Hetty’s Hanky
J. Douglas Kneale
University of Western Ontario
e river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights.
T. S. Eliot, e Waste Land
T   G E’ A B, the narrator mentions
a certain mysterious object. e first is in Chapter , “A Dilemma,” in
which Arthur, after sending Adam for some brandy following their fight,
looks about his Hermitage in search of something:
Arthur lay still for some minutes after Adam was gone, but
presently he rose feebly from the ottoman and peered about
slowly in the broken moonlight, seeking something. It was
a short bit of wax candle that stood amongst a confusion of
writing and drawing materials. ere was more searching for
the means of lighting the candle, and when that was done, he
went cautiously round the room as if wishing to assure himself
of the presence or absence of something. At last he found a
slight thing, which he put first in his pocket, and then, on a
second thought, took it out again and thrust deep down into
a waste-paper basket. It was a woman’s little pink silk handkerchief. ()
ESC .– (June/September ): –
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e next time we hear of the handkerchief is twenty chapters later, in
“Another Meeting in the Wood,” when Arthur and Adam again visit the
Hermitage, after Hetty’s conviction and sentence for transportation. e
description is a reprise of the earlier scene, focalized through both Adam’s
remembering and Arthur’s feeling:
J. D K
is Professor and Chair
of the Department of
English at the University
of Western Ontario.
He is the author of
Monumental Writing:
Aspects of Rhetoric in
Wordsworth’s Poetry
(University of Nebraska
Press, ) and
Romantic Aversions:
Aftermaths of Classicism
in Wordsworth and
Coleridge (McGillQueen’s and Liverpool
University Press, )
and the editor of e
Mind in Creation: Essays
on English Romantic
Literature in Honour
of Ross G. Woodman
(McGill-Queen’s,
). His articles have
appeared in , ,
Studies in Romanticism,
Ariel, and elsewhere.
e Hermitage had never been entered since they left it
together, for Arthur had locked up the key in his desk. And
now, when he opened the door, there was the candle burnt
out in the socket; there was the chair in the same place where
Adam remembered sitting; there was the waste-paper basket
full of scraps, and deep down in it, Arthur felt in an instant,
there was the little pink silk handkerchief. ()
And finally, the last appearance of the handkerchief is at the end of this
same chapter, in the concluding sentence after Adam’s exit: “As soon as the
door was closed behind him, Arthur went to the waste-paper basket and
took out the little pink silk handkerchief ” (). ese are the only times
that we are told about this “little pink silk handkerchief”; these three brief
mentions. at is all. How are we to interpret this “slight thing,” this slim
but overdetermined bit of business?
To build an article on something as light as a handkerchief might give
pause over both matter and manner, yet there is precedent in literary
commentary for both my method and its object of scrutiny.¹ My contention, in unfolding the significance of this device, is that Eliot’s treatment
of the handkerchief opens up new perspectives on the forensics of Adam
Bede—that is, on its discourse of investigation, evidentiary and intertextual
witness, courtroom drama, and verdict. At the same time, however, Eliot’s
handling of the hanky points beyond forensics, beyond a strictly juridical binarism of guilty / not guilty toward the more complicated ethical
question of “how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen
consequences of his own deed” (). By no means a simple condemnation of the forensic and a vindication of the ethical, Adam Bede tries the
 For initial support, I turn to Eliot herself, in her Westminster Review essay on
“[e Progress of the Intellect]”: “A correct generalization gives significance to
the smallest detail” (). Schor’s book Reading in Detail provides endorsement
of the method while pointing out the risks: “To read in detail is, however tacitly,
to invest the detail with a truth-bearing function.” Yet this turns out to be uncertain: “As the guarantor of meaning, the detail is for that very reason constantly
threatened by falsification and misprision” (). Schor goes on to relate “the rise
of the detail” since the eighteenth century to “the birth of realism” but more
specifically to a “conceptual space” governed by “the laws of sexual difference”
()—an observation not irrelevant to Adam Bede.
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limits of these discursive fields, revealing their shared legal, moral, and
rhetorical jurisdiction but also the points at which the conviction of one
domain gives way to the belief of another. My close-up analysis will focus
on one strand in the prosecution of the case: with a simple, quotidian
accessory such as a handkerchief, Eliot quietly plants evidence of a mute
witness in the novel whose unspoken testimony implicates everyone. Can
a “little pink silk handkerchief ” do that?
I. Evidence
I begin forensically, in keeping with Eliot’s dominant rhetoric in Adam
Bede. Chapter , “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” and in which Eliot
gives readers a central, well-known document in the history of nineteenthcentury realism, employs a crucial courtroom metaphor that governs
both the theme of the novel and its presentation. Blending an empirical
language of reflection with a psychological vocabulary of feeling, Eliot
links the act of narration to a particular standard of representation. e
narrator says:
I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and
things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. e
mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be
disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much
bound to tell you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is,
as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.
(; emphasis added)
Not the cursory claim to realistic faithfulness sometimes made by novelists, Eliot’s statement casts its own language, and its perceptions, in a
deliberately forensic mode. It is a motivated choice, for despite its being
a novel of sympathetic realism, Adam Bede is still part murder mystery,
part courtroom drama, and a crucial aspect of our response to the novel
generally, and to Hetty particularly, depends on the way that our sympathies are controlled by the forensic discourse within the novel (Hetty’s
trial and the legal rules of engagement that operate there) as much as the
forensic framework of the novel (the metaphor of the narrator in a witness-box on oath and the responsibility to tell as “precisely” as possible).
Yet what is the relation between courtroom rhetoric and sympathy? How
can a discourse as formal, as “precise,” as forensic rhetoric be the means
to produce a sympathetic response in the reader?
It all depends on perspective, on what the court (or the narrator) allows
you to see. Another way of putting this would be to say that it depends on
what is entered into evidence, since the inclusion or exclusion of certain
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evidence—including eye-witness accounts—determines perspective.² In
Adam Bede, the genius of Eliot’s manipulation of perspective lies in her not
allowing the reader to witness the murder: at the end of Chapter , “e
Journey in Despair,” the focus shifts away from Hetty, with her “rounded
childish face, and the hard unloving despairing soul looking out of it,” to
the narrator’s feelings—“My heart bleeds for her”; the camera pulls back
from the close-up on the individual to the moral generality of the final
sentence of the chapter: “God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery!” ().
e language of “beginners” is part of Eliot’s rhetoric of cause and
effect—the “consequences,” “links,” and “more links” (, ) that make
up the narrative chain of events as distinct from the moral “web” (, ,
), “fold” (), or “fibres” (, , , ) of responsibility and of
feeling that interweave themselves throughout the novel.³ e strategy of
removing Hetty from our view, and thus of preventing our witnessing the
murder, is crucial in this context, for the next time we see Hetty is in the
courtroom, in Chapter , “e Verdict” (Bartle Massey having described
 See Welsh, Strong Representations, especially – (on Fielding and Scott) for
a study of one kind of evidence—circumstantial evidence—and its relation to
both legal history and the history of the novel.
 An online search of Adam Bede in Project Gutenberg shows that while the
word “consequences” appears numerous times throughout the novel, the words
“responsibility” and “responsibilities” never appear and the word “responsible”
appears only once, in Chapter , in the Rev. Irwine’s crucial statement: “[T]he
problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed, is one that might well make us tremble to look into
it” (). See Project Gutenberg Release  (April ) http://gutenberg.net/
etext/adamb.txt. A number of commentators have addressed the issue of
ethics and moral responsibility in Eliot through these images of links and webs.
See, for example, George Levine on determinism and responsibility: his definition of determinism as “the belief that every event has its causal antecedents”
() branches out into the claim that “For George Eliot, every man’s life is at the
center of a vast and complex web of causes” (). More recently, Markovits, in
arguing that Eliot’s “primary concern is always with the ethical” (), has rightly
noted that “in [Eliot’s] novels, the smallest actions can bring about vast and
unimaginable consequences” within “the web of human interaction” (). See
also Redfield  and , n. Referring to Eliot’s statement about an “inexorable
law of consequences” in her essay on “[e Progress of the Intellect]” (), these
readers and others have attempted to analyze the relation of Eliot’s philosophy
to her art of realism. For example, Caroline Levine, in a consideration of Eliot’s
“critique of Victorian femininity” and its “consequences for realism” (), writes
that “the ethical work of Victorian realism involves forging a new and responsible approach to the world by way of the art object” (). Loesberg, following
Redfield, carefully shows how Eliot often “veils an aesthetic problem that she
treats explicitly as a moral one” (; see also , n, where he compares his
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her appearance to Adam in Chapter  as preparation for her reappearance
in court). As this chapter title, and the titles of the immediately preceding chapters (“e Eve of the Trial,” “e Morning of the Trial”) reveal,
Eliot participates in the forensic mode explicitly, raising to the level of
narrative what had been implicit all along in the novel’s rhetoric—the
language of being “bound to tell you, as precisely as I can … as if I were in
the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (). By avoiding the
depiction of the murder—something not fit to be represented in the novel’s
scheme, and related by Hetty to Dinah only later, in Chapter ⁴—Eliot
resorts to a judicial rhetoric that situates readers not as witnesses to a
crime but as courtroom spectators—admittedly, privileged ones, as we
shall see—whose judgement depends on the available evidence. Instead of
narrating a simple cause-and-effect relation—commit a crime and suffer
the penalty—the novel pursues a different path in which the immediate
question of guilt becomes part of a larger issue of responsibility.
What is evidently missing from the picture at this point, however, is a
moral supplement that Eliot, after Wordsworth, calls “something more /
an brotherly forgiveness” (). e phrase is part of Eliot’s epigraph to
Adam Bede; it comes from Wordsworth’s poem e Excursion, Book ,
and is spoken by the Pastor:
And when
I speak of such among my flock as swerved
Or fell, those only shall be singled out
Upon whose lapse, or error, something more
an brotherly forgiveness may attend.
(.–; Poetical Works : )
As the tuning fork for the novel as a whole, the epigraph makes us aware of
a prevenient forgiveness, a sympathy or pardon already present before the
beginning of the story: the novel may indeed speak of those who “swerved
/ Or fell,” or of “lapse, or error,” but it also anticipates in this suspicion
argument to Miller’s in e Ethics of Reading; compare my note  below). See
Redfield’s excellent discussion of Eliot’s “aesthetic and ethical project” () and
its relation to sympathy (–).
 Compare Williams and his statement that Eliot’s removal of Hetty from our
view at this point “abandons her in a moral action more decisive than Hetty’s
own confused and desperate leaving of her child” (; see also note  below).
Williams says this in the context of his criticism of “a recurring problem in
[Eliot’s] social consciousness” ()—her inability “to individuate working
people” ()—though this “problem” (moral and aesthetic) may be seen to
extend to characters from other classes, as in the case of Arthur.
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Eliot resorts to
a judicial
rhetoric that
situates readers
not as witnesses
to a crime but
as courtroom
spectators—
of guilt the possibility of “something more.” is possibility is especially
important in the larger context of Eliot’s citation of Wordsworth, for the
Pastor’s speech deals with aspects of narrative that parallel Eliot’s strategies. Responding to the idealization of a country churchyard as a place
where the voice that speaks
In envy or detraction is not heard;
Which malice may not enter; where the traces
Of evil inclinations are unknown;
Where love and pity tenderly unite
With resignation; and no jarring tone
Intrudes, the peaceful concert to disturb
Of amity and gratitude … (.–)
the Pastor adapts his narration accordingly:
I willingly confine
My narratives to subjects that excite
Feelings with these accordant; love, esteem,
And admiration. (.–)
By choosing only certain subjects, those that fit a plan to arouse feelings
of “love, esteem, / And admiration,” the Pastor announces a deliberate
narrative partiality; and even when he speaks of those who “swerved /
Or fell,” he claims that he does so with “something more / an brotherly forgiveness.” Eliot likewise strategically chooses to tell her story in a
certain way, confining her narrative not just to particular subjects but to
particular perspectives that might excite feelings accordant with “love
and pity” (Excursion .). What is significant for Eliot is not simply
what happens but how it is presented to the reader, how it is offered as
evidence. In recounting the composition of the novel in a journal entry for
 November , Eliot notes that she did not divulge to her publisher
Blackwood how the story would turn out, or what the verdict would be: “I
refused to tell my story beforehand, on the ground that I would not have
it judged apart from my treatment, which alone determines the moral
quality of art” (; emphasis in original). While Eliot here is speaking
of her narrative design, one can easily substitute “Hetty” for “it” in the
sentence and arrive at the point I have been making: Eliot would not have
her judged apart from her treatment, which alone determines our view of
the moral quality of the character.
us while Adam Bede’s structure and style reflect a judicial standpoint, Eliot gives us plenty of clues throughout the novel to suggest that
things are more tangled than a forensic perspective might admit. While
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forensic discourse is based on an adversarial structure, a prosecution/
defense, guilty/not guilty binarism—the very sort of black-and-white
clarity that Eliot in Chapter  attributes to romance over realism—the
novel disturbs this arrangement. One expression of this complication
is the pagan/Christian opposition that the narrator foregrounds in the
character of the Rev. Irwine: “‘is Rector of Broxton is little better than a
pagan!’” (). e classically educated Irwine, with his dog Juno, his copy
of Aeschylus open on the table, and his Horatian phraseology, discusses
the concept of Nemesis over breakfast with Arthur. In a conversation
that manages to talk around its real subject—Arthur’s guiltiness over his
relations with Hetty—Irwine describes “inward suffering” as “the worst
form of Nemesis” () and then proceeds to lecture Arthur on forms of
causality: “Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible
consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves” (). e Christian
complement of forgiveness, omitted here, is later provided by Dinah, but
Irwine’s statement opens up the “subtler web” () of responsibility that
cannot be “confined.” Irwine repeats his comments to Adam: “[T]he
problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed, is one that might well make us tremble to look
into it” (). Arthur will later reiterate this view to Adam, somewhat
unconvincingly (–), partly because Arthur believes in the linear
reversibility of experience; he wants to think that one can go back and
make something right again. Adam, however, teaches him that “ere’s a
sort o’ damage, sir, that can’t be made up for” (); as he says to the Rev.
Irwine, “that’s the deepest curse of all … that’s what makes the blackness of
it … it can never be undone” (). e lesson is not merely judicial—crime
and punishment—but moral—truth and consequences.
But where, then, in this tangled web of ethics and forensics, does
the “little pink silk handkerchief ” fit in? Can we read it as a piece of evidence, though a piece not entered as evidence in the courtroom drama?
As readers we have seen something that none of the spectators in the
courtroom—including the jurors—has seen; Eliot once again directs us
in such a way as to complicate the “Guilty” () verdict. But we need to
remember something else, perhaps more important: Adam never sees
the hanky either.
Hetty’s Hanky | 
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II. Witness
Arthur is careful not to let Adam witness the handkerchief on the two
occasions when they are in its presence in the Hermitage. In the first
citation at the beginning of this essay, there are three linked quests that
lead to the handkerchief. First, Arthur is described as “seeking something”
—which turns out to be a candle; then there is “more searching” for something with which to light the candle; and still Arthur searches “as if wishing
to assure himself of the presence or absence of something.” e questromance achieves its object, if not its end: “At last he found a slight thing.”
At work in this chain of investigative events is a decremental repetition:
“something … something … thing.” e deliberate generality of the common nouns heightens the suspense of investigation, provoking the reader
to ask, What is it? What is he looking for? It is a curious quest, for its
success seems, paradoxically, to depend on either “the presence or absence
of something.” Finding, not finding: they add up to the same “thing.”⁵
is language of “things” has multiple associations. It can suggest
something trivial (“a slight thing”), or something less than human (an
object rather than a subject), or it can be just the opposite—a term of
endearment, not dehumanization. Of all the characters in Adam Bede,
Hetty is the one who is repeatedly described as a thing—a poor thing,
or a poor little thing, a dear little thing: “dear young, round, soft, flexible
thing!” (); “the prettiest thing in the world” (); “the prettiest thing
God had made” (); Hetty’s beauty “was the beauty of young frisking
things” (); “she was such a young thing” (). Likened repeatedly to
animals or domestic pets—kittens above all (“the little puss …!” []; see
also ), but also downy ducks, young calves, and little birds—Hetty is
seen as a thing by both men and women. Like Wordsworth’s Lucy, Hetty
seems “a thing that could not feel / e touch of earthly years”—a poignant
irony, since by the end of the novel we know that Hetty, like Lucy, is dead,
“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees”
(Poetical Works : ).⁶
 is is not the only occasion on which Arthur has difficulty searching for some-
thing. In Chapter , when Mrs Poyser invites Arthur into the parlour at the Hall
Farm, Eliot’s description of his reply proleptically echoes the handkerchief scene:
“‘No, indeed, thank you, Mrs Poyser,’ said the Captain, looking eagerly round the
kitchen, as if his eye were seeking something it could not find. ‘I delight in your
kitchen. I think it is the most charming room I know. I should like every farmer’s
wife to come and look at it for a pattern’” (; emphasis added). What Arthur
is looking for literally, of course, is the dairy, with its pretty milkmaid Hetty.
 Compare Mitchell’s discussion of how Hetty is “constantly trivialized” () by
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Compare this scene to Arthur’s later return to the Hermitage. Instead
of a fumbling search for a petit objet, Eliot’s language is confidently deictic,
pointing to the very things that were formerly sought after: “there was the
candle … ; there was the chair …; there was the waste-paper basket … and
… there was the little pink silk handkerchief.” No confusion this time, and
as soon as Adam leaves, Arthur goes straight to the waste-paper basket
and pulls out the handkerchief. It is a repetition, with a difference, of the
earlier quest, but direct this time, assured; not wavering between either
“the presence or absence of something” but assertive and knowing in the
fullness of presence (there, there, there, there). Arthur, sole possessor of
this knowledge as well as this object, demonstrates that the handkerchief
itself possesses something—a value, an affective content, a meaning. But
what does this “slight thing” mean? Can we answer such a question when
Arthur is the only one who holds it? Or just because he is the single master
of the handkerchief, must he also be sole keeper of its meaning?
Let us not protract a false naïveté in our inferences. Let us say what
every reasonable witness would say under the circumstances: it’s Hetty’s
hanky. Yes, it’s Hetty’s hanky, all right, but not one that she bought for
herself. How could Hetty afford such a fine, expensive “little pink silk
handkerchief ” when “she had given almost all her spare money” ()
just to buy a new pair of cotton stockings?⁷ Obviously, it was a gift from
Eliot’s epithets of “little,” “foolish,” etc.; see also Hertz on “Poor Hetty.” One
animal motif that Eliot suggestively embeds is the contrast between Hetty as
kitten and Bartle Massey’s dog Vixen as mother; in Chapter  Eliot has Bartle
Massey launch into a long tirade against women, after which he speculates on
the father of Vixen’s pups:
“I’m pretty sure the father was that hulking bull-terrier of Will
Baker’s—wasn’t he now, eh, you sly hussey?” (Here Vixen tucked
her tail between her legs, and ran forward into the house. Subjects
are sometimes broached which a well-bred female will ignore.)
“But where’s the use of talking to a woman with babbies?” continued Bartle, “she’s got no conscience—no conscience—it’s all
run to milk!” ()
e questions of fatherhood, babies, behaviour of women, and female conscience all resonate obviously and ominously in the case of Hetty. See Matus on
maternal instinct in Adam Bede and Hetty’s lack of “the will and the responsibility needed to mother adequately” ().
 Eliot gives us different handkerchiefs in the novel: Seth has a “blue linen handkerchief ” (); old Martin Poyser also has a blue handkerchief (); young Mr.
Poyser goes off to church with “a silk handkerchief of a yellow tone round his
neck” (); Bessy Cranage fans herself with her handkerchief at the games in
Chapter  (); and Nancy and Molly have little pocket-handkerchiefs with
prayer-books wrapped inside (). Only Hetty’s hanky is given repeated
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Let us not
protract a false
naïveté in our
inferences.
Arthur, like the other gifts he gave her—the gold locket containing the
locks of light and dark hair being the prime example, but the “beautiful
pair of gold and pearls and garnet” earrings () being Hetty’s personal
favourite. It is Hetty’s hanky and it was a gift from Arthur. But it is more
than that: it is also a nasty bit of incriminating evidence, a “testimony of
summer nights” that discredits Arthur’s downplaying of his involvement
with Hetty in Chapters  and . Arthur has tried to deceive Adam into
thinking that nothing has happened, that his meeting with Hetty in the
dark wood was accidental, and that his kissing her was innocent flirtation: “I overtook pretty little Hetty Sorrel as I was coming to my den—the
Hermitage, there” (). e handkerchief changes all that. Its presence is
a token of Arthur’s guilt, but that guilt, in this economy of gift exchange,
spreads to incriminate the receiver as much as the donor: the hanky means
that Hetty was there. ere, there, there, there. In “the Hermitage, there”;
there alone with Arthur. Hanky-panky? It is a reasonable inference and
explains Arthur’s anxiousness as if he wished “to assure himself of the
presence or absence of something.”
Adam cannot be allowed to see this thing for fear that he will interpret it in exactly this way, as any observer would. In the lead-up to their
fight in the Grove, Arthur’s reaction to Adam’s accusation—“is is not
the first time you’ve met Hetty Sorrel in this grove, and this is not the
first time you’ve kissed her” ()—is expressed in the very language of
investigation: “Arthur felt a startled uncertainty how far Adam was speaking from knowledge and how far from mere inference” (). But put “a
mention. In her chapter “Why ere’s No Sex in Jane Austen,” Morgan makes
passing reference to the evidence of the handkerchief, though with a curious
misprision: in Austen, she says, “the rooms are littered with nothing so evocative as the ‘woman’s little pink silk neckerchief ’ [sic] in Adam Bede” (). e
difference between a handkerchief and a neckerchief is semiotic and sexual.
Hetty wears the latter openly: our first sight of her in Chapter , when Arthur
admires her in the dairy, reveals the loveliness of “the contour of her pink and
white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-coloured stuff bodice” (); when
Adam visits Hetty at the Hall Farm in Chapter , she is described as wearing
“her neckerchief pushed a little backwards on this warm evening” (); and
for the birthday feast in Chapter , Hetty has decided that “at the dance this
evening she was not to wear any neckerchief ” (). us, while neckerchiefs
have their public semiotics, the “little pink silk handkerchief ” seems to belong
to a private or secret system of signification. In a related observation, Krieger
contrasts Bessy Cranage’s and Hetty’s wearing of earrings in the novel as a difference between a “communal openness” and an “alienating secrecy” (). He
argues that earrings function as “the rather obvious symbol of an errant sexuality” (). Compare Homans (and Caroline Levine –; and Welsh, Blackmail
–) on Dinah’s “blushing” and the emergence of her self-conscious sexuality
as “a signifier of domesticity” ().
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woman’s little pink silk handkerchief ” in plain sight, and whose inference
would not quickly become knowledge? And “after such knowledge, what
forgiveness?”
What Arthur doesn’t know is that Adam has already begun piecing
together additional evidence. In the preceding Chapter , just before
Adam and Hetty dance, Totty breaks the string of beads on which Hetty
has slipped the gold locket, and the locket falls to the floor. Adam sees it,
picks it up, but cannot interpret it: “Had Hetty a lover he didn’t know of?”
(). Adam’s questioning turns to fear and “puzzled alarm” () as he
considers that the locket implies the presence of a rival; he then reverses
himself to believe that the locket means just the opposite: her hiding it
“was a proof she cared” about Adam and his disdain for such trinkets
(). But Eliot quickly reduces this alleged “proof ” to “an ingenious web
of probabilities” ()—until Adam sees Arthur and Hetty kissing. en,
everything becomes clear; Adam is able to interpret it all:
He understood it all now—the locket, and everything else that
had been doubtful to him: a terrible scorching light showed
him the hidden letters that changed the meaning of the past.
()
Like a text that has suddenly and uncannily moved from unreadability to
readability, the past is now rewritten in the “terrible scorching light” of
the kiss. Arthur can’t undo that—he can only try to dismiss it and thereby
delude Adam—but there is something else, “a slight thing” () but also
a huge telltale proof, that he can hide. e hanky is the incriminating
evidence of Arthur’s and Hetty’s mutual guilt; its appearance in Arthur’s
private Hermitage also marks the scene of the deed. For Adam to see the
hanky so soon after the fight would certainly confirm his reading of the
situation and would disprove Arthur’s version of events. e kiss was seen,
and that means mischief, but the hanky is evidence of things not seen, and
that spells trouble.
III. Proof
Hetty’s hanky is a text, but also an intertext. Recall the precedent set in
the case of Othello. In Act . Emilia, having found Desdemona’s “napkin”
(..), tells Iago that she has what he wanted:
Emilia.
Iago.
Emilia.
I have a thing for you.
A thing for me? It is a common thing–
Ha?
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Iago.
Emilia.
Iago.
Emilia.
To have a foolish wife.
O, is that all? What will you give me now
For that same handkerchief?
What handkerchief?
What handkerchief?
Why, that the Moor first gave to Desdemona;
at which so often you did bid me steal.
(..–)
Like Eliot, not only does Shakespeare use a language of “things” in the
exchange between Emilia and Iago, but the handkerchief itself plays
an evidentiary role. In the incremental echoes “handkerchief? / What
handkerchief? / What handkerchief?” the epiphoric repetition emphasizes the confusion and deceit, the struggles for and impediments to
understanding, that operate throughout the play. is interrogative
repetition soon turns to imperative, however, as Othello explosively
demands in the next scene, “Fetch me the handkerchief!… e handkerchief!… e handkerchief!” (..–). Emilia tells us some of the history of Desdemona’s hanky:
Emilia.
I am glad I have found this napkin;
is was her first remembrance from the Moor,
My wayward husband hath a hundred times
Wooed me to steal it; but she so loves the token
(For he conjured her she should ever keep it)
at she reserves it evermore about her
To kiss and talk to. I’ll have the work ta’en out
And give’t Iago.
What he will do with it heaven knows, not I;
I nothing but to please his fantasy. (..–)
The “nothing” of the last line prepares us for the play on “thing” that fol-
lows—“I have a thing for you.… A thing for me? It is a common thing”;
Emilia’s speech also makes us aware that the hanky, as Othello’s “first gift”
(..) to Desdemona, has particular value and significance. But when
Iago begins to plant suspicion in Othello’s mind, this “slight thing”—“Your
napkin is too little,” Othello says to Desdemona (..)—gathers forensic weight, becoming a witness for the prosecution of Desdemona: “It
speaks against her with the other proofs,” Iago says (..). Iago confirms the paradoxical weighty “proof ” of so flimsy a thing in his assertion
that “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As
proofs of holy writ” (..–). And when Othello interrogates Desdemona in . concerning the whereabouts of the handkerchief, he acts
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like Arthur—that is, “as if wishing to assure himself of the presence or
absence of something.”⁸
e word “proof” and its variations occur almost a dozen times in this
one scene, and when combined with other terms, such as the repeated use
of “witness” here and in ..–, they amount to a judicial rhetoric that
seeks to convict rather than persuade. Compare another Shakespearean
example of proof or evidence involving personal property, in Cymbeline:
Posthumus gives Imogen a bracelet that Iachimo subsequently steals, offering it as “proof ” that he has seduced Imogen. e language that Iachimo
uses in the theft scene is gravely forensic, as he thinks about how best to
fake evidence to convince Posthumus that his wife has betrayed him:
Ah, but some natural notes about her body
Above ten thousand meaner movables
Would testify, t’enrich mine inventory.
O sleep, thou ape of death, lie dull upon her.
And be her sense but as a monument,
us in a chapel lying. Come off, come off–
[Takes off her bracelet.]
As slippery as the Gordian knot was hard.
’Tis mine, and this will witness outwardly,
As strongly as the conscience does within,
To th’madding of her lord. (..–)
uses in the theft
scene is gravely
forensic, as he
how best to
fake evidence
to convince
 From the considerable amount of commentary on Othello and the handkerchief,
I would refer the reader particularly to the essays by Boose, Berger, and Sofer.
Scheman, citing Nowottny, notes the “judicial” quality of “Iago’s perspective”
(, n). Cavell’s comments, in his chapter “Othello and the Stake of the Other,”
on what he calls “the thing denied our sight” () apply to the themes of sexuality and knowledge in both Shakespeare and Eliot. Desdemona’s handkerchief
is a “counterstory” () functioning both as the truth and as a counter to the
truth—a “cover story for a deeper conviction; a terrible doubt covering a yet
more terrible certainty” (). With Eliot, the handkerchief is also caught up
in a question at once forensic and theological, involving witness, proof, and
knowledge in more than one register.
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135
that Iachimo
thinks about
Once again the rhetoric of witness and testifying works to make the evidence of the bracelet “strong / As proofs of holy writ” (Othello ..–).
Shakespeare dramatizes a strategy of persuasion whose end must lie in a
“Guilty” verdict.
In Othello and Cymbeline as in Adam Bede, then, a “slight thing”—a
handkerchief or bracelet—becomes a piece of evidence with the power to
incriminate. Whether Eliot, “the female Shakespeare,” as Herbert Spencer
called her, was thinking specifically of Othello when she wrote the scene of
Arthur’s fumbling in the dark, we know from her letters of her interest in
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Posthumus that
his wife has
betrayed him.
Shakespeare generally at this period, and a certain parallelism with a difference emerges, grounded not only in the detail of the handkerchief itself but
in its loss or displacement, its “presence or absence.”⁹ e Shakespearean
associations reinforce the novel’s approximation to tragedy, as readers have
noted,¹⁰ though Greek influences vie strongly here, as in the references to
the concept of Nemesis. Insofar as Adam Bede is about a fall, about those
who “swerved / Or fell,” Eliot must change her notes to tragic, and yet she
must do so while remaining faithful to both the forensic and the forgiving voices of her story. Adam Bede may be a nineteenth-century classical
tragedy, but it is also a novel about the illusion of safe sex. Perhaps not
coincidentally, in both Othello and Adam Bede the handkerchief appears
briefly only three times,¹¹ yet it plays a role that wraps around the centre
of each text, enfolding a crisis that includes betrayal and murder. It would
be going too far to suggest, as with Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about
a Handkerchief, that Adam Bede is a novel about a napkin. In fact, omas
Rymer’s ironic observation on Othello—“So much ado, so much stress, so
much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Why was not this
call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?” ()—is effectively reversed in
Adam Bede: so little fuss, such subtle and deliberate handling, such muted
repetition—and yet such guilty concern over a handkerchief!
IV. Fifth Business
To describe the hanky as Hetty’s is to say that it places her at the scene
of the Hermitage. In legal terms, the hanky is a piece of evidence, but in
rhetorical terms it is a metonymy, a part that stands for a whole; it is a trace,
a trail, “ocular proof ” (Othello ..) that Hetty was there. It is curious
that each of the three times that Eliot describes the hanky, she uses the
same phrase: “little pink silk handkerchief.” e adjectives never vary, nor
 Haight recounts how Herbert Spencer called Eliot “the female Shakespeare”
(). For Eliot’s declining Macmillan’s offer to write a volume on Shakespeare
for the “English Men of Letters” series, see Cross : ; and for a speculation
as to Eliot’s reasons for declining, see Knoepflmacher, “Daniel Deronda and
William Shakespeare,” where Knoepflmacher states that to her contemporaries
Eliot “had become nothing less than a ‘modern’ Shakespeare” (). For the
centrality of Shakespeare to Eliot’s imagination, especially her fictional characterizations, see Novy.
 See, for example, Hardy’s chapter on “e Tragic Process: Adam Bede,”
–.
 Desdemona’s handkerchief appears in Othello ., ., and .. Hetty’s handkerchief is brought to our attention in the three passages I cite at the beginning
of this essay.
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does their order, so that the object acquires a fixed, official status: mark
it Exhibit . But the hanky also has metaphorical values; it is not merely
associated with Hetty, as a belonging, but can be read as a sign of Hetty.
Yet what would be the metaphorical equivalent of something that a man
bestows on a woman, who subsequently loses it or leaves it behind for the
man, like a guilty thing, to retrieve, put in his pocket and then, on second
thought, throw out in the garbage, and then later retrieve yet again? Possessing it confers worth on the woman, while the loss of it depreciates her
value. is mystery isn’t hard to solve; the allegorical possibilities all seem
to suggest that the fate of the hanky is the fate of Hetty, though which
power structure, sex or economics, should dominate such a reading is
difficult to judge. It is tempting to say that the hanky is Hetty’s hymen, and
it is equally inviting to hazard the economic equation that Hetty = trash,
at least in the mind of Arthur and his community. “Deep down,” in “the
waste-paper basket full of scraps,” the “little pink silk handkerchief ” lies
hidden. As hymen, the hanky inhabits a borderland between economics
and forensics, being at once a valuable gift and a damning clue. Arthur’s
irresolute fumbling with the handkerchief, his uncertainty whether to keep
or to throw the thing away, suggests an ambivalence that operates on other
levels too. Arthur takes away Hetty’s hymen, but he gives her a “little pink
silk handkerchief” in place of it. Quid pro quo. And the anxious searching
in the dark Hermitage betrays an ambiguous quest, with Arthur’s behaving
“as if wishing to assure himself of the presence or absence of something.”
Presence, absence: these apply equally to a question of sexual as well as
legal innocence. e proof of the hanky points to the loss of the hymen,
but the hiding of the hanky (in a pocket or a waste-paper basket) seeks
to prevent such an unveiling. Eliot, of course, is not the first author to
associate handkerchiefs with virginity. I return to Othello: readers have
connected Desdemona’s handkerchief, which is “spotted with strawberries” (..), to the tradition requiring a bride to prove her virginity by
offering blood-stained wedding sheets as evidence, and they quote Biblical
precedents (Deuteronomy ) for putting a bride to death if she cannot
provide such proof.¹² Hetty’s pink hanky, while not spotted red-and-white,
 See, for example, Boose. Hodgson, offering a counter-argument to Boose over
the significance of Desdemona’s handkerchief ’s being “spotted with strawberries,” begins by outlining how critics have claimed that the handkerchief “symbolizes true and honorable love” (), but he goes on to show how the play
refutes this interpretation: “[T]he handkerchief is an emblem of Desdemona’s
reputation; and as such it closely parallels in its progress through the play the
career of her good name” (). Compare Scheman, who says that in Othello
“various characters attempt to fix and control” the meaning of the handkerchief
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arguably evokes this tradition, though ironically not as a proof of virginity but of its loss. But at this point in the text, with no handkerchief as
evidence, who is going to arraign Arthur?
And worse: how do you prosecute such an unknown? Eliot carefully
avoids fleshing out Arthur as a character. Her first description of him is
significant for how little detail it actually offers; unlike the very particularized portraits that we get of Adam, Dinah, and Hetty, Arthur’s description
contains a displacement from the individual to a type:
If you want to know more particularly how he looked, call to
your remembrance some tawny-whiskered, brown-locked,
clear-complexioned young Englishman whom you have met
with in a foreign town. ()
In this non-portrait, we sense that Arthur is almost less a character than a
function, a kind of “fifth business”—neither “Hero nor Heroine, Confidante
nor Villain, but … nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition
or the dénouement.”¹³ What we see of him is enough to show that, while
good-natured, he is shallow and vacillating, living “a great deal in other
people’s opinions and feelings concerning himself ” (). Eliot reinforces
this image of Arthur intertextually. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a kind of novelistic shorthand was used to imply what characters
are like by telling us what they read; in the case of Arthur, we know that
he has attempted Lyrical Ballads (Adam Bede opens in , the year
after the first edition of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s volume), but he
pronounces most of the poems to be “twaddling stuff ” ()—with the
exception of “e Ancient Mariner,” which is declared “a strange, striking
thing” ().¹⁴ More significant, however, is what Arthur has not read, but
what out of all the “twaddling stuff ” might have done him good: another
“strange, striking thing,” by Wordsworth this time, the very title of which
“as love token, talisman, or hard evidence of adultery” (). While Neely reads
the handkerchief as “a symbol of women’s loving, civilizing, sexual power,” especially “Desdemona’s loving power over Othello” (), she says that “[o]nce
lost, the female power it symbolizes is degraded and constrained, and comedy
gives way to tragedy” ().
 I take this definition from the epigraph to Davies’s novel Fifth Business. Compare Welsh: “Arthur is not [Eliot’s] hero” (Blackmail ).
 Gill glosses this allusion to say that Coleridge’s poem “is, significantly, about
a man who commits a crime against Nature” (, n)—though this perhaps
misses the reason for Eliot’s reference: Arthur’s mention of “e Ancient Mariner” is motivated by the Rev. Irwine’s mother’s reference to eyes, which prompts
Arthur’s reply: “‘Talking of eyes,’ said Captain Donnithorne, ‘that reminds me,
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Eliot buries within Arthur’s last name. I refer to “e orn,” in which a
woman gets pregnant and allegedly murders her illegitimate child:
I cannot tell; but some will say
She hanged her baby on the tree;
Some say she drowned it in the pond,
Which is a little step beyond:
But all and each agree,
e little Babe was buried there,
Beneath that hill of moss so fair.
(–; Poetical Works : )
Had Arthur actually gone on to read this poem, Eliot’s intertextual irony
implies, there’s no telling what a help Wordsworth might have been; from
deliberate epigraph to subtle allusion, a Wordsworthian sympathy lies
within reach, preveniently—but out of the grasp of a character like Arthur.
He prefers, as we see in Chapter , to read of the seductions of Zeluco,
though he seems not to finish that book either, throwing it into the corner
of his Hermitage in a fit of frustration after encountering Hetty in Fir-Tree
Grove (, ).¹⁵
Arthur’s dithering over what to do with the evidence shows his essential weakness as a character. But the progress of the hanky also fits a pattern
of Arthur’s behaviour that I mentioned earlier: Arthur wants to believe
in a linearity of experience that can be reversed, undone—except that
in this case “ere’s a sort o’ damage … that can’t be made up for” ().
Still, the reversibility of the process shows through in this movement of
the hanky—pocket > waste-paper basket > pocket—in which a transfer
of symbolic value occurs from worth to rubbish and back again. is act
by Arthur has always been puzzling. Why does he take the hanky out of
the garbage and put it back in his pocket? Is this a sentimental gesture, the
recovery of a lover’s souvenir? Is Arthur’s  on it? Or is the hanky just
too good a thing to throw away, maybe even something to use again in the
right circumstances? “Keep a thing, its use will come,” said Tennyson.
that I’ve got a book I meant to bring you, godmamma’” (). Arthur is undoubtedly supposed to be thinking of the “glittering eye” of the Ancient Mariner.
 See Buchan for an analogous argument regarding Zeluco, Dr. Moore’s tale of
seduction and its moral consequences, and especially for how “the more one
considers the contents of Zeluco … the more one laments that [Arthur] had not
finished the book and taken its message to heart” (). See also Harris –
for a discussion of the relevance of Zeluco. Knoepflmacher (George Eliot’s Early
Novels ) and Clayton discuss the analogy to Wordsworth’s “orn.”
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From deliberate epigraph to
subtle allusion, a
Wordsworthian
sympathy lies
within reach,
preveniently.
V. Defense
Up to this point I’ve been focusing on the handkerchief as if it implicated
Arthur in a crime. But Arthur hasn’t committed any crime; he is guilty of a
moral wrong that later results in the commission of a felony of infanticide,
and it is precisely this problem—“the problem how far a man is to be held
responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed” ()—that
Adam Bede as a whole forces the reader to consider. It is necessary to weigh
Hetty’s case at this point, and to ask whether she has any defense, all the
more since Adam’s immediate response, upon hearing that Hetty has been
charged with murder, is to blame Arthur, not Hetty:
“It’s his doing,” [Adam] said; “if there’s been any crime, it’s at
his door, not at hers. He taught her to deceive—he deceived
me first. Let ’em put him on his trial—let him stand in court
beside her, and I’ll tell ’em how he got hold of her heart, and
’ticed her t’evil, and then lied to me. Is he to go free, while they
lay all the punishment on her …? ()
Eliot’s strategy in handling this problem, like her design in not wanting
the reader to judge the story apart from its moral treatment, involves a
crucial control of perspective, so that at first we perhaps doubt, as do some
characters in the novel, that Hetty has actually killed a child, her child.
What reader has not had to back up on first reading to establish just when,
exactly, Hetty got pregnant? How did we miss that? While Eliot presents
us with a dawning realization of the pregnancy—the description of the
“more luxuriant womanliness about Hetty of late” () in Chapter ,
for example, leading to the explicit “hidden dread” of the next chapter’s
title—the announcement of the child-murder comes as a surprise. Adam’s
immediate reaction upon hearing the news from the Rev. Irwine may mirror the reader’s own response as Adam moves from a denial of fact to a
verdict of hope. His words recall Wordsworth’s narrator in “e orn”:
“But kill a new-born infant thus, / I do not think she could!” (–): “It
isn’t possible. She never had a child. She can’t be guilty. Who says it? …
[W]ho says she is guilty?” (; emphasis in original).
is last question goes directly to the concept of witness in the novel,
for no one—including the reader—actually sees Hetty commit the crime.
Hetty’s plea, entered by her lawyer, is “not guilty” (), and we are granted
only the legal testimony of certain people after the fact and from their
own limited perspectives. It is not until after the jury has announced its
decision that Eliot gives us the prison confession in which Hetty recounts
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to Dinah what actually happened.¹⁶ In the courtroom, there are a number
of witnesses for the prosecution: the forensic gynecologist, who attests to
the fact that Hetty has indeed recently had a baby; Sarah Stone, who took
Hetty into her home on the night she gave birth,  February, in Stoniton;
and John Olding, who discovered the dead infant buried in the woods. We
are not told much about the defense’s cross-examination; instead, Eliot
gives us the response of Adam, who “could not listen to the cross-examination by Hetty’s counsel” and who “heard no more of the evidence, and
was unconscious when the case for the prosecution had closed” (, ).
Martin Poyser earlier had been required to testify, and the Rev. Irwine
acts as a character witness at the end, but the outcome is known to Adam
even before the jury declares its verdict: “It was the supreme moment of
his suffering. Hetty was guilty” ().
Why Eliot should choose to distance us from the crime, to adopt a
forensic perspective for the prosecution, and at the same time to focalize
an alternative viewpoint through Adam is, I have suggested, part of her
desire to present a sympathetic treatment of the subject. Yet Eliot gives
us anything but a sympathetic picture of Hetty in the courtroom: “e
sympathy of the court was not with the prisoner: the unnaturalness of her
crime stood out the more harshly by the side of her hard immovability and
obstinate silence” ().¹⁷ Because the clinical courtroom discourse comes
before the prison confession, the reader is required to accept the verdict,
 Carroll says in a fine essay on Adam Bede that “the moral conflict” in Hetty’s
abandonment of and then attempted return to her infant is expressed structurally in the book: “is is why the legal trial comes first, makes its judgment, and
is then superseded by the agony of Hetty’s confession, upon which no judgment is possible since she is completely divided in her thoughts and actions”
(). It may be overstating the case to say that no judgement of the latter is
possible; rather, I think that Eliot seeks to represent something beyond mere
judgement, closer to forgiveness and sympathy. Compare Argyros: “[T]he
most important witness and eventual storyteller in Adam Bede will prove to
be Hetty Sorrel—who is significantly not allowed by Eliot to tell her story in
court (when the telling might have made a material difference in the outcome
of events)” (–).
 Trodd says that Hetty “notably fails in her function of creating a community of
sympathy,” which “leaves her, despite her beauty, powerless in the court-room”
(). By contrast, Adam’s “trials” are both an effect and a cause of sympathy: in
Chapter , the Rev. Irwine tries to prepare Adam for the bad news about Hetty
by saying that Adam has “had some hard trials in [his] life”—but that what he is
about to experience goes “far beyond the range of common trial” (). Dinah
likewise uses the metaphor of “trial” to describe human experience, particularly
in the sorting out of good and evil: “‘But that is our trial:—we must learn to
see the good in the midst of much that is unlovely’” (). Note in passing the
motif of “hardness” that runs through the text and which includes both Hetty
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but even this acceptance has its “fibres of sympathy” that prepare us for
its confirmation in Hetty’s admission of her guilt and Dinah’s prompting
her to “pray to the God of all mercy” (). In light of her confession,
what defense could have been mounted? ere is no legal justification
for what Hetty did; yet can there not be a moral, sympathetic response
to her “lapse, or error” upon which “something more / an brotherly
forgiveness may attend”? at “something” comes not in the form of the
withheld recommendation to mercy by the jury, not even in the “hard-won
release from death” that Arthur brings at “the last moment” (), thus
commuting Hetty’s death sentence to transportation. It comes in another
kind of witnessing that never enters the courtroom but which, for Eliot,
was intended to be the climax: Dinah’s ministry in the prison scene, in
which Hetty’s denial turns to confession and then to asking for forgiveness
from Adam as well as from God. In recounting her composition of Adam
Bede, Eliot draws our attention to the incident that functioned both as the
“germ” of the novel and as its culmination: starting from the real-crime
anecdote told by her aunt of “a very ignorant girl who had murdered
her child and refused to confess—how she had stayed with her praying,
through the night and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears,
and confessed her crime” (), Eliot builds a brilliantly interwoven tale of
(“‘[H]er heart’s as hard as a pibble,’” Mrs Poyser says []) and Adam (see
especially  and  for his relation to his alcoholic father). e allegorical
landscape of Stonyshire / Stoniton vs. Loamshire / Hayslope appears to provide
a natural correlative of the moral hardness of the characters but, as with her
realism / romance debate in Chapter , Eliot complicates the simple stone /
loam opposition by not allowing either literal or figural hardness to be judged
apart from its treatment. In contrast to courtroom discourse, Graver show how
Eliot’s rhetorical strategy of narratorial addresses to the reader help create a
bond of sentiment between reader and character—even if that sentiment seems
“imposed by the aesthetic of sympathy and the ideology of community rather
than prompted by the dramatic action” (). In any case, “the purpose of direct
address,” Graver argues, is “to increase sympathetic response through an appeal
to common experience” (). Apropos of direct address and sympathy, Caroline Levine calls attention to the irony inherent in Eliot’s extended digression or
“pause” in Chapter : “[I]t seems particularly odd for the quintessential realist
novel to introduce a self-reflexive interlude” (). Compare Doyle –, for
another discussion of the techniques by which Eliot manipulates the reader’s
sympathetic or unsympathetic responses to different characters, and Argyros,
who maintains that sympathy is “primarily an ethical category” for Eliot, yet her
“efforts to direct, manipulate, and contain reader sympathies have ideological
implications as well: the re-distribution of power is always implicated in the
manipulation of reader sympathies” ().
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suffering, with “the scene in the prison being of course the climax towards
which I worked” ().
Dinah’s preaching near the beginning of the novel had already introduced the theme of divine forgiveness, and the trajectory of that theme
takes us all the way to the prison scene—a trajectory specially marked by
Eliot through the device of the external observer. In Chapter  we first
see the “elderly horseman” () as he and Adam pass each other; then we
watch him as he pauses to listen to Dinah’s preaching in Chapter ; and we
see him, identified finally as Colonel Townley, in Chapter  as he helps
Dinah gain access to Hetty in prison. As a narrative function, Townley
links origin and climax structurally and thereby underlines the thematic
workings of sin, confession, and forgiveness. If sin and confession are in
this sense the germ and climax of the novel, they suggest a pattern of evil
and good that we saw earlier in the repeated references to images of causality, such as “links” and “consequences.” e particular relation in this
case is a version of the felix culpa, or happy sin, which is the fallen and
fallacious view that it was a fortunate or even necessary thing that Adam
and Eve sinned—because then God, through his Son, could come down
in all his goodness and grace and show everyone how loving and merciful
he is.¹⁸ e felix culpa reasoning is a defensive rationalization by a fallen
mind that seeks to justify itself: “Yes, I sinned, but look at the good that is
going to come out of the evil I did.” To wit: it’s a good thing that Arthur
seduced Hetty and that she did what she did because if it weren’t for that,
Adam and Dinah never could have known the love that they do by the
end of the novel. It’s an outrageous argument—and yet an argument that
 Knoepflmacher, discussing Eliot’s theology in the context of her “highly imaginative appropriation of Paradise Lost” in Adam Bede (Limits ), broaches this
question of the so-called “fortunate fall”: like Milton’s Adam, Knoepflmacher
writes, “Adam Bede, too, learns to recognize that ‘there may good come out of
this that we don’t see’” (). But this very statement, made by Bartle Massey,
is immediately repudiated by Adam: “‘Good come out of it!… at doesn’t
alter th’evil: her ruin can’t be undone …’” (; emphasis in original). In other
words, it is not that Adam “must overcome despair by recognizing the paradox
of a fortunate fall” (Knoepflmacher, Limits ); it is rather that Adam teaches
us that there’s no such thing as a fortunate fall: “‘Evil’s evil, and sorrow’s sorrow,’” he says (). Interestingly, Krieger has back-to-back chapters on “William Wordsworth and the Felix Culpa” (–) and “Adam Bede and the
Cushioned Fall: e Extenuation of Extremity” (–), though he does not
make the connection between the felix culpa and Adam Bede. For a revision of
Knoepflmacher’s reading, see the fine discussion of Eliot’s “dialogue with John
Milton” by Nardo, especially –, where she by contrast argues that Adam
“eventually does read in his life the pattern of the fortunate fall”—though she
notes: “Milton’s God may be able to bring goodness out of evil, but Arthur
Donnithorne cannot” ().
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The felix culpa
reasoning is a
defensive rationalization by a
fallen mind that
seeks to justify
itself: …
more than one character makes in the book. Who would make such a
defense in Adam Bede?
Above all, Arthur, of course, who wants so badly to believe in the
reversibility of actions. On the morning after his fight with Adam, Arthur
rationalizes the consequences of his having to break off his relations with
Hetty:
And perhaps hereafter he might be able to do a great deal for
her, and make up to her for all the tears she would shed about
him. She would owe the advantage of his care for her in future
years to the sorrow she had incurred now. So good comes
out of evil. Such is the beautiful arrangement of things! (;
emphasis in original)
e counter-argument to this fallacy is expressed by Adam when he responds to Bartle Massey’s attempt, quoted above, to console him with the
notion that “there may good come out of this that we don’t see” ():
“Good come out of it!… at doesn’t alter th’evil: her ruin can’t
be undone. I hate that talk o’ people, as if there was a way o’
making amends for everything. ey’d more need be brought
to see as the wrong they do can never be altered. When a
man’s spoiled his fellow-creatur’s life, he’s no right to comfort
himself with thinking good may come out of it: somebody
else’s good doesn’t alter her shame and misery.” (; emphasis
in original)
Adam perhaps appears to take a somewhat different view later, when he
reflects on his new-found love with Dinah:
“I should never ha’ come to know that her love ’ud be the
greatest o’ blessings to me, if what I counted a blessing hadn’t
been wrenched and torn away from me, and left me with a
greater need, so as I could crave and hunger for a greater and
a better comfort.” ()
Yet Adam isn’t accepting the fallacy of the fortunate fall here; he is stating a
fact of experience, not exulting in his “greatest o’ blessings” at the expense
of Hetty’s shame. e law of non-reversibility that he stated earlier still
holds, and Adam reiterates the principle that “‘ere’s a sort o’ damage
… that can’t be made up for’” (). As if to corroborate this, Eliot has the
narrator add a final comment on the idea of a happy sin:
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at is a base and selfish, even a blasphemous spirit, which
rejoices and is thankful over the past evil that has blighted or
crushed another, because it has been made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves: Adam could never cease to mourn
over that mystery of human sorrow which had been brought
so close to him: he could never thank God for another’s misery.… [H]e would have shaken his head at such a sentiment,
and said, “Evil’s evil, and sorrow’s sorrow, and you can’t alter
its nature by wrapping it up in other words. Other folks were
not created for my sake, that I should think all square when
things turn out well for me.” ()
It is precisely the unalterability of experience, and therefore the unavoidable consequences that result from experience, that carry Adam Bede
through anguish to regeneration. ere is no defense for Hetty; evil’s evil,
and no amount of good in after times can alter that.¹⁹ Toward the end of
his meeting with Adam after Hetty’s sentencing, Arthur shows that he has
learned from the whole tragic experience, yet his moral education is perhaps more regretful than regenerative. Asking Adam to help him “lessen
the evil consequences of the past, which is unchangeable” (), Arthur
demonstrates his new-found understanding of the linearity of experi-
 Creeger makes a related point when he resorts to a legal metaphor to note that
the fact that there is “no room for Hetty” at the end of the novel “stands as an
indictment against the ethic which the book suggests” (); for a different
view of the “ethic” of Adam Bede, see Miller’s reading of Chapter , in which
“the economic, the ethical, and the legal” () dimensions of Eliot’s theory of
realism are unsettled. In his essay on Eliot in Compassion: e Culture and
Politics of an Emotion, Hertz, citing Raymond Williams’s powerful statement
(see note  above) that Eliot “abandons [Hetty] in a moral action more decisive than Hetty’s own confused and desperate leaving of her child” (; see
Williams ), ironically suggests that “the best advice to give someone on the
receiving end of George Eliot’s narrator’s sympathy would be: ‘Duck!’” (). In
a different vein, Goslee makes an unflinching observation: “From Adam Bedethrough Middlemarch,” he says, “Eliot can preach compassion because she has
learned how to make her plots dole out justice” (). In this judicial context,
the “explicitly moral perspective” of Adam Bede, Grossman argues, relies on
being in a stabilizing tension with the law courts as a complementary scene of
justice” (). Compare Jaffe, who examines “scenes of sympathy” rather than of
justice in Victorian fiction—“narratives that render visible otherwise invisible
determinations of social identity” (). But see Luyster’s response to Grossman,
in which she argues that “a study of the intersection of the law courts with
the nineteenth-century British novel cannot be confined to novels with trial
scenes” (), and that there are fundamental differences between story-telling
in novels and in the courtroom.
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ence and its effects, yet he still wants to make a distinction between real
action and the “unforeseen consequences” of an action.²⁰ Arthur makes an
ambiguous slip in his words: “‘If I were careless about what I’ve done–what
I’ve been the cause of …’” (). What is the difference between doing and
causing here? As a correction of overstatement, “‘what I’ve done’” might
be read as murder, and therefore Arthur quickly alters this to the lesser
charge of seduction; as an acknowledgment of a cumulative failing, “‘what
I’ve been the cause of’” adds up to more than a single, isolated act of doing.
“With a single drop of ink” begins the novel: a single cause that adumbrates
the multeity that will grow out of unity. Arthur’s ambivalent struggle shows
an unresolved conflict between a growing sense of sacrifice that contains
a wish-fulfilment: “God knows, I’d give my life if I could undo it” ().
Interesting words by a man who, on the next page, “[a]s soon as the door
was closed behind him … went to the waste-paper basket and took out
the little pink silk handkerchief ” ().
While not a
scarlet letter, the
“little pink silk
handkerchief”
has nevertheless
performed its
office.
VI. Closing Statement
While not a scarlet letter, the “little pink silk handkerchief ” has nevertheless performed its office. Rhetorically, semiotically, intertextually, Hetty’s
hanky leads into a forensics of Eliot’s novel, as it represents the evidence
of error, a lover’s token, an erotic prize, a woman’s sex, “the presence or
absence of something.” To analyze this hanky is to discover “long-winding fibres” () that are intricately woven into the moral fabric of the
novel, into what Eliot sees as its “web” () of folly and self-indulgence
but finally of responsibility and feeling. “e evil consequences that may
lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence” () are shown to be real
and irreversible and yet still wrapped within a larger ethic of forgiveness.
It is testimony to Eliot’s imaginative treatment that such a “slight” motif
should weigh so heavily in the text and that an unfolding of the hanky
should reveal its grasp of Eliot’s master trope: “sympathy—the one poor
word which includes all our best insight and our best love” (). Forensics can go only so far with its rhetoric of consequences and links, and
“something more,” another type of witness, must take over at the point
where the witness-box ends.
 Adam’s last speech in the novel reports Arthur’s final understanding of consequence: Arthur is said to have told Adam: “‘[Y]ou told me the truth when
you said to me once, ‘ere’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for’”
().
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