I have continued my presentation of Eliot’s development by placing my analysis of each novel in the context of the ongoing events of her life; I have also described briefly in each case some of the details of her writing process. In this way, I hope to show how Eliot’s pattern of extraordinary intellectual, creative, and emotional growth continued throughout her fiction-writing career. I have also placed my discussions in the context of each novel’s critical reception, both in Eliot’s time and ours. My purpose in so doing is to convey something of the scope of each work of fiction, and the extent of the author’s success, at the same time that I demonstrate the way in which my psychoanalytic interpretations can help to answer some of the questions raised by critics; I also want to stress that criticisms of George Eliot’s work should be seen in the light of her overall achievement.
I must also add that Eliot’s artistic and personal development did not go smoothly, even once she started on the path of fiction writing. Instead of a smooth ascent, her creative path sometimes seems more like a labyrinth. To many modern critics, Romola and Felix Holt present serious problems; some even consider one or both to be failures. Yet after attempting to work through the difficulties presented by those novels, Eliot was prepared to write her masterpiece, Middlemarch; and by the time she finished what some readers believe to be an even greater work, Daniel Deronda, she seems to have achieved, in addition to her eminent position as an English novelist, her own inner sense of completion.
I have tried to write this book in such a way that it will interest the general reader as much as the academic reader. Prior knowledge of George Eliot’s novels, or of psychoanalytic theory, although helpful, is not necessary. For those who may be unfamiliar with the variety of academic styles of documentation, I want to explain that instead of using footnotes, I have incorporated all references to the list of "Works Cited" in the body of the text, in order to make it easier for readers to locate my sources. In short, I have tried to write the kind of book that I would like to read myself. I hope my readers will find it useful.
ONE
Self-Disorder and Aggression in
Adam Bede
After the completion of "Janet’s Repentance," the third and last story in Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot wrote her editor, John Blackwood, on September 5, 1857, that "I have a subject in my mind which will not come under the limitations of the title 'Clerical Life,' and I am inclined to take a large canvas for it, and write a novel" (Letters 2:381). On October 17 she wrote, "My new story haunts me a good deal, and I shall set about it without delay. It will be a country story–full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay" (387). She began writing on October 22. After she had finished the novel in November 1858, she recorded in her journal her "History of Adam Bede,” where she explains the germ of her story: an anecdote told her in 1839 by her Methodist aunt, Mrs. Samuel Evans, of a visit to a "condemned criminal, 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 had begun thinking, shortly after beginning to write the Scenes, of blending this story "and some other recollections of my aunt in one story with some points in my father’s early life and character" (502).
She carefully researched the background of her novel, which takes place in 1799 in the county of "Loamshire," a symbolic re-creation of Staffordshire, where her father had come from his childhood home in Derbyshire (re-created in the novel as "Stonyshire"), as a young man to begin his career as a carpenter. Eliot gleaned from Southey’s Life of Wesley the details she needed for her characterization of Dinah, her Methodist preacher, about women’s preaching, visions, the divination of God’s will, visits to prisons, and preaching in the open air. She also searched the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1799 for details of vegetation and weather for her setting. As Gordon Haight observes, "her concern for details helps explain the sense of authenticity, the remarkable density of background her realism achieves" (Biography 250). Yet she emphasized in her letters after the novel was published that the story had developed out of her imagination: "There is not a single portrait in Adam Bede. . . . The whole course of the story–the descriptions of scenery or houses–the characters–the dialogue—everything is a combination of widely sundered elements of experience" (3:155). Regarding her accurate rendering of the local dialect, she stresses that she "never knew any Derbyshire people, or Staffordshire either, except my father and his brothers," and that she had visited her paternal relatives only a few times while she was growing up (157).
It would be hard to overstate the success of Adam Bede. It was published on February 1, 1859; by the middle of March, Blackwood wrote to congratulate her upon being "a popular as well as a great author" (3:33); he added that "the sale is nothing to the ring of applause that I hear in all directions." In June, her friend Barbara Bodichon wrote, "I wish you could hear people talking about AB”(108). In July, Charles Dickens wrote to say that "Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences of my life. . . . The conception of Hetty’s character is so extraordinarily subtle and true, that I laid the book down fifty times, to shut my eyes and think about it. I know nothing so skilful, determined, and uncompromising. The whole country life that the story is set in, is so real, and so droll and genuine, and yet so selected and polished by art, that I cannot praise it enough to you" (114–15). G. H. Lewes wrote his son in March 1860 that Bede "had had greater success than any novel since Scott (except Dickens). I do not mean has sold more–for 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin' and 'Les Mysteres de Paris' surpass all novels in sale; but in its influence, and in obtaining the suffrages of the highest and wisest as well of the ordinary novel reader, nothing equals 'Adam Bede'" (275).
The scope of the novel reaches far beyond its provincial origins. One twentieth-century critic, U. C. Knoepflmacher, has rightly seen the novel as Eliot’s reinterpretation of the fallen and redeemed Adam of Milton’s epic (Novels 91-126). Although the title character is the primary focus of the author’s theme of "tragic growth" (Hardy, Novels 39), Eliot attempts to show "an enlargement of moral sympathy" (Gregor 24) on the part of all four major characters–Adam, Arthur, Hetty, and Dinah. Many twentieth-century readers have difficulty accepting Eliot’s message, however, because of the treatment of Hetty, the character who is convicted of infanticide and banished from the community of Hayslope. Critics who have puzzled over the author’s apparent harshness toward Hetty include Knoepflmacher, who calls Hetty’s early disappearance from the novel her "execution by her moralistic creator" (Novels 124), and George Creeger, who suggests that Hetty is "the victim" of her creator’s own "hardness" (231). Mason Harris, who refers to Eliot’s "unforgivable" refusal to portray Hetty’s further development after her exile, objects to the novel’s ending on the grounds that "the reconstructed, Hetty-less pastoral of the ending seems to refute the whole process of the novel" ("Hetty" 189, 194). Other critics who have objected to the ending of the novel on similar grounds include Michael Edwards, who feels that its power "is diminished by Adam’s lack of guilt as regards Hetty" (218), and Murray Krieger, who suggests that "our discomfort with the conclusion is our sense that the transformed pain is not evident enough" (219).
My purpose in this chapter is to show how Heinz Kohut’s "self-psychology" illuminates the problems that critics have noted in Adam Bede. I will argue that Eliot’s portrayal of the inhabitants of the village of Hayslope shows that the community victimizes Hetty; each of the major characters, Arthur, Adam, and even the idealized heroine, Dinah, is shown using Hetty as a scapegoat. At the same time, I will show how Kohut’s theory about the relationship between incomplete self-development and rage helps to account for the aggressive behavior of the characters. I will then explain how Eliot’s apparent failure to see the extent of the aggression she portrays in her characters