DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF VICTORIAN MEDIEVALISM IN GEORGE ELIOT’S
ADAM BEDE
by
Patricia A. Rippetoe
DANIEL J. SIEGEL, COMMITTEE CHAIR
MARY FLOWERS BRASWELL
ALISON A. CHAPMAN
CAROLYN A. CONLEY
L. KYLE GRIMES
A THESIS
Submitted to the graduate faculty of the University of Alabama at Birmingham,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
2010
Copyright by
Patricia A. Rippetoe
2010
DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF VICTORIAN MEDIEVALISM IN GEORGE
ELIOT’S ADAM BEDE
PATRICIA A. RIPPETOE
ENGLISH
ABSTRACT
The Victorian identification of nineteenth-century Britain as a period of transition
stemmed from a complex set of variables that included social ills associated with
industrialism, political upheaval over methods of reform, dissatisfaction with the
Anglican Church, and the sense that, in an increasingly urban society, humanity was
losing its connection to Nature. By the mid-nineteenth century, there was already a body
of literature produced by Victorian medievalists such as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris who
searched a mythical medieval past for a corrective to these contemporary ills and for a
prospective cultural model. Despite George Eliot’s well-known commitment to realism,
her early novel Adam Bede contains idealized medieval motifs that reflect a dialogue with
Victorian-medievalist themes. I argue that Eliot resolves the apparent contradiction
between her credo of realism and Adam Bede’s apparent medieval traditionalism in a
manner that is consistent with both her liberal-realist fiction and certain elements of
Victorian-medievalist thought. The thesis examines three main aspects of nineteenthcentury medievalism in Adam Bede—the return to medieval Church fervor and ritual, a
reunification with nature, and the value of feudal social order—and analyzes Eliot’s
position towards each. I conclude that although Eliot experiments with major elements of
the medievalist agenda in Adam Bede, she ultimately rejects medievalist ideals for a more
iii
realist and human answer to nineteenth-century ills. Thus, medieval forms of Christian
dogma and practice become vehicles to a less doctrinaire, more inclusive human family
of fellow feeling. Nature, though lush and idyllic, becomes dangerous and untrustworthy.
Feudal social hierarchy, whether overseen by an aristocracy of birth or talent, holds the
potential for irrevocable abuses. What Eliot gives us in Adam Bede, when the dust of
feudal nostalgia settles, is a harmonious, homeostatic community based on human
nurturing, compassion, and empathy as a corrective to capricious, rather than unifying,
nature and idealized aristocratic superiority. Eliot, after contemplating the mirror she
trains on the medieval past, finally opts in Adam Bede for a social whole bound by a
human sympathy that will protect humanity from the fragmenting effects of nineteenthcentury materialism and urban industrialization.
Keywords: George Eliot, Adam Bede, medievalism, Victorian novel
iv
This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Edwin and Doris Rippetoe.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Daniel J. Siegel to whom I owe a great
debt for guiding this work to its completion. His excellent classes in nineteenth-century
literature and our many discussions taught me what I know about the joys and
complexities of the Victorian novel, and George Eliot specifically. He is all a student
could hope for in a mentor and professor—that perfect blend of intellectual acumen,
patience, inspiration, enthusiasm, and great fellow feeling. I am also deeply obligated to
Dr. M. Flowers Braswell for the early stages of this document. The germ of this work
was conceived in her seminar on Middle English, and she has always been a keen and
generous supporter of my scholarship in general and of my efforts to construct a thesis
based on Victorian medievalism. I also owe a great deal to the rest of my committee—Dr.
Alison Chapman, Dr. Kyle Grimes, and Dr. Carolyn Conley of UAB’s history
department—who offered valuable insights at crucial stages of this thesis’s evolution. My
thanks also go to Ms. Jeanene Skillen for important bibliographical and editorial
assistance as well as much-needed moral support. I am also grateful to UAB’s
outstanding English department for embracing me and giving me a home and to UAB’s
generous employee educational assistance program for relieving the financial burden of
graduate study. And of course, my love and gratitude belong to my husband, Greg Pence,
without whose unflinching enthusiasm for my pursuit of a Master’s degree in English
none of this would have happened.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………..iii
DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………..…….v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………..vi
CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION: DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF VICTORIAN
MEDIEVALISM IN GEORGE ELIOT’S ADAM BEDE………………………....1
2 GEORGE ELIOT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ‘OLD RIGID FORMS’ OF
CHRISTIANITY IN ADAM BEDE: A PATHWAY TO FELLOW FEELING …,15
3 FINDING THE CAPRICIOUSNESS OF NATURE IN ADAM BEDE’S
PASTORAL NOSTALGIA: A DECIDEDLY NON-MEDIEVALIST
APPROACH…………………………………………………………….…......…38
4 GEORGE ELIOT, THOMAS CARLYLE, AND THE MEDIEVALIST SOCIAL
HIERARCHY: PUTTING THE FEUDAL ORDER TO REST IN ADAM
BEDE………………………………………………………………………….…..59
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….…....81
vii
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF VICTORIAN
MEDIEVALISM IN GEORGE ELIOT’S ADAM BEDE
I turn without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls,
and heroic warriors….There are few…heroes. (Adam Bede 195-197)
In her early novel Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot not only gazes back to the
close of eighteenth-century pastoral England, but she also recalls the much more distant
past of the Middle Ages. The evocation of mythical medieval ideals formed the basis for
Victorian medievalism, a phenomenon which, this thesis will claim, Eliot is in dialogue
with in Adam Bede.1 The novel’s late eighteenth-century setting resonates with echoes of
feudalism and the human harmony within cycles of time and nature that still resounded in
agrarian regions of England at the time. Alice Chandler states of late eighteenth-century
rural England that this was a universe where traces of the Middle Ages still lingered,
1
It is this mythical ideal of the Middle Ages, evoked by such nineteenth-century thinkers
as Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Morris, Kingsley, etc., that I refer to in the use of the term
“Victorian medievalism” throughout this thesis. The precise boundaries of the nineteenthcentury medievalist phenomenon are somewhat amorphous and difficult to limn, and the
sociopolitical goals of these writers and others like them vary widely. But they all evoked
an idealized medieval past to discourse on the value of such constructs as feudalism and
chivalric honor, the hierarchy and practices of the medieval Catholic Church, and a closer
affinity with nature. It is not my intention to employ the term “medievalism” to refer to
the nineteenth-century revival of scholarly interest in Britain’s medieval past. Although
the nineteenth century saw prodigious work undertaken by Victorian antiquarians,
archivists, and historians who pioneered the salvage, documentation, publication, and, at
times, interpretation of medieval manuscripts, I do not refer to this area of scholarship
when I employ the phrase “Victorian medievalism.”
2
where medieval “customs and festivals were only slowly dying out; and the whir of the
spinning wheel had just begun to grow silent” (13). And Bob Bushaway asserts
much of the customary framework within which were conducted the social
and economic relationships during [Thomas] Hardy’s lifetime [18401928] had been transmitted forward from the later Middle Ages…to the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when…it remained…an essential
context for the community, informing the lives and experiences of both the
labouring poor and the rural elite alike. (1)
But not only does Adam Bede depict an eighteenth-century past still echoing with
medieval social and cultural practices, it contains motifs of an idealized Middle Ages
where images reminiscent of chivalry, courtly love, romantic heroism, Catholic ritual,
and a hierarchical feudal system contrast sharply with the increasingly faithless, socially
alienated, and industrialized nineteenth century in which the novel was written. And
though Eliot’s commitment to realism has been well documented in most major critical
readings of her work, Adam Bede’s pastoral setting and its many allusions to medieval
themes evoke the yearnings of Victorian medievalism. After all, Judith Johnston claims
that Eliot was immersed in the popular cultural phenomenon of Victorian medievalism
and consciously used the ample medieval resources at her disposal. It is these resources,
observes Johnston, that Eliot “developed as an effective force in [her writing, beginning]
with Walter Scott and his contemporaries Ritson, Ellis, and Southey…” (19):
[Eliot’s use of medieval sources] was pervasive….[her] medievalism came
to include not only such simple direct connections between medieval texts
and Eliot’s novels, but also [included] a specific nineteenth-century
3
medievalism, a medievalism which appropriates medieval themes, motifs,
and concerns to reproduce them in specifically nineteenth-century form,
most obvious in the work of Walter Scott, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Morris.
(5)2
Patricia Connors also takes care to note Eliot’s knowledge of medieval source material,
particularly the tales of Arthurian legend, claiming the author was “steeped in the
Arthurian revival” (4).3 And both Connors and Johnston present strong evidence that the
2
While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss in detail Eliot’s relationship with
medieval texts available to her at the time Adam Bede was written, it is important to note
that she worked at the intellectual epicenter of nineteenth-century British thought, a time
when Victorian society was in the grips of what Charles Delheim describes as “a
widespread cultural phenomenon [of medievalism]” (20). We might note the following as
examples of George Eliot’s familiarity with medieval sources: Eliot’s 1855 review of
Robert Bell’s 1854 edition of Chaucer in the “Belle Lettres” section of the Westminster
Review; the four epigraphs quoting Geoffrey Chaucer in chapters twelve, twenty-one,
fifty, and sixty-five of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1861); and Eliot’s own worn volumes of
Malory that contain marginalia and other markings indicating close readings of all three
volumes. See Malory, La Mort d’Arthure: The History of King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table. Eliot’s copies of these volumes now reside in the Dr. Williams Library
in London (shelf no. 1011.H.26-28). Predating all the above references, however, is
George Eliot’s profound admiration for Sir Walter Scott. According to Meg Moring,
Walter Scott was “Eliot’s longest and best-loved Romanticist” (22). Scott, an early
nineteenth-century historical novelist and poet, frequently used idealized medieval
themes. According to Chandler,
By the late eighteenth century…medievalism had become allied with…the
deepest intellectual currents of the Romantic age: its concern with time
and its interests in nature, liberty, and primitivism. To one extent or
another, all these modes of looking at the past, as well as purely gothic and
antiquarian elements, occur in Scott’s poems and novels… (25)
Moring cites Haight when she claims “Eliot first read Scott when she was seven, and she
read and re-read his novels throughout her life” (22).
3
The Arthurian revival was a subgenre of the overall Victorian cultural phenomenon
known as the medieval revival. Among the works that Connors states Eliot certainly
knew, she cites: Spenser’s Faerie Queen and Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” “The Lady
of Shalott,” and “Maud.” Connors quotes Eliot’s 1855 review of “Maud”: “ ‘The Morte
d’Arthur’ breathes the intensest spirit of chivalry in the pure and serene air of unselfish
piety; and it falls on the ear with the rich, soothing melody of a Dona nobis swelling
4
well-read Eliot was familiar with both primary and secondary source material that
revealed glimpses of the Middle Ages.
But if George Eliot’s imaginative vision in Adam Bede is a paean to medievalism,
it becomes a curious one indeed. For there is no place in Eliot’s fiction that more clearly
asserts her well-known and much-noted commitment to realism than in the digressio of
Adam Bede’s chapter seventeen. In it she clearly banishes romance and chivalric heroism
to the worlds of illusion and falsity in a seeming rejection of Victorian-medievalist
sensibilities:
I turn without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls,
and heroic warriors….There are few…heroes. I can’t afford to give all my
love and reverence to such rarities…more needful that my heart should
swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty
people who sit at the same hearth with me…than at the deeds of heroes
whom I shall never know except by hearsay… (195-197)
Contrary, for example, to Thomas Carlyle’s proposal for the hero-worship of a new
aristocracy of divinely inspired wise men, Eliot here calls for a clear-eyed recognition of
the beauty in humanity’s real, ordinary, and flawed individuals. Several years before she
wrote her chapter-seventeen manifesto on the necessity of realism versus illusory and
idealized heroics, Eliot had written of her disdain for the exaltation of illusions. In a
review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. III, published just three years before
Adam Bede’s appearance, she writes: “The truth of infinite value that he [Ruskin] teaches
through the aisles of a cathedral” (5). She observes that Eliot also knew the works of
Southey, Lytton’s King Arthur (1848), and Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult”
(1852).
5
is realism—the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and
faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the
mists of feeling in place of definite, substantial reality” (Byatt and Warren 368). And, as
A.S. Byatt observes, “the realism of Eliot’s fiction is partly a moral realism,
rejecting…consoling doctrines, and partly a related technical realism, a desire for
accuracy” (xvi). Such unshrinking allegiance to the substance of reality without vague
sentiment or misty idealism is certainly recognized by most critical readings of Eliot as a
tenet of her aesthetic and also of her philosophy. Josephine McDonagh addresses the
contradiction between Eliot’s realism and her dreamy view of the past in Adam Bede by
claiming that a fissure exists between the traditionalism and ideal social order of Eliot’s
early novels and her later stories of “complex, changing societies [that abandon] the
earlier…rural idylls of the past” (40). But other critical readings of the early Adam Bede
have concluded that the novel is actually an “exclusive, monolithic, and ideological”4
political discourse on realism.
I will argue that Eliot resolves the apparent contradiction between her credo of
realism and Adam Bede’s apparent medieval traditionalism in a manner that is consistent
with both her liberal-realist fiction and her sympathies with certain elements of Victorianmedievalist thought—sympathies that include the notion of social harmony, a more
emotionally engaged system of moral belief, and an emphasis on the sacred, albeit a
metaphysical rather than theological sacredness, in the human mind and soul. This
resolution forms a part of Eliot’s prescription for moral and social progress in her own
time.
4
For example, see Neetens 25.
6
In 1957, Walter Houghton noted that the nineteenth century was perceived as an
age of great transition: “This is the basic and almost universal conception of the period
and it is peculiarly Victorian…never before had [intellectuals] thought of their own time
as an era of change from the past to the future” (1). Houghton states that such nineteenthcentury thinkers as Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, and William Morris
generally subscribed to this notion of nineteenth-century transition (1). Dwight Culler
adds other Victorian voices5 to Houghton’s list, including the particularly poignant words
of Thomas Arnold regarding the nineteenth century:
We cannot accept the present, and we shall not live to see the future. It is
an age of transition; in which the mass are carried hither and thither by
chimeras of different kinds, while to the few, who…have caught a glimpse
of the sublime but distant future, is left nothing but sadness and isolation.6
Tennyson also writes ominously of the times: “All ages are ages of transition, but this is
an awful moment of transition…”7 As this thesis will demonstrate, the nineteenth
century’s dissatisfaction with the present and its identification with transition stemmed
from a complex set of variables that included the social ills inherent in the rise of new
industrial cities; political upheaval over methods of reform; loss of religious faith from
5
Culler cites numerous readings from Victorian thinkers such as Sir Henry Holland, the
Arnolds, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mill, for example, describing the
nineteenth century as a period of transition (6).
6
7
Thomas Arnold, letter of April 17, 1847, cited in Honan 121.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, excerpt from an 1887 letter to Hallam Tennyson in Hallam
Tennyson 337.
7
such challenges to the Anglican Church as rationalism, scientific inquiry,8 accusations of
Church detachment, and denominational dissent; and a sense that in an increasingly urban
and industrialized society, humanity was losing its very connection with the natural
world.
Kathryn Sutherland notes that amidst anxieties over what course the Victorian
future might take, there was urgency to search history for a reparative and unifying social
vision. Sutherland echoes John Stuart Mill9 in claiming that the quest to compare one’s
own age with former ages became a dominant idea that governed the thought of
nineteenth-century thinkers such as Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, all of whom
invoked, to various degrees, a view of the Middle Ages in an attempt to provide a moral
anchor for nineteenth-century society and culture (456). As a result, Sutherland
concludes:
Following Carlyle’s lead, [the subsequent writers who reached to the past
for answers]…offer not a material and intellectual but a moral and
spiritual vision designed to qualify the Rationalist, unilinear conception of
history as progress; theirs is a counter-history whereby the spiritually
rootless Victorian discovers himself through identification with the
past…[In the second half of the nineteenth century] the line of [historical]
8
Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833) were
two major scientific treatises challenging nineteenth-century belief in literal Biblical
interpretation.
9
According to Mill, the idea of comparing one’s age with former ages had occurred to
philosophers; but until the nineteenth century, it never before was the dominant idea of an
age. See Mill, Spirit of the Age.
8
influence…from Carlyle to Ruskin to Morris is identified by the litmus
test of medievalism. (456)
Thus, by the middle of the nineteenth century, there is already a body of literature that
proposes a backward look toward medieval times as both a corrective for present ills and
a cultural model for the future. According to Alice Chandler,
[the] more the world changed [in the nineteenth century]…the more the
partly historical but basically mythical Middle Ages that had become a
tradition in literature served to remind men of a Golden Age. The Middle
Ages were idealized as a period of faith, order, joy, munificence, and
creativity…The Middle Ages became a metaphor both for a specific social
order, and somewhat more vaguely, for a metaphysically harmonious
world view. (1)
This evocation of largely mythical ideals10 attributed to the Middle Ages by Victorian
thinkers was part of the sustained Victorian-medievalist movement—a phenomenon that
spanned such diverse fields as philosophy, literature, art, architecture, politics,
economics, and social policy. Its goal was to construct from an idealized medieval past a
more stable, harmonious, natural, and spiritual antidote to a nineteenth century that was
in awful transition, to paraphrase Tennyson, and which had no clear path into the future.
Chandler contends that the nineteenth-century medieval revival fit the dominant
pattern of the age in providing a corrective to mechanistic rationalism in a society
questing for lost faith and social harmony: “[The] unifying theme of the entire medieval
10
Dwight Culler observes: “It will not do…to say that the Victorians were simply
constructing a ‘myth’ of history…[they] believed that what they were saying was true,
and that belief is an important part of what they were saying” (7).
9
revival [maintains]…that by reanimating the spirit of the medieval past, [humanity] could
find [itself] a home...” (10). If Chandler is correct, then McDonagh’s description of Adam
Bede hints at the longings of the medieval revival in the novel without actually
acknowledging them as such:
[in] the changing world of imperial Britain11 of the late nineteenth
century, George Eliot’s early novels [which include Adam Bede] stood as
a corrective to the contemporary experience of migration, urbanization,
and technical change; her visions of organic village life
in…Hayslope…where, as one critic put it, the characters were joined to
their environment by ‘vital threads that will not bear disruption’ (187)12
presented an idealized social order and way of life, and, at the same time,
a memorial to a unified national past. (40)
McDonagh suggests that Adam Bede attempts to transcend nineteenth-century rationalism
and materialism by conjuring a vision of a past agrarian society that is dreamy, highly
idealized, and connected harmoniously with a structured natural order—a solution that
echoes the backward-gazing aspirations of Victorian medievalism. By reverting to the
past Eliot at first appears to employ Victorian medievalist nostalgia to espouse a return to
an idealized and legendary past—a past that encompasses the medievalist call for a return
to humankind’s place in a simpler, more natural world; a return to paternalistic and
aristocratic feudal social order; and a return to the awe, mystery, and emotionalism of
11
Although McDonagh locates Adam Bede within “the changing world of imperial
Britain of the late nineteenth century,” most Victorianists would describe the time period
of Eliot’s early fiction (roughly 1857-1862) as the mid-Victorian period. See Theodore
Hoppen’s The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846-1886.
12
From David Carroll, ed.
10
Christian practices of the Middle Ages. Indeed, in Adam Bede, Eliot presents her
audience with a number of fundamentally Victorian-medievalist themes: she embraces
the emotional quality of medieval Christian faith, ritual, symbolism, and mystery; she
demonstrates the ostensible value in a harmony with the natural agrarian world by setting
her novel in quaint, pastoral Hayslope; and as we shall see, she also evokes medievalist
social order in structuring Loamshire13 as a feudal hierarchy where, at least initially, the
moral authority of Arthur Donnithorne, the seeming new-aristocrat (i.e. in Carlylian
terms), and his traditionally aristocratic grandfather, is unquestioned.
But in the novel, Eliot more often than not puts the feudal social order and
medieval, chivalric heroism to the test and finds it wanting, thus providing an opportunity
to turn to her realist agenda in chapter seventeen’s “beauty of commonplace
things…[and] loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who
sit at the same hearth with me…than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know
except by hearsay…” (197). As we shall see, in certain instances Eliot employs medieval
ideals only as a foil to devalue the idealistic aims of Victorian medievalism’s aristocratic
social structure as well as its call for a return to idealized Nature. For example, in the
knightly, aristocratic Arthur Donnithorne’s moral failure as a hero (in his seduction of
Hetty Sorrel) and the socially inferior Adam’s moral progress (in his acquisition of fellow
feeling), Eliot demonstrates that nobility of character, compassion, and benevolence are
not restricted to one hereditary, elite, ruling class. Eliot thus turns away unshrinkingly
from the conventional notion of heroic and aristocratic perfection to find beauty in human
imperfection, moral struggle and ultimate moral progress. At the same time, we shall see
13
Loamshire is the rural county over which old Squire Donnithorne presides.
11
that Eliot’s use of medieval Church sacramental language is not a medievalist call for
restoring some lost ideal of Catholicism or even Christianity. Instead, she deploys old
religious forms and rituals in Adam Bede to evoke the awe and emotionalism necessary
for the growth of human sympathy—the fellow feeling that allows humanity to transcend
mere rationalism in moral decision-making.
There are several aspects of this work that render it interesting and potentially
important. First, critical literature about George Eliot’s use of medieval themes and
motifs is extremely scarce; there seem to be only two primary works that discuss Eliot
and her relationship to medievalism. The first is Patricia Connors’s “Arthurian Legend as
a Source for George Eliot’s Adam Bede.” But although Connors attempts to delineate
medieval motifs in Adam Bede, she limits her inquiry to scant Arthurian allusions in the
novel. And, though Connors does note correspondences between aspects of Arthurian
legend and Adam Bede, she does not attempt to enlighten her readers as to why Eliot
might have used such material in her fiction, stating only that in Adam Bede “Eliot paid
tribute to the quest and its ideals…Thus [Eliot] drew on one of England’s lasting national
mythologies” (7). The second work to discuss George Eliot’s deployment of Victorianmedievalist themes is Judith Johnston’s George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism.
Johnston’s discussion of Eliot and medievalism is more extensive and delves more deeply
than Connors’s does; however, Johnston restricts her discussion to Eliot’s two later
novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, claiming that Eliot arrives at the use of
medieval motifs only late in her career.14 Given the preceding discussion, clearly
14
Johnston justifies her attention to medievalism with regard to only the last two of
Eliot’s novels by referring to Eliot’s ideology of realism in Adam Bede’s chapter
seventeen—an ideology Johnston appears to believe precludes any Victorian medievalist
12
Johnson’s thesis should be examined and elaborated to account for the medieval
references in the earlier Adam Bede. Further, because George Eliot’s links to Victorianmedievalist thought in Adam Bede have not been adequately investigated, this thesis will
illuminate the nature of Eliot’s complicated relationship with medievalism and inform us
as to the ways she deploys medievalism in the novel, not only to criticize aspects of
nineteenth-century medievalist thought, but also to further her own moral agenda.
This thesis examines three main aspects of medievalist thought in Adam Bede and
discusses George Eliot’s position towards each. The first is the medievalist call for
renewed religious faith; the second, the medievalist desire to renew harmony with Nature
and the natural order; and the third, the medievalist advocacy of either traditional feudal
social structure or Carlyle’s variation—a new ruling class of the wise and talented. The
first chapter of the thesis examines religious themes in Adam Bede, particularly the
novel’s little-noted language of pre-Reformation Church sacraments (i.e. reconciliation
through confession, Eucharistic sanctification, and purgatorial baptism into new life).15
The chapter attempts to reconcile these highly Catholic motifs with Eliot’s early
sensibility. Citing Eliot’s passage: “I turn without shrinking from cloud-borne angels,
from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors…” (195), Johnston claims she is interested
only in “what happens when” Eliot turns back to these entities (i.e. the angels, prophets
etc.) in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda; and she proposes to demonstrate in her work
how Eliot uses in these last two novels the “idealistic worlds of romance and chivalry”
that Eliot earlier abjured (2). This thesis challenges Johnston’s premise that Adam Bede
does not engage in discourse on medievalism.
15
It is important to note here that there is no evidence that Eliot had any more than a
general, culturally transmitted notion of medieval Church practices. Just as the
nineteenth-century medievalists embraced a myth of the Middle Ages that had most
likely never existed (as opposed to the scholarly antiquarians, archivists, and historians
who were actually examining medieval manuscripts for specific data regarding medieval
culture), so did Eliot embrace elements of medieval Church practices to comment on the
inadequacies of nineteenth-century Anglicanism and nineteenth-century faith in general.
13
Protestant background, her own purported loss of faith, the Victorian Church of
England’s inadequacies in coping with nineteenth-century crises of transition, and Eliot’s
ultimate belief in the necessity of ardent faith (whether human or religious) to animate
moral precepts. This section concludes that Eliot uses the shared cultural memory of
sacramental mystery and symbolism to advocate a nineteenth-century progression
towards a human community of compassion, invigorated by empathy and fellow feeling.
The thesis’s second chapter examines the medievalist preoccupation with Nature16 and its
relationship to Adam Bede. Although Eliot portrays Hayslope as a seemingly Edenic
village whose seasonal cycles, customs, labors, and lush abundance make it a virtual
locus amoenus of natural—even spiritual—harmony, Eliot, as we shall see, diverges
sharply from medievalism’s wish for spiritual intimacy, truth, comfort, and consolation
from Nature. Instead, this chapter concludes that Eliot actually warns her readers of
Nature’s capriciousness and the dangers inherent in relying on the natural world for
moral animation or direction. The third and final chapter of this thesis examines the
medievalist social order reflected in Adam Bede, from both a traditional and hereditary
feudal structure as well as from a Carlylian belief in an aristocracy of wise, talented, and
naturally heroic leaders who are divinely impelled to rule. Although the social structure
of Adam Bede’s Hayslope village seems to promote the idealized feudal values that
medievalists such as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris propose, this final section concludes
that Eliot employs both traditional and Carlylian feudal motifs in the novel as foils by
16
For example, Chandler observes that one of medievalism’s major aspects was “its
identification with nature and the past and thus with simpler and truer modes of feeling
and expression and nobler and more heroic codes of action…Ruskin alone consistently
bases his medievalism on a belief in nature and nature’s God…with a full and explicit
recognition of the relationship between nature, art, and man” (195-196).
14
which she will ultimately devalue, reject, and finally put to rest the notion of aristocratic,
feudal rule. In Arthur Donnithorne’s moral failures and in Adam Bede’s moral
enlargement, Eliot tests the Victorian-medievalist social model and finds it inadequate.
At Adam Bede’s end we are left with virtually no ruler, and we discover that what Eliot
has been advocating all along is an ideal society of human sympathy animated by an
emotionalism that Eliot dubs fellow feeling. In Adam Bede, Eliot leaves us finally with a
homeostatic community (at least for the time being) that is prepared to confront the
vagaries of the natural world with resolute endurance and a sense of shared comfort
rather than with a look back to a past that Eliot demonstrates was flawed and insufficient
to provide answers for the nineteenth century in transition.
15
CHAPTER 2
GEORGE ELIOT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ‘OLD RIGID FORMS’ OF
CHRISTIANITY IN ADAM BEDE: A PATHWAY TO FELLOW FEELING
Without…fellow feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity
towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful
journey? (Adam Bede 228)
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come
out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
(Adam Bede 464)
As leading Victorian medievalists such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin
looked to the Middle Ages for a solution to an increasingly alienated, mechanistic society
questing for its lost faith and social order, religious belief became central to the
medievalist social remedy. Alice Chandler observes of Carlyle specifically: “Faith is the
key to [his] medievalism” (144). Richard Altick also comments on Carlyle’s reparative
vision of social order: “Nothing short of society’s ethical and religious regeneration, a
return to the serene faith, obedience, and values of [medieval times]—not identical with
them…but harmonious in spirit—will offer any promise of genuine cure” (xv). And A. L.
Le Quesne says of Carlyle, “to most of its adherents [Victorian medievalism] was no
more than a wistful nostalgia….To Carlyle…twelfth-century England becomes [in its
moral essence] a model…which is capable of being revived in the present” (75). Of John
Ruskin, Chandler claims: “[Ruskin] expresses the value of preserving the past as an
object lesson or inspiration to mankind, since it is an embodiment of the higher values of
an age that was closer to God…” (200), and she observes that Ruskin believed: “In
contrast to the Christian feudalism of the Middle Ages…[the Victorian] age can only
16
show atheistic liberalism” (207). George Landow claims of Ruskin, “In the manner of the
Old Testament prophet, [Ruskin] demonstrates that the actions of his contemporaries
reveal that they have abandoned the ways of God” (171). The nineteenth-century
Anglican Church, having been found wholly inadequate by medievalist reformers in
meeting the needs of the Victorian poor, of its doubting intellectuals, and of its urban
disenfranchised,17 suffered woefully in comparison to the idealized spiritual model of the
17
Commenting that the nineteenth-century Church had become more interested in
fashion and status than in being a meaningful social institution (6), Chandler observes
that the English Church was attacked for being neglectful to the poor and unresponsive to
the crisis of belief occurring during the period. Besides the external challenges to the
Church posed by documents such as Darwin’s Origin of Species published in 1859—the
same year as Adam Bede—and Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833), Josef Altholz
observes that there were internal difficulties in the Church as well:
[Victorian] humanitarian values …were incompatible with the
commonplace theology of the day…[which stressed] the sterner and
harsher Christian doctrines: original sin...atonement, eternal punishment.
The unbalanced emphasis of these essentially unattractive themes was
bound to come into conflict with the sentimental and humanitarian spirit
of the age...The conflict between humane ethics and rigorous dogma
[eternal damnation, for example] was responsible for some of the more
spectacular losses of faith in the 1840s. (65)
George Eliot, in her initial year immersed in London’s intellectual circles, wrote for the
Westminster Review a January 1851 review of McKay’s The Progress of the Intellect
(1850). In it she addresses the clergy’s failure to appeal to the morality within human
nature and the new community of sympathy to which an enlarged morality was tending:
it would be wise in our theological teachers, instead of struggling to retain
a footing for themselves and their doctrine on the crumbling structure of
dogmatic interpretation, to cherish those more liberal views of biblical
criticism, which, admitting of a development of the Christian system
corresponding to the wants and the culture of the age, would enable it to
strike a firm root in man’s moral nature, and to entwine itself with the
growth of those new forms of social life to which we are tending. (281)
Altholz also points to the Anglican clergy for the failure of nineteenth-century faith:
After all, Lyell's geology and Darwin's biology, even if absolutely true,
affected only a few chapters of Genesis, leaving the rest of the Bible
untouched; but biblical criticism, even in the hands of devout clergymen,
affected the whole text and inspiration and authority of the Bible and
perhaps of the Christian faith. Most important, however, is the fact that
what ultimately alienated the rising intellectual generation was, not the
17
medieval Catholic Church touted by Victorian medievalists. Their portrait of the intense
religious fervor, unity, Church benevolence, and ecclesiastical leadership enjoyed by
Christians of the Middle Ages was an antidote for the morally conflicted nineteenth
century which suffered from a staggering lack of faith.
Although few critics have commented on the issue, George Eliot’s 1859 novel
Adam Bede is, like the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, deeply attracted to the old forms
and ceremonies of medieval Christian sacramental practices.18 Though little noted, the
novel’s powerful allusions to Catholic sacraments seem to echo Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s
external challenge of science or criticism, but the response of the
spokesmen of orthodox religion. It was the failure of orthodoxy, not the
strengths of heresy or infidelity, which lost the intellectual classes to
religion. (62)
Amidst this religious climate, Victorian medievalism called for a reversion to the
idealized medieval past perceived as filled with as sense of intense faith, sacred duty, and
heroic sacrifices for God.
18
Throughout the text I use the phrases “the medieval Church” and “the pre-Reformation
Church” to refer to the Christian Church in England as yet undivided by the schism with
Rome and the Reformation. I also use the phrases in relation to Christian sacramental
practices because it was the medieval period that saw the formalization of the ceremonies
and rituals of the Christian sacraments. It is the mystery and emotionalism of these rites
and observances to which medievalists such as Carlyle, Scott, Tennyson, and Ruskin
refer when idealizing the Christian faith as unifying and edifying. For example, according
to Anthony Symondson, the church architect A. W. N. Pugin, a convert to the nineteenthcentury idealization of the medieval faith, “venerated medieval Catholicism” (192) and
advocated a recovery of the meaning and value of sacraments (most specifically baptism
and the Eucharist) in the Church of England of the 1840s and 1850s. Symondson claims
that Pugin sought to revive the ceremonies, the vestments, the plainsong chant, the
ornamentation, the dappled lighting of stained glass and candle flame of the medieval
Church. Symondson claims that Pugin’s plea found greater fulfillment in the Victorian
Church of England “than in the Catholic Church” (194) at the time. Thus, the
medievalists’ call for a return to the medieval Church was not so much a plea for a new
Catholicism but a return to the mysteries and emotionalism of the undivided medieval
Church. Because Eliot was steeped in the works of Tennyson, Scott, Carlyle, and Ruskin,
it is to the medieval Church of ritual and form I believe she refers when discussing the
“old rigid forms” in Adam Bede and in her letters. This is particularly true of her
references to the sacrament of confession (177), which was not formalized until 1215.
See footnote 30.
18
call for a return to the unifying and fervent medieval Church whose ardor they believed
would reanimate spiritual faith and divinely inspired social harmony. More generally, the
importance Eliot places on Christian practices of the pre-Reformation Church in Adam
Bede appears to align her with one of the central themes of Victorian medievalism—the
call for renewed faith in God and obeisance to the medieval Church’s social structure.
Interestingly, George Eliot, who, according to conventional wisdom, lost her religious
faith after exposure to German biblical criticism before embarking on a literary career,
launches in Adam Bede an exploration of religious faith, belief, and reverence for the
unseen that takes her readers on a journey to past devotional forms.19 Though little noted
19
Marilyn Orr calls for a reappraisal of Eliot’s “understanding of faith and for a more
comprehensive analysis of the deep and inextricable interrelation of faith and imagination
that informs her aesthetic” (451). Conventional wisdom about George Eliot’s religious
beliefs maintains she traveled a simple trajectory from Evangelical Christian to atheistic,
secular philosopher whose “extensive readings in and speculations on philosophy are
crucial to her novels” (Anger 76). However, notes Orr, critics such as Peter S. Hodgson
and Barry Qualls have challenged that assumption and suggest that Eliot had, as Qualls
observes, “a three-decade history of struggling with the meaning of Bible and
Christianity for the nineteenth-century mind” (120). And Lord Acton is frequently quoted
as describing Eliot as an emblem “…of a generation distracted between the intense need
of believing and difficulty of belief…” (Fears 485). For example, Eliot seems to display
antagonism towards Christianity in her November 18, 1853 letter to Sara Hennell: “I
can’t help laughing at the imbecility of that pious dictum—that if Shelley had lived till
now he would have been a Christian—that is, he would have been old woman enough for
it by this time” (Haight 2: 126). Yet, her views regarding Christianity had softened by
1859, the year Adam Bede was published. In a December 6, 1859 letter to Francois
d’Albert-Durade, Eliot attempts to explain her changed attitude:
there are many pages in “Adam Bede” in which you do not recognize the
‘Marian’…of old Geneva days…Ten years of experience have wrought
great changes in that inward self: I no longer have any antagonism towards
any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have
expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that
predominates over all argumentative tendencies. I have not returned to
dogmatic Christianity—to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a
creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen—but I see in it the
highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in
19
by critics, Adam Bede is not merely a novel whose religious inquiry engages in Anglican
and Methodist discourse; it is also a novel that evokes images of the medieval religious
forms and practices of Catholicism—images such as the lay counterparts to the
sacraments of baptism, confession, and Eucharist described in the novel, the roadside
crucifix that Eliot mentions in chapter thirty-five (a holy icon commonly found enshrined
on the roadsides of Roman Catholic countries), and the narrator’s description of Dinah
Morris that echoes medieval hagiographies20—lending credence to the claim that Adam
Bede supports a return to the faith and order of the Middle Ages so idealized by Victorian
medievalists.
However, besides substantiating that Eliot does indeed plumb medieval Christian
forms in Adam Bede, this chapter will argue that Eliot, while sympathetic to some aspects
of medievalism’s vision of religion, ultimately challenges and rejects the medievalist
tendency to reconstruct an idealized religious past. Nor do Eliot’s evocations of the
the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward
life of sincere Christians in all ages. (Haight 3: 230-31)
Christianity plays an enormous role in George Eliot’s novels, and an exploration of
Eliot’s complicated relationship with religion, both old forms and new, is called for,
particularly in the novel Adam Bede—a novel that engages in a dialogue between the
Anglican Church and Methodism, but which is also a novel resonating with echoes of
such deeply Catholic forms as sacramental confession, Catholic hagiography, and
Catholic iconography.
20
In chapter two of Adam Bede, we are given the virgin-saint Dinah’s portrait: her plain,
nun-like Quaker garb and grey eyes that “seemed rather to be shedding love than making
observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to
give out, rather than impressed by external objects” (27), and we are told of her delicate
face “that [makes] one think of white flowers with light touches of color on their pure
petals” (27). Much later, Adam Bede’s narrator more strongly conveys the idea of
hagiography when she describes Dinah’s reaction to Adam’s voice: “She started without
looking around, as if she connected the sound with no place…She was so accustomed to
think of impressions as purely spiritual monitions, that she looked for no material visible
accompaniment of the voice” (579).
20
medieval Church in Adam Bede represent the views of her early influences such as the
positivist Auguste Comte—views that extolled the structure of the medieval Catholic
Church.21 And neither is the mirror that George Eliot turns on early nineteenth-century
England and the more medieval distant past a mere exercise in wistful nostalgia. Instead,
Eliot’s use of medieval Catholic imagery in Adam Bede is part of the
Self-described experiments in life…[she conducts to determine]…what
gains from the past revelations and discipline [of religious expression] we
must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting
history…[and to what extent] the religion of the future must be one that
enables us to do without consolation. 22
In performing this experiment, George Eliot looked to the past in humanity’s shared
memory of religious myths and rituals. The sense of awe, mystery, and emotional
intensity she observed in pre-Reformation religious practices would form the basis for her
religion of the future, a religion that expressed “less care for personal consolation
21
Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century French positivist philosopher (1798-1857)
wrote in both his major works, Cours de philosophie positive and Systeme de politique
positive, that the achievement under medieval Catholicism of a fundamental division
between spiritual and temporal authority would be more and more recognized as the
greatest advance ever made in the general theory of the social organism. Eliot,
sympathetic to Comte’s positivism, parts company with him on this matter and criticizes
his views on the medieval Church in a selection, “Historic Guidance,” from a notebook
the author kept. See Pinney 361, 373-76.
22
See letter from George Eliot to Dr. Joseph Frank Payne (January 25, 1876) in Haight 6:
216. In a much earlier letter to John Chapman, written on July 5, 1856, Eliot mentions the
1856 work Compensation by Henrietta Lascelles, Lady Chatterton and states: “I wonder
what the story called ‘Compensation’ is. I have long wanted to fire away at the doctrine
of Compensation, which I detest, considered as a theory of life” (See Haight 2: 258). A.S.
Byatt observes that one of Eliot’s moral lessons to her readers is “that resignation and
suffering do not produce compensation and some divine reward for virtue” (xvi).
21
[promised by traditional Christianity] and a more deeply awing sense of responsibility to
men.”23 This new religion of humanity would result in a society based on the best of
human love and compassion. Thus for Eliot, ardent faith—whether secular or spiritual—
becomes one way to achieve the emotional engagement necessary to elevate otherwise
sterile rules and strictures to a living morality based on human sympathy, compassion,
and responsibility.24 According to Peter Hodgson, a central theme in all of Eliot’s novels
is the notion that the bonds of human emotional engagement and the compassion deriving
from that engagement allow humanity to survive without the illusion of Divine
consolation and reward. And Eliot’s own words attest to this idea:
As for the ‘forms and ceremonies,’ I feel no regret that any should turn to
them for comfort, if they can find comfort in them…[but the] highest
calling is to do without opium [i.e. religious doctrines of consolation and
compensation] and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed
endurance…[so that] new and higher possibilities may open up—but we
must make them happen.25
As a result, far from advocating a return to medieval Church structures that she so
pointedly criticizes in her essay, “Historic Guidance,”26 Eliot extracts from the old
23
See letter from George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe (May 8, 1869) in Haight, 5:31.
24
Alexander Welsh observes that Eliot came to believe that “knowledge and ideas by
themselves will never bring humanity to change anything. [Eliot] has always believed in
emotional engagement: without feeling, our moral precepts…would be sterile” (72).
25
See letter from George Eliot to Mme. Eugene Bodichon (December 26, 1860) in
Haight 3: 365-66.
26
Eliot says of Comte’s advocacy of the medieval Church:
22
religious forms the emotional animation that binds humanity in the kind of loving
sympathy that elevates it. And despite Eliot’s commitment to a clear-eyed apprehension
of the real that she delineates in the novel’s chapter seventeen, her reverence for the
“mystery that lies under the process”27 gives her the freedom to reach back in Adam Bede
to medieval Church sacraments for the awe, the mystery, and shared memory that bind
humanity and allow it to confront the real. As Hodgson states of George Eliot’s
commitment to realism: “mystery is to be found not above and beyond the real but
beneath and within it” (20). We learn of Eliot’s perception of religious feeling as a
unifying, strengthening, and elevating emotion when Adam Bede’s narrator tells her
readers:
It has yet to be shown that [men transformed into priests—whether secular
philosopher/priests or religious priests with sacramental claims]…will be
exempt from the temptation of warping influences which have hitherto
made corporations disposed to amplify their power even to tyranny &
created in them a spirit of jealously towards all inspirations outside their
‘pale irregularities.’ Doctrine, no matter of what sort, is liable to putrefy
when kept in close chambers to be dispensed accordingly to the will of
men authorized to hold the keys.
“Historic Guidance” was not published in George Eliot’s lifetime and can be found in the
manuscript entitled “Miscellaneous Notes/George Eliot” (MS HM 12993) at the
Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. “Historic Guidance” is considered George Eliot’s
only known critique of Auguste Comte whose positivist philosophy is said to have
influenced her well-known Realist Project. For a transcript of the essay and further
discussion of it, see Pinney 373.
27
Basil Willey claims: “although [George Eliot’s] religious consciousness was preeminently moral, it was not exclusively so; she also had the faculty of reverence, the
capacity to acknowledge the reality of the unseen” (238). He quotes a December 5, 1859
letter from Eliot to Mme. Eugene Bodichon written shortly after Eliot’s reading of
Darwin’s Origin of Species: “to me the Development Theory, and all other explanations
of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the
mystery that lies under the processes” (238). The letter is reproduced in Haight 3:148.
23
Love [i.e. ardent, romantic love]…is hardly distinguishable from religious
feeling. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the
influence of autumn sunsets…all bring with them the consciousness that
they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and
beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into
silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses
itself in the sense of divine mystery. (42)
Adam Bede’s allusions to religious feeling are explicit in its attention to Anglicanism and
Methodism, but they are also importantly present in its largely unnoticed references to
medieval sacramental practices—the most obvious being the narrator’s reflections on the
“old rigid forms” (177) of sacramental confession. Thus the novel’s highly Catholic
motifs of baptism by fire, confession, and the sanctifying communion of holy bread and
wine, in particular, become a stimulus for the engagement of human “emotion in its
keenest moment” (42) lost in a sense of divine mystery. It is this engagement that for
Eliot ultimately enlarges human sympathy and thus, morality.
In Adam Bede, George Eliot argues strongly for the emotionalism aroused by
medieval religious forms as she follows Adam’s moral progress throughout the novel.
Adam, until his encounter with Bartle Massey in a dull upper room in Stoniton, is
protected from the emotional consequences of human failure because his morality is
emotionally disengaged, uncompromising, and rather compassionless. As Arthur
Donnithorne tells Adam, “I should think…you never have any struggles within yourself. I
fancy you would master a wish that you had made up your mind it was not quite right to
indulge…I mean, you are never shilly-shally…” (182). And Adam responds: “I don’t
24
ever remember being see-saw...when I’d made my mind up…when a thing was wrong…I
think my fault lies the other way. When I’ve said a thing, if it’s only to myself, it’s hard
for me to go back’ ” (182). The novel’s narrator further elaborates Adam’s rigidity in
chapter twenty:
Whenever Adam was strongly convinced of any proposition, it took the
form of a principle in his mind…perhaps here lay the secret of the
hardness he had accused himself of: he had too little fellow-feeling with
the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences. Without this
fellow feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity towards our
stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey? And
there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it—by
getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must
share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their inward
suffering. That is a long and hard lesson, and Adam had at present only
learned the alphabet of it in his father’s sudden death… (228)
In a fashion similar to her chapter-seventeen digressio on the value of realism, Eliot here
reveals her manifesto on the necessity for human sympathy and fellow feeling in order to
transcend rational but sterile moral principles. It is emotional engagement with others that
informs one’s moral choices in a way that allows empathy for human failure in a caring
social body. And it is this emotional awareness and sympathy for what is loveable in even
flawed individuals that enlarges one morally and permits the resolute endurance of
human suffering. As Adam Bede’s narrator states:
25
There are few prophets in the world, few sublimely beautiful women; few
heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I
want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men…more
needful that my heart should swell with loving admirations at some trait of
gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with
me…(197)
Much later in the novel, the novel’s narrator justifies the need for fellow feeling among
the flawed and ordinary people forming her community: “We are children of a large
family, and must learn…to be content with little nurture…and help each other more”
(320). But interestingly, it is Adam, when he discusses the sterility of Mr. Ryde’s
preaching versus that of his successor Mr. Irwine’s more emotionally engaged ways, who
makes the clear distinction between religion based on sterile precepts and a religion of
emotional engagement and resulting moral enlargement: “ ‘But,’ said Adam, ‘I’ve seen
pretty clear, ever since I was a young ‘un, as religion’s something else besides notions. It
isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings” (198). Shortly thereafter,
Adam, prophetically as it happens, observes this distinction again:
‘There’s things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come into you
like a rushing mighty wind as the Scripture28 says, and part your life in two
a’most, so as you look back on yourself as if you was somebody else.
Those are things as you can’t bottle up in a “do this” and “do that”…’ (199)
However, although intellectually Adam recognizes Mr. Irwine’s capacity to forgo
his predecessor’s cold, rigid, rationality in favor of a more emotionally engaged attitude
28
See: New Testament, Acts 2:2.
26
that “make[s] folks love and respect him” (199), Adam’s growth in this regard is still, as
the novel’s narrator suggests, in its infancy. But as we shall see, it is a spiritual wind that
blows through Adam’s heart to finally produce the fellow feeling required for moral
growth. Barbara Hardy observes:
Adam’s suffering comes out of his rigidity….His unimaginative rigidity,
[is] in its way as egotistic as Arthur’s self-delusion or Hetty’s shallow
inability to feel the world outside herself….Adam’s tragic growth…must
be a change of heart before it is a change of mind. (38-9)
And, as we shall see, it is Adam’s experience with a number of sacramental forms that
finally affects his heart and allows change to foment there.
When confronted with Hetty’s actions and subsequent trial, Adam’s world turns
groundless and he reels helplessly; his unyielding moral certainty leaves him
directionless and disoriented. In the small Stoniton inn, under the shepherding care of
Bartle Massey, Adam finally understands the full import of the words he speaks after
Arthur’s betrayal: “I seem as if I’d been measuring my work from a false line, and had
got it all to measure over again” (346). The ostensibly rational values that initially make
Adam judgmental and arrogant in his moral certainty have collapsed. And as Adam
struggles with Hetty’s crime, “[he shrinks from]…an “over-mastering sense of pain…”
(463). But Adam possesses the sensibility that Pinney claims Eliot herself possessed:
“[the] keen and sympathetic sense of the way in which old forms of belief and
observance are bound up…in the social body…” (358). That is, the shared memory of old
religious tradition has the ability to arouse in Adam the fellow feeling that unites him
with his community. And as he awaits Hetty’s fate in Stoniton, Eliot’s evocation of the
27
sacraments of baptism and Eucharist provides for Adam the vehicle for his moral
enlargement and change of heart.
Bartle Massey, the teacher and confirmed bachelor, in his new role as minister to
Adam’s exquisite emotional pain, seems more father and priest than the crusty
misogynist Eliot has so far portrayed him. Says Massey to Irwine: “ ‘Trust to me….I
shan’t thrust myself on [Adam]—only keep an eye on him, and see that he gets some
good food, and put in a word here and there’ ” (455). But in the vigil that precedes
Hetty’s sentencing, Adam, with Bartle Massey’s intercession, will receive more than
material sustenance and the comfort of words. By means of two Christian sacraments—
the baptism by fire and the shared Eucharistic meal—Adam undergoes rebirth into a new
life of human sympathy. As Hardy states, “This is the appropriate purgation for Adam,
whose fault, we have been told much earlier, was a lack of fellow-feeling…[this] crisis
[of Hetty’s fall] forces fellow-feeling upon…a mind which fuses principle and action too
readily and too simply” (43). The observance of old religious forms, bound as they are in
sympathetic human memory, ultimately cleanses his heart of judgment and arrogance and
replaces them with compassion for flawed humanity—those animating emotions of moral
development.
In the midst of the crisis, Massey offers Adam a Eucharistic counterpart:
‘I must see to your [Adam’s] having a bit of the loaf, and some of that
wine Mr. Irwine sent this morning…Come now,’ he went on bringing
forward the bottle and the loaf, and pouring some wine into a
cup…‘Drink a drop with me lad—drink with me.’ Adam pushed the cup
gently away. (465)
28
Disoriented, fearful, and overwhelmed with suffering, Adam has no appetite for the
shared meal. Before he can partake of the Eucharist of human connectedness, he must
undergo a cleansing—a baptism—to prepare him for a Eucharistic consecration into new
moral vision.
In describing Adam’s baptism, Eliot uses sacramental language that hearkens
back to medieval sainthood. Adam’s baptismal cleansing is not the benign ceremony to
which infants are subjected at the Anglican baptismal font. Here, Adam undergoes the
sacrament of martyrs and saints of old—baptism by fire:
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration,
the initiation into a new state….Adam looked back on all the previous
years as if they had been a dim sleepy existence, and he had only now
awaked to full consciousness …as if all that he had himself endured and
called sorrow before was only a moment’s stroke that had never left a
bruise. Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may
come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new
pity. (464)
With this new awe, Adam absorbs Massey’s description of Hetty’s trial and the older
man’s adjuration: “ ‘you must show courage. Drink some wine now, and show me you
mean to bear it like a man’….Adam with an air of quiet obedience, took the cup, and
drank a little” (465). It is only then that Adam determines to attend Hetty at court rather
than have her stand friendless:
‘I’ll go to court…it’s cowardly for me to stay away….We hand folks over
to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves. I used to be hard sometimes:
29
I’ll never be hard again’…Nerved by an active [i.e. animating] resolution,
Adam took a morsel of bread and drank some wine…he stood upright
again. (467)
In Adam’s quiet and heroic transformation in that small, upper room, Eliot demonstrates
Adam’s newfound perception of the “beauty of commonplace things…[and] loving
admiration of some trait of gentle goodness in faulty people who sit at the same hearth
with [him]…” (197). In his conversion, the simple workman Adam Bede, though
insignificant by medieval feudal standards, has morally progressed. He has discarded his
rigid precepts and allowed, through the evocation of baptismal cleansing and Eucharistic
consecration, fellow feeling to alter his heart. To use Adam’s words, at this moral turning
point he is parted “in two a’most, so as you look back on yourself as if you was
somebody else” (199). His ascension is in stark contrast to the knightly Arthur
Donnithorne’s downfall—a downfall presaged by his failure to complete the third
sacramental ritual in Adam Bede—the very Catholic sacrament of confession.29
If ever there were a character poised for romantic medieval heroism epitomizing
chivalric virtues, it is Adam Bede’s Arthur Donnithorne. Arthur, young and knightly, a
member of the gentry, heir to a feudal-like estate, and armed with dreams to better his
lands and tenants, also struggles with a moral challenge. He fears he cannot, despite all
arguments against them, resist his unacceptable sexual impulses towards Hetty:
He was dissatisfied with himself, irritated, mortified. He no sooner fixed
his mind on the probable consequences of giving way to the emotions
which had stolen over him…than he refused to believe such a future for
29
Confession is also known as the sacrament of reconciliation.
30
himself….Yet…[it] seemed, he couldn’t quite depend on his own
resolution, as he had thought he could….There was no knowing what
impulse might seize him. (151)
In order “to secure himself from any more of this folly [regarding Hetty]” (152), Arthur
resolves to confess to Mr. Irwine:
He would go and tell Irwine—tell him everything. The mere act of telling
would make it seem trivial; the temptation would vanish…In every way it
would help him to tell Irwin….He was sure he should sleep now…there
was no more need for him to think. (152)
But Arthur Donnithorne finds that the confession he hopes will stop him from
“[behaving] like a scoundrel [if there is] no shame or conscience to stop him” (182) is
more difficult than he believed it would be. By setting the proposed confession in
Irwine’s study, Eliot signals her reversion to the more distant religious past that she is
about to evoke: “It was a small low room, belonging to the old part of the house…”
(183). But even in the small, low surroundings of the oldest part of his confessor’s house,
Arthur, in the presence of bright sunlight and a well laid breakfast table, fails to unburden
himself:
One can say everything best over a meal…We take a less gloomy view of
our errors now our father confessor listens to us over his egg and coffee…
(177)…[But Arthur] was conscious of increased disinclination to tell his
story about Hetty….and the mere fact that he was in the presence of an
intimate friend, who had not the slightest notion that he had any such
serious internal struggle as he came to confide, rather shook his own belief
31
in the seriousness of the struggle…what could Irwine do for him that he
could not do for himself? (186)
Even when Reverend Irwine performs the faint echo of a medieval examination of
conscience, 30 Arthur is incognizant of the prompt and remains unanimated by any
resolution to confess. Irwine asks Arthur:
“Is it some [moral] danger of your own that you are considering in this
philosophical, general way?”...Brought suddenly and involuntarily to the
brink of confession, Arthur shrank back, and felt less disposed towards it
than ever….he might hereafter find the fact of having made a confession to
the Rector a serious annoyance…[and] Mr. Irwine was too delicate to
imply even a friendly curiosity. (188-189)
With apparent regret, Adam Bede’s narrator explains Arthur’s failure to confess by
hearkening once again to medieval forms of the pre-Reformation Church:
Still there was this advantage to the old rigid forms, that they committed
you to the fulfillment of a resolution by some outward deed: when you
have put your mouth to one end of a hole in a stone wall, and are aware that
there is an expectant ear at the other end, you are more likely to say what
you came out with the intention of saying, than if you were seated with
your legs in an easy attitude under the mahogany, with a companion who
30
After the Roman Catholic Lateran Council of 1215, the sacrament of confession
became mandatory for all Christians. Because intention was crucial to the commission of
a sin, many instruction manuals, intended to examine the medieval sinner for such
variables of sin as intention, frequency, degree, and contrition, were issued to poorly
trained parish priests as guides for determining proper penance. For more on medieval
examination of conscience, see Braswell’s The Medieval Sinner.
32
will have no reason to be surprised if you have nothing in particular to say.
(177)
Arthur’s casual attempt at confession remains ineffective because the informal, modernday setting in his friend Irwine’s rectory lacks the emotional urgency and immediacy of
the more ritualized, medieval sacrament. The casual interview fails to awaken in Arthur
the genuine contrition and humility that might have bound him to Irwine in sympathy.
The “keen and sympathetic sense of the way in which old forms of belief and observance
are bound up…in the social body” (Pinney 358), though present in Adam, is missing in
Arthur. His inability to experience the emotions appropriate to a confessional moment
prevents him from practicing a higher standard of moral conduct. Instead, he deceives
himself into trivializing his passion for Hetty and into believing that Irwine, his “father
confessor,” can do nothing for him.
Arthur’s inability to access the emotions of confessional humility and contrition,
which might have animated right conduct in him, is pointedly addressed by the narrator’s
remarks in chapter eighteen: “no wonder the secret [of our emotions] escapes the
unsympathizing observer, who might as well put on his spectacles to discern odours”
(218). It is as if Arthur is the traveler of which the narrator speaks who, finding a crucifix
by the roadside and knowing “nothing of the story of man’s life upon [the earth, finds]
this image of agony…strangely out of place in the midst of…joyous nature” (395).31
31
Margaret Reynolds notes: “crucifix statues are frequently found at crossroads in
France, Germany, and Italy [i.e. countries with large Roman Catholic populations
familiar with the iconography of Christ crucified]” (643). A traveler with no knowledge
of Christianity would be puzzled at such an image and fail to be moved by the emotions
of a shared religious past. Eliot seems to liken this traveler’s absence of sympathy to
Arthur’s lack of sympathy for the consequences of his actions.
33
Eliot’s narrator contrasts this lack of awareness with Adam Bede’s sensibilities, which
are more finely attuned and sympathetic to the echoes of religious belief and observance:
Adam’s thoughts of Hetty did not deafen him to the [Sunday] service; they
rather blended with all the other deep feelings for which the church service
was a channel to him this afternoon, as a certain consciousness of our
entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of
keen sensibility. And to Adam the church service was the best channel he
could have found…its recurrent responses and the familiar rhythm of its
collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have
done; as, to those early Christians who have worshipped from their
childhood upward in catacombs, the torch-light and shadows must have
seemed nearer the Divine presence that the heathenish daylight of the
street. The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its
subtle relations to our own past. (217)
Adam’s appreciation of and emotional response to church forms and rituals demonstrate
his subtle relationship to a shared religious emotionalism and, therefore, his capacity for
fellow feelings that transform barren moral precepts. And, although at this point in the
novel Adam has yet to face his final crisis and ultimate triumph in Stoniton, we sense that
the route to his secret emotions is secure. It is Arthur, with all his good intentions, his
advantages of birth, and his seeming awareness of social responsibility, who proves to be
deficient in his ability to appreciate shared religious emotionalism. He refuses the
evocation of sacramental confession not just once but more purposefully and
determinedly again after Adam strikes him in the Grove. Indeed, following the incident, it
34
is Adam who offers the confession: “there was one thing on [Adam’s] mind…it was to
confess what had been unjust [the blow] in his own words. Perhaps he longed all the
more to make his confession, that his indignation might be free again…” (334). However,
Arthur does not respond in kind, and by withholding a confession about Hetty, he denies
an honest, emotional connection with Adam:
Arthur was in the wretched position of being an open, generous man, who
has committed an error which makes deception seem a necessity. The
native impulse to give truth in return for truth, to meet trust with frank
confession, must be suppressed…The only aim that seemed admissible to
him now was to deceive Adam to the utmost; to make Adam think better
of him than he deserved. (335)
Arthur, by again denying this counterpart of sacramental reconciliation, distances himself
from the possibility of sympathetic human community with both Irwine and Adam. His
inability to confess until the consequences of his actions have run far beyond recall
dooms him to moral stagnation. Arthur has proven to be unsympathetic to the emotional
possibilities of sacramental form. The emotions of contrition and humility remain
unprovoked, and, to paraphrase Eliot’s words, he wears glasses to smell odors (218).
As has been noted in numerous critical readings of George Eliot, her relationship
with religion was a complicated one comprising, as Qualls states, a three-decade-long
struggle in an attempt to discover a place for religious thought within the nineteenthcentury intellect (120). Although Lord Acton refers to George Eliot as the nineteenthcentury emblem “of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and
35
difficulty of belief” (485),32 Eliot in Adam Bede manages to reconcile her nineteenthcentury realism with her reverence for the mysteries and emotionalism inherent in the
medievalists’ ideal of undivided Christianity in the Middle Ages. It is the shared memory
and influences of sacramental religion that Eliot evokes in her deployment of the
sacramental language of confession, baptism, and the Eucharist in Adam Bede. In her
ongoing, written experiments to discover “a religion more perfect than any yet
prevalent…[one with] less care for personal consolation, and a more deeply awing sense
of responsibility to man,”33 Eliot is far from espousing the medievalists’ nostalgia for an
idealized, but authoritarian and dogmatic religious order. In 1860, George Eliot wrote:
I have faith in the working-out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or
any other church has presented, and those who have strength to wait and
endure, are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls—their
intellects as well as their emotions—do not embrace with entire
reverence…34
Instead, through a shared human reverence for religious history and symbolic meaning,
she hopes for a nineteenth-century progression to a more perfect morality invigorated by
the recognition of the mysteries, the truths, and sympathies that bind the ordinary, the
everyday, and the flawed in clear-eyed and enduring community. One of Eliot’s goals in
Adam Bede is to explore the mysteries of the real to discover what is emotionally
32
See Fears, J. R.
33
See letter from George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe (May 8, 1869) in Haight 5: 31.
34
See letter from George Eliot to Mme. Eugene Bodichon (December 26, 1860) in
Haight 3: 365-66.
36
animating for all people who seek a moral life bound by human sympathy. As Wiley
says: “[Eliot] was not, of course, a practising Christian, but in her estrangement from the
religion about Jesus she was none the further from the religion of Jesus” (237). In 1863,
Eliot seems to confirm this in her own words:
It seems to me the soul of Christianity lies not at all in the facts of an
individual life, but in the ideas of which that life was the meeting point
and starting point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of
the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ
either in its historical influence or its great symbolic meaning.35
Over four years earlier she had concluded that moral and intellectual progress was
measured by an understanding of all forms of knowledge as well as all forms of faith—
that atheistic intolerance of any sort of veneration and emotional knowledge was
unacceptable:
I have a growing conviction…that we may measure true moral and
intellectual culture by the comprehension and veneration given to all
forms of thought and feeling which have influenced large masses of
mankind—and of all intolerance the intolerance calling itself philosophical
is the most odious to me.36
How fitting then that Adam Bede’s two religious figures, Mr. Irwine and Dinah Morris—
the former, a nineteenth-century representative of an Anglican Church perceived to be
sterile and unbending, the latter a spirited evangelist whose Methodism challenged the
35
See letter from George Eliot to Mrs. Peter Taylor (July 30, 1863) in Haight 4: 343.
36
See letter from George Eliot to Sara Hennell (February 24, 1857) in Haight 2: 301.
37
out-of touch English Church in the Victorian Age—are ultimately subsumed into the
ecumenical, undivided Hayslope community of love and fellow feeling, a community
animated not by rational sterile precepts but the shared emotionalism of Eliot’s
sacramental language.
38
CHAPTER 3
FINDING THE CAPRICIOUSNESS OF NATURE IN ADAM BEDE’S PASTORAL
NOSTALGIA: A DECIDEDLY NON-MEDIEVALIST APPROACH
There are so many of us, and our lots are so different: what wonder that
Nature’s mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crises of our lives?
(Adam Bede 320)
The medieval feudal system, for which the Victorian medievalists were so
nostalgic, not only represented to them a more harmoniously integrated social system, but
it also signified an allegiance with an organic and natural environment that was in
opposition to the perceived unnatural and ecologically destructive nineteenth-century
urban setting. According to Alice Chandler, Victorian medievalist thinkers idealized
pastoral societies that were based on medieval feudal models because these systems
retained their closeness to Nature, thus allowing the vital, the creative, and the less
artificial aspects of human nature to flourish. As a result, Nature became inextricably
entwined with the Divine—the source of life, growth, and the innately human—as the
Victorian-medievalist view attempted to counter the fear that the nineteenth-century
natural sciences saw no need for the spiritual. Both Michael Alexander and Kevin Morris
concur. Alexander states that both the Romantics and Victorian medievalists “identified
God more and more directly with man and his world” (70), and Morris observes that in
the nineteenth century, an age when science was disproving the existence of the
supernatural in Nature, Victorian medievalists felt an urgency to assert a metaphysical
vision within the natural world. He claims: “In the Middle Ages, natural supernaturalism
needed no assertion….To assert such a vision is, then, medievalist rather than medieval”
39
(191). Alfred Siewers also seems to agree. He describes the medievalist assertion of the
metaphysical within the pastoral world as “ecocentric” (141), where
the landscape of the spiritual realm integrated with the
physical….Christian [and pagan] notions of Paradise [were] all
interwoven with ‘real world’ natural topography….Rather than an
allegorical backdrop or structure of vertically separated physical and
spiritual landscapes…this integrative cultural landscape was…a
polycentered reality [bisecting earthly reality and otherworldly ideals].
(141)
It is no wonder then that George Eliot’s bucolic depiction of rural England at the
dawn of the nineteenth century seems to place her sympathies with the Victorian
medievalist vision of idealized Nature imbued with divine animation. The novel’s late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pastoral setting rings with echoes of the feudal
Middle Ages in medieval social practices that, according to Chandler, had never quite
died.37 Human harmony within the natural rhythms of time, labor, and custom in the
simpler, agrarian universe of Adam Bede seems to create the sort of “home” (Chandler
10), that medievalism hoped for—a home where the divine in Nature might evoke the
best of the human spirit—where the spiritual and temporal might coexist in an
environment that is Edenic at the same time it is real. Josephine McDonagh notes:
“in Adam Bede…we enter a world in which time is regulated by the natural cycles of the
day and the seasons—even of the body….Decisive moments in the text are always
recounted against a background of naturalistic detail” (43). McDonagh further states that
37
See Chandler 13.
40
despite Eliot’s commitment to realism in Adam Bede’s chapter-seventeen digressio, the
author’s appeal to a Victorian nostalgic spirit lies in part in her romantic descriptions of
Nature in the novel: “the scenes she describes are frequently green and sundrenched.
Daily life is represented against the backdrop of picturesque landscapes, and is organized
around [pastoral] communal celebrations, festivals and parties…” (41). In attempting to
transcend rationalism, McDonagh seems to say, Eliot conjures an imaginative view of
Nature in Adam Bede—that of a highly idealized natural world connected harmoniously,
even spiritually, with society. Indeed, from chapter one on, Adam Bede abounds in vivid
pastoral imagery that tends towards the ideal;38 and in Adam Bede, Eliot does seem to
subscribe to the Victorian medievalists’ vision of the natural world in a number of ways:
she resurrects from ancient and medieval literature the locus amoenus;39 she speaks of the
affinity with the earth, with time, and with natural phenomena40 enjoyed by Hayslope’s
inhabitants; and she nostalgically describes the bucolic village of Hayslope.41
38
Lucie Armitt states:
[Eliot’s] novels are…predominantly, novels of the countryside, novels
that self-consciously exploit the conventions of the pastoral tradition.
Pastoral literature is dependent on far more than simply a rural setting. It is
also dependent on a utilitsation of idealisation, nostalgia, [and]
consolatory techniques…Basically, then, it suggests a form of the simple
or good life which is set up in contrast to the complex, difficult and rather
unsatisfactory life that readers of literature know only too well… (43)
39
Locus amoenus is Latin for “pleasant place.” As a literary trope, it is often depicted as
a green, pastoral, and Edenic site with shady trees, cool running waters, and verdant
grasses.
40
For example, natural phenomena such as harvest, weather, seasons, sheep shearing,
haymaking—and even Hetty Sorrel’s pregnancy.
41
As mentioned earlier, the phenomenon of medievalism was at times amorphous and
difficult to define. Medievalism’s principal tenets, which included harmony with Nature,
pre-Reformation faith, and feudal order, encompassed a wide range of philosophies. For
41
However, this chapter will argue that Eliot’s evocation of pastoral themes in
Adam Bede does not represent sympathy with Victorian medievalism, with its
worldly/otherworldly (i.e., polycentered) representations of Nature and its belief in the
ennobling effects of pastoral harmony upon human nature. Nor are Adam Bede’s pastoral
themes a simple nostalgia for what McDonagh describes as “the earlier, more respectable
and socially conventional period of [George Eliot’s] life” (40). 42 In Adam Bede, we shall
see that Eliot departs dramatically from the medievalist view that allegiance with Nature
evokes the divine within the human soul. Instead, the vivid pastoral setting of Adam Bede
becomes for Eliot a foil against which she explores those values that more truly animate
otherwise sterile moral precepts. Nature in Adam Bede, though bountiful, idyllic, and
seductive, is also fraught with danger and deception; and a relationship with Nature alone
does not ensure the emergence of the best in the human spirit. It will be argued that
despite Adam Bede’s ostensible deployment of pastoral, medievalist motifs, Eliot is
actually warning her audience that the same vital, liberating, and creative forces of
Nature spoken of by Victorian medievalists are capricious, morally dangerous, and
insufficient for moral animation.
example, Carlyle’s conservative call for a return to the benevolent patriarchy of feudal
society as well as Morris’s almost Marxist exaltation of the late Middle Ages (with its
rise of the artisan/laborers and guilds that ostensibly freed workers from feudal patriarchy
as well as capitalistic exploitation), are both interpreted as medievalist. Further, at times
the goals of medievalism overlapped other social movements of the nineteenth century
that were nostalgic for the pastoral past. Although the communal-agrarian social ideal is
not owned by Victorian medievalism, I claim that, given the strong confluence of other
medieval motifs in Adam Bede, it makes sense to view Eliot’s depiction of Nature as
another evocation of the medievalist ideals with which she experiments in the novel.
42
McDonagh here refers to John Cross’s George Eliot’s Life (1885-86), in which Cross
discusses Eliot’s early life in England’s rural Midlands, her love of certain rural
locations, and her deep Christian faith.
42
Unlike the Victorian medievalists’ idealized Nature, in Adam Bede Nature is a
collision of both appetitive and generative aspects of the natural world, and the result is
moral confusion and morally unpredictable results. Take, for example, one of Eliot’s lush
descriptions of Hayslope’s beauty at the opening of Book IV:
The reaping of the wheat had begun in our north midland country of
Loamshire, but the harvest was likely still to be retarded by the heavy
rains…The eighteenth of August was one of these days, when the sunshine
looked brighter in all eyes for the gloom that went before. Grand masses
of cloud were hurried across the blue, and the great round hills behind the
Chase seemed alive with their flying shadows; the sun was hidden for a
moment, and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy; the leaves,
still green, were tossed off the hedgerow trees by the wind; around the
farmhouses there was a sound of clapping doors; the apples fell in the
orchards; and the stray horses on the green sides of the lanes and on the
common had their manes blown about their faces. And yet the wind
seemed only part of the general gladness because the sun was shining. A
merry day for the children, who ran and shouted to see if they could top
the wind with their voices; and the grown-up people, too, were in good
spirits, inclined to believe in yet finer days, when the wind had fallen.
(319)
However, amidst the beauty and merriment of sun and windswept August days, Nature
becomes an unpredictable, ultimately, and deceptive force that cannot be relied upon. The
sentence that follows the paragraph above reads: “If only the corn were not ripe enough
43
to be blown out of the husk and scattered as untimely seed!” (320). Thus, the wind that
enlivens the Chase with flying shadows, the wind that is a part of Hayslope’s general
gladness—that inspires hopes for even better days—also scatters the village corn too
soon and leads to its waste. The parallels between the too-soon spilt corn and the futility
of the Arthur’s too-soon spilt seed at the Hermitage and Hetty’s moribund seed in the
form of her dead and abandoned baby are obvious. That the quote above directly
precedes Adam’s discovery of Arthur’s and Hetty’s secret seems no coincidence.43
Nature has practiced its sleight-of-hand and led Arthur and Hetty to moral confusion,
ultimate tragedy, and the untimely dissipation of the best in their characters. In this light,
the prophecy of Adam Bede’s Mr. Craig (when he makes an incorrect weather forecast)
takes on greater significance and seems to refer to the whole of Nature: “ ’the weather,
you see’s a ticklish thing, an’ a fool ‘ull hit on’t sometimes when a wise man misses;
that’s why the almanecks get so much credit. It’s one o’ them chancy things as fools
thrive on’ ” (226). Here Eliot again underscores the fickleness and unreliability of Nature.
In Adam Bede, Eliot actually devalues the Victorian-medievalist idealization of
Nature by demonstrating that Nature alone does not imbue humanity with noble
sentiments. Hayslope inhabitants—Adam, Arthur, and Hetty—are all closely involved
with the natural world: Adam is a carpenter and conservationist whose “perceptions were
more at home with trees than with other objects…He kept them in his memory, as a
painter does…” (323); Arthur, as the future squire, has grand aspirations for tending the
Chase estate forests and caring for his tenant farms and farmers; and the dairymaid Hetty
43
The one time Adam allows himself to be guided by instinct and impulse occurs in that
scene in Fir-Tree Gove. He strikes Arthur—an act he considers a great evil.
44
tosses and pats her butter within the Poysers’ dairy in a scene “to sicken for with a sort of
calenture44 in hot and dusty streets—such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of
new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure
water…” (91). However, reliance on morally indifferent Nature can lead to individual
separation from Eliot’s vision of a human community that is an organic whole. As Eliot’s
narrator in Adam Bede tells her readers: “There are so many of us, and our lots are so
different: what wonder that Nature’s mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crises
of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn…to be content with little
nurture [from Nature]…and help each other more” (Adam Bede 320). In this statement,
Eliot’s narrative voice explains what Hodgson describes as “less care for personal
consolation [e.g. in religious dogma or Nature] and a more deeply awing sense of
responsibility to men” (2). It is the bonds of loving human sympathy that elevate
humanity rather than the deep affinity with and reliance upon Nature so extolled by
Victorian medievalists. Of the three Hayslope natives mentioned above, only Adam is
ultimately spiritually enlightened and enabled to grow morally. He achieves this not
because he allows himself to be guided by an ostensible moral rectitude in Nature
(indeed, as a craftsman he controls and shapes Nature), but because he has found
compassion and human sympathy.
McDonagh has noted that Eliot’s use of the pastoral in her early novels leads,
according to some critics, to “a pleasant sense of intimacy” (42), but for other critical
readers Adam Bede’s pastoral themes have been
44
Margaret Reynolds describes “calenture” as a tropical fever that caused sailors to
perceive the sea as green fields, causing them to jump overboard (621). Eliot’s use of this
image in describing the Poysers’s dairy is another reminder of the illusory and deceptive
quality of pastoral nature.
45
the cause of suspicion and the focus of critique. Critics on the left, such as
Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in particular, have found the early
novels, much more than the late works, to be guilty of a kind of
ideological subterfuge: that is, they present a vision of rural England as
natural and harmonious, but which in reality disguises all manner of class
conflicts and interests... (42)
It will fall to chapter three to analyze whether the pastoral and feudal-like setting of
Adam Bede serves the social subterfuge of harmonious pastoral nostalgia that is
mentioned by critics such as Williams and Eagleton.45 That chapter will examine more
fully the novel’s relationship to the wistful, Victorian-medievalist view of a great social
order linked to the orderly operations of Nature. However, it is important here to address
the above assertion that Eliot’s vision of pastoral nature in Adam Bede’s bucolic England
is a subterfuge of peaceful nostalgia serving to obfuscate conflicts within the novel. This
chapter argues that, rather than conceal tensions in the novel by employing the screen of
Hayslope’s idyllic natural world, Eliot actually clarifies for her audience that Nature, far
from being orderly and peaceful, is capricious, unpredictable, and most certainly capable
45
Raymond Williams, in reviewing the works of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy for an
examination of fictional depictions of rural life in England, notes the following:
I cannot remember when I suddenly realized that [the pastoral experience]
was not really true at all….When at last I saw that it was false I knew I
had to look for its sources…not only [in] sentimental ruralists…[but] more
critically, the…progressives… (299)
And Terry Eagleton claims:
a potentially tragic collision between ‘corporate’ and ‘individualist’
ideologies is consistently defused and repressed by the forms of Eliot’s
fiction…The function of framing, externalizing forms of Eliot’s rural [e.g.
the pastoral] form is to allow [transparency]…but in doing so to recast the
historical contradictions at the heart of Eliot’s fiction into ideologically
resolvable terms. (112)
46
of betraying some of its own loyal inhabitants. In this sense, the pastoral experience in
Adam Bede underscores realism by highlighting the moral confusion and conflict beneath
the novel’s dreamy, bucolic setting. Because Nature is a misleading force over which the
human character must prevail in order to achieve freedom and growth, the novel’s
pastoral setting—though beautiful, romantic, and lush—is fickle and cannot be relied
upon as a route to divine enlightenment.
In Adam Bede, Eliot provides numerous descriptions typical of pastoral literature
that, says Lucie Armitt, depends on “idealization, [and] nostalgia…[suggesting] a form of
the simple or good life which is set up in contrast to the complex, difficult and rather
unsatisfactory life that readers of literature know only too well…” (43). If the entirety of
Hayslope village conformed to Armitt’s definition of pastoral literature, then it would be
a peaceful universe that had located a comprehensive, alternative world-view to the
increasingly mechanized nineteenth century. The village itself would be a wide-ranging
locus amoenus, 46 offering an escape from industrialized city tensions; and it would
46
In medieval romance, the locus amoenus is often a place of respite from the dangers of
the quest, or it is a place removed from social order where erotic passions might be safely
explored. Although the locus amoenus as literary trope dates back to ancient times, its
deployment was popular in medieval romantic literature. See for example, Chretien de
Troyes’s twelfth-century Chevalier de la Carrette, Gottfried von Straussburg’s eleventhcentury Tristan, and Chaucer’s fourteenth-century “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and his
spoof of the locus amoenus in “The Merchant’s Tale,” both from The Canterbury Tales.
For a thorough discussion of the locus amoenus in the Middle Ages see Clarke: Literary
Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400.
David Evett provides a brief history of the locus amoenus as a literary trope and
states:
established very early in European literary tradition, the sweet conjunction
of grass, shade, and water becomes the standard device for bringing
together man and nature, the nearly indispensable rhetorical introduction
to…a reflection upon the familiar pastoral contrast of country and city
life…[The] formulaic topos [of the locus amoenus] is conceived as a
pausing place…an emblem of rest, relaxation, retirement. (505)
47
provide its residents, as Chandler describes it, a way “to naturalize [humanity] in the
universe and make [humanity] feel related to [Nature]” (7). And, superficially at least, the
seemingly idyllic world of Hayslope does appear to conform to Armitt’s description of
the pastoral life desired by Victorian medievalists and perceived by critics such as
Eagleton and Williams as an idyllic diversion from human conflicts.
As McDonagh states of Adam Bede: “we enter a world in which time is regulated
by the natural cycles of the day and the seasons…Decisive moments in the text are
always recounted against a background of naturalistic detail [which Eliot] assiduously
researched…for the period covered by the novel” (43). Indeed, Hayslope’s community
seems deeply related to the cycles of nature by tradition, custom, and livelihood,
providing an ostensible alternative, for instance, to the more soulless and industrialized
Stoniton. For example, as Adam works late into the night, he shudders at the sound of “a
smart rap, as if with a willow wand…at the house door, and Gyp [the dog], instead of
Robert Hass, in his short summary of the locus amoenus, reports:
the locus amoenus is always…an ideal realm that is far removed from the
painful difficulties of the real world. By imaginatively creating the [ideal]
landscape of one’s desires, [the author using the trope] in effect, controls
nature and transforms its wildness into a realm that is suitable for human
harmony and habitation. (674)
Hass claims that Tennyson, himself an interpreter of medieval history and myth, provides
an appropriate example of a Victorian-medievalist kind of locus amoenus. He states the
poet used the Victorian nostalgia for idealized nature as a locus amoenus of consolation
in his poem, In Memoriam:
Tennyson offers [after he describes his initial grief] several sections of
retrospective, classical pastoral in which he give us a glimpse of the locus
amoenus…he assumes the role of the shepherd and summons a happy
memory of the past as an idyllic place that is suitable for a communion
with a loved one. (675)
Finally, according to Michael Squires, George Eliot in Adam Bede
varies only slightly the traditional representation of the locus amoenus.
Topographically the locus amoenus in Adam Bede is a grove of trees—
Arthur calls it ‘a sacred grove’—which skirts one side of a privately
owned but unenclosed game preserve called Donnithorne Chase. (670)
48
barking, as might have been expected, gave a loud howl” (56). We learn that local
tradition acknowledges the willow rap as a portent of death. In fact, Adam’s father is
most likely drowning as the willow rap sounds and Adam opens the door: “Nothing was
there; all was still…leaves were motionless, and the light of the stars showed the placid
fields on both sides of the brook quite empty of visible life” (56). Grounded in the
mysterious traditions of Nature, the rational Adam is nonetheless enough in touch with
the local legends of his pastoral world to recognize Nature’s mysteries:
he had that mental combination which is at once humble in the region of
mystery, and keen in the region of knowledge…he was at once penetrating
and credulous [of superstition]…he believed in dreams and prognostics,
and to his dying day he bated his breath a little when he told the story of
the stroke with the willow wand. (56).
Besides its pastoral traditions, Hayslope is also bound to Nature by its customs. The
ancient rhythms of the autumn harvest and its accompanying feast profoundly move
Adam and connect him in an almost sacramental way to Nature’s seasons:
he saw in the distance the last load of barley winding its way towards the
yard-gate of the Hall farm, and heard the first chant of ‘Harvest Home!’
rising and sinking like a wave. Fainter and fainter, and more musical
through the growing distance, the falling dying sound still reached him…It
was enough to make Adam feel that he was in a great temple, and that the
distant chant was a sacred song. (561)
But more important than pastoral tradition and custom, Hayslope is intimately bound to
Nature in its livelihood. Adam Bede contains numerous references to Hayslope’s alliance
49
with the land in its farming, haymaking, sheep shearing, and husbandry. Eliot’s lush
description of the Poysers’ dairy (quoted above) is an example of this alliance as is the
nostalgia her narrator experiences when Adam drinks Mrs. Poyser’s whey:
Ah! I think I taste that whey now—with a flavor so delicate that one can
hardly distinguish it from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that
fills one’s imagination with a still, happy dreaminess. And the light music
of the dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with the twittering of a bird
outside the wire network window—the window overlooking the garden,
and shaded by tall Gueldres roses. (236)
And readers also hear from Dinah Morris in more general terms about the links between
the pastoral and Hayslope’s livelihood. For example, she describes Hayslope as a
community where “people lead a quiet life among the green pastures and the still waters,
tilling the ground and tending the cattle” (101), and a country where “they’re rich in corn
and cattle, and ground so level and easy to tread…” (131).
However, amidst the pastoral depictions in Adam Bede, within the novel’s lines
describing the bounty and peace Hayslope residents’ enjoy from their alliance with the
land, there seems always to be an admonition from Eliot warning of conflicts and
negative consequences from too great a reliance upon Nature—that Nature is a false
guide leading those in league with it astray. Far from using pastoral Nature to induce a
dreamy distraction from conflict and tension (in the way Mrs. Poyser’s whey produces
the narrator’s reverie), Eliot seems to use the pastoral to clarify rather than obscure
tension within the novel. Recall for example, the above-cited merry winds that bring joy
to Hayslope yet cause the corn to spill its seed too soon. Dinah Morris, observing bucolic
50
Hayslope from the distance of Stoniton, notes to Mr. Irwine that because of Nature’s
lushness there is an actual unresponsiveness to the Divine among rural villagers living a
quiet life among green pastures: “there’s a strange deadness to the Word, as different as
can be from the great towns…the promise is sweeter when this life is so dark and weary,
and the soul gets more hungry when the body is ill at ease” (101); and later, in a
conversation with Lisbeth Bede, Dinah declares that the beauties of Nature might actually
deceive people into thinking they are in a false Divine presence, keeping them from the
true Divinity in God’s word:
[In Stonyshire] the men spend their days in the mines away from the
sunlight [Nature]. It’s very blessed on a bleak cold day, when the sky is
hanging dark over the hill, to feel the love of God in one’s soul, and carry
it to the lonely, bare, stone houses, where there’s nothing else to give
comfort. (131)
Eliot, through Dinah, asks her readers not to be fooled into thinking that pastoral Nature
provides comfort. In the absence of such beauty, it becomes clear that God alone, in the
spirit of human fellowship, provides solace and guidance to a troubled or excited heart.
These statements are a radical departure from both the Victorian medievalist and the
Romantic views of Nature as Divine. But it is the idyllic locus amoenus of Adam Bede
that triggers the novel’s greatest conflicts.
There is arguably no more familiar pastoral motif than the locus amoenus, and its
presence in Hayslope seems to evoke in Adam Bede the Victorian-medievalist ideal of a
pristine physical world integrated with Christian and pagan elements of Paradise. Adam
Bede’s locus amoenus is a Paradisiacal spot called Fir-tree Grove:
51
It was…the delicious labyrinthine wood which skirted one side of the
Chase…It was a wood of beeches and limes, with here and there a light,
silver-stemmed birch—just the sort of wood most haunted by nymphs: you
see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping from
behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their soft
liquid laughter—but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye, they
vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe that their voice
was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose themselves into
a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost
bough. It was not a grove with measured grass or rolled gravel for you to
tread upon, but with narrow, hollow-shaped, earthy paths, edged with faint
dashes of delicate moss—paths which look as if they were made by the
free-will of the trees and underwood, moving reverently aside to look at
the tall queen of the white-footed nymphs. (141)
However, despite Eliot’s romantic depiction of Fir-Tree Grove as, in Hass’s words, “an
ideal realm that is far removed from the painful difficulties of the real world” (674),
Eliot, in the idyllic passage above, is already signaling to her readers that Nature, far from
being an Edenic safe haven, is morally ambiguous, duplicitous, and fraught with peril. If
one looks too closely at Fir-Tree Grove with “a sacrilegious eye,” pastoral images will
vanish. Nymphs of the locus amoenus might “metamorphose” and confuse the senses,
deceiving one into believing they are running brooks or mocking, tawny squirrels.
Nature, in the form of the grove’s trees, has a “free-will” which seems designed to
morally obfuscate rather than morally enlighten. The paths they form are not even and
52
measured—they are not fit for sure strides—they are narrow, mossy, and hollow. And, as
the above passage continues, the signs become clearer that Eliot’s locus amoenus is a
perverted one:
It was along the broadest of these paths that Arthur Donnithorne
passed…the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper
boughs…[it was] an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful
face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and
poisons us with violet-scented breath. (141)
Idyllic Nature is now revealed as a deceiver; for at the heart of Fir-Tree Grove is the
Hermitage, the site Arthur’s seduction of Hetty Sorrel and the site of their ultimate moral
self-deception. Squires argues that Eliot uses the pastoral charm and sensual nature of
Fir-Tree Grove as the location of Arthur and Hetty’s moral education, teaching them the
penalties and consequences of those who secret themselves from the community to
engage in the impulses of Nature: “George Eliot creates a sensual haven [in the Grove]
and then [stresses] the moral implications of the meetings between Arthur and Hetty…”
(671), and: “George Eliot turns from [Hetty’s and Arthur’s] sensuality to the moral
consequences of their meetings, largely because the philosophy underlying the scene
stresses the consequences of an action over its immediate pleasurable value to the
characters...” (672).47 However, by describing the locus amoenus in Adam Bede as a mere
47
Squires also points out that the Grove in Adam Bede is a place of intense, intuitive
experience—not only the site of Hetty’s seduction, but also the rare example in the novel
of Adam’s fury and sin. As he strides through the Grove, delighting in the sight of its
magnificent beeches, he is stricken at the sight of Arthur and Hetty’s kiss. He bursts into
a rage:
that could be controlled no longer…All his jealousy and sense of personal
injury, which he had been hitherto trying to keep under, had leaped up and
53
tool for teaching about moral consequences and social responsibility, Squires seems to
neglect what Eliot says specifically about Nature. Rather than a nostalgia for the idyllic
and restorative in Nature, and rather than an unexpected trope to demonstrate the
consequences of sin and social irresponsibility, Adam Bede’s locus amoenus represents
Nature as a trickster, a moral obfuscator that seduces Arthur and Hetty into moral selfdeception and degeneration rather than life sustaining generation. In Fir-Tree Grove we
might find Eliot’s strongest statements regarding the separation of the Divine from
Nature, of Nature’s duplicity, and of its false comfort.
Even the temporal cycles of Nature, Eliot implies, cannot be relied upon to
provide comfort and freedom from the tensions and alienation of a more industrialized
society. The major action of Adam Bede moves through one year of the seven that
comprise the story, and Eliot imbues even the passing of the seasons (a process that
should, in the pastoral literary tradition, prove to be consolatory) with tension and
uncertainty. From the time readers are aware of Hetty’s seduction, Eliot’s naturalistic
detail regarding the passage of time becomes anything but reassuring.48 Something as
ostensibly regular and consoling as seasonal cycles in the natural order become in Adam
Bede a source of anxiety, not just for Hetty as her pregnancy burgeons, but also for
mastered him…Poor Adam, possessed by rage that could find no other
vent...stood face to face with the first great irrevocable evil he had ever
committed…The blow soon came, and Arthur fell, his head lying
concealed in a tuft of fern, so that Adam could only discern his darkly-clad
body…and what was the good of it? What had he done by fighting? Only
satisfied his own passion… (Adam Bede 327-9)
48
Hetty’s pregnancy supposedly occurs sometime between Arthur’s July birthday feast
and the time in mid-August when Adam discovers Hetty’s little pink scarf at the
Hermitage in Fir-Tree Grove.
54
readers who are drawn into counting the days and months with her by means of Eliot’s
naturalistic signals for the passage of time. For example, signs are unmistakable that it is
autumn in Hayslope: “The barley was all carried at last, and the harvest suppers went
by…The apples and nuts were gathered and stored; the scent of whey departed from the
farmhouses, and the scent of brewing came in its stead” (381); and we learn “It was a dry
Sunday, and really a pleasant day for the 2nd of November…” (388) in the same chapter
that Adam discerns “there was a more luxuriant womanliness about Hetty of late”
(390).49 As an anguished Hetty contemplates suicide, Eliot provides another vivid image
of time’s further passage that confirms not only Nature’s indifference to her (where just
months earlier it had seduced and exhilarated her) but also time’s inadequacy in
providing comfort or security:
It was about ten o’clock [in the early part of February] when Hetty set off,
and the slight hoar frost that had whitened the hedges in the early morning
had disappeared as the sun mounted the cloudless sky. Bright February
days have a stronger charm of hope about them than any other days in the
year. One likes to pause in the mild rays of the sun, and look over the
gates at the patient plough-horses turning at the end of the furrow, and
think that the beautiful year is all before one. The birds seem to feel just
the same: their notes are as clear as the clear air. There are no leaves on
the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the grassy fields are!...What a
glad world this looks like…the image of agony would seem to [a traveller]
strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature. (394)
49
The luxuriant womanliness Adam observes is one of Eliot’s subtle references to
Hetty’s pregnancy.
55
Time has also become Arthur's enemy. For all his anticipation of time’s most regular
cycle, i.e. his grandfather’s death, his inheritance, and his ascendancy as squire to better
promote Hayslope’s natural endowments, time brings him no such consolation. He
succumbs to morally confusing Nature and that cycle, so expected and so comforting, is
irreparably destroyed. At his grandfather’s death, Arthur is virtually banished from
Hayslope; he will never preside over the Chase; and he will never produce an heir of his
own.
Perhaps the difference that Lawrence Jones sees between Eliot’s Adam Bede and
Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd is not as great as he imagines. In
examining the differences in the pastoral motifs in Adam Bede and Far From the
Madding Crowd, he notes:
George Eliot and Hardy were relatively close in their readings of the
scheme of Natural Law, but temperamentally they were very different.
Both might have seen Nature as a great regular system operating with
indifference to human values and aspirations, but the feeling-tone of
George Eliot's natural description is Wordsworthian rather than
Naturalistic. For example, in the opening of Book IV…when George Eliot
is pointing out the indifference of Natural Law to individual men she still
personifies [Nature as the mother of a large family]. (406)
As we have seen above, the quote to which Jones refers50 can be read quite differently—
in a way that seems to fit more closely with Eliot’s professed desire for a social organism
whose moral precepts are based on human sympathy and compassion rather than Nature.
50
See page 41 of this text for further explanation.
56
It is because we cannot rely on Nature and because we are a family of humanity separate
from Nature that we can hope for comfort and survival. When Jones tells us “Michael
Squires has shown how with Fir-Tree Grove in Adam Bede…George Eliot’s locus
amoenus is ultimately used to make a moral point, while Hardy’s is used to suggest the
natural power of the erotic” (407), it seems a mistake to say that Eliot is making any point
to her readers other than the capriciousness and unreliability of Nature. Her locus
amoenus is a warning to her readers that Nature is confusing and deceitful more than it is
a lesson for Arthur and Hetty. In that sense, Eliot’s locus amoenus is also a symbol of
“the natural power of the erotic” that confuses Hetty and Arthur and separates them from
the ideal—the community of human sympathy and compassion.
As she does by evoking old religious forms in Adam Bede, Eliot also does in
evoking the pastoral in the novel. She extracts the mythical, the awe-inspiring, and the
shared human memory from the rural past that binds humankind in the kind of loving
sympathy that elevates it. But always, Eliot proceeds to show her readers the illusory
quality of that memory to clear the way for a superior vision. As Hodgson states:
“mystery is to be found not above and beyond the real but beneath and within it” (20).
Although bucolic Nature in Adam Bede is a stimulus to a human imagination that can
reanimate human sympathy through memory, Nature does not invigorate the morality of
Eliot’s new society. Moral progress in Adam Bede evolves from a kind of moral decisionmaking whose source is human sympathy and emotional connectedness to one’s fellow
human being. In Adam Bede, Nature’s beauty and cycles become tricksters, dreamy
opiates that present challenges to be overcome by human compassion and empathy—
57
sometimes, as in Adam’s case, successfully, and sometimes, as with Arthur and Hetty,
unsuccessfully.
Thus, by focusing her lens on England’s bucolic past, Eliot actually emphasizes
the failure of Nature alone to foster harmony, order, and human freedom. Unlike the
Victorian medievalists who idealize a Nature intertwined with the divine, Eliot in Adam
Bede seems to regard too close an affinity with the natural world as fraught with the
perils of moral error and excessive individual freedom. For Eliot, human psychological
complexity, moral choice, and sympathetic membership in an organic community—
rather than Nature—morally elevate one and summon the best in one’s character. In this
light, Eliot’s introductory epigraph for Adam Bede (an excerpt from Book Six of
Wordsworth’s The Excursion) takes on added meaning:
So that ye may have
Clear images before your gladdened eyes
Of nature’s unambitious underwood
And flowers that prosper in the shade. And when
I speak of such among the flock as swerved
Or fell, those only shall be singled out
Upon whose lapse, or error, something more
Than brotherly forgiveness may attend. (1)
The reader understands that Arthur and Hetty (like the unnamed, unwed mother in
Wordsworth’s shady grave) are to be pitied and extended brotherly love and forgiveness.
Wordsworth in this section of Excursion finds beauty and the occasion for moral teaching
even in Nature’s “unambitious underwood [and] flowers that prosper in the shade.”
58
Eliot’s lapsed, anguished and conflicted characters, grown in the lush but obfuscating
beauty of ideal Hayslope, discover that even the most ostensibly intoxicating and
consoling aspects of idyllic Nature—so exalted by medievalists—revert to “unambitious
underwood” without a morality that springs from an organic social whole guided not by
natural order but by human sympathy and compassion.
59
CHAPTER 4
GEORGE ELIOT, THOMAS CARLYLE, AND THE MEDIEVALIST SOCIAL
HIERARCHY: PUTTING THE FEUDAL ORDER TO REST IN ADAM BEDE
‘See if you’ll get a stranger to lead such a life here as that: a maggot must
be born in the rotten cheese to like it, I reckon.’ (Adam Bede 378)
Although the nineteenth-century medieval revival in Britain stemmed from
complex and at times opposing ideologies, it is safe to say that one of its major missions
was a response to the explosive social crises of 1830s and 1840s industrial Britain and the
plight of the alienated and disenfranchised poor and working classes attempting to live
meaningfully within an exploitive and utilitarian sociopolitical system. For example,
Richard Altick, writing of Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle’s 1843 answer to these
social conditions, states that 1840s Britain was packed with “social dynamite” (viii) as a
result of the injustices of both the self-interested, aristocratic rule of agrarian England and
the urban cash-payment nexus51 regime of “new style” capitalists whose “Benthamite
philosophy…fragmented the ‘brotherhood of man’ into millions of atoms, each person a
faceless, nameless nullity in the view of all the rest, his value reckoned solely by the
contribution he could make toward the nation’s material wealth” (xi).52 Such a dire
51
According to Richard Altick, the “cash-payment nexus” is a phrase coined by Thomas
Carlyle. It refers to his belief that, under Benthamite capitalism, “the sole obligatory
relationship man bore to fellow-man was the exchange of money in payment for labor or
goods…[money] was the only cement that pretended to hold society together” (xi).
52
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher and social reformer whose
principle of utility was, according to Mary Warnock, “the foundation…of his morality. It
formed the means of distinguishing the good from the bad in all aspects of life (even
including the aesthetic)” (4). Bentham objected to the notion of an innate instinct
60
(whether human or divine) for what was right, moral, and just. Such a subjective system
of morality, he believed, led to confusion and moral relativism. According to Peter
Stokes, Bentham perceived moral character as a social product (712) and not the result of
special moral intuitiveness or heightened powers of moral deduction. Bentham attempted
a new science of morality that discounted the notion that any spiritual or noble claims to
superior moral judgment motivated moral actions. Instead he proposed that the only
standard for good or right action was a strict economy of material, and thus empirically
demonstrable, increases in the pleasure or happiness resulting from human behavior.
Stokes states that Bentham’s conception of the workhouse was one such
institution. His workhouses were based on a calculus for happiness that aimed for
material benefits for the greatest number of individuals. Thus, it seemed to reduce the
suffering poor to a mere mathematical equation of numbers alone. Claims Stokes,
Bentham was
a doctrinaire social engineer [whose]…ambitious plan, stipulated that all
the poor would come under one central authority and that relief would
only be granted on admittance to a workhouse—hence the need for its vast
scale…a particularly egregious example of a freakishly controlling, antiindividualist attempt to ‘de-moralize’ the poor—to judge them as a group,
rather than on an individual basis within a moral framework…In insisting
on the necessity for rigorous categorization, Bentham emphasizes the
irrelevance of personal relations and individual endeavors. (712)
As a result, says Stokes, charity becomes a governmental institution run as a business by
a joint-stock company that promotes profit and other advantages of private ownership
(715). Private charity was the enemy of industry, according to Bentham, because it
interfered “detrimentally with the labor market” (714).
Bentham’s secularized and materialistic utilitarian philosophies were extremely
popular and influential in various Victorian attempts at political, social, and economic
reform. But according to Stokes, Bentham’s utility was targeted by such nineteenthcentury thinkers as Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin as the foundation of “systematic,
institutional cruelty informed by the abstract economic principles” (712) that formed the
basis of the New Poor Laws in 1834 (for more on Bentham’s proposed handling of the
poor, see Bentham’s 1798 Pauper Management Improved).
Bentham’s devoted student, John Stuart Mill (1803-1873), was an ardent believer
in individual freedom and later elaborated Bentham’s utilitarianism. And, according to
Chandler, he condemned attempts to revive feudalism:
[Mill’s] speech on the ‘Utility of Knowledge,’ delivered in 1823,
condemns the new feudalism as a mask for tyranny where the ‘the appeal
from the ages of civilization to the age of barbarism is made [by those
who] would wish to see the great mass of mankind subject to the despotic
sway of nobles, priests, and kings. (114)
It is not surprising then that utilitarians, says Chandler, “found the assumptions of
medievalism at war with their beliefs…[however the] very fact that Mill…found the need
to write against it shows how strongly the idealization of the past held the English mind”
(114). True or not, Chandler’s point does indicate ideologies early in the nineteenth
century in conflict over the restoration of an idealized past in England. Encompassed in
61
perception of the disintegration of social order, sense of community, and human
individuality, from the perspective of nineteenth-century medievalism, necessitated a
look back to the idealized Middle Ages for solutions. Typically, medievalist social
remedies included the responsible leadership of a paternalistic ruling class over a
harmonious, productive, all-inclusive, near-utopian social order. This new nineteenthcentury feudalism, as Chandler describes it, was much more than a reaction to an
industrialized society, but rather it was “allied with…a utopianism that created the ideal
out of the past rather than from the future....[medievalism was a myth that] combined an
idealistic desire to create a secure and harmonious state with a realistic belief that reason
alone53 could not achieve that goal” (102). Arguably, there was no greater champion of
medievalism as a cure for societal ills than Thomas Carlyle.
Describing his age as “the Mechanical Age…the Age of Machinery in every
outward and inward sense of that word…which has forgotten the moral, religious,
spiritual condition of the people [in favor of] their physical, practical, economical
condition as regulated by public laws…[where] Men are to be guided only by their selfinterests” (Signs of the Times 465), Carlyle abhorred and rejected Benthamism in favor of
a new feudal order based on religious faith and the rule of wisdom. A. L. Le Quesne
comments that Carlyle believed that “the utilitarian frame of mind derived from the
this conflict were such social issues as class, social justice, individual freedom, the role of
religion, and the nature of economic progress.
53
In Chandler’s phrase “reason alone,” we assume that she refers not only to Bentham’s
reduction of human happiness to a calculus, but also to the larger nineteenth-century
belief that a movement towards rationalism and materialism signified human progress.
Opponents of this view included the conservative Edmund Burke (1729-1797) who
believed that the death of chivalry meant the end of altruism and the beginning of selfinterest as the approved motive of behavior.
62
teachings of Jeremy Bentham…sought to reduce human emotions to measurable
quantities, human relationships to mechanical interactions, human dealings to sheer
calculations of profit and loss” (57). Richard Altick explains that in Carlyle’s view, “the
get-rich-quick, dog-eat-dog…spirit that dominated British economic life [in the
nineteenth century]…was supplied by Benthamite utilitarianism [which held] that the
highest good was freedom…freedom to make as much money as possible without
limitations imposed by government…or conscience…” (x). And interestingly, Suzy
Anger includes George Eliot in the group of nineteenth-century thinkers who, like
Carlyle and Charles Dickens, perceived utilitarianism as socially dangerous: “Like
Dickens, [Eliot] criticizes the utilitarian ethics deriving from Jeremy Bentham, a moral
view she describes as concerned with ‘arithmetical proportion,’ ‘balance of happiness,’
and the ‘quantitative view of human anguish,’ a theory that…[turns] individuals into
abstractions…” (79). Seeking an alternative to the cash-payment nexus of industrialism
and the feckless leadership of the nineteenth-century aristocracy, Carlyle outlined
(primarily in Chartism, Past and Present, Heroes and Hero-worship, and Signs of the
Times) his idea of social reform on an idealized concept of medieval heroes.
Central to Carlyle’s solution for effecting a genuine cure for the “quackery and
cant”54 of Victorian society was the new feudal hero. Ostensibly wise, selfless,
chivalrous, and dutiful (even at the expense of personal happiness), the new hero’s
superior and divinely endowed wisdom entitled him to rule those less heroic, thus
54
Richard Altick explains that Carlyle typically employed the words “quackery” and
“cant” in Past and Present to sum up “the hypocrisy, the worship of false gods and the
pursuit of wrong ends, complacency, dependence upon slogans and legislative
contrivance and expediency” (xi) that typified nineteenth-century society.
63
assuring them of benevolent, just, and responsible governance.55 In return for such
munificence, the hero’s subjects were to make him the object of their worship, fealty, and
obedience. Chandler claims that within Carlyle’s social remedy four premises were
implicit: “The spiritual nature of the universe, man’s need to recognize it…his need to
subordinate himself to those best able to understand it…[and] the belief that the Middle
Ages was the period when all these ideals were best realized” (131). Carlyle, like the
German Romantics, says Chandler, believed that “God continually manifested himself in
appearances, whose meaning man could exert himself to grasp” (125). Heroes embodied
and manifested God’s divinity more thoroughly than most men and thus “were better
able than others to see the moral significance of life and apply this vision to the everyday
concerns of society” (125). Le Quesne further elaborates Carlyle’s philosophy of social
order by stating that “the ruling class of a society is responsible for the moral and
physical well-being of the people over whom it rules, but it is responsible for the people
rather than to them. The responsibility is upward, to the divine justice that presides over
the social order” (56). As Altick states, “Nothing short of society’s ethical and religious
regeneration” (xv) would suffice for Carlyle as a remedy for the ills of his age. In Past
and Present, Carlyle calls for “more Wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the
Wisest, we must have an Aristocracy of Talent!” (34). This new aristocracy of faithbased wisdom and talent composed Carlyle’s ruling class, not the wealthy and greedy
urban industrialist or worse, the agrarian aristocrat who had substituted idleness,
55
Carlyle states in Past and Present that he was inspired to this position by a reading of
Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle, summarized by Altick as “a narrative of [harmonious
and orderly social] life at the abbey of St. Edmund during the late, twelfth-century abbacy
of the astute, vigorous monk Samson” (xiii). Carlyle was struck by the benevolent
fellowship of the abbey and its favorable contrast to such soulless Victorian-age
communities of despair as the dismal workhouse.
64
ignorance, and self-interest for a long tradition of selfless public service. Carlyle’s
window to the past in Past and Present then becomes a glimpse at a future society ruled
by a new aristocracy that differs from the tired and out-of-touch gentry of Carlyle’s
nineteenth century.
Initially, the vision of the past that Adam Bede’s narrative voice proposes to
conjure with “a single drop of ink” (10) appears to promote the idealized social values
that Carlyle extols. As we shall see, George Eliot makes clear that Hayslope’s social
structure, in the final days of 1799, is feudal, based on an agrarian economy presided over
by a paternalistic, hereditary gentry. Except for Dinah Morris’s brief comments about the
hunger and poverty she encounters in her missionary work in distant, industrial
Snowfield, Adam Bede’s audience, like Hayslope’s villagers, is spared the grim realities
of the desperate and disenfranchised poor that will more widely pervade industrialized
Britain’s future. For now, in feudal-like Hayslope there is harmony and abundance. And
as the novel begins, the only two discordant notes disrupting the town seem minor: the
evangelical Dinah Morris is viewed skeptically by the Hayslope folk both for her
Methodism and her gender, but the villagers tolerate her—even come to love her—
because of her goodness and her acceptance by the traditional Anglican, the Reverend
Mr. Irwine. The second conflict arises in the form of the penurious old Squire
Donnithorne, whose refusal to entertain renovations and newer conservation methods for
the betterment of his tenants engenders their hatred; but it is a hatred borne with
forbearance because the prospect of the ostensibly heroic Arthur’s imminent succession
is in view. Regarding the behavior of old Squire Donnithorne, Suzanne Graver claims:
65
while George Eliot does suggest that we need not regret the passing of a
system [i.e. the feudal system of aristocratic land rule] so liable to abuse, it
is the failure to fulfill mutual obligations, themselves supported by the
feudal code, that she most openly and severely censures. (98)
If Graver is correct in her contention that Eliot is most critical of Squire Donnithorne’s
governance because Eliot, like Thomas Carlyle, condemns the failure of a selfish and
ignorant aristocracy to fulfill its social contract with the working class, then one might
conclude that Eliot, like Carlyle, endorses the kind of enlightened feudal aristocracy
described by Graver as a “unity of unequal beings bound together through rights and
duties…authority and service” (98). And in fact, as we shall see, there are numerous
medieval motifs, relating both to the medieval heroic and the medieval, feudal social
structure, running through Adam Bede to support such a conclusion. As Adam Bede
opens, Eliot’s use of feudal motifs in Hayslope village leads her readers to believe that
there is hope for a new Carlylian social order and imminent prospects for a wise heroaristocrat in the squire’s grandson, Arthur Donnithorne. However, if Adam Bede is a
novel about the value of a new kind of aristocracy and its obligation to maintain its feudal
obligations, it is a curious position for Eliot to assume given an 1851 Westminster Review
article issued eight years before the publication of her novel. In that article Eliot writes:
if by a survey of the past, it can be shown how each age and each race has
had a faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of
development, and that for succeeding ages to dream of retaining the spirit
along with the forms of the past, is as futile as the embalming of the dead
66
body in the hope that it may one day be resumed by the living soul”
(269).56
And it is clear that at the time of Adam Bede’s publication in 1859 Eliot is still locked in
debate with the Victorian-medievalist notion of resuscitating the past to serve the present.
This chapter proposes to resolve the conflict between George Eliot’s uses of the
medieval past in Adam Bede and her 1851 comments on the resuscitation of the past by
arguing that Eliot employs feudal motifs and portrays Arthur Donnithorne, initially, as a
burgeoning aristocratic hero in order to construct foils by which she will ultimately
devalue and reject the medievalist proposal for the return to traditional feudal rule as a
social remedy. Nor does Eliot embrace Carlyle’s alternative new aristocracy, thought it
might seem so at first. Because both aristocratic Donnithornes—the old Squire and
Arthur—fail as moral leaders, and because peasant-artisan Adam Bede achieves the
divinely-inspired humility and human empathy necessary for wise moral leadership,
Adam Bede might be construed as a condemnation of traditional feudal aristocracy in
favor of Carlyle’s new aristocracy of hero-rulers that is inclusive of the working-class
wise. But Eliot makes clear by the novel’s end that she also eliminates Carlyle’s new
aristocracy of the wise within which Adam Bede might easily have served as hero-leader.
Therefore, although Graver registers Eliot’s ambivalence about the feudal order, this
essay will go farther and argue that, in Adam Bede, Eliot systematically presents both
traditional as well as Carlylian feudalism as viable social options for the very purpose of
undermining them. Adam Bede becomes then a crucible in which Eliot, searching for
social solutions to nineteenth-century industrialization and materialism, experiments with
56
See: “R. W. MacKay’s The Progress of the Intellect” reprinted in Byatt and Warren,
ed.
67
several medievalist variations of feudal society: the traditional nineteenth-century
feudalism still practiced by the old Squire, the emergence of a new feudal hero from the
aristocracy in the character of Arthur, and the ascension of a new ruling hero from the
peasant-artisan class in Adam Bede. But she discards them all. As we shall see, Adam
Bede’s final chapters reveal that no one appears to be in governance in Hayslope. As an
organic entity composed of compassionate, responsible, and sympathetic people of like
mind, Hayslope is a community where no one body emerges to rule. In fact, by the
novel’s end the village appears in no need of leadership at all because all its inhabitants
known to the novel’s audience have been either expunged from the community because
of moral failure or subsumed into the social whole, having proven their capacity for
human sympathy, moral judgment and, thus, responsibility to each other.
There are numerous indications in Adam Bede that Eliot is commenting on and
evaluating the social structures of the medieval past with its echoes of chivalric codes, the
tenets of courtly love, the idealized medieval hero, and the hierarchical governance of the
privileged. The legend of King Arthur and his court, for example, is arguably one of the
most important and vivid motifs of the Victorian medieval revival, incorporating all the
above aspects of the medieval past. 57 And according to Patricia Connors, Hayslope, at
least superficially, appears to be an eighteenth-century Camelot with Arthur Donnithorne
poised as its hero-king. Claiming that Eliot was “steeped in the Arthurian revival” (4) of
the nineteenth century,58 Connors observes evocations of Arthurian legend in Adam Bede
57
See, for example, Inga Bryden’s Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in
Victorian Culture.
58
Connors goes to great lengths to link George Eliot with a knowledge of Arthurian
legend. She cites Eliot’s familiarity with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and “The Lady of
68
in the character of Arthur Donnithorne—the knightly, chivalric, but restless young
aristocrat who, like King Arthur, is a quest figure “desiring to be a St. George to every
dragon” (6)—and in the (very marginal) character of Arthur’s friend, fellow member of
the gentry, and hunting companion, whose name, significantly, is Gawaine. 59
Arthur’s twenty-first birthday celebration becomes a virtual medieval tournament
with feasting and games of skill, all overseen by the feudal noblesse of the surrounding
gentry:
splendid old Mrs. Irwine…was led out by Arthur, followed by the whole
family party, to her raised seat under the striped marquee, where she was to
give out the prizes to the victors. Staid, formal Lydia had requested to
resign that queenly office to the royal old lady, and Arthur was
pleased…No other friend of the family, besides Mr. Gawaine, was
invited…today all the forces were required for the entertainment of the
tenants. (297)
And ever looming is the acknowledgment of and deference to the aristocratic ruling class
shown by the obedient workers of Hayslope: “For in those days, the keenest of bucolic
minds felt a whispering awe at the sight of the gentry, such as of old men felt when they
stood on tip-to to watch the gods passing by in tall human shape” (87).
Shallot”; Malory’s Morte d’Arthur; Walter Scott’s Sir Tristen; and Lytton’s King Arthur.
Judith Johnston also cites a wide range of Arthurian source material available to Eliot at
the time she wrote Adam Bede. For a more complete listing, see Johnston.
59
According to Connors, Arthur Donnithorne is a romantic quest figure: “Arthur’s
actions follow a course which Northrop Frye calls the romance cycle because his
essential pattern of action…is the journey. Language and images of travel are associated
with him throughout the novel...The broken arm, his badge of military service…is
emblematic of Arthur’s whole search for adventure (6). However, like many medieval
knights-errant, Arthur Donnithorne’s quest fails.
69
This deference exists despite Chandler’s observation that after the loss off the
feudal social structure, medievalists feared that the worker had become alienated from
society itself:
the Middle Ages were seen [by Victorian medievalists] as familial and
patriarchal…medievalists…saw a lost sense of closeness….Farmer and
laborer, apprentice, journeyman, and master were all said to have been
linked together…by reciprocal ties….One of the leitmotifs
of…medievalist writing is the complaint that farmers [or landowners] and
field hands no longer dine together. (3)
But although the classes mingle familially at Arthur’s birthday festivities, social strata are
still rigidly defined and there is a subtle, tacit contract of service and obedience for
leadership and security, just as under the feudal system. The gentry could not break
chivalric and courtly codes and strict feudal hierarchy could not be violated—even if
landowners, farmers, laborers, and journeymen did dine together. Eliot gives us a glimpse
of the delicacies of this so-called familial system at the birthday dinner as Adam and
guests ponder the seating arrangements:
When Adam heard that he was to dine up-stairs with the large tenants, he
felt rather uncomfortable at the idea of being exalted in this way above his
mother and Seth, who were to dine in the cloisters below.…“Seth, lad,
[Adam] said, “the Captain [Arthur] has sent to say I’m dining upstairs….But I don’t like sitting up above thee and mother, as if I was better
than my own flesh and blood. Thee’t not take it unkind, I hope?”….Owing
to [the] arrangement, Adam [seated in a more exalted position], being of
70
course, at the bottom of the table, fell under the immediate observation of
Mr. Casson, who, too much occupied with the question of precedence, had
not hitherto noticed his entrance. Mr. Casson…considered Adam ‘rather
lifted up and peppery-like’: he thought the gentry made more fuss about
this young carpenter than was necessary….(282-285)
Thus, though Chandler observes that medievalists glorified the feudal social system for
providing a familial atmosphere in which both worker and landlord broke bread together,
Eliot shows her readers how rigid and hierarchical even the all-inclusive, feudal dinner
table could be. At Arthur’s birthday feast, hairs are split over ascendancy, nuances of
precedence are debated, and presumptiveness is scorned all in the name of knowing one’s
place within the social hierarchy. This interdependent but rigidly hierarchical structure is
also highlighted in Adam Bede’s attitude towards Arthur and Hetty: not only is Arthur’s
character too noble to form an attachment to Hetty, but Hetty is clearly too unsuitably
low for Arthur:60
The idea of Hetty had just crossed Mr. Irwine’s mind as he looked
inquiringly at Arthur, but his disclaiming, indifferent answer confirmed the
thought which had quickly followed—that there could be nothing serious in
that direction…and the hint he had given Arthur about her the other day
had no more serious meaning than to prevent him from noticing her so as to
rouse the little chit’s vanity, and in this way perturb the rustic drama of her
life. Arthur would soon join his regiment, and be far away: no, there could
60
The novel’s narrator is particularly clear on the latter point. Adam Bede’s narrator
describes Hetty’s prettiness as a deceit of beauty for her “moral deficiencies” (170).
71
be no danger in that quarter, even if Arthur’s character had not been a
strong security against it. His honest, patronizing pride in the goodwill and
respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish
romance, still more against a lower kind of folly. (189)61
But by the time Irwine speaks these words it is already too late. Arthur is smitten and
ultimately violates his feudal contract with Hetty and all of Hayslope by dishonoring her;
and Hetty has violated her social contract with the feudal order as she dreams of being a
lady: “[Captain Donnithorne] would want to marry her, and make a lady of her; she could
hardly dare to shape the thought—yet how else could it be?” (165). Adam, who at least
initially seems to know his place in the social order, understands too well that Hetty does
not know hers: “ ‘Her head was allays likely to be turned,’ [Adam] thought, ‘when a
gentleman, with his fine manners, and fine clothes…came about her, making up to her in
a bold way, as a man couldn’t do that was only her equal; an it’s much if she’ll ever like a
common man now’ ” (354).
In Arthur’s violation of the feudal social contract, he demonstrates the dangers for
abuse inherent in traditional, paternalistic feudal society. However, prior to Arthur’s
seduction of Hetty, Eliot shows her audience that he might be Loamshire’s hope for the
new Carlylian aristocrat who will rule with wisdom and benevolence. As Mr. Irwine tells
Arthur early in the novel, “ ‘A man can never do anything at variance with his own
61
De Amore, commonly known as the rules of courtly love, is a treatise written in the
twelfth century by the French courtier Andreas Cappellanus. It was a codification of
social and sexual life in the court of Eleanor of Aquitane and was supposedly
commissioned by her daughter, Marie de Champagne. Courtly love was a primary motif
for medieval romance poetry. Mr. Irwine’s concerns unwittingly reflect one of the chief
rules of courtly love: that no gentleman should chose as his love anyone he would be
ashamed to marry. For the complete text of De Amore in English, see Cappellanus: The
Art of Courtly Love.
72
nature. He carries with him the germ of his most exceptional action’ ” (188). Indeed,
throughout Adam Bede Eliot leads her readers to believe that Arthur, as Carlyle’s new
hero, carries the germ of greatness in his nature. Arthur seems to have a vision that is a
superior alternative, by Carlylian standards, to his grandfather’s outmoded version of
greedy, self-interested aristocratic governance. Arthur seems determined strive for the
wisdom to help his neighbors when he tells Mr. Irwine
there’s nothing I should like better than to carry out some…ideas in
putting the farmers on a better management of their land…making what
was a wild country, all of the same dark hue, bright and variegated with
corn and cattle. My grandfather will never let me have any power while he
lives; but there’s nothing I should like better than to undertake the
Stoneyshire side of the estate…and set improvements on foot…I should
like to know all the labourers and see them touching their hats to me with
a look of good will. (185)
And later, in his remarks at the birthday feast, Arthur formalizes this intention into a
covenant with the Hayslope community:
I look forward to this position [of Squire], not merely as one of power and
pleasure for myself, but as a means of benefiting my neighbours…I have
interested myself a good deal in [farming]…and when the course of events
shall place the estate in my hands, it will be my first desire to afford my
tenants all the encouragement a landlord can give them, in improving their
land, and trying to bring about a better practice of husbandry…nothing
would make me so happy as to be able to respect every man on the estate,
73
and to be respected by him in return…I only meet your good hopes
concerning me by telling you that my own hopes correspond to them—that
what you expect from me I desire to fulfill… (290)62
The covenant is ultimately and officially sealed in Arthur’s gallant toast to the
grandfather who is hated by the community:
Perhaps there was no one present except Mr. Irwine who thoroughly
understood and approved Arthur’s graceful mode of proposing his
grandfather’s health. The farmers knew well enough that they hated the
old Squire…The bucolic mind does not readily apprehend the refinements
of good taste. But the toast could not be rejected. (290)
However, in the end, the entire concept of feudal rule—whether by a traditional
aristocracy or Carlyle’s new aristocracy with wisdom—fails. Eliot has shown us both,
and she has demonstrated that both systems are subject to too much abuse. The old
Squire, always hated by his lessees, finally violates his social bond with his best tenants,
the Poysers, in his scheme to lease Chase Farm. And Arthur’s lust for and ultimate
seduction of the inferior Hetty breaks his social contract and reveals that there were more
than a few grains of foolishness, denial, and narcissism in his nature to prevent his
fulfillment of Hayslope’s dreams for him. Their once-gallant knight falls; his social
contract with his tenants is broken. The dream of feudal social order is gone, and all that
62
Arthur’s proposed improvements and reforms mark him as a new, modern kind of
aristocrat who welcomes change based on scientific breakthroughs in farming and
forestry. Eliot specifically links Arthur to progress and innovation, but she also maintains
Arthur’s expectations of loyalty, obedience, and admiration from his tenants and laborers
as leader of a proper feudal hierarchy. Thus, in Arthur’s above commitment to his
dependents, Eliot identifies Arthur as a potential new Carlylian aristocrat-hero whose
authority comes from his wisdom and heroic qualities rather than the stagnant, outdated
mandate of mere heredity.
74
is left of it is the pretty pink sash Arthur has discarded—a valueless love token from a
devalued counterpart of the high-ranking lady-love of medieval romance.63
Both the old Squire’s and Arthur’s abuses have justified the breakdown of feudal
class barriers in Adam Bede. In chapter thirty-two, Mrs. Poyser finally has her say to the
miserly Squire’s face when his scheme for the dairy pushes her to the breaking point:
I should like to see if there’s another tenant besides Poyser as ‘ud put up
wi’ begging and praying, and having to pay half—an being strung up wi’
the rent as it’s much if he gets enough out o’ the land to pay, for all he’s
put his own money into the ground before-hand. See if you’ll get a
stranger to lead such a life here as that: a maggot must be born in the
rotten cheese to like it, I reckon. (378).64
63
Although an exploration of medieval women’s garments as tokens of love is beyond
the scope of this essay, please see E. Jane Burns for a critical history of the role of
women’s garments as tokens of love in medieval romance poetry. After relating the story
of the demoiselle d’Escalot, who asked Lancelot to wear the sleeve of her robe on his
helmet in order to initiate a courtship with him, Burns observes:
That a courtly lady’s sleeve [or other piece of clothing] might function as
a love token…of the knight willing to defend and protect her forms part of
a well-known constellation of courtly traditions involving the exchange of
love tokens…[the garment] serves as a surrogate for her inspiring
presence, propelling the knight who loves her to accomplish feats of
extraordinary prowess that bring honor and credit to his name….because
the lady’s love motivates him and increases his strength. (4)
Ironically, Eliot transforms Hetty’s pink scarf into just the opposite—a devalued
counterpart of a courtly form of feminine inspiration by which Arthur discredits his
name.
64
Mrs. Poyser, in referring to strangers on the Chase Farm, is not just reminding the
Squire he has failed in his obligation to provide economic security for his tenants, but
also that he has failed in his obligation to value the familial bonds he should have striven
to maintain (under the feudal system) with long-time, faithful farmers such as the
Poysers.
75
Adam also reaches the limits of respect for his betters eventually, although initially he
defers whole-heartedly to the claims of the feudal hierarchy:
Adam, [the narrator] must confess, was very susceptible to the influence
of rank, and quite ready to give an extra amount of respect to every one
who had more advantages than himself, not being a philosopher, or a
proletaire with democratic ideas, but simply a stout-limbed clever
carpenter with a large fund of reverence in his nature, which inclined him
to admit all established claims unless he saw very clear ground for
questioning them…The word ‘gentleman’ had a spell for Adam, and as he
often said, he ‘couldn’t abide a fellow who thought he made himself fine
by being coxy to’s betters.’ (179)
However, his physical attack on Arthur shatters feudal class boundaries after he learns of
Arthur’s dalliance with Hetty. The betrayal has become his “clear ground” for
questioning Arthur’s claim to superiority, and Adam now feels morally justified in
demanding Arthur’s letter of separation from Hetty. Having broken the tacit feudal
contract so honored by Adam, Arthur has betrayed his oath of mutual respect and
protection to the workers of Hayslope—perhaps more grievously than the old Squire
betrayed his oath to the Poysers. Hetty is now “ruined” for any other man of her station.
Recognizing the dissolution of the feudal oath, Adam now requires a written contract (i.e.
the letter) from Arthur. After the Donnithornes’ abuses, the traditional dream of social
order expounded upon by Chandler is dead in Adam Bede. It would have been easy for
Eliot to turn then to Adam as Hayslope’s next hope for a true Carlylian hero-leader in the
wake of Hetty and Arthur’s tragedy. Adam Bede is morally enlarged by his baptism of
76
fire, and he has achieved the wisdom of human sympathy and compassion. He has found
the grains of exceptional deeds within his character and enlarged and capitalized upon
them to reach a more profound sense of love. He appears, then, perfectly poised to be
Carlyle’s wise hero-ruler.
But Eliot rejects all modes of feudal social order, even Carlyle’s.
By the novel’s end, Eliot has not promoted Adam into a new aristocracy of talent
and wisdom. Instead, she puts Carlyle’s dream of social order finally in its grave along
with the more traditional dream of feudal order. As Graver tells us, “[Eliot] calls [feudal
codes] into question by frequently dramatizing their failures” (99). But in Adam Bede,
George Eliot does not merely call these codes into question; she passes a death sentence
upon them. Despite the high regard in Hayslope for Adam, in the end there appears to be
no leader there at all. The old Squire is dead, and we learn that Arthur (who has been
absent from Hayslope and the novel for nearly six years) is a broken man without wife,
heirs, or the respect of his tenants. He plans to slip impotently back to Hayslope in
retirement with the truth of Adam’s prophetic words echoing in his ears: “There is a sort
of wrong that can never be made up for” (590).
At the close of Adam Bede, Adam, though morally enlarged by his acquisition of
human sympathy and compassion, is subsumed back into the Hayslope community—his
comfort and source of nurturing. A.S. Byatt claims that Eliot teaches that “resignation
and suffering do not produce ‘compensation’ and some divine reward for virtue…the
‘realism’ of Eliot’s fiction is partly a moral realism, rejecting ‘compensation’ and other
consoling doctrines” (xvi). Byatt’s observation gives added meaning to Adam Bede’s
narrative voice in the novel’s chapter twenty-seven: “We are children of a large family,
77
and must learn, as such children do, not to expect our hurts to be made much of—to be
content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other more” (320). Adam’s
enlightenment is the result of both his suffering and the comfort he receives from those
who love him, particularly Dinah: “…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…‘I shall look t’ her [Dinah] to help me to see things right
[thinks Adam]. For she’s better than I am…that’s a poor sort of life, when you can’t look
to them nearest to you t’ help you with a bit better thought than what you’ve got inside
you a’ready’ ” (577). This lesson ultimately forms the basis of the society that Eliot
proposes for the like-minded inhabitants of Hayslope. What Eliot gives us when the dust
of feudal nostalgia settles is a harmonious community based on human nurturing,
compassion, and inspiration to counter capricious nature and idealized medievalist
heroics. She leaves Hayslope with a new, organic society of human sympathy composed
of such residents as Mr. Irwine, Adam, the Poysers, and Mr. Massey. Even the extreme
Dinah has relinquished her evangelizing and been absorbed into the community. Those
not of like mind have been either expunged or rendered harmless. In the end, Eliot in
Adam Bede has renounced the medieval-style heroic leader and places her faith in the real
and ordinary people of chapter seventeen.
As Adam Bede closes, the sympathies of a social whole bound by human
compassion, love, and mutuality have created an island of safety (at least for the moment)
in rural Britain of 1807. This society has achieved a new homeostasis and rescued
Hayslope from the fragmenting effects of Benthamite materialism and urban
industrialization. However, one wonders as Stoniton’s industrialized and alienated urban
78
poor rumble not too far in the distance, how long the idyllic little island of social
harmony that is Hayslope can stem the tide of social unrest that surrounds it. Evidently,
George Eliot wondered as well. In her 1874 novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial
Life, she moves twenty-five years into Adam Bede’s future to once again contemplate
social order and the emergence of a new middle class of the wise and talented.
Everywhere on the pages of Adam Bede one is confronted with the incongruity
between George Eliot’s strongly stated commitment to realism and her powerful
evocation of medievalist images of faith, Nature, and society. Suzanne Graver concludes
that Eliot’s “genius resides not in resolving conflicts but rather in creating dramas that
powerfully convey the difficulty of reconciling visionary and practical…values” (311).
But the decisive solutions that Eliot brings to the conflicts posed by nineteenth-century
realism and visionary medievalism defy Graver’s conclusions. In Adam Bede, Eliot
experiments with major elements of the medievalist agenda: the memory of ardent faith
in the practice of sacramental forms, humanity’s alignment with nature, and a feudal
hierarchical society; and, after exploring each case, the novel ultimately rejects
medievalist ideals for a more realist, a more human answer to nineteenth-century ills.
Although, of the three areas this thesis addresses, Eliot does seem most sympathetic to
medieval religious forms and rituals as a way to invigorate fellow feeling, Adam Bede
ultimately rejects the dogmas of Christianity with its consoling promise of Divine
rewards as an inducement for virtuous earthly conduct. In its place is a less doctrinaire,
but also more inclusive human family of fellow feeling. By the novel’s end, we know that
Mr. Ryde’s successor, Mr. Irwine, has exchanged rigid Anglicanism for a more simple
sympathy that engenders love from all; Dinah’s evangelical Methodism is modified to
79
allow fellowship with Adam and her Hayslope community; and those who failed to
develop are removed from the scene. Adam and Dinah, who had the potential for
extraordinary sainthood, although they are valued individuals in Hayslope, become
nonetheless everyday individuals who are subsumed into a much more valuable whole.
But in addition to an exploration of medievalist religious ardor, Eliot also demonstrates
clearly the unreliability of the medievalist vision of Nature and the dangers inherent in
depending on the natural world for worldly harmony or divine inspiration. Again reliance
on the human family, the community of each other, is the answer. And finally, Eliot puts
all doubts to rest in Adam Bede about her belief in the value of the feudal hierarchical
social structure—be it governed by an aristocracy of birth or of talent. She is unequivocal
in the potential for abuse this kind of society holds. We see this in the little community of
loving egalitarianism that Hayslope has become by the novel’s end.
Yet a question still nags as to the practicality of Eliot’s solution and whether it
ultimately becomes another visionary map for the future that is just as impractical as the
medievalist social vision. The success of Eliot’s answer depends upon moral progress and
the evolution of a basic goodness within humanity. However, industrialization, poverty,
social-class barriers, and all the other ills recorded during the Victorian age of transition
still threaten Hayslope from beyond. And the future looms ominously as the nineteenth
century continues to grind forward from 1807 with increases in capitalistic
acquisitiveness, urbanization, and imperialism. As she gazes back to the past, Adam
Bede’s narrator, in the spirit of realism, promises to provide her readers with “a faithful
account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind….I feel as much
bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-
80
box narrating my experience on oath” (193). But whether the doubtless defects and
shadows in this ostensibly real mirror—defects which the narrator herself
acknowledges—too greatly disturb the reflection, thereby rendering it faint or confused,
raises the conjecture that Eliot might have questioned her solutions and given herself a
reason to later revisit the practicality of the social remedies she so clearly supports in
Adam Bede. And in Eliot’s arguably most brilliant novel, Middlemarch: A Study of
Provincial Live (1874), she obviously does return to that mirror more than twenty-five
years after the setting of Adam Bede. Once there, George Eliot contemplates “the history
of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time”
(25) in her ongoing experiments in life to examine the real and the true.
81
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