In the work of George Eliot, a “past evil that has blighted or crushed another” is often “made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves” (Adam Bede 573; ch. 54).Footnote ¹ Eliot's early novel Adam Bede might be read as a three-volume exploration of the moral difficulties inherent in a narrative pattern premised on such inequality of lots. The seduction of Adam Bede's first love, Hetty Sorrel, her pregnancy, subsequent act of infanticide, transportation, and early death darkly prepare the path to the hero's joyous union with Dinah Morris, who guides him through the story's most painful, educative hours. Adam's union with Dinah, the narrator tells us, is deeper, more powerful, and more pleasurable than any with Hetty might have been because of the knowledge through suffering that Adam attains; “what better harvest from that painful seed-time” can there be than this second love? (578; ch. 55). Yet Hetty embodies all the loss and destruction that enable Adam and Dinah's redemptive future while enjoying no such redemption herself.

The imbalanced fortunes of the novel's protagonists demand that Eliot consider the distressing possibility that Adam and Dinah's joy depends on, countenances or ignores Hetty's suffering. In what could well be an epigram for the novel as a whole, Adam's mother reprimands her son, Seth, “thee may'st well talk o’ trouble bein’ a good thing . . . for thee thriv'st on it” (156; ch. 10). The specific problem for Eliot is that it is the trouble of others – not the individual's own trouble – that so often allows the individual to thrive. While Eliot repeatedly represents Adam and Dinah's joy as but a remote consequence of Hetty's circumstances, the expository labor expended to do so suggests Eliot's own deep discomfort with the injustice of remote consequences that bring about personal happiness coincident with the suffering of others.Footnote ² The idea that people might unjustly profit by each other troubled Eliot far more than the idea that people might suffer for each other without just cause: “So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain” (Mill on the Floss 329; bk. 3, ch. 7). Eliot intuitively grasped the originally Christian notion that unearned suffering was the common human lot. Transforming that “inherent,” inevitable suffering into an effect of the web of human relations, she could accept an injustice of personal suffering; yet she was confounded by the inverse injustice of unearned personal joy, though it was just as much an effect of the web of human lives as diffusive suffering. Perhaps the difference was that unearned personal joy was not abundant and diffusive, but scarce and potentially divisive.

The uneven relation between one person's evil and another's good expresses an ethical dilemma that Victorians were likely to perceive in economic terms since ethics and political economy continued to shape each other in the mid-nineteenth century as they had in the eighteenth. Questions of self-interest and the interest of the community framed inquiries in both fields; from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill, political economy and moral theory were often the province of the same thinkers. For George Eliot, a political economy that could not justify itself by moral standards was particularly reprehensible.Footnote ³ When characters reap good from the evil that blights others, the novel speaks less explicitly about guilt than about marketplace justice and agency: who is “paying” the cost of this pain and who is benefiting from its “product”?Footnote ⁴ The “purchase” of joy should not be at someone else's expense (174; ch. 12). To the extent that Adam reaps good that others, too, have had to pay for (in Eliot's coin of the realm: suffering), is he not guilty of a form of theft or its mirror relation, the debt that attends unearned benefit? Would not the only ethically appropriate response then be to return this good, to renounce it or sacrifice it? George Eliot's answer here is, a bit surprisingly, a resounding no.

In Adam Bede, Eliot identifies the inclination to guilty self-sacrifice as mistaken and useless in a modern world. Eliot rejects unreasonable guilt at good fortune in this world and sketches a new moral economy in which the inherited Christian ideals of brotherhood, poverty, debt, and guilt come under critical scrutiny while a measured personal pleasure and benefit come to seem justifiable even in a world where others will continue to suffer. Adam Bede thus constitutes a significant moment of what we might call ethical realism in Eliot's canon and asks us to continue to refine our notions of a novelist whom early critics analyzed in relation to Comte and whom more recent critics have most strikingly described in terms of her anti-sociality.Footnote ⁵

In Adam Bede, Adam and Dinah must sever the suffering of others from their understanding of their own fate, yet Eliot can only affect this shift for her characters by combating an extreme ethical position held by many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Christian to agnostic and atheistic. Stefan Collini has argued that Victorian intellectuals shaped and participated in what he calls a dominant “culture of altruism” where the particular vice of selfishness was perceived to be the root of all moral failing (65) and by extension, its opposite, altruism, came to seem the heart of moral virtue (66). Victorian moralists “exhibited an obsessive antipathy to selfishness, and consequently their reflections were structured by a sharp and sometimes exhaustive polarity between egoism and altruism” (65). In the work of many Victorian novelists, including George Eliot, we can see what I will call here the maximalist demand of altruism, in which the pursuit of any end came to seem egoistic if it benefited the self at all, even if the pursuit caused no suffering and denied no other party's needs. The maximalist demand of altruism defined one as egoistic negatively, via omission, simply if one's actions were not focused on attending directly to another's needs. Consequently, it could become exceedingly difficult, as Collini puts it, “to frame a morally positive description of purely private or non-collaborative forms of self-cultivation or self-assertion” (66).

When George Eliot articulated the anxiety of her characters over personal benefit coincident with someone else's loss (even when they have not caused or foreseen it), her fiction situated itself between the maximalist altruistic demand and a highly mediated version of two vital mid-century philosophies: Benthamite utilitarianism and laissez-faire economics. It is not that Adam Bede takes up or is influenced by such theories in their details; nor is it the case that these two theories worked smoothly in tandem in the mid-nineteenth century. While laissez-faire economics and utilitarianism diverged in critical ways, for my purposes here, their most important overlap and their relevance to Adam Bede is in their subordination of individual motivation and identity to the effects of the latter on the collective. As Jeremy Bentham defined utilitarianism in what came to be its most influential statement before John Stuart Mill's, “an action may then be said to be conformable to the principle of utility . . . (meaning with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it” (18).Footnote ⁶ Meanwhile, in the Smithian marketplace, private, self-interested acts were said to engender unintended, public benefit.

While Eliot rejected such approaches precisely because they blurred the focus on an individual and his or her responsibilities, intentions, and affections,Footnote ⁷ these systems nonetheless offered her the basis for a model of consequences sufficiently divorced from their initial causes and intentions to afford the most conscientious of Victorian moral agents an escape from the exaggerated sense of responsibility represented by the maximalist altruistic demand. Eliot's task in relation to these philosophies, then, was to find a way of allowing her characters and narrator a share in the larger social good without denying the meaning of the individual costs that produced that wider sort of benefit. Thus we see Eliot taking up some of the most pressing political questions of her day in the language of ethics.

In 1859, George Eliot offered her experimental critique of maximalist altruism against the prevailing literary and philosophic norms. Adam Bede appeared in the same year that Dickens hallowed the life-offering of Sidney Carton. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1848), Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Thackeray's History of Henry Esmond (1852), and Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) were but a few of the massively popular literary works that enshrined the value of self-sacrifice in the years preceding Eliot's first major novel.Footnote ⁸ In biographical terms, we might explain Eliot's stance by noting that in 1859, as a professionalizing female writer about to assert a public identity that would equate her morally suspect body with the increasingly successful record of her novel-writing, Eliot was in a uniquely appropriate position to question the limits of self-sacrificial abdication and to seek ground for the self's “fuller life” (Adam Bede 574; ch. 54).Footnote ⁹ Yet Eliot's interest in a self-preserving, self-appreciating ethic is important beyond her biography because such an ethic came to prevail – or at the very least to seem to intellectuals a truly viable alternative – by the end of the century.Footnote ¹⁰ In the writings of Herbert Spencer, who endorsed a qualified egoism, and in the biting critique of altruistic ideals offered by such writers as Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, and Lytton Strachey, the demands of altruism were rejected with a force whose effects persist into our own century.

George Eliot thus returns us in Adam Bede to a historical moment particularly difficult to retrieve: a moment when some few Victorian moral thinkers had begun to see danger in the claims of an altruism so extreme it necessitated behavior verging on masochism, especially for women.Footnote ¹¹ Eliot's iconoclastic position among novelists in 1859 may be so difficult to retrieve from the past because the normative ethics of altruism have been mainly displaced in our own day with the individualist logic of “self-realization.” Today altruism can seem not a constraint to be thrown off as it seemed in 1859, but truly a radical alternative to a mode of self-aggrandizement often linked to capitalist culture by both its detractors and its enthusiasts. Consequently, Eliot may look socially conservative today for precisely the reasons that made Adam Bede challenging and potentially radical in 1859.

Let me emphasize that my argument is no more extreme than Eliot's own position: in Adam Bede, Eliot took as the object of her critique the tendency of generally good and blameless people to deny themselves pleasures that would not hurt anyone else. This is an extremely limited space in which to make a case for egoism: we can see just how limited by considering Eliot's definitive treatment of egoism in other works. When, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie causes others to suffer while she briefly pursues her own pleasure, she herself articulates the heavy truth, endorsed by the narrator, that she “must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others” (571; bk. 6, ch. 11). Overt egoists in Eliot's oeuvre, for example, Tito Melema or Rosamund Vincy, are treated to scathing criticism for their tendencies, whatever the scope of their action. And in Adam Bede itself, Arthur Donnithorne meets his own painful nemesis while Hetty Sorrel suffers for her sins in ways that can seem needlessly cruel on the author's part. Yet Eliot was also willing to draw characters who painfully, equivocally find a middle ground – not entirely self-renouncing and certainly not entirely self-seeking. Not only do her characters find such a ground, but Eliot sets her narrator the task of clarifying and defending such compromise. That the narrator betrays great uncertainty about the ethics of such a middle ground emphasizes for us how powerful was the dominant maximalist understanding of altruism at mid-century. For scholars of Victorian culture, this emphasis has the added benefit of encouraging us to continue to refine our theories of the rise of individualism; we need to acknowledge the intense communal counter-strain Victorians encountered in their day-to-day experience and to recognize how gradually it was that “duty” moved away from its maximalist interpretation.

Adam Bede sets the stage for Adam's guilty conflict regarding the inequality of lots by first looking to two fundamental areas, marriage and economic life. The convention of marriage becomes a primary site in the novel for the consideration of possession, deprivation, and exclusivity of enjoyment. As Eliot would explore more fully in The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda (1876), coupling and marriage seem frequently to be acts of robbery or deprivation so violent that they threaten to wreck another's selfhood. Love between a man and a woman can mean the responsibility for others’ “crushed hearts” as Maggie Tulliver painfully puts it (Mill on the Floss 598; bk. 6, ch. 14). Adam Bede narrates the lives of Dinah Morris, the deeply pious Methodist preacher, and Hetty Sorrel, the beautiful, narcissistic niece of the Poysers in Hayslope. Hetty's story is built upon two lovers – Adam Bede, the earnest craftsman, and Arthur Donnithorne, the heir to Hayslope – and two promises of marriage. Dinah's story, too, features two lovers – Adam and Seth Bede, his younger brother – and two proposals. Marriage in the novel appears to require not simply an acceptance, but a double action of rejecting one lover and accepting another, emphasizing the way that this brand of possession constitutively requires a second party to experience a serious lack. Marriage is a source of guilt.

Hetty's choice of Arthur as her lover determines the dramatic plot of the novel while Adam's suffering in the face of that choice reveals the normative exclusivity of the affective and sexual bond of marriage. Yet it is Dinah's dilemma that opens to scrutiny marriage as a social form. Marriage, we see through Dinah, entails far more than the selection demanded between two rivals. Dinah's choice between two kind and upstanding brothers who are at peace with each other pales in comparison with the far more fundamental decision she sees herself making in choosing to couple and marry at all. What troubles Dinah is simply the idea of confining herself passionately to one human being. From Dinah's first appearance in the novel, she is associated with an ethic of communal good as well as communal property. In fact, the condition of divided human lots that allow one person's evil to bring about another's good is opposed to the Christian vision she articulates.

Sympathy takes its most powerful early expression in the novel in the sort of Christian teaching that Dinah attempts to spread in Hayslope.

Dinah is united with her brothers and sisters in Christ who are, like she is, the beneficiaries of Christ's supreme sacrifice. Their fellowship is hallowed from the outset by that founding example of self-forgetful generosity. What Dinah has – a great blessedness – she wishes to share: “because I know it, I want you to have it, too.” Dinah would rather not possess anything, even knowledge, without it being a communal good.Footnote ¹² She repeatedly stresses the similarity between herself and her listeners: “I am poor, like you.” And she stresses the plenteousness of this blessing that does not distinguish between those many who get their living with their own hands and that rare lord and lady, referred to appropriately in the singular. We can see the miraculous nature of this blessing in the way that the significations of “it” cascade from blessedness to love of God, to God himself, to his love, to the streams of his love, to a store that is triply enough. Against the single mention of “riches,” that paradoxically seems to sap the term of its suggestive power, God's love is truly abundant in the way that only an immaterial property can be. God and his love, “enough for evermore,” offer a quantitative and temporal surfeit.

When Adam proposes marriage to Dinah much later, near the end of the novel, her ethic of communal good and communal property – and her sense of herself as a communal possession – are wholly disturbed by the knowledge that if she marries, she will no longer be able to serve a wider community. In response to Adam, she answers,

Dinah construes adulthood as the spiritual journey from childhood “upward” rather than merely forward in time. The four repetitions of “no” are echoed by Dinah's final “know,” so that precious knowledge becomes identical with self-denial. In a fashion typical of the novels Eliot would go on to write, Dinah faces a “great temptation”; only her temptation has as its potential victim no single human face. We are not witnessing the ghostlike appearance of Lydia Glasher, accusing Gwendolen Harleth of displacing herself and her children, nor the imagined tearful eyes of Lucy Deane imploring Maggie Tulliver to restore her lover.

After Adam confesses his love to Dinah, Dinah describes her sense of temptation and her attempt to fight against it:

Past, present, and future run together here in Dinah's overly developed apparatus of self-checking. In this extraordinary passage, Dinah's vision of human marriage actually suggests a sort of dalliance rather than a consecrated union. In her visual tableau, Dinah, the still and darkened visionary, sits between two visible male figures. If Dinah sits and Jesus stands, the lack of specification as to Adam's physical position may indicate that he beckons to her and reaches out his arms from a reclining position, which suggests to the imaginatively guilty Dinah her own “ease” and “delight.” But not only does Adam reach out to Dinah from the subjunctive sphere of her own imaginings; he competes with the authority of the Man of Sorrows, whose actions, narrated not in the subjunctive, but in the past progressive accordant with Dinah's own actual sitting, are rooted in the reality of the presence of others, the sinful and suffering.

While Adam occupies one end of the tableau and the Man of Sorrows the other, with Dinah in between, the tableau is more triangular than linear; it opens out onto a whole world of troubled others. In Dinah's intensely guilty vision, the temptation toward ease manifests itself not merely as a choice between serving oneself and serving others, but as a choice between serving oneself and mocking or actively rejecting others. Dinah imagines a scenario of simultaneity where she chooses ease for herself in the near presence of the afflicted. The “hardness” that she invokes then becomes more fully defined: Dinah imagines taking her ease and delight in the very face of the afflicted. Ease and delight are inseparable in her vision from a base of suffering, and the suffering increases in direct proportion with her delight.

Since the rise of feminist criticism, scholars have been troubled by the way in which Dinah's plot is resolved. In such accounts, Dinah's confinement to a maternal and wifely role is seen as a function of repression.Footnote ¹³ Certainly the novel itself suggests an ambivalence about this resolution. Yet Eliot's decision to move Dinah from the public to the private sphere asks us to consider Dinah as a devout evangelical practiced in routine self-denial as much as it emphasizes her difficult status as a woman. In Dinah's case, marriage counters the maximalist altruistic demand that would demand of her no action but one that actively seeks the good of others; any private desire for happiness would be obviated by so strict a moral standard. From this point of view, the locus of repression is not marriage and wifely modesty so much as the asceticism Dinah embraces in her single-minded duty as a Christian. If Dinah's struggle, like that of other characters in Eliot's fiction, is “to prevent self-negation from leading only to death or asceticism,” marriage to Adam is a move not toward but away from an ethic entirely shaped by asceticism (Kucich 161).Footnote ¹⁴ As Mrs. Poyser puts it when asked to think about Dinah marrying Adam, “Nay . . . she'll never marry anybody, if he isn't a Methodist and a cripple” (555; ch. 52).Footnote ¹⁵

The history of the novel's composition suggests that marriage in the novel indeed does reflect the larger questions of altruistic and selfish behavior. Marriage – and specifically, marriage to Adam – comes to signify the problem of pursuing one's own desires knowing that others suffer from privation. In the novel's first draft, Dinah was a “widder woman,” a widow, rather than the “preacher-woman” described by all subsequent drafts (Martin xci). Eliot records the following in her “History of ‘Adam Bede’”:

Carol Martin suggests that Eliot may have made Dinah a widow in order to grant Dinah additional moral authority and to allay any readerly concerns as to the propriety of her traveling alone. Yet Martin's comment imagines the decision of Dinah's status as a perfunctory bow to convention. Along this line of thought, the novel would be fundamentally unchanged whether Dinah is a widow or an unmarried, eligible young woman. While Eliot's own statement suggests that she embraced Lewes's suggestion enthusiastically, Dinah's intense deliberations over marriage suggest that the change to Eliot's original conception of the character significantly re-directed the novel.

As a widow, Dinah would have confronted none of the temptations that provide the tension of her plot as we know it. Perhaps what appealed to Eliot about Lewes's suggestion was the opportunity it gave her to illuminate the very risks that had at the first encouraged her to place Dinah outside the marriage plot. While Eliot had always foreseen Seth's fruitless courting of Dinah, this plot feature would have read entirely differently in the absence of a marriage between Adam and Dinah. Seth's courting would have been either slightly comical, or somewhat melancholy, but ultimately a reinforcement of Dinah's singlemindedness – and that mind entirely distinct from a private body and heart. Once Eliot had in mind the change to her plan, she found it necessary to return to Chapter Three of Book One to re-emphasize Dinah's early rejection of Seth as a husband. Without such a clarification, Eliot feared that later her hero Adam would lose readerly sympathy since he would appear to be consciously supplanting his brother in his pursuit of Dinah (xci). Thus from the time that Eliot re-conceived the novel's plot, she contended with the central problems of competition and the inequality of narrative gifts. The decision to marry off two such decisive, self-determining characters – Dinah, firm and steady in her Christian vocation, and Adam, almost soldierly in his early love and then his compassion for the lost Hetty, and devoted, too, to his brother's happiness – committed Eliot to treating fully the problem these two characters struggle with so mightily: the morality of choosing or accepting personal pleasure or benefit in the face of others’ deprivation or suffering.

While Dinah receives narratorial praise for her “self-renouncing sympathy” (399; ch. 33), the novel is not monologic in its treatment of this quality. It is Mrs. Poyser, Dinah (and Hetty's) sharp-tongued aunt, who most often scrutinizes Dinah's beliefs and predilections. Mrs. Poyser's critique comes to seem even more significant when we note that her sayings were among the most highly praised and quoted elements of the novel upon its publication. Mrs. Poyser takes issue with Dinah's piety from an economic point of view when she points out that self-renouncing love cannot sustain human life for long:

Mrs. Poyser argues logically that the Bible's command to love one's neighbor as oneself must presume self-love in order for it to be meaningful. As she sees it, a good Christian loves him or herself, clothes and feeds him or herself, and then learns from that self-regarding love how to treat others. Self-regard, then, not self-abnegation, is the root of piety and loving-kindness. If one doesn't love oneself, there is no effective standard for how to treat others.

Mrs. Poyser frames for the novel a critique of thoroughgoing, self-forgetful Christian charity and its more secular counterpart, maximalist altruism. What takes the individualistic edge off her argument, however, is its cause: Mrs. Poyser is very fond of Dinah, and protective of her, too, calling her “poor child” as we have seen. Mrs. Poyser works to defend Dinah against Dinah's own better impulses by repeatedly turning to Scripture, her niece's authoritative source, and arguing that her niece reads it perversely:

Mrs. Poyser argues that Scripture teaches its readers to behave with “common sense” and reason. Her rationale is that “other folks” want of Dinah, as they want of anyone, the sort of reasonable behavior that includes keeping one's own cloak or standing up for one's own physical well-being. In this model, there actually is very little interaction between “folks”; everyone takes care of him or herself, so there is no charity that remains to be done. And perhaps this is why folks want Dinah to keep her own coat: precisely so that none of them will later need to supply her with one when she has given her own away. By imagining that all people want each other to take care of themselves, Mrs. Poyser turns self-regard into a double phenomenon in which it is also socially generous because it protects others’ autonomy and independence.

Mrs. Poyser's retort to Dinah that the Bible itself supports self-care is not incidental or idiosyncratic. Objections to ethics of intense self-sacrifice, Christian or “altruistic,” argued precisely that such an approach was not authentically Christian or that it unreasonably exceeded the valuable Christian precedent.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1759, Adam Smith had referred to scripture assuming the need to encourage the readers of Theory of Moral Sentiments to “restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections”: “as to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor” (25; I.i.5.5). But one hundred years later, in 1859, Mrs. Poyser and George Eliot seemed to be engaged in the reverse work.

Mrs. Poyser presages by a few years John Stuart Mill's objections to Comtean altruism. In Mill's attempt to refine and re-limit the term altruism, he distinguishes between “obligatory” and “meritorious” behavior, between faithful “believers” and those who are “saints”: “There is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on every one to restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with the essential interests of others” (337). Behavior exceeding that standard deserves praise and gratitude but cannot and should not be expected as common virtue. Similarly, in 1879, by the time the tide was shifting more decisively against a maximalist altruism, Fraser's Magazine published an essay, “The Failure of Altruism,” whose author took issue with the philosophy precisely because it did not rest at but expanded the biblical commandment of loving your neighbor. The essayist commented on altruism by saying,

The expansion of one's “neighbor” here to “the whole human race” reinforces the writer's sense of the impossibility and unattainability of the altruistic aim. In stressing the newness of the gospel of altruism, the writer in Fraser's takes a position much like Mrs. Poyser's with respect to Dinah's Christianity. The “airy regions of spiritual life” do not easily find a counterpart in Hayslope.

Like Mrs. Poyser, Lisbeth Bede, Adam and Seth's mother, explores the paradoxical effects of altruism by exposing the trouble with its “self-forgetfulness.” Lisbeth lectures Seth:

Lisbeth argues that if one doesn't take care of oneself – and that includes saving money or goods that one doesn't immediately need – a second human party will wind up unfairly required to assume responsibility for one's welfare. The altruistic giver may ultimately find him or herself in a condition of neediness and egoism that a less immediately altruistic self-protection might have been able to avoid. One social extreme, as both John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer would later argue, tends to produce the opposite extreme.Footnote ¹⁷

What Lisbeth does not take into account, however, is that from the evangelical perspective, such a blurring of the lines between men is the ordinary state of things. Of course, Adam “has to take thought for” Seth; they are fellow Christians, not to say brothers. The possibility that Adam may later have to compensate for Seth's eager charity is not an evil if one sees the social world as a circle of giving. It is only if one is wed to a model of individual property and identity that “taking thought” for another is an unfair or undesirable endpoint. The social vision of both Lisbeth and Mrs. Poyser opposes Dinah's circle in which all men and women are brothers and sisters in Christ and one man makes up the deficit created by another woman as a third woman helps provide for the first man.

Elsewhere in the novel, George Eliot dramatizes the counter-evangelical vision and asks us to evaluate its merits and deficiencies. When Hetty faints from exhaustion and disappointment while seeking Arthur, a landlady and her husband kindly take her in. Hetty produces the beloved locket and earrings, gifts from Arthur, and in utter desperation tells her benefactors that she wishes to sell them. The landlady suggests that instead of selling the items, her husband can advance Hetty some money on the items. If Hetty wants to redeem them, she should contact them within two months; if not, the items will revert to their possession. The narrator comments as follows:

What is striking about this description is that given the context of the novel, the passage can be read ironically as an exposé of self-aggrandizing hypocrisy or alternatively as a reasonably even-handed evaluation of human motivation that recognizes both the generosity of its impulses and the self-regard.Footnote ¹⁸ The landlady sees that Hetty comes from respectable people and thinks her own benevolence may find a reward from Hetty's friends with the proof of the valuables. This projection is a function of her “imagination,” a term which in Eliot's lexicon evokes both the capacity to sympathize with others and the capacity to predict probable consequences which is itself a moral function.Footnote ¹⁹

The novel asks us to consider seriously whether sincerity, respect, and positive sympathy (the entrance into another's happiness) can co-exist with a distinct division between the self and another that does not hesitate to gain from the other's loss. Eliot's narrator proceeds with irony, opening in the double negative, “I will not say that . . . the landlady had no regard,” and moving within the space of the sentence to a contrary assertion of the landlady's “remarkabl[y] vivid” vision of reward. And both the landlady and her husband entertain the hope that Hetty will not return to claim the ornaments, with the couple itself divided by private interests (“The husband thought, if the ornaments were not redeemed, he could make a good thing of it by taking them to London and selling them: the wife thought she would coax the good man into letting her keep them” [429; ch. 37]). Nonetheless, the transaction has not been purely self-interested: “And they were accommodating Hetty, poor thing! – a pretty, respectable-looking young woman, apparently in a sad case. They declined to take anything for her food and bed; she was quite welcome” (429; ch. 37). Eliot's free indirect discourse allows the reader to consider the landlord and lady ironically, as self-interested and self-deceived do-gooders, or alternatively, as I believe, as partaking of dynamically mixed impulses, self- and other-interest.

In this scene of negotiation, we encounter a nuance in moral-economic thought that we have not yet seen in the Dinah-Mrs. Poyser divide. This nuance is significant to the education of Adam Bede and to the novel's resolution of the problems of loss and gain, pain and pleasure, and the contest between the self and another. The problem all along has been the moral rectitude of benefiting from another's loss, dependent on the assumption that self-sacrifice, the renunciation of personal benefit, would prevent or seriously limit the other's loss. In the scenario of the landlord and lady, a new possibility is raised. Perhaps the other's loss is inevitable no matter how one behaves or what one renounces; perhaps it is even hubristic to imagine that one could sway the balance in such a way; as Bartle Massey, Adam Bede's former schoolteacher, asks him, “Do you mean to go turning up your nose at every opportunity, because it's got a bit of a smell about it that nobody finds out but yourself?” (291; ch. 21). In the case of the small, regular, and illustrative drama of hiring a room, the narrator's assumption seems to be that the great majority of people will operate with some self-interest: “how many of your well-wishers would decline to make a little gain out of you?” If every landlady, for instance, will try to gain the highest percentage possible, then the attempt becomes normative. If the attempt is normative, the landlady's seeking a high percentage no longer actively persecutes or hurts the guest because almost anywhere the guest turns the circumstances will be the same. The gain to the landlady is in any event “a little” and the loss to the guest comes to seem inevitable, which renders it not exactly a loss, but simply the cost of living. An imbalance of advantage appears to be simply the way of the world, but not the immovable feudal way of the world so much as the fluctuating way of the dawning capitalist marketplace.

Eliot's ironic mode of presentation here (in her perhaps least ironically-toned novel) is equivalent, I suggest, to this worldly-wise recognition of mixed motives in both the economic and the moral marketplace. Yet the irony that would appear cynical and moralistic may sit side by side with an empiricist neutrality that anticipates shifting ideas about the effects of individual altruism. The narrator introduces the landlord by telling us that he “was a man whose abundant feeding served to keep his good-nature, as well as his person, in high condition” (421; ch. 36). It is the money the landlord takes in from his guests that allows him to eat well and it is his eating well that allows him to turn more generously toward Hetty. A quotient of self-interest proves to be the very source of his generosity. If such ideas can come across as moral apologetics for potentially rapacious economic tendencies, it is worth noting that in the 1880s, Spencer would assert this in scientific terms: “The adequately egoistic individual retains those powers which make altruistic activities possible. The individual who is inadequately egoistic, loses more or less of his ability to be altruistic” (194).Footnote ²⁰

While Eliot here allows that “the way of the world” invites and may yet justify a limited pursuit of self-interest, she does not pursue any serious, historically specific alternative, for instance, the wholesale restructuring of economic and social life upon a collective basis, a model she briefly explores but links to the simplemindedness of uneducated religious folk and treats as easily corruptible in the opening of Silas Marner. We have seen that Dinah Morris represents such an economy, spiritual and material. It is meaningful then, that Hetty finds the slip of paper with Dinah's name on it as she sits in the inn contemplating the difficulty of selling her ornaments to advantage. Dinah represents a world beyond this world, a charity and mercy absent of self-interest. Yet in a world peopled not by Dinah's fellows in Christ, in a fallen world where intense self-interest sometimes prevails, Eliot allows that a limited pursuit of self-interest may be acceptable. If such is the case, the original moral objection to accepting – not actively pursuing – but being responsive to accidental personal benefit coincident with another's cost becomes the mark of an impossible, outdated ethical standard. Eliot's task is to envision a morality suited to a world shaped by tragedies of excessive self-interest and the resulting “market fluctuations” attendant on the lives of involved witnesses, rather than the perfectly addressed and apportioned gifts and punishments of providence.

The novel's ending poses the starkest vision of the inequality of lots. Hetty is condemned to death; when the sentence is averted, she is transported as a laborer, and immediately before her release, she dies. Arthur must forego his long-awaited inheritance on the very day it becomes available to him and is reduced by fever and suffering. Certainly, Hetty and Arthur are guilty parties, but Hetty's repentance under Dinah's guidance seems to gain her little or no mercy from the author, who controls narrative rewards and punishments. Meanwhile, the novel slowly takes its readers on an ascending journey through Adam and Dinah's discovery of mutual attraction, then their marriage, toward the Epilogue that introduces children into a united family, including Uncle Seth.Footnote ²¹

What marks the prolonged redemptive ending of Adam and Dinah's novel is the pervasive sense of discomfort and trouble that the narrator acknowledges, then attempts to funnel into a deeper moral lesson. In the final Book Six of the novel and in the chapters preceding it, the narrator repeatedly analyzes and justifies the “transformation of pain into sympathy” and the transformation of sympathy into the “sweetness” of love (531; ch. 50 and 547; ch. 51 and 555; ch. 52). By the novel's end, the narrator can assert that Adam's love for Dinah has fed importantly on the roots of his earlier affection and its tragedy: “Tender and deep as his love for Hetty had been . . . his love for Dinah was better and more precious to him; for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow” (574; ch. 54). It tells us something important about Eliot's aim in the novel that the above passage comes a full one hundred pages after her delineation of Adam's “baptism” by suffering on the morning of the trial: his “regeneration, the initiation into a new state. . . . and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity” (471–72; ch. 42). The narrative pace of the transformation of sorrow into sympathy and then love is admirably slow and unrushed, suggesting that this psychic process is not secondary but primary to the novel's concerns.

Yet this psychic process is one that the omniscient narrator cannot leave alone, indicating that it teems with contradiction and mystery. The following passage (which requires quotation at nearly its full length) is Eliot's most concentrated attempt to disentangle the knot of ethical confusion and guilt at the heart of the novel's representation of the inequality of lots. As Adam returns to Snowfield to find Dinah in a meeting which will result in their engagement, he remembers his first journey there, seeking the runaway Hetty. The narrator accompanies him:

Collini's claim is a helpful interpretive tool here: a powerful fear of egoism motivates this passage. Here, as throughout the novel, Eliot struggles to preserve egoism as a negative ethical category but, at the same time, to limit its definition so that an ascetic altruism does not remain the only viable ethic. Eliot first takes pains to distinguish Adam from the “base and selfish . . . spirit” that would be “thankful over the past evil that has . . . crushed another, because it has been made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves.” Yet in Eliot's narrator's disallowed hypothetical – “And if I were capable of that narrow-sighted joy in Adam's behalf” – we can recognize the decisive question of the novel: is there a way to embrace private good without merely denying the individual costs that have helped to produce it? Can we as observers and readers distinguish the narrow, egoistic joy at the benefits that come to us upon the fall of others from the sympathetic knowledge that is the precondition for a fuller, more socially inclusive joy?

The passage's double conclusion, its presentation of two distinct ideas, suggests serious internal irresolution for Eliot. First, the narrator goes back to the notion that Adam has fully paid for his pleasure: “But it is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our own personal share of pain.” Adam, the again-impersonal narrator asserts, has bought his fuller life with his own pain, not with Hetty's or anyone else's; this more comfortable conclusion is one ascribed to by a critical reading such as U. C. Knoepflmacher's. Hetty's pain and her actions and punishments can thus be separated now from the path that is Adam's. Adam himself must become convinced of the non-ignobility, the acceptability, of having fairly earned or bought his life's joy. This idea of perfect justice finds expression earlier in the novel, when Dinah seeks to leave Hayslope, not knowing of Adam's love, and utters a prayer for those she leaves behind: “Make them glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted them, and the years wherein they have seen evil” (539; ch. 51). When a divine hand dispenses suffering and gladness, then personal benefit accords precisely with the sum of accrued affliction. There is no risk here of oppression, theft, unpaid debts, or unearned benefits. Days of gladness should and can fairly repay days of evil.

Yet Dinah's prayer, mirroring Adam's moral standard for himself, features a slight, but significant change from the original verse in Psalms 90.15, which states, “Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil” (translation from the Hebrew mine; emphasis added). Dinah does not include herself in a prayer that expresses a desire for parity between the days of suffering and joy, as if such a human desire – not to suffer more than one's fair share – is meant for others, but not for her. That the Psalm is associated with Moses (“A prayer of Moses, the man of God” [90.1]), who leads his people to the Promised Land but cannot enter it with them, suggests at first a standard stricter and more exacting than justice – a standard like Dinah's – for those close to God. Yet in the scriptural case, it is God's decree, not his own, that Moses not enter the Promised Land, and it is a decree that Moses himself most humanly appeals; even the man of God can be, at times, a man. In Dinah's stricter-than-scripture universe, suffering beyond justice does not come down from above but is self-imposed; denial, as have seen above with Adam, is self-denial.

Yet if such stringent self-denial comes under critique, as I have suggested above, it is not obvious what the alternative might be. Can Eliot suggest anything beyond the fair-and-square happiness which “is not ignoble,” but not exactly noble either? If we return one last time to the final sentence of that passage, haunted as it is by its double negatives, we are left with significant questions about social costs that nobody can be expected to pay and thus remain unpaid, unredeemed: “Surely it is not possible to feel otherwise, any more than it would be possible for a man with a cataract to regret the painful process by which his dim blurred sight of men as trees walking had been exchanged for clear outline and effulgent day.” Abbreviating and desacralizing here the narrative of divine healing related in the Gospel of Mark, Eliot describes the process of embracing a fuller life and clear sight as being ‘impossible to regret.’Footnote ²² In this absence of a full affirmation, we can trace not only Adam Bede's but Eliot's own hesitations in the face of the difference between Adam and Hetty, the gainer and the loser. Perhaps Adam's sight has been sharpened and restored but the trees walking – the odd hybrid of natural and supernatural which Eliot above calls “that mystery of human sorrows” – simply fall out of sight.

The “men as trees walking” in this novel are Hetty and Arthur, whose liaison Adam first comes to recognize in the Grove: Adam pauses at a particular beech to “convince himself it was not two trees wedded together, but only one” (Oxford ed., 281; ch. 27), and it is at that moment that he confronts the image of Arthur and Hetty kissing and separating to walk in two different directions.Footnote ²³ Eliot's metaphor takes on a dark sense because the trees do not turn into the faces and bodies of human beings; at the moment that Adam's vision grows acute enough to begin to see Hetty and Arthur, they are nearly destroyed figures. The capacity of the seeing man to recognize human bodies and faces in living action, which should be the very aim of healed sympathetic sight, is left in question. How is such a resolution distinct from the previously disavowed “narrow-sighted joy”? Does Adam's clear, simple idea – “Evil's evil, and sorrow's sorrow, and you can't alter its nature by wrapping it up in other words” – solve the problem of social cost?

Eliot seems to be suggesting something rather different than Adam's objective formulation. One person's evil or sorrow is only limitedly the evil of another who has had no hand in creating it. The definitions of these experiences must be more complex because they originate with different subjects who see from distinct points of view. In saying at the outset of the passage that thought and interpretation as they occur across time alter our meanings, the narrator indicates also that it matters who is interpreting. Hetty's evil and sorrow cannot be to Adam what they are to Hetty. Eliot draws lines here between individuals precisely in order to allow Adam the freedom to accept the good that has ultimately come from Hetty's evil but cannot, from Eliot's point of view, be considered its direct effect. The separation of human lots then must suffice to explain or justify the inequality of the lots to those who benefit perhaps guiltily, but not undeservingly. Adam's challenge here is not to determine, as Mr. Irwine puts it, “how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed” (468; ch. 41), but at what point a man can un”blend” (469; ch. 41) himself from others’ deeds.

Eliot's moral lesson in this novel is the inverse of what we often remember her novels teaching: that human lots are a web, that individual lives cannot be separated. The two trees that are one may be another mystery of human sorrows: they may be not only Arthur and Hetty, two trees who by rights should be a wedded one, but Adam and Hetty, two distinct trees whom Adam has wedded as one. Perhaps Eliot could articulate a highly individualist ethic in Adam Bede because this novel featured characters whose moral work lay as much in distinguishing and recognizing human separation as connection.Footnote ²⁴ That her novels went on to feature protagonists who still needed to be shown the candle and mirror of egoism and that Eliot's narrators so often preached interdependence and connection suggest the bind constraining Victorian moralists as they struggled to define and re-define the terms altruism and egoism.

In his influential account of Adam Bede, Raymond Williams argued that while Eliot expanded the “knowable community” beyond the class-limited depiction of Jnae Austen, still she was unable to represent the “real inhabitants of rural England” as the “bearers of personal experience” (168). Hetty, in particular, Williams sees as Eliot's sacrifice: at the final moment, the novelist abandons her “in a moral action more decisive than Hetty's own confused and desperate leaving of her own child” (173). Yet I have argued here that Eliot's unequal treatment of her protagonists was a moral cost which troubled the novelist herself. A novel keenly alive to the inseparability of the ethical and the economic, Adam Bede reflects to us not only the extraordinary demands of Victorian notions of altruism and the insufficient half-measures of such alternatives as utilitarianism, but also, the intractable realities of a material world in which desire and need are felt by all but attained only by some.