Rewriting Sources

IT IS OF QUESTIONABLE VALUE to trace literary sources as one would plot a family tree. Such an approach, although common, precludes any nuanced understanding of the context within which texts are created. By the time Eliot published Adam Bede the figure of the “infanticidal woman” was ubiquitous; the question is, how did she rework the material, and to what effect? I would suggest that she was selective about acknowledging her sources. Adam Bede is positioned in dialogue with a rich continental Romantic tradition, while virtually ignoring popular sources, a tactic designed to frame the text emphatically within bourgeois discourse. Alicia Carroll credits five sources for the figure of Hetty, two historical and three literary: Mary Voce, hanged for infanticide in 1802; Hetty Wesley, sister of John, whose story Eliot read in John Southey's Life of Wesley (1820); Hester Mason from George Henry Lewes's novel Rose, Blanche and Violet (1848); Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); and Ruth Hilton from Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853) (219), though this latter may have been a negative influence for Gillian Beer writes, “[Eliot's] criticism of Ruth's sharp contrasts and of its idealization served as a model which could be implicitly corrected in Adam Bede” (71). Carroll neglects, however, popular sources that would certainly also have been known to Eliot, and just as certainly never fully acknowledged, and she does not stray from English language sources. Nor does she mention the obvious: Scott's Effie Deans.

Bernard Semmel describes Eliot's early love of Scott. He posits a sympathy based on shared conservatism, maintains that the idea of a national tradition is key for both authors, and comments that although the two wrote very different novels, their texts “had similar roots and a similar political direction” (137). There are three references to The Heart of Mid-Lothian in Eliot's published letters (2: 348; 3: 159; 8: 201). The first has no connection to Adam Bede. In the second, Lewes uses The Heart of Mid-Lothian to make a point about fact versus fiction in Adam Bede, though it is interesting that he could have chosen any novel for his argument. The third letter makes direct comparison between the two novels: Eliot writes to her publisher, John Blackwood, in defense of her and Scott's shared subject matter, what Blackwood calls “the usual sad catastrophe” (Letters 2: 446): “What girl of twelve was ever injured by the Heart of Midlothian? Of artistic writing it may be said pre-eminently–‘to the pure writer all things are pure”’ (Letters 8: 201–02). Eliot, then, was not only aware of but participated in the obvious comparison between the two novels.¹

Over time, however, Scott became diminished in her regard. William Baker maintains that Eliot associated Scott with her childhood and her father, and she came to disapprove of him because he was a writer with “money-need” (528) and had risked his artistic integrity for Abbotsford, his estate (Wilt 471–72). It is telling that when Lewes presented Eliot with a bound set of Scott's novels as a gift in 1860, he wrote on the flyleaf, “To Marian Evans Lewes, the best of Novelists, and Wives, These works of Her longest-venerated and best-loved Romancist” rather than “best-loved novelist” (Baker 522, 528). Effie and Hetty begin alike, but the hard fate of the latter is in part an answer to the Romanticism of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, especially in its final book. Despite her early affection for Scott and the clear parallels between the two novels, Adam Bede functions in many respects as a rebuttal to Scott's entire aesthetic project. These differences aside, however, Eliot's novel contributes a conservative voice, markedly similar to that of Scott, to an on-going public discussion, but in the realistic mode more congenial to the literary culture of mid-century England.

Narratives of actual infanticide are practically non-existent in the canonical novel in English, though narratives of illegitimacy and the “fallen woman” abound (Billingsley; MacPike; Watt; VICT-L Feb. 1998). German literature is another matter, for infanticide was a rich theme for the Romantics of the Sturm und Drang school, the best known example being Goethe's Faust (1808). Susanne Kord designates infanticide as the most popular literary theme in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany, though almost exclusively with male writers, and describes this literature as having a dual purpose: “the depiction and transfiguration of female innocence and the moral warning directed at those who are tempted to stray from the path of female virtue” (449, 455). Eliot was fluent in German; earlier in her career she had translated David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus) and Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christenthums (The Essence of Christianity) into English; and she had read most of Goethe (Ashton 166) including Faust (Haight 429), and had helped Lewes with the research for his Life of Goethe (1855). The English Romantics used tropes similar to those of the Germans, for example Wordsworth in “The Thorn,” from which Jay Clayton and others draw a direct line of influence to Eliot (38), but the English texts are much more allusive than the German. (In fact, Arnold claims that Wordsworth disparaged Goethe and would not read him [7]). So although breaking new ground in England by treating infanticide, Eliot was participating in an established continental literary tradition even while she was rejecting Romanticism.

Adam Bede is credited with a number of historical as well as literary sources. Anthea Trodd suggests a possible historical influence when she notes an exchange between Eliot and Lewes, and Blackwood (Letters 2: 360, 362–63), about the treatment in court of one Madeleine Smith accused of poisoning her lover. Trodd speculates that Eliot's “notorious severity to Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, which she began writing three months later, was influenced by this demonstration of public tolerance to engaging young female criminals” (38–39), though Smith would hardly have been alone in experiencing leniency. A second source was Eliot's own life: Adam Bede is set in her childhood neighborhood, her aunt and uncle were Methodists, and her aunt preached. She herself wrote in her journal that she also used “some points in my father's early life and character” (Letters 2: 502). Carroll cites two historical models for Hetty, though neither are as similar to her as the average protagonist in an infanticide broadside. Eliot draws an extended list of similarities from Robert Southey's Life of Wesley, both factual and rhetorical, between Hetty Sorrel and Hetty Wesley: the latter, lively and attractive, was also seduced and cast out from her family, and made a penitent religious conversion. According to Eliot's A Writer's Notebook she took extensive notes from Southey for her portrait of Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris. The second historical source has been more widely treated. It is well known that the original basis for the narrative was an event involving Eliot's aunt, Elizabeth Evans (née Thomlinson), who along with some other Methodist women effected the last-minute repentance of Mary Voce–whom Eliot does not name but terms “a very ignorant girl who had murdered her child and refused to confess”–before she was hanged (Letters 2: 502). This story is usually only referred to anecdotally by critics, if at all; it is treated as the smallest of germs for cultivation by the artistic genius. In fact, much is known of the incident: several broadsides exist, as does a family history written by Eliot's second cousin, William Mottram. This tedious text is questionable from any number of perspectives, not least because the author describes himself as the “Grand nephew of Adam and Seth Bede and cousin to the Author” on the title page. However, the existence of the text does indicate the significance of the whole Mary Voce/Elizabeth Evans incident to what John Purkis calls “the oral tradition of the family” (77). Mary Voce is not nearly as prototypical of the “infanticidal woman” described by social historians as is Hetty, for she was married, took more than one lover, had previously been found guilty of various petty crimes, and had been pregnant five times with one young son living (“A full and particular Account of the Life, Trial, and Behaviour of Mary Voce”). As a seduced virgin Hetty was certainly more palatable to the genteel reader, and as the heroine of a novel from a respectable press she was more acceptable to that same reader than the protagonist of a penny broadside.

Three broadsides about Mary Voe have been reproduced in Valentine Cunningham's recent Oxford edition of Adam Bede.²

They represent an interesting range, from the pious–“An Account of the Experience and Happy Death of Mary Voce”–to the lurid: “the dominion of Lust seized my soul, I quitted the protecting partner of my virgin heart, and rambling after new delights, became intoxicated with a succession of carnal pleasures” (“The Life, Character, Behaviour at the Place of Execution and Dying Speech of Mary Voce” 549). Verses, very likely taken from yet another broadside, were published in the Nottingham Date Book, according to Mottram a “graphic” and “vivid historical chronicle,” mainly, it would seem, of executions (199). They concern only the hanging and focus on Voce's religious conversion: As Hetty confesses rather than converts, and arguably from human need rather than religious conviction, the central action of these popular texts is radically abandoned and replaced by Eliot's agenda of humanism, positivism, and realism.

Another plausible popular model is the criminal biography, a genre canonized by Daniel Defoe but common before and afterwards in the various narratives of the lives of criminal individuals and groups, such as those collected in G. T. Crook's The Complete Newgate Calender (1926). Alexander Pettit, however, quite rightly maintains that Adam Bede is reformist in intent and so linked more closely to individual novels rather than to this older genre (290). And what of the ballads themselves, that so influenced Scott and Wordsworth? Jay Clayton makes a subtle point about the interrelations and cross references between Scott, Wordsworth, Eliot, and, later, Thomas Hardy, and he traces what he terms a double determination of motif, one strain of which are the obvious literary antecedents, and the other of which consists of the traditional, the anonymous, and the conventional (39). We cannot know the extent of Eliot's familiarity with those popular sources that resonate most clearly within the novel: the broadside ballads of abandoned, wandering maids, and the newspaper and broadside reports of the travails of actual women. We can only trace backwards from the text and make assumptions about buried popular tropes. Eliot is writing for readers with another set of referents, people who are familiar with Dutch and other schools of painting, what Daniel Gunn neatly terms “gestur[ing] toward the unfashionable rural world while still remaining inside of the museum,” “at the very center of metropolitan culture” (369). Much has already been written about Eliot's construction of her audience and her assumptions about their cultural capital (Brown; Furst 61–63; Gunn; Widdowson et al.). The point here is that given her stance, Eliot, unlike Scott, denied and rewrote, rather than celebrated and recreated, her more marginal sources. Clayton goes further and maintains that in her desire to embrace realism, she denies all textual sources:

Certainly the type of research she did supports the idea of mimetic art: in A Writer's Notebook there are notes about Wesleyan beliefs, laboring-class clothing styles and food, and lists of types of clouds and trees. The Gentleman's Magazine was an important source of this type of information. Nowhere are there allusions to other infanticide narratives, other than the aforementioned references to The Heart of Mid-Lothian in the letters, and her aunt's story of Mary Voce.

Eliot, the Popular Press, and Real-Life Accounts

COMPARE ELIOT'S TREATMENT OF THE “INFANTICIDAL WOMAN” with these lines taken from “The Outcast” published in a London newspaper in 1861: a woman, seduced and abandoned, seeks refuge:

Such sentimental images of abandonment have a long cultural pedigree, and at mid-century they had considerable currency in the popular press. From newspaper accounts of the period, it becomes very plain that the only way in which any sympathy towards the “infanticidal woman” was possible was to configure her as the hapless victim of a “vile seducer”: to deny her any agency. Most liberal or reformist texts in one way or another play upon this trope. Readers taking up Adam Bede for the first time would have been extremely familiar with the outcast figure and they would have made the inevitable comparisons between the “pale and wasted form” and the character of Hetty Sorrel who in court “stood like a white image, staring down at her hands, and seeming neither to hear nor see anything…white as a sheet” (359; ch. 42). Eliot's response to the perceived crisis of infanticide, however, is markedly different from the demonization/sentimentalization axis in the popular press. In the broadsides and newspaper articles the young woman, seduced and abandoned, is positioned as an object of pity, even of charity, as long as she remains the victim. Eliot does not allow Hetty this luxury; with her disdainful descriptions she attacks the cliche of the helpless woman and firmly directs her readers away from the paternalistic, infantilizing sympathy provoked by stock representations. Hetty is pale, true, but courtroom observers “thought she looked as if some demon had cast a blighting glance upon her, withered up the woman's soul in her, and left only a hard despairing obstinacy” (361; ch. 43).

In his blame of Arthur, Adam exemplifies the repudiation of the “vile seducer” so common in the newspaper articles and broadsides, and Arthur's guilty response indicates that he accepts this description, but compared with Hetty's fate of transportation and death, the text treats him leniently, just as critics and activists claimed society forgave seducers. Ann Higginbotham ties Adam Bede into the mid-century feminist campaign that called men to account for their sexual liaisons (322), but I would argue that Eliot does not appear to subscribe to this position despite the influence and encouragement of her good friend, feminist activist Barbara Bodichon, who argued in 1854 that men were also culpable for infanticide when they abandoned woman and refused adequate support, and so should be held legally accountable (Bodichon 29–31; Pell 22). Eliot certainly exposes the psychology of sentimental benevolence (Harris, “Arthur” 56), but Arthur Donnithorne is no “gay Lothario” or “vile seducer” who escapes, blameless and nameless, while the object of his uncontrollable lust is irrevocably ruined. Any possible empathy for Hetty is reduced in proportion to the sympathy felt for the forlorn Arthur, so sadly reduced by the whole affair. He is punished in a way suitable to his station, with loss of health and peace of mind (448; epilogue), and through the various tropes of his repentance, the reader is to understand that he is also victimized, perhaps even more so than Hetty, for as he thinks, “The little puss hadn't cared for him half as much as he cared for her” (368; ch. 44). It is my contention that Eliot allocates blame disproportionately: that Hetty is punished, Arthur is excused, and Adam is figured as the true sufferer because the male characters, unlike Hetty, are represented as having the ability to learn from mistakes.

Although there is nothing on the subject in her letters or in A Writer's Notebook, Eliot would seem to have been familiar with some of the many first-person accounts in trial transcripts, Ordinary's accounts, broadsides, and newspapers, for her powerful evocation of the desperation that was so characteristic of many women's actions is unerring. Hetty's travails take on new meaning when read beside the testimony of laboring-class women tried for infanticide, for she is in most ways entirely consistent with the profile of the first-time offender that has since been established by social historians (Malcolmson; Rose). When she is pregnant, her aunt and guardian Mrs. Poyser suffers from a convenient series of colds (304; ch. 35), just as Effie Dean's aunt did. This may seem like a poor plot device, but, as noted, the historical record reveals that a surprising number of pregnant women managed to conceal their conditions even until the birth and afterwards. The journey, which Eliot said she wrote without revision (Letters 2: 504), is painfully resonant of many real women's stories. Cathy Monholland quotes from the mid-century trial transcripts of two such women: “[Elizabeth] Benyon ‘wander[ed] about in a state of great destitution,’ and so did [seventeen years old] Jane Revill, who also ‘wandered about without food for nearly two days, was worn out in body & mind. The child cried with hunger & prisoner was too weak to resist a sudden temptation to destroy the child”’ (114). Fully half of the women in Monholland's study murdered their infants while on journeys from home (72). Malcolmson comments that “[i]t is just this sort of despairing isolation, the sense of being cut adrift from society, which George Eliot so vividly reconstructs in Adam Bede, as Hetty Sorrel wanders uncertainly about the English countryside, at the end, and very briefly, with an infant in her arms” (207).

As was so often the case, evidence of this essentially private crime came from the medical witnesses, and so it is with Hetty. Bartle Massey, his old schoolteacher, tells Adam, “‘The doctor's evidence is heavy on her–is heavy. But she's gone on denying she's had a child from first to last: these poor silly women-things–they've not the sense to know it's no use denying what's proved”’ (359; ch. 43). Eliot is here delicately but emphatically alluding to the medical examinations that accused women underwent to determine if their hymens were intact, there was vaginal evidence of recent birth, and their breasts were producing milk. Massey's dismissive allusion to “women-things” positions Hetty's subjective reality in its real relation to professional opinion, which alone has the power to offer “proof.” Hetty's dissociation here is also characteristic; Monholland notes that some women denied their actions even when there was physical evidence in the room in front of them (128–29). Malcolmson maintains that Adam Bede is an illustration of a frame of mind common to women with unwanted pregnancies in the eighteenth century: “a dread of facing up to the imminent disgrace and a desperate hoping that, if the secret were kept, some sort of deliverance would occur” (193).

Eliot also paints an accurate picture of the courtroom, where the self-presentation of the accused was in many cases even more telling than the evidence. Hetty is obdurate, “a pale, hard-looking culprit” (361; ch. 43), which is explicitly a factor in the guilty verdict and capital sentence, as it was with so many accused women. Trodd comments that “Hetty's abnormal lack of domestic feelings, we may infer, leaves her, despite her beauty, powerless in the courtroom” (137). Christine Krueger makes a strong argument about the ways in which the legal system silenced women, and suggests that in writing courtroom scenes, writers like Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Tonna were writing about their own silencing. She characterizes Eliot's relationship to the law as “hostile” because of her situation with Lewes (339) and finds that Adam Bede explores the relationship between sexual and textual legitimacy. “Hetty's language–its plain description, repetition, and naive sincerity” would be “unintelligible” in a courtroom (348–49). These points are excellent but would be even more compelling if one were not so aware of the narrator repeatedly speaking in the voice of a punitive courtroom spectator–“the unnaturalness of her crime stood out the more harshly by the side of her hard immovability and obstinate silence” (365; ch. 43)–and if Hetty had not been shut out from the narrative as surely as she is from testifying at the trial.

It is in the final scenes of Hetty's story that Eliot departs from the realism of her earlier treatment. The breathless plot developments of the crime and courtroom drama are highly fictionalized allusions to the ponderous workings of the law. For example, Hetty's last-minute reprieve, delivered right to the scaffold by Arthur on horseback, “his eyes…glazed by madness” (386; ch. 47), is the stuff of high melodrama, but in fact it was a rare woman who was executed in these cases. Rose notes that by 1849 it was virtually automatic for the Home Secretary to grant a reprieve; more to the point, at the time at which Hetty's trial is set, the Stuart laws were deemed unworkable because juries would not convict while child murder was a capital offense (70–76). Further, Mason Harris reminds us of the reality of the lives of women who were transported–they faced either hard labor, prostitution, or both–and suggests that Eliot's realism cannot follow Hetty to Botany Bay (“Infanticide” n196). Had she done so, the pastoral closure of the novel would have been impossible. That Eliot was writing from the age of the prison rather than the scaffold may account, in part, for the contrived quality of the end of Hetty's story, even as she sought for greater verisimilitude by adamantly rejecting the victimized maiden of popular accounts.

Publication

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF ADAM BEDE was contentious even before publication. John Blackwood's trepidation about representations of sexuality, doubtless heightened by his earlier response to the spousal abuse and alcoholism in “Janet's Repentance” in her first fiction, Scenes from Clerical Life, was a source of vexation for Eliot, and she declined to comply with his nervous request for a synopsis of the rest after he had read the first sixteen chapters. She wrote to him as we have seen, with reference to The Heart of Mid-Lothian, that the morality of a work lay in its treatment rather than in its subject matter, and told him that he “can certainly not be more solicitous about the moral spirit of what you publish in the Magazine, than I am about the moral spirit of what I write” (Letters 8: 202–03). Blackwood did not renew his request, but his fears would seem to have affected the mode of publication: originally intended for serialization in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, because of Blackwood's squeamishness Eliot decided instead on volume publication (Anderson; Martin: Serial Fiction, “Two Unpublished Letters”). Ironically, this decision likely affected people's readings in just such a way as Blackwood would have wished, for as originally planned the section breaks emphasize the suspense of the Arthur/Hetty plot and volume publication somewhat obscures this focus (Martin, Serial Fiction 99–104).

The novel enjoyed a “stunning reception” (Martin, Serial Fiction 106): sixteen thousand copies were sold in the first year (Mintz 45) and critical responses were generally favorable (David Carroll; Karl 300–05), so it would seem that Eliot's perceptions of literary morality were vindicated. There were, of course, some notable exceptions: the Saturday Review commented that

The North British Review and the Examiner also commented unfavorably, and on similar grounds. There was a further source of worry: due to widespread rumors that another, one Joseph Liggins, was the author of her work, Eliot was prematurely obliged to reveal her identity shortly after publication. This was not simply a question of the ownership of intellectual property; it was a forced, even if unwitting, uncloaking of a woman audaciously claiming a public voice. Marian Evans Lewes's “coming out” as George Eliot caused John and William Blackwood further anxiety, given her unsanctioned liaison with Lewes, but despite a rumored boycott of the forthcoming Mill on the Floss by Mudie's Circulating Library, which would have been disastrous for sales but luckily never came to pass, these fears and the real prejudice which lay behind them would not seem to have affected the success of the novel. Commentators have noticed, however, a change in the tone of the reviews written after the gender of “George Eliot” was revealed (Showalter 95). Certainly the whole period was filled with distress for Eliot, most of it focused on issues of sexuality.

Anxieties about Sexuality and Gender

In his study of insanity and responsibility in Victorian trials, Roger Smith traces a “network of correspondences between women, nature, passivity, emotion, and irresponsibility” (143). He goes on to remark: “Infanticide focused several medical concerns regarding motherhood and the family, while puerperal insanity (insanity following childbirth) was a model for the alienist view of a potentially dangerous insanity” (144). This discourse of the feminine was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. The question is, what does Adam Bede do with these pre-existing tropes of feminine irresponsibility? I contend that Eliot apportioned considerable blame to Hetty not because she was arguing against the infantilization of women, but because she was able, through a slight of hand, to shift the site of the pathology from gender to class. While the final silencing of Dinah as lay preacher is very arguably a locus for Eliot's reading of gender, Hetty's story is not. Dinah, articulate and upwardly mobile, is a legitimate site for the exploration of the gender issues that concerned Eliot, while Hetty is unregenerately of the laboring classes, so while of all the characters she is arguably the most affected by inequalities of sexuality and gender, these issues are largely subsumed. She is not a woman; she is a working-class woman, and that is an altogether different breed.

Adam Bede, particularly in its treatment of background characters, participates in the characterization of the rural laboring-classes as “coarse,” as when the narrator remarks that “[t]he jocose talk of haymakers is best at a distance; like those clumsy bells round the cows' necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature” (177; ch. 19). Eliot is clearer about what she means by this disruptive, unaesthetic “coarseness” in “The Natural History of German Life” published three years earlier:

There are many things that might be said of these words, but we will focus here on only one of them. “Coarse,” in Eliot's lexicon, does not merely mean unrefined; it implies a rough and aggressive sexuality. In partial explanation of this type of characterization of the laboring classes, Jeffrey Weeks comments: “The trend towards a form of social colonization was accentuated throughout the nineteenth century by the perceived otherness of the working class, condemned, it was believed, to sexual rampancy and immorality, and often even physically different from the more leisured classes” (33). He suggests that the middle classes invented “sexuality” and that they needed an “Other.” There is a whole literature on the sexualization of laboring-class women, rendered exotic by their physicality, by middle-class men, one of the most well-known instances being Arthur J. Munby's relationship with his servant and later wife, Hannah Cullwick.² Cissie Fairchilds uses the evocative phrase, “the eroticism of inequality,” to describe the appeal of servants to their masters (166). The doubleness of the position of the laboring-class woman, simultaneously eroticized and denigrated, compounds the already considerable ambiguities faced by a woman writing in disguise as a man. Eliot's narrator, disconcertingly, is constructed as an appreciative, if patronizing, heterosexual man. Much has been written about the infantilizing nature of the descriptions of Hetty (Smith 143)–she is “kitten-like” (73; ch. 7), “little,” “silly” (87; ch. 9), a “velvet peach” (113; ch. 12), and she has a “sweet baby-like roundness about her face and figure” (130; ch. 15)–but little has been said about how much of a connoisseur of those little “bit[s] o' pink-and-white,” as Bartle Massey says (350; ch. 40), the narrator manages to sound, especially when he sententiously comments to the reader, with reference to Hetty's disaster, “God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery” (326; ch. 37).

Given this apparent comfort with the masculine narrative voice, the difficulties Eliot experienced in publicly claiming authorship, as a woman, are ironic. But Blackwood's concerns aside, the novel is not primarily about sexuality or gender: it is about class, and anxieties about class are refracted through gender issues. Rendering the feminine as problematic–Julia Swindells comments that “Eliot extends the authorial, masculine persona, in presenting woman as a problem for man, but a problem of woman” (56)–necessitates the male persona of the narrator. Eliot's narrator functions as a ventriloquist's dummy or a type of masking to engender a series of questions and ambiguities. For example, Laurie Langbauer reports that Eliot angered some readers who supposed that she supported the punitive Elizabethan statute (209); presumably her assumption is that such a proposition is false. Of course, the novel could also be read as a critique of the old law and “the traditional forms of English patriarchy,” as Nancy Pell asserts (23). Eliot is not on record either way, and the whole question of the actual law seems almost beside the point, and not only because the old statute was no more than a distant memory when Eliot was writing.

Contemporary feminist criticism of Eliot, and Adam Bede in particular, has not yet fully articulated the way in which sexuality is firmly positioned in relation to class. Disapproval for Eliot's harsh treatment of Hetty (Swindells 45–57; Johnstone; Weissman 164–66) has largely been superseded by a more redemptive discourse. For example, Showalter maintains that Eliot was in effect “forced” to toe the moral line (164); Nina Auerbach claims Hetty as a subversive site; Elaine Lawless reads the novel as a critique of patriarchy (249–50; 253); and Susan Morgan writes that Hetty's real crime is that she “rejects the masculine and culturally inherited vision of the earthly paradise” (272). Even Judith Weissman, who strongly characterizes Eliot as “anti-woman,” appears to excuse Eliot's “Victorian” treatment of working-class women as realistic in light of the author's personal knowledge of the price of sexual nonconformity (164). Such arguments, while frequently powerful and persuasive, border on misreading in their persistent placement of gender in the foreground at the expense of class.

Social Disruption

It is significant that Adam Bede is set sixty years before the time of its writing. In Novels of the Eighteen-Forties Kathleen Tillotson maintains that this lapse of time was a common practice, and cites the Brontës, Eliot, Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray as examples. She speculates that it was common in the mid-nineteenth century to view history until the 1830s as a smooth continuum, broken irrevocably by the coming of the New Age, symbolized by industrialization and the railroad (93–97). On the far side of this rupture lay the past, a lost Golden Age; on this side, flux and uncertainty. Peter Widdowson, Paul Stigant, and Peter Brooker point out that the historical setting also allows for a certain exclusiveness of realism, and the propagation of a world view that is not universal but rather a closed totality, inscribed in a fixed and centered view of history (14). Many critical texts characterize the novel as a pastoral, a straightforward foil to Eliot's later works, and possibly somewhat static. The tone of such commentary is faintly dismissive, as if the novel were a mere apprenticeship work (Brown 129), though such a position ignores the fact that Eliot wrote the novel as a mature woman with a strong pedigree as an intellectual and a writer. Its final closure is neither complacent nor quaint; it is a vigorous, albeit doomed, attempt to bolster a nostalgic perception of a status quo that looks very much like Arnold's threatened England.

Morgan writes that Adam Bede genders paradise as masculine and discordance as feminine (270). Literary realism functions as the male order under which Hetty is sacrificed “for nothing more than a handshake between two men” (Langbauer 208). Literary aesthetics are not only gendered, however; they are also political. To refer back to Scott, Wordsworth, and the German Romantics: the death of Hetty functions as a purging of Romanticism and its association with the outlaw (Langbauer 208). Romanticism, or at least an important strain of it, is the aesthetic representation of radicalism, and Eliot responds with the different, newer aesthetic of realism. Widdowson et al. are worth quoting at length about the dovetailing of Eliot's philosophy and aesthetic:

One can see how such a philosophy could become prescriptive, particularly when who, specifically, has the right to determine “the demands of the community” remains conveniently unstated. The narrator in Adam Bede not only yearns towards patriarchal stability, but social, economic, and political strength as well. Eliot, like Arnold, is taking what Michael Wolff has termed a “transgressive” stance towards her society and culture: “It was hard to be an intellectual in the 1840s or 50s and not be disturbed by what you saw around you every day and read about in the papers and reviews” (<mwolff@english.umass.edu>, “Re: Suggestions for syllabus on transgression,” VICT-L, 26/3/97). It is important here not to conflate “transgressive” with “progressive.” Adam Bede was written against a background of what Mark McLaughlin has termed “consensus and crisis” at a time when middle-class Victorian culture felt threatened by working-class disruption (56). Rosemarie Bodenheimer comments on Eliot's despair about the direction of progress (10). Eliot's much-vaunted humanism, her “sympathy”–Jane Carlyle wrote to Eliot that Adam Bede “put her in charity with the whole human race” (Letters 3: 23)–perversely functions to forestall the social disruption of Arnold's ragged hordes at the gates. Other reviewers agree with Carlyle: on April 12, 1859, E. S. Dallas wrote in the Times that Eliot “beat down all external differences” between characters and found in each “a remnant of Eden.” In July of that year Anne Mozley wrote in Bentley's Quarterly Review that “Adam Bede has a voice of its own which chimes in a telling, because natural and simple way, with associations and thoughts which have been lying half developed and struggling for expression in many minds” (qtd. in David Carroll 79, 81, 87). It would seem that in her desire to erase the threat of class differences by erasing class itself, Eliot spoke for a significant segment of the book-reading public.

One might ask about the famous chapter 17, in which Eliot democratically defends the everyday as a suitable subject for art. Tellingly, this debate between aficionados of “the Dutch school” and the “lofty-minded people” who disdain it (152; ch. 17) is completely contained within the circle of literary producers and consumers: Eliot is defending her artistic choices and attempting to educate her readers, and her publisher, about her aesthetic (Anderson 46; Gunn 368). Daniel Gunn reminds us that Eliot's references to Dutch painting, static images rather than narratives, leave awkward questions about poverty unanswered (375–76). In Ways of Seeing John Berger writes of the popularity of these Dutch genre paintings–pictures of “low life”–with the newly arrived bourgeoisie. He writes that “the facility of oil paint to create an illusion of substantiality lent plausibility to a sentimental lie: namely that it was the honest and hard-working who prospered, and that the good-for-nothings deservedly had nothing” (103). By the use of this painterly model, the text attempts to neutralize any class threat and “cleanse [its subjects] of threatening social meanings” (366). Gunn continues, “Dutch painting implies for [Eliot] an aesthetic of simplicity, in which representation is seen as unmeditated by the artificial conventions of art and thus untroubled by superimposed meanings” (372). To extrapolate, she wants to retain as much authorial power to fix textual meaning as possible, because meanings are important and have social repercussions.

Turning to those whose meaning Eliot wanted to “fix”: Swindells contends that as a class, artisans were viewed as potentially disruptive of middle-class interests (45). The figures of Adam, Dinah, and mild brother Seth function to domesticate this fear and render it benign, and no more so than in the ending. Catherine Belsey's comments on realism are pertinent here:

In Eliot's own assessment the novel is “complete” and “balanced” (Shuttleworth 50). The time-line of the novel, June of 1799 to June of 1807, creates a full circle whereby the entire narrative is revealed as a momentary eruption in an otherwise stable order. Fredric Jameson writes of ideology as “strategies of containment” (52). The closure at the end of Adam Bede is an attempt to close and contain the rifts made by the issues of nineteenth-century social relations raised in the text, but the contradictions arising from this forced enclosure unmask the formal unification of the work as, to quote Jameson again, a mirage (56). The epilogue is not even four pages long, yet it tightly ties up all the loose threads. Adam and Dinah are married and have produced two children, named after Adam and his late mother, Lisbeth, an intensely irritating character who redeems herself by pushing Adam and Dinah together and then dying. Dinah has been forced by the consolidation of Methodism to give up preaching. The young family lives with Uncle Seth, who was himself formerly in love with Dinah. Arthur, after years of illness and exile, has returned, chastened and reduced. In comparison, Adam has become a material success. And Hetty, finally on her way back to England after seven years in Australia, fortuitously dies in transit. Widdowson et al. write that the terseness of the description of Hetty's reprieve is due to “embarrassed recognition of [the text's] own fictiveness” (14). The same dynamic is true of the epilogue. This is not, then, an “infanticide” novel, if such a thing even exists; rather, it is a novel which uses the pre-existing trope of infanticide to underscore a series of interrelated middle-class anxieties around sexuality and social disruption. At mid-century, infanticide was a flashpoint for various anxieties, even though it is by no means clear that there was any increase in incidents. As Monholland reminds us, “So whether there was or was not an explosion in the occurrences of infanticide is not really important. What mattered to contemporaries was that it seemed that an epidemic of the crime was underway, since they were bombarded with news and reports from all sides” (47–48). It is my contention that it was more than a flashpoint; it was a convenient short-form or metaphor for mid-century middle-class distress.

Hetty bears a double meaning: she “never ceases to be a figure for both femaleness and class subordination” (Homans 167). Hetty's dreams of social mobility and material accumulation are the real threat, not her sexuality, and her rejection of the Poyser's world is so potentially disruptive that she must be nullified (Morgan 272). She is ambitious rather than sexually or emotionally engaged, which is ultimately a more subversive stance (Auerbach 178). Margaret Homans suggests that Hetty's newborn passion must be hidden, and that this figurative truth is made literal in the actual birth and concealment (30). She is referring here to sexual longings, but I would maintain that it is even more imperative for Hetty to hide her passionate social ambitions. The threat lies in the possibility that Hetty is not unique in her desires; that she embodies a whole culture of discontent. Interestingly, Mary Jean Corbett describes Adam Bede as Eliot's attack on the Philistines, in the persons of the Poysers (299), while Mason Harris claims that Hetty is representative of Hayslope and that her fall signals a community breakdown (“Infanticide” 178–79). Since both these readings are credible, there exists the intriguing possibility of an uncomfortable sisterhood between Eliot and her disdained character which would explain some of the textual dissonances around issues of gender. Finally, the realism of Hetty's experience breaks through the disapproval of the narrator; she is disruptive, so she must be killed. Auerbach notes the “social myth” of the fallen woman–that in real life these women were not automatically ostracized (168–69)–and social historians agree, which means that the real murderer is Eliot, in the library, with the pen. To harken back to Widdowson et al.'s remarks on Eliot's humanism, “[s]ociety survives and gradually evolves in this view by the slow accretion of high moral behaviour on the part of those individuals who have suffered and learnt sympathy, who recognize the demands of the community” (8): there is no place in such a society for the discontented Hetty. As Beer aptly comments, the novel “regains its poise” when events are again stabilized and made private. “The ending of Adam Bede diminishes energies and seals the picture with a layer of varnish” (72–73).

Surveillance

IN KEEPING WITH HER GOAL “to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind” (150; ch. 17), Eliot approached her novels methodically; she researched history, botany, and other subjects, and made the measured scientific observation of customs of the historian or natural scientist (Writer's Notebook). There are class issues involved in taking the stance of the sociologist, of the scientific observer, or of the professional when the object of study is from the laboring classes. There is never any discussion of consent, any more than a zoologist would ask the animals, a botanist the plants, or an anthropologist the indigenous people of a far-flung colony. There is a whole literature on the professional middle-class treatment of laboring-class subjects as foreign; indeed, such formulations were unselfconsciously acknowledged at the time and Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth are just the two most famous “ethnographers” who made fact-finding expeditions into the lives of the poor and laboring classes (VICT-L: “Victorians and Travel,” July 1997 and “Flanerie in London,” Oct. 1997). Eliot's narrator takes the stance of a natural historian rather than a social scientist. The reader is introduced to people and mores with whom s/he is assumed to have been previously unfamiliar. For example, here the narrator facilitates our understanding of the early Methodists: “They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard” (34; ch. 3). Eliot's description of all her characters is pseudo-anthropological, in that what purports to be explanatory further engenders stigmatization. Country people believe in signs, because “a peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel” (44; ch. 4). Perhaps what most distinguishes them from Eliot's presumed reader is their illiteracy: of three laborers attending evening classes, in an otherwise affectionate description the reader is told, “It was almost as if three rough animals were making humble efforts to learn how they might become human” (199–200; ch. 21). The use of dialect is particularly telling. Dinah does not speak in dialect and is not laboring-class in appearance, except for her hands, as she has “a type of face one rarely sees among our common people” (55; ch. 5). Adam's use of dialect is more pronounced when he speaks directly to the narrator, but he speaks “standard” English to his mother and she in turn answers him in dialect (102; ch. 11). Eliot may have indeed been attempting “to recapture the language of her childhood” (Karl 334), but dialect and colorful colloquialisms function in the novel as quaint markers of hierarchy within the laboring classes, rather than as the representation of actual cultural practice. Even so, Eliot had initial disagreements with Blackwood over the inclusion of dialect, and it was the focus of some subsequent criticism (Karl 292, 334–35).

Assume that the right to investigate and categorize is not so very far from actual intervention, and this hazy line is where observation becomes active surveillance and discipline. “Realism” as artistic ideology and practice conflates with surveillance. Hetty Sorrel, as object of the narrative gaze, conflates with the laboring-class woman under surveillance by the middle-class mistress, employer, or philanthropist. One difference between Hetty and previous incarnations of the “infanticidal woman” is her complicity in her own construction as an object to be viewed, by virtue of her complacent self-consciousness of the process by which she is being commodified. As Auerbach comments, “Hetty is presented as fallen from her first lush and sensuous appearance” (169). The narrator describes the dairy early in the novel:

Even when in distress Hetty is performing, as when she later watches herself cry in the mirror (281; ch. 31). Langbauer writes that by admiring herself, Hetty only mimics what the novel does to her (213–14). Further, by putting on this show the narrative would have us believe that Hetty assents to, and is in some degree responsible for, all that happens to her, for though ignorant she is not blameless: we are particularly told that she has “a false air of innocence” (73; ch. 7) which prepares us to scrutinize her further. By the end of the novel Hetty has left the protection of her family to seek Arthur and entered alone into the public space, where all can assess her, and, as the narrator comments, “the stranger's eye detects what the familiar unsuspecting eye leaves unnoticed” (315; ch. 36). In public “there were always men lounging there, who stared at her and joked her rudely” (314; ch. 36); here the surveillance takes a nasty turn, prefiguring the humiliation of the trial when “[a]ll eyes were strained to look at her” (365; ch. 43). In trial transcripts, women are objects to be known and objects of suspicion, because they do not, in this context, want to be known. They are in a sense “hostile witnesses” whom the medical practitioner must read through their bodies and interpret for the judge and jury. This type of forced examination, though unforseen by Hetty, is offered as the logical outcome of her earlier pleasure in her own physicality when she makes “a great play of the pouting mouth and dark eyes.”

Failure of Representation

In order to even be under surveillance the object of study must of necessity be at some distance from the observer, whether that distance be actual or perceptual. This is the paradox at the heart of the dynamic of observation: the object of interest, positioned as “other” or “lesser than,” can never be completely understood, because of that distance, and because any such understanding would jeopardize the very inequity which it is the core purpose of the surveillance to reaffirm. Medical texts take women as their subjects but emphatically exclude their perspectives; newspaper stories and broadsides erase the woman and concentrate on the mechanics of the crime, the narratives of witnesses, and the professional discourse of coroners, prosecutors, and judges. Of necessity then, Hetty stands at some distance from the moral center of the narrative. The entire text, born of a story told to one woman by another about her visit to a third, is structured so as to minimize the character of Hetty from the start, and when she is present she is not the point-of-view character. She does not tell her own story for although she can read, in terms of cultural capital she is pre-literate, and her uneducated, inarticulate state affirms her secondary status in the narrative. We only hear Hetty through others' descriptions of her, so she is doubly displaced from the reader. Events concerning her often happen offstage: obviously the seduction and the birth and abandonment of the infant, but other events as well, crucial events like the trial, which is described secondhand by Bartle Massey to Adam. The details of her actions are recounted, or reconstructed, in court by others, like the silent women described in the newspaper articles who are betrayed by their neighbors to the authorities. Anything about her that needs to be conveyed must be interpreted by the narrator, or by one of the articulate characters. The one great exception is Hetty's recounting of her story to Dinah in the prison, and even here her words must be coaxed and witnessed by another. Tellingly, Eliot wrote in her journal in 1858, “I determined on making what we always called in our conversations ‘My Aunt's Story”’–not Mary Voce's story–“the subject of a long novel” (Letters 2: 502). Adam, an addition of Eliot's based on her father, is the central figure, and it is he, and neither Dinah nor Hetty, who is interviewed by the narrator-as-anthropologist in chapter seventeen (156). He is the respectfully deferential “authentic” source; he interprets and mediates for the narrator, who in turn interprets for the reader. Hetty herself is never understood; Adam's empathy grows from his own pain and disillusionment but he never empathizes with her actions, only with her outcast status when the Poyser's have disowned her. Finally, Hetty dies offstage on a returning transport ship so as not to disrupt the marriage of Adam and Dinah. Her death is thrown off in one line in the epilogue: Dinah says to Seth, “And the death of the poor wanderer, when she was coming back to us, has been sorrow upon sorrow” (448).

Hetty is limited; this knowledge must reassure. Hetty is an object to be described and categorized. But more, the perspective from which she is to be known is an integral part of that knowledge. She is described in great physical detail. We have already noted the narrator's almost salacious references to her as a “peach.” These appreciative descriptions go hand-in-hand with “the novel's rhetoric [which] forbids the reader to like Hetty…Her association with small, spiritually depleted forms of life seems to deprive her fall of a corresponding ascent we can admire” (Auerbach 174). The narrative tone, initially indulgent, becomes condemnatory. We are told of her “narrow bit of an imagination,” her fragmentary and illogical perceptions (132, 138; ch. 15). Certainly this language is highly gendered, but it is heavily inflected with assumptions about class difference as well. Compare it with these words from an article Eliot wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette called “Servants' Logic”: “The majority of [servants'] minds are no more to be controlled by strong reasons than plum-pudding is to be grasped by sharp pincers” (391); after a conversation with your cook, “You depart with a sigh, feeling that to deposit rules in Sally's mind is very much like depositing your thimble in a dust-heap” (393); and “Servants are rich in intuitions. They have a vast number of certainties which are deep by reason of their groundlessness” (394). Again, we hear the voice of the anthropologist, describing the exotic tribe to the readers at home and firmly fixing the position of that tribe relative to the observer, and by extension, the reader. In all Eliot's anecdotes, the servant's il/logical assumptions could also be read as stemming from a separate culture, with separate interests, but she fails to imagine this perspective. Gunn goes so far as to describe Eliot's descriptions of the laboring-class characters as “abusive” (370), and it is difficult to disagree. That all being said, and despite what I have characterized as Eliot's refusal to represent her, Hetty lives and breathes almost despite her creator. Several commentators write that Hetty “got away” from Eliot and offer various explanations: the reality of her situation is too strong, or Eliot's concerns around gender issues forged an unlikely bond between character and author. These are plausible reasons, but to them I would add, that the strength of Eliot's anxious imagining of such a constellation of threats as Hetty embodies gives her characterization a vibrancy not shared by anything else in the narrative.

JUST EXACTLY WHAT IS THE READER being told in Adam Bede about the infanticidal woman? She is limited, vain, unintelligent, venal, narcissistic, manipulative, lacking in spirituality, and exceptionally attractive physically. Since we have the golden example of Dinah, there is no question of blaming Hetty's environment or lack of education for her trivial character: she was clearly born that way. Infanticide, then, it would logically follow, can only happen when hard circumstances together with a run of bad luck come to a particularly selfish woman: had Arthur been where Hetty expected to find him she would not have been in such desperate straits, as he had specifically (but obliquely) offered to support her in the event of a pregnancy (280; ch. 31). Infanticide is figured as exceptional, for had Eliot treated it as commonplace, she would have had to formulate a more comprehensive explanation for the phenomenon. As things stand, she avoids having to comment on poverty, sexual violence, abuse of power, or the sexual double standard by deflecting attention to Hetty's “false air of innocence” and coquettish charms. But while Hetty is thus constructed as exceptional, she also fulfils the negative prognostications of the misogynist Bartle Massey about all women that run through the entire novel as a subterranean refrain; there is a strange loop, because Dinah and not Hetty becomes the real exception–Dinah is the only woman Massey will kiss; Dinah is the only woman Mrs. Bede will allow in her kitchen–and so all other (laboring class) women by implication are likened to Hetty, even as she is perversely isolated and dehumanized. Dinah, however, goes on to join the lower ranks of the middle class after her marriage to Adam and his successes in business. This potential contradiction is therefore resolved, though the bigger contradiction–Hetty as an exceptional woman in her inexplicable act of infanticide; Hetty as representative of her class in her limited character and her dangerous sexuality–remains.

Eliot's text is not as all-encompassing as her wider theoretical vision, and it falls away precisely with the character of Hetty. Eliot diverges from both literary and popular sources, and she rewrites the sentimental and the condemnatory both, but she does not escape from her culture's underlying main assumption about the “infanticidal woman”: that she is not made of the same stuff as you and I. To refer back to Arnold's “Wragg” and the “grimness, bareness, and hideousness” of her situation: such a formulation engenders repulsion and alienation, rather than empathy or understanding. In both texts, the “infanticidal woman” is held at such arm's length, as to be rendered invisible. So, it would seem, is the “immoral” woman: Matthew Arnold's name was notably absent from the petition circulated after Eliot's death to bury her in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey (Karl 639). The introduction to this essay proposed a “double-axis” of representation of the “infanticidal woman” in mid-century Britain, an axis of discipline and patronage. While many texts, such as the articles in the “Infanticide Memoranda” (a collection of mid-nineteenth-century newspaper articles held at the Harvard Law Library) or William Hunter's landmark forensic treatise On The Uncertainty Of Signs Of Murder In The Case Of Bastard Children (1783), participate in Laqueur's “humanitarian narrative,” Adam Bede demonstrates how readily that axis could swing towards the punitive as a result of widespread anxieties among the middle classes about a rising democracy that threatened an entire way of life. Blackwood need not have been concerned about Eliot's handling of what he called “the usual sad catastrophe,” however. Eliot took a nameless woman–nameless to her, at least–with a long line of literary and popular antecedents, and reassuringly rewrote her for Mudie's subscribers.