¶ … Adam Bede, George Eliot uses some of the conventions of the Romantic novel while violating others. In the end the book asks us, as readers, to answer the fundamental question posed in so many books written within the Romantic tradition: Do the hero and heroine live happily ever after? But this is not the mindlessly vacuous posing of that question that we come across in so many works, for Eliot is far too intelligent a writer simply to ask us whether a particular romantic pairing will turn out well. Rather, behind the question of what happens to particular characters is - for Eliot as well as for ourselves - the larger question of what makes a human life happy. It is Eliot's insistence that we examine the nature of love, the position of the individual in the society that she is writing about, and the importance of fate as opposed to free will that marks this work as an important Romantic - and not just a romantic - novel.
In order to understand the framework within which Eliot created Adam Bede, it is essential that we examine the novelistic traditions in which she was writing. In doing so, we should consider especially how women in this book serve as arbiters both of the emotional lives of the characters and of the morality of this world as well.
Published in 1859, Adam Bede presents us with the story of the completely ethical title character and his love for Hetty Sorrel. Hetty's beauty of face is outshone only by the superficiality of her own character and morals. Much of the business of the story is taken up by Bede's attempt to save the superficial and misguided Sorrel from the fate that she seems unable to avoid. Indeed, she seems determined to embrace a fate that must in the end cause grief as she allows herself to be seduced by the squire, Arthur Donnithorne.
Donnithorne, of course, abandons her as soon as he has been successful in winning her. In her grief over losing the squire she agrees to marry Adam - but then discovers that she is pregnant. She gives birth to a son who dies in a decidedly ambiguous way. We are never entirely sure to what extent she may be responsible for the baby's death. She is condemned for murder, although her sentence will later be commuted to transportation to the colonies for life, a commutation that mirrors our own confusion over the extent to which she is guilty. In the end Adam marries Dinah Morris, a young Methodist preacher, a woman who is as wise and good as Hetty is not and is capable of bending both emotions and morality to be forces for good.
Is this then a Romantic novel? Mostly. Romanticism was in fact a movement that covered a great deal of intellectual and aesthetic territory. It was in large measure an intellectual attempt to use various forms of artistic expression to throw into confusion the orderly, neoclassical conventions that had developed during the Enlightenment - and even more an intellectual and artistic attempt to combat the dislocation and depersonalization of so much of daily life that had been forced upon people by industrialization.
Romantic novelists and novels - and this is certainly true of George Eliot and Adam Bede - threw out classical conventions such as the unities of time, place, and action of tragedy that had been so enthusiastically revived by the neoclassical writers of the 18th century. The virtues of spontaneity and lyricism in tone and writing were fundamental to much of Romantic writing, virtues that Romantic writers found in medieval lays as well as folk stories and vernacular speech, and these too can be found throughout Adam Bede. The measured language of neoclassical linguistic traditions is nowhere to be found in this novel, with its natural and varied speech patterns.
Eliot too firmly pitched her camp with other Romantic writers with her choice of both hero and heroine. While in many ways they certainly seem (to us as 21st-century readers) to be stereotypically virtuous, they are both more realistic and more psychologically complex than the heroes than populated 18th century literature. They may not always act as we would, but we recognize in Arthur and Hetty, in Adam and Dinah real human beings driven by the kinds of complex motivations and desires that we ourselves are home to. Each of them is idiosyncratic...
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