iver, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel” (349).¹⁰

This carnivalesque tradition of philosophic feasting can be traced to Plato's Symposium, which Rabelais frequently invokes as the love feast featuring Aristophanes' myth of the androgynously monstrous circle people whose love conquers all until the jealous gods dualistically divide them. In Adam Bede, this tradition is evident in Rector Irwine's belief that “a breakfast or a dinner” provides “an easy and cheerful substitute for more troublesome and disagreeable ceremonies,” so that confessional table talk over “egg and coffee” is humanizing to the extent “that mortal sin is not incompatible with an appetite for muffins” (161; ch. 16). Of course, there is also some irony here, since Irwine's “epicurean” delight (69; ch. 5) blinds the good Rector to Arthur's potential “mortal sin” with Hetty. On the other hand, the wine and loaf, symbolic of communion, that Bartle Massey shares with Adam on the morning of Hetty's trial help Adam to forgive Hetty (and Arthur) and to convert himself to Eliot's religion of humanity: “I used to be hard sometimes: I'll never be hard again” (428; ch. 42). Adam's consequent resolve to visit Hetty in prison, however, seems as much a carnivalesque as a Comptean work of loving mercy when he ritualistically atones for her unforgiving “flesh and blood” with his own forgiving acceptance of Hetty's sin of the flesh: “Nerved by an active resolution, Adam took a morsel of bread and drank some wine” (430–31; ch. 42). In all these cases, though, “one can say everything best over a meal,” as the narrator puts it (161; ch. 16).

Eliot's ultimate example of the carnivalesque symposium occurs during the “Harvest Supper” (ch. 53) at the Hall Farm, which features enormous rounds of “hot roast-beef and fresh-drawn ale,” besides the repeated “grin of delight” of Tom Saft or Tom Fool. Laughing Tom reincarnates “the part of the old jester,” and his witty “repartee” or billingsgate significantly “deal[s more] with the deeper and more lasting relations of things” (516–17) than the festive occasion seems to warrant. Indeed, accompanying the general “sense of profusion” (518), there is also a sense that this annual love feast does cyclically defeat the deaths of autumn and of Hetty's child by enshrining such eternal carnivalesque values as food, drink, laughter, song, and communal dialogue, as well as by celebrating the mundus inversus, with its healthy reversal of all upper and lower categories, as classes and genders intermingle equally. Thus, this renewing First Supper provides a liminal introit to Adam and Dinah's conjugal initiation into the ways of love and the carnivalesque community of Bakhtin's “laughing people,” when the couple subsequently gathers a “better harvest from that painful seed-time” of Adam's sorrow (534; ch. 55). In fact, the climactic “drinking ceremony” with its overriding philosophy of “ad libitum,” or “doing as one pleases,” also recalls Rabelais's celebrated Utopia, the Abbey of Thélème, with its identical Carnival philosophy. In this sense, the idealized lyrics of “M' loove's a roos wi'out a thorn” (521) seem realistically counterpointed by the “Three Merry Mowers,” although it is “doubtful whether the rose would not predominate over the mowers” (526) in this utopian mood. Similarly, Mrs. Poyser's and Bartle Massey's grand querelle debate over marriage recalls Rabelais's dialogic over Panurge's conjugal future. For Bartle, If a man says a word, his wife 'll match it with a contradiction”; for Mrs. Poyser, “I know what the men like–a poor soft, as 'ud simper at 'em like the pictur o' the sun, whether they did right or wrong,” though she frankly admits “the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men” (524–25). In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes' carnal approach to love clearly defeats Eryximachus' dispassionate, technical analysis of it; in Eliot, following Rabelais, Mrs. Poyser's praise-abuse dialogism just as surely defeats Bartle's more reductive monologism.

As Rabelais's gnostic gospel of the Holy Bottle blatantly belches, all Pantagruelians must learn to drink in life's intoxicating cocktail. Drinking, as I have already indicated, also plays a pivotal role in Adam Bede. Comparing the relative merits of the older Jonathan Burge and the younger Adam, Bartle Massey insists, “as for age, what that's worth depends on the quality o' the liquor” (242; ch. 21). Chapter 1 immediately initiates the debate on the relative merits of “thick ale” versus “religion,” that is, on various “sperrit[s],” as Adam's traditional carnivalesque pun suggests. And as Adam puts it (though he misses the irony), “there's such a thing as being over-speritial” with both kinds of spirits. “It's the preacher as empties th' alehouse,” so that “if a man gets religion, he'll do his work none the worse for that,” preaches Adam, who significantly reveals that his work ethic is his religion. Indeed, Adam's excessive “pride and delight [are] in 's work,” and so he generally disapproves of anything, like liquor, linked with leisure time and ludic “fun” (10, 13), until he ultimately practices the redemptive gospel of “playful work” (493; ch. 50) with Dinah.¹¹

On the other hand, drinking also bestows considerable carnivalesque blessings in Adam Bede. Though Adam feels that “beer was a thing only to be drunk on holidays” (45; ch. 4), Rector Irwine more liberally advises the scrupulous Joshua Rann to continue “taking your pot of beer soberly, when you've done your day's work”–and even jokes about “get[ting] gloriously drunk after” daily “exertions” (61; ch. 5)–since such practices create a healthier work/play biorhythm than does teetotaling. Martin Poyser similarly finds that “an extra glass [of ale] had restored his youthful confidence in his good looks and good dancing” (283–84; ch. 26) during Arthur's coming-of-age festivities; and, more in the Rabelaisian spirit of in vino veritas, Mr. Craig discovers that “an extra glass of grog” helps him evaluate “the relative advantages of matrimony and bachelorhood” (204; ch. 18). Moreover, the repeated image of toasting a neighbor or “drinking his health” (266; ch. 24,“The Health-Drinking”), as practiced by all social classes, contributes to both individual and communal renewal in Adam Bede.¹²

The personified figure of “Old Leisure,” “able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine,– not being squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations” (514; ch. 52), represents Eliot's most curious assessment of the Pantagruelian spirit, one perhaps comparable to “Old Carnival” in Romola. Even her nostalgic tone here seems ambivalently self-conscious, as she uncharacteristically celebrates Leisure's “easy, jolly conscience” and the related autumnal haze of “great flocks of geese,” “new corn-ricks,” and “the surprising abundance of fruit” (513–14; ch. 52). Yet this enigmatic Carnival interlude structurally links Adam's proposal to Dinah with the Harvest Supper, and it is surprisingly introduced by Dinah's smile, as well as more suitably by Mrs. Poyser's ironic Carnival critique of Dinah's native, Lenten Stonyshire: “Scarceness o' victual 'ull keep: there's no need to be hasty wi' the cooking. An' scarceness is what there's the biggest stock of i' that country” (513; ch. 52). Taken straightforwardly, the narrator's ultimate apostrophe to Old Leisure sustains his carnivalesque ahistoricity against any historicized Lenten attacks, so as to reaffirm that malt always does more than Milton (or Carlyle) can: “Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard: he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus” (514; ch. 52).¹³

Like the sometimes self-indulgent drinking series, the heteroglossic sexual series also speaks both literally and figuratively in Adam Bede. Literally, of course, Hetty and Arthur have sex, Rector Irwine accuses some clergy of surrendering to “the lusts of the flesh” (69; ch. 5), Adam is repulsed by a Carnival prostitute (“the painted woman outside the shows at Treddles'on fair” [224; ch. 20]), and Dinah preaches against lusty Bess's vain “earrings,” “fine gowns,” and seductive “fat red cheeks,” strongly suggesting that her sexuality could condemn Bess to “everlasting fire!” (30–32; ch. 2). Sexual “truth” is frequently problematized, however, through figurative displacement in a carnivalesque context, often involving Wortspiel or obscene, two-faced puns like Heine's. For example, after Adam beats and unmans Arthur for his sexual dalliance with Hetty, the younger man feels that he will be more virile, “more of a man on horseback” astride his mare Meg (312; ch. 29). Lest readers miss the sexual innuendo here, that “pretty creature” Meg later “arched her bay neck in the sunshine … and trembled with pleasure when her master stroked her nose” (316). Then Meg is explicitly compared to those “others of her sex” whose human “hearts are in a [similar] state of fluttering expectation” towards their gentleman “master.” This dovetailing of sexual and class issues becomes even clearer when Arthur's brow-beaten groom Old John jokes that the “young mester” has “been ridin' fit to split the mare i' two this forenoon” (318). In this sense, lordly Arthur embodies the Roman eques or knight on a horse, whose wealth and erect stature render him culturally powerful and priapic, besides transforming him into a kind of bi-being or Carnival monster. No wonder Adam dubs Arthur “a double-faced man” (302; ch. 27).

Though Hetty's animal appetites are troped more obviously than her paramour's, her potential plight as a deflowered flower maiden also seems sexually displaced in the Poyser hortus conclusus “during that leafy, flowery, bushy time” (218; ch. 20) of pubescent currant- and cherry-picking. The “bushy” metaphor here grows more sexually insistent when we recall that Arthur had been “‘taking’ a few bushes and ditches” on Meg like a classically lusty, rapacious “Centaur” (127; ch. 12). Furthermore, John Olding–whose name echoes that of the groom Old John, with his sexual reading of Arthur's riding–testifies that Hetty buried her baby “under a nut-bush” (436; ch. 43), as its seed had been buried within her. Such carnivalesque wordplay even implicates the demure Dinah, who is initially described as having “reddish hair” like the “red sorrel” (24, 20; ch. 2), which is unmistakably associated (at least in hindsight) with the sorrowful scarlet woman Hetty Sorrel. After Mr. Irwine curiously asks whether Dinah feels “any embarrassment” preaching as “a lovely young woman on whom men's eyes are fixed,” she biblically compares herself to “the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was” (92; ch. 8). Critics, though, have certainly taken heed of Dinah's unintentional sexual pun, with Helena Michie, for example, finding in it a “coded and potentially subversive means of access to Dinah's body through its apparent negation” (62). Yet such critics have overlooked the relation of such a playful negation and profaning of scripture to the carnivalesque tradition.

V

IT IS THE DEATH SERIES, finally, that renders the carnivalesque most problematical in Adam Bede. The pictorial tradition linking the vanity of human wishes with death is fairly common in the Dutch school Eliot admired (Haak 125–28). Death, which Eliot calls “the great Reconciler” (55; ch. 4)– that grotesquely real monstrosity that notably appears in the carnivalesque's danse macabre figure–is perhaps most famously represented by Hans Holbein, one of Eliot's “favorite German painters” (Witemeyer 23), in his vanitas canvas The Ambassadors (1533; Figure 1). This controversial painting deserves special notice not only because Eliot similarly invokes the vanitas tradition in Romola's carnivalesque “Bonfire of Vanities,” but also because Holbein's intertwined optics and semiotics seem to recur so suggestively in Adam Bede. That is, the ambassadors' vanity in calculating “the religious crises facing Christendom” (Rowlands 87) with intricate measuring instruments– which resemble Adam's (self-)regulating ruler–pales before the encrypted death's head, which also haunts Eliot's text. (Holbein's broken lute, which recalls the disharmony of the spheres, can be further seen to recur in Mrs. Poyser's broken spinning wheel.) And this real-life metaphysical absence can only be perceived through what Jacques Lacan calls “the anamorphic ghost,” Holbein's “trap for the gaze” that grotesquely both exorcizes and, by extension, exercises the realist perspective (89, 92). For instance, “the vanity of [Adam's] own rage” after striking Arthur makes him kneel transfixed and transformed before his master's inert body, as if “gazing at an image of death” (303; ch. 27).

Hans Holbein the Younger. The Ambassadors. Oil on canvas, 1533. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.

Readers of Adam Bede must repeatedly employ this kind of perspectival shift. As Bakhtin explains, grotesque realism's gnostic focus on pregnant death, “as in Holbein's … ‘dance of death,”’ often becomes “a more or less funny monstrosity,” which is “always related to birth” because “the grave is related to the earth's life-giving womb. Birth-death, death-birth, such are the components of life itself” (Bakhtin 50–51). It is, of course, up to the viewer's/reader's own sense of humor whether the various memento mori hidden in The Ambassadors and in Arthur's apparent death become “funny,” but they do nevertheless involve darkly playful jokes– as the vanitas tradition invariably does–on the characters, if not on the viewers/readers themselves.¹⁴

Cautionary vanitas imagery involving the hidden details of both physical and spiritual (pregnant) death abounds in Adam Bede. It is often linked with the novel's frequent mirror (and masking) imagery and invariably implicates the vanity of readerly wishes. This may be especially true for readers seeking some nostalgic or Romantic version of the utopian Carnival, because more often than not that particular trope can quickly turn bitter, like “the Piagnone Carnival” in Romola; and Hetty's “girlish passion and vanity” (335; ch. 35) seems as tragically vain as Tessa's love of display in the later novel. Once Hetty's pregnancy is evident to herself and to Eliot's readers, however, she is disabused of romance vanitas and “could conceive no other existence for herself in future than a hidden one” (373; ch. 36), in which she masks (rather than displays) her ballooning body, just as Eliot often masks or at least displaces her own tropes that implicate grotesque realism, particularly its sexual series.

Bakhtin calls “the theme of the mask, the most complex theme of folk culture” but emphasizes that the hypocritical or self-deceptive “Romantic form of the mask” subverts “the oneness of the folk carnival concept” and must be exorcised. This “mask hides something, keeps a secret, deceives” (39–40), just as that “wild drunken rascal” Will Maskery, in a version of what Bakhtin terms “a carnivalesque game of names” (Bakhtin 461), appears as a two-faced, teetotaling agelast whom the folk community should scapegoat “out of the village with rope-ends and pitchforks, and then,” Rector Irwine jokes, “get gloriously drunk” (61, 65; ch. 5). The “theme of the mask” is seriously personified, though, by self-deceived and scapegoated Hetty, which renders Eliot's cautionary carnivalism even more complicated and heteroglossic. Eliot emphasizes that, once pregnant, Hetty “knew no romance, and had only a feeble share in the feelings which are the source of romance.” Consequently, the vanity of “well-read ladies may find it difficult to understand her [grotesque] state of mind” (373; ch. 36)– unless, of course, they are “moderately acquainted with French literature,” especially Rabelais's more cautionary, if not bitter, implications.

Similarly, when Hetty and Arthur enter Fir-tree Grove's bower of romance bliss as “the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs,” the reader is told that at the same midsummer moment, their deadly “destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil” (128–29; ch. 12), like the masked, anamorphic death's head in The Ambassadors. At this point, however, the reader needs no change in perspective to envision “hazy” as a carnivalesque hazing or travesty of romance illusions. The reader does, however, require a shift of genres and paradigms to perceive the elegiac Et in Arcadia Ego motif and its relationship to pregnant death here. As traced by Erwin Panofsky, this pictorial and literary tradition begins with a classical shepherd's glorification of a pastoral golden age and appears to end in the eighteenth century with shepherds unexpectedly encountering “a huge human skull” (307) or tomb, which then ironically intones “I, too, am in Arcadia.” Panofsky's summary of this evolving tradition, though, suggests the dialogism between the pastoral and grotesque realism in Adam Bede, beginning with a “nostalgic but as yet impersonal longing for the unbroken peace and innocence of an ideal past” (like Adam's), then transforming “into a bitter, personal accusation against the real present” (like Arthur's), and ending with “a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality” and mutability (like that of Eliot's narrator during the Harvest Supper; 304, 313). Drawn from various sources, Panofsky's concluding chiasmus, furthermore, implies pregnant death: “Even in Arcady, there is death … Even in death, there may be Arcady” (320). And so when readers hear that unself-conscious Arthur “may be a shepherd in Arcadia for aught he knows” (136; ch. 13), they should consider this idealizing pastoral pretext in the context of its hidden destiny of Death, and the subsequent, real possibility of rebirth. In fact, Eliot makes sure of this interpretation by leveling irony against any “read[ing of] a novel” (135) that places the lovers' tryst exclusively in the tradition of the pastoral romance.

Eliot's most suggestive image of hidden (pregnant) death occurs appropriately in chapter 35, “The Hidden Dread,” when pregnant Hetty flees from Hayslope and the narrator rhapsodizes over “how green all the grassy fields are!” Unexpectedly, he then breaks into an Et in Arcadia Ego contemplation of this traditional “glad world” of the echoing green in “foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire”– except that “I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire: an image of a great agony–the agony of the Cross.” The narrator ultimately muses that some corresponding “image of agony” may here be “hidden behind the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn” at any “turning by the wood” (363–64; ch. 35)–as it is in the legendary “willow wand” episode (51; ch. 4) that signaled Thias Bede's drowning.¹⁵

The reader may not initially perceive the hidden memento mori in chapter 35 because a literal “Cross” never appears in Loamshire as it does in “foreign countries” (and as a crucifix does in Holbein's The Ambassadors). Nevertheless, a hidden “image of agony,” actually of pregnant death, gradually becomes visible in the pregnant Hetty, who vainly attempts to flee the double physical and spiritual agony she carries within herself. The example of Christ's forgiving Passion (instituted in “the apple-blossoms” of Eden), if not the living myth of a dying and reviving goddess (of “the golden corn”), will be necessary to ensure Hetty's spiritual rebirth (363–64; ch. 35). Furthermore, the text's repeated, interrelated puns on cross and turn recur here as the “turning by the wood” (363; ch. 35) suggests an agonizing crossroads or turning point in Hetty's life journey.¹⁶

Finally, the related doublings between “our English Loamshire” and “foreign countries” should be stressed because they reinforce uncanny Carnival and Lenten correspondences throughout the text, such as those Freud discusses with the German terms heimlich (familiar, homely), and unheimlich (foreign, strange): “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops toward an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (131).¹⁸

When Hetty undertakes her “long, lonely journey … away from the familiar to the strange” (371; ch. 36), this otherness uncannily involves the discourse of her own psychic underground as “The Journey in Hope” (ch. 36) descends into “The Journey in Despair” (ch. 37). Here she seeks “the relief of unconsciousness” by sleeping “on the familiar earth,” and yet in her “dozing dreams,” the disapproving, familiar face of her aunt Poyser transforms into the “unknown,” but likewise disapproving face of a man who calls her “a wild woman” (389–90; ch. 37). This repressed Carnival identity Hetty then compulsively repeats as it recalls the inn “sign of the Green Man” (377; ch. 36)–that is, the Carnival Wild Man, Jack-in-the Green, or Harlequin (Anderson 29–31)–where she had earlier spent the night. The Wild Man (or Wild Woman) traditionally personifies instinct's victory over intelligence and so subverts “the courtly technique of amorous delay” (Bernheimer 149) practiced by Adam and Dinah and profaned by Arthur and Hetty. Here, the folklore figure appears to be more ambiguous: it may imply Carnival's more supportive and sympathetic response to Hetty's moral “fall,” in addition to satirizing Adam's timid courtesy, as the Green Knight famously satirized Gawain's “amorous delay[s].” (Arthur, initially more like King Arthur than Lancelot, even lunches with his friend “Gawaine” to try to delay–if not prevent– meeting Hetty in the wood [127; ch. 12].) At any rate, the canny landlady's “stranger's eye detects what the familiar unsuspecting eye leaves unnoticed,” namely, Hetty's masked pregnancy, as she “hasten[s] to support Hetty” physically at the Green Man, supplying her body with the carnivalesque comforts of “bread and meat and beer” (378, 377; ch. 36). Hetty's misshapen body itself can be seen to represent another uncanny Carnival sign: as Mary Russo has argued, “both in the history of carnival and in its theory, the category of the female body as grotesque (in, for instance, pregnancy or aging) brings to light … displaced abjection” (221). Indeed, when Hetty retreats from the Green Man, she even “strangely, by some fascination, tak[es] the way back she had come” (385; ch. 37), thereby compulsively returning to the scene of her future crime in order to displace, terminally, her monstrous abjection. No wonder Hetty's “trial must come on at the Lent assizes” (415; ch. 40) since Lenten control invariably redresses carnivalesque excess in Carnival's dialogism.

In terms of the uncanny, perhaps Hetty's central problem, one that ultimately haunts all the major characters in Adam Bede, is her motivating Heimweh or homesickness, that is, her search for a “family likeness” (and home) that nevertheless significantly celebrates Carnival alterity: “Family likeness… blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement” (41–42; ch. 6). Homebodies, like Mrs. Poyser, who can cure homesickness with her caquet and querelle powers, reflect Bakhtin's uncanny point that both the empowered official state apparatus (like the Old Squire) and the familiar, “classical canon” (like the pastoral romance) drove “carnival forms” and unhomely, grotesque realism into kitchens, bedrooms, and domestic fiction in the nineteenth century: these uncanny “festivities were brought into the home and became part of the family's private life” (33). Put somewhat differently, the repressed Carnival was returned to the domestic life of folk culture and thus helped liberate that life, as Mrs. Poyser demonstrates.

Adam and Seth's homely workshop and sibling relationship also suggest this uncanny leitmotif–“two brothers, so like each other in the midst of their unlikeness” (487; ch. 50). At the novel's opening in the workshop, the unlikeness is more arresting: as Wiry Ben comments approvingly of Seth (implying a carnivalesque critique of Adam), he “donna set up [his] bristles at every bit o' fun, like some o' [his] kin” (12). By the Epilogue, so (un)like “that June evening nine years ago” (536), however, Adam no longer works overtime, but rather enjoys compensatory “playful work” and restful play at home with his children. As Adam tells Arthur, his new gospel is to “do the best I can,” that is, “to do my work well, and make the world a bit better place for them as can enjoy it” (472; ch. 48). In fact, Adam's workplace, his “timber yard,” is now enjoyably at home, and Dinah's final words seem invitingly restful: “Come in, Adam, it has been a hard day for thee” (539).

Likewise, the “family likeness” between Dinah and Mrs. Poyser initially involves the uncanny “contrast between … Dinah's seraphic gentleness” and her aunt's “keenness” (75; ch. 6). Much later, though, their similar “black gown[s]” appear “to heighten the family likeness” between them “in the pleasant house-place” (475; ch. 49) at the Hall Farm. Little wonder, then, that in the Epilogue the “plumper” Dinah–sporting a “fuller,” “more matronly figure” and armed with Arthur's watch or talismanic profane time–finally greets “Mr and Mrs Poyser coming in at the yard-gate” (536–39), since Dinah and Adam's home is now, like the Hall Farm, clearly hospitable to Mrs. Poyser's “pattern” of caquet dialogue and familiar carnivalesque recreation, rest, and recovery.

VI

TO RETURN TO THE THREE questions I raised at the beginning of this essay, Adam Bede's Carnival motifs cannot be categorized as either Bakhtinian or post-Bakhtinian, since they include both utopian and dystopian values. Sometimes, as at the Harvest Supper, Eliot invests the carnivalesque with traditional and nostalgic values, while other elements, such as Hetty's alleged infanticide, bear more postmodern meanings, resonant with bitterness and abjection. Indeed, the heteroglossic, ambivalent nature of the carnivalesque suggests that it evades monologic theorizing and conceptualizing. As Roger Malbert writes, the “varieties of creative expression in the Carnival … reflect its multiple sources in the imaginations of many individuals. That plurality defines an art-form that resists, and should resist, institutionalization and conformity” (96). Such multiplicity and plurality are evident, too, in the way in which Adam Bede's Carnival values implicate a number of otherwise disparate traditions, motifs, and genres, including Et in Arcadia Ego, vanitas, the uncanny, Dutch realism, the pastoral romance, the Green Man, biblical Eden, and memento mori. Furthermore, although these elements of the novel frequently indicate that Carnival libertas exists only to underscore hegemonic control–Umberto Eco even asserts that “[w]ithout a valid law to break, carnival is impossible” (6)–they also imply that such playful freedom is ultimately essential to human happiness and transcends any coercive containment.

To address the second question I initially posed, the carnivalesque sometimes subverts and sometimes supports traditional readings of the novel. For example, the Carnival critiques of Dinah as a preachy, disembodied Methodist and Adam as a sober, workaholic agelast are more focused, if not more satirically severe, within the context of grotesque realism, than are approaches that tend to read their characters within the more general paradigms of romance and the Bildungsroman. Furthermore, the carnivalesque highlights the thematic roles of traditional “carnies” like Wiry Ben, Tom Saft, and Old Leisure, whom past criticism has routinely neglected. On the other hand, the carnivalesque's brand of grotesque realism also significantly supports Eliot's self-proclaimed and critically acclaimed Dutch (and often dystopian) realism in Adam Bede. And the Carnival's insistence on the value of the “laughing people”–their balancing workdays with holidays, thereby nostalgically recreating the traditional “Ecchoing Green” celebrated in Blake's “Song of Innocence” (87)–supports Dorothy Van Ghent's classic account of the novel's corresponding natural, communal, and generational time schemes, its “patient rhythms of night and day, of the seasons, of planting and harvest, of the generations of men, and of the thoughts of simple people who are bound by deep tradition to soil and to community” (175). Bakhtin even suggestively extends such insights by stressing the Heraclitean notion of tumbling Time in Rabelais, that is, “the playing boy … who possesses the supreme power in the universe” (82). In its critical crossbreeding of dystopian and utopian values, Adam Bede thus challenges traditional readings of the Carnival itself.¹⁹

Finally, the Carnival's “hazing” emphasis on Rabelaisian querelle-des-femmes debates, quacchero travesties, and caquet scoldings–especially as deployed by Mrs. Poyser, Dinah, and Hetty and against male monologism like that of Adam, the Old Squire, and Bartle Massey–does often seem genuinely gender-coded. In this carnivalesque sense, Mrs. Poyser's meaty caquet proverbs, Dinah's feminine preaching, and Hetty's pregnancy (not to mention Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot's hybrid identity) are all “naturally” and sympathetically monstrous in deconstructing monologic masculine values and then reinvigorating, if not mating, them with heteroglossic plentitude. One must quickly add, however, that Eliot's gendered versions of the Carnival also satirize “wenches” and “angels” alike as often as they do men. Indeed, Eliot creates a Carnival body of playful work in Adam Bede that not only incorporates but questions Carnival and Lenten values, both “the secrets of good brewing” and “the folly of stinginess.” In becoming “unpredictable, unsatisfactory and problematic” (Goethe 469), Eliot's English Carnival ultimately mirrors Goethe's Roman Carnival and thus “real” mid-Victorian life itself.²⁰