The affair is not simply a matter of Arthur’s failure to recognize his own frustrated sex drive, which Harris asserts has been "sublimated" into "sentimental musing over Hetty" ("Misuse" 45). Sexual fantasy and behavior can also serve as a defense, for example, against "hostile aggression" (Coen 895). Arthur, feeling controlled and therefore angry at his grandfather, expresses his frustration and need for power in the involvement with Hetty. Yet he also feels he is under her power, or "witchery." As often as he determines to do so, he is not able to end the affair and separate himself from Hetty, who is as much an extension of his fantasies as he is of hers. Just as Hetty’s fantasies are about the luxuries of the social position that would be hers as Arthur’s wife (144, 181, 199, 296), so Arthur’s are about his life as squire after his grandfather’s death (170, 483). Arthur’s inadequate sense of his own identity, which depends to such an extent on his future inheritance from his grandfather, makes him susceptible to the need for completing himself in the relationship with Hetty, in which he can act out his fantasy of being loved by the lower classes for his philanthropic works after he takes over his grandfather’s position in the community.
Arthur does finally suffer from the pain he has caused Hetty. His atonement, however, follows the pattern of his atonement with the old gardener: an attempt to rectify aggressive action by giving up possessions. He gives up his position as squire and goes away. Yet his exile is only temporary. He is eventually able to return and find a place in Hayslope. Hetty, by virtue of her position in the community, is the one who must bear the full weight of the consequences of their behavior.
Eliot attempts to show her title character Adam undergoing a transformation from an inner "hardness" to a capacity for sympathy for others (Creeger 234-35). The description of Adam’s family life points to the source of his hardness as his lost "sense of distinction" as "Thias Bede’s lad" since the onset of his father’s alcoholism during his late teenage years. Adam’s "shame and anguish" (92) had caused him to run away from home, but he had returned because he did not want to leave his mother and brother Seth with the burden of enduring the situation without him. Kohut explains that shame results in rage, and in the shamed individual’s ongoing readiness to seek revenge ("Thoughts" 380-81)–a reaction that Eliot similarly depicts. By the time Adam’s story opens, his shame has turned to rage, which shows itself in his propensity for fighting (211) and in his severity toward his father (86). Adam focuses all his anger about his family situation on his father, although it is clear that his mother Lisbeth has her own problem of "idolatrous love" (87) for Adam and her obvious preference for him over Seth.
Adam’s anger toward his father culminates in his actions on the night of his father’s death. He is furious because his father is out drinking when he should have been working on the job of making a coffin for a man in a neighboring village. While Adam stays up to finish the job himself, he thinks of his father’s continuously "worsening" behavior (92), but feels determined not to run away from the situation again, although he feels his father will be a "sore cross" to him for years to come. At that moment he hears a rap "as if with a willow wand" on the house door, goes to the door to look out, sees that no one seems to be there, and thinks of the superstition that the sound of a willow wand rapping on the door means that someone is dying (93). After he hears the sound again and still sees no sign of his father, he reasons that Thias is probably "sleeping off his drunkenness at the [tavern]." Not wanting to succumb to superstitious thinking, he determines not to open the door again, and for the rest of the night hears no more knocking. The next morning, however, Seth discovers that Thias has drowned during the night, "not far from his own door," as Mr. Irwine says later (137).
Carol Christ notes that Thias’s death "occurs as a magical fulfillment of Adam’s anger" (131); Krieger suggests that "the resentfulness Adam feels . . . brings him close to wishing his father dead" (211). It is possible to interpret Adam’s hearing the sound of the willow wand not only as a manifestation of his sense of foreboding, but as his wish for his father’s death. It is also possible to interpret Adam’s decision not to open the door again despite his father’s expected arrival as a form of passive aggression, and as an indirect contribution to his father’s death. In any case, Thias’s death causes Adam to repent his "severity" toward him (97). And this repentance, in Eliot’s view, turns out to be the first step of the process "in which Adam learns to overcome his angry severity toward others" (Christ 131).
Adam’s attitude toward Arthur and Hetty repeats the pattern of his attitude toward his parents. Even before he realizes they are actually having an affair, he is openly outraged at Arthur’s involvement with Hetty and provokes him into a fight. Yet he has trouble seeing any wrong in Hetty even after it becomes clear that she has abandoned her baby. Adam’s reluctance to feel hostile toward Hetty is related to his reluctance to be angry with his mother. His dream, which recounts the events in the Bede household shortly after Thias’s death, shows Adam’s close identification of Hetty with his mother. When his mother approaches, accidentally waking him, he is not startled to see her because she had been present "with her fretful grief" throughout his feverish reliving of the day’s events. Yet Hetty, too, had "continually" appeared in the dream, "mingling … in scenes with which she had nothing to do"; and "wherever Hetty came, his mother was sure to follow soon" (152). Adam’s dream suggests that he has transferred his attachment to his mother, who has always loved him with "idolatrous love," to his "preoccupying fancy" with Hetty (161-62).
When Adam learns of Hetty’s interest in Arthur, he does not express anger toward her openly. Instead, his aggressiveness takes the form of an intrusion on her relationship with Arthur. By insisting that Arthur not see Hetty again and that he write her a letter breaking off the relationship, he is cutting off all possibility that Arthur will be able to help her. At the time of the intrusion, Adam is not aware that Hetty is pregnant, nor is he aware that Arthur really does care for her more than he has let Adam know. His intrusiveness, however, is inappropriate and ends up making the situation worse. It is perhaps Adam’s bitter jealousy (370), more than an interest in Hetty’s welfare, that makes him insist on the letter, which he gives to Hetty himself after he tells her that Arthur "care[s] nothing about [her] as a man ought to care" (367). As Bruce K. Martin argues, "Adam thus indirectly contributes to the child-killing" by "remov[ing] from Hetty’s mind the possibility of consulting Arthur until it is too late" (759).
Adam’s inner struggles center on his inability to see Hetty realistically. Even before he sees her with Arthur in the woods, her locket (a gift from Arthur) drops to the floor in front of Adam; he fears she has a lover, but then rationalizes that she "might have bought the thing herself" (333). After he delivers Arthur’s letter to her, he still hopes that she will become interested in him: "She may turn round the other way, when she finds he’s made light of her all the while" (370). He continues to hope for her love by "creat[ing] the mind he believed in out of his own" (400). When he learns that Hetty has been accused of infanticide, he finds it impossible to believe: "'It’s his doing,' he said; 'if there’s been any crime, it’s at his door, not at hers. … I can't bear it. … it’s too hard to think she’s wicked'" (455). At the trial, when it becomes clear that Hetty is guilty, "It was the supreme moment of his suffering: Hetty was guilty, and he was silently calling to God for help" (481). Later, in the "upper