I am revisiting Adam Bede. Not, of course, in the sense that I am rereading it, but in the sense that I am thinking about it. Deeply. And, in thinking about the novel, I have been thinking about Hetty Sorrel – the title character that wasn’t.
The thing about Hetty, for me, is that this could have been her book.
When I think of Adam Bede, as I often have this past year, I think of Hetty. I think of her looking into her mirror in her room, I think of her journey by post (I especially thought of this whenever this method of transportation was mentioned in a Jane Austen novel), I think of her tragedy.
Without giving too much away, particularly with regard to that last point, I think Hetty represents a character that was corrupted by beauty – by her own beauty. She wasn’t so much a corrupter (although others, namely Adam, were mislead by that same beauty) and she wasn’t necessarily corrupted by an outside person (she was already fundamentally wrong when she met Arthur).
I think this beauty and this corruption (and the way in which they were tied) is interesting in part because Hetty is never really able to recover from it. In the end, Adam and Hetty both interact with Dinah. Hetty is forgiven but I believe it is Adam who is ultimately saved. His is the story that doesn’t end in tragedy (although it begins and middles with it) – hers is (although it didn’t have to be). Adam’s ending, as Adam is the title character, saves Adam Bede from itself being a tragedy. Hetty falls from grace (although, perhaps my point is more that she didn’t necessarily fall, she just didn’t save herself or let herself be saved*), Adam, in all the religious language that this entails, ascends.
And this is what the reader is left with. Not what happened to Hetty (or what Hetty did?) but Adam’s (quite literal) baptism:
“Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. The yearning memories, the bitter regret, the agnoized sympathy, the struggling appeals to the Invisible Right – all the intense emotions which had filled the days and nights of the past week, and were compressing themselves again like an eager crwod into the hours of this single morning, made Adam look back on allt he previous years as if they had been a dim, sleepy, existence, and he had only now awaked to full consciousness. It seemed to him as if he had always before thought it a light thing that men should suffer; as if all that he had himself endured, and called sorrow before, was only a moment’s stroke that never left a bruise. Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and pity.” (Google-able here)
But what does any of this amount to? This is not Hetty’s book – Hetty’s book is a tragedy. Hetty and her beauty are merely plot devices – the things that push Adam to his baptism. He is able to be virtuous because he rejects the pretty woman.
That all sounds very Wollstonecraftian – all the stuff about women and decorations and virtue. If I were going to argue that Eliot is making some sort of argument about the role of women through her book – and I am totally NOT going to argue that, probably ever – she would probably be making some sort of Wollstonecraftian argument about women being virtuous and rational. Dinah is both of those things and Dinah is our real heroine. And Dinah is not beautiful and she is not consumed by beauty.
Dinah is better than Hetty, right?
Maybe. But this is where, for me, things stop being so Wollstonecraftian. Eliot never seems to come down harshly on Hetty and, for that matter, neither do any of her characters. Hetty is, in fact, forgiven.
We’re not even supposed to come down too harshly on Arthur. Or even the society that set this up. The word used is “sorrow.” (See above. Also: anguish, awe, pity, etc.) This book is not judgmental.
The religion that works for Adam is the religion that, perhaps, didn’t get to Hetty in time. Or, perhaps, isn’t something that would work for her (because she’s a woman, because she’s already been corrupted by her beauty?) at all. Hetty isn’t able to be saved – not by Irwin, and not by Dinah. There is no place for her in the religious community.
And there’s no place for her in this narrative. Hetty isn’t a heroine – the heroine dies or marries the hero.
Somehow, George Eliot managed to write an entire novel about a woman that the hero and heroine merely knew. (To make an analogy, it would be like Austen writing Pride and Prejudice about Charlotte Lucas.) Chilling.
*This word “saves” is particularly interesting for Hetty. She is, in terms of plot, “saved” from death. But it is it this that, perhaps, ultimately prevents her religious salvation – she is not allowed to die, forgiven. I think this ending is actually particularly clever – Hetty’s plotline is interrupted, just when she’s about to pay penance, perhaps yet again by the same man.
George Eliot Summer 2011 