scholarly journals Adam Bede and ‘the green trash of the railway stall’: George Eliot and the Lady Novelists of 1859

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-260
Author(s):  
Gail Marshall
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Adam Bede

Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice

Pólemos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Francesca D’Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
The Way

Abstract Starting from an analysis of realism as expressed by George Eliot in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, this paper intends to investigate the way in which law is enforced in a case of infanticide. In particular, in Eliot’s novel the crime is committed by the beautiful and naive Hetty Sorrel whose tragic destiny is a consequence of her seduction by the aristocratic Arthur Donnithorne. Hence her condition of a fallen woman and, accordingly, the trial culminating in the sentencing to hanging. Significantly, Hetty’s silence before the jury in the courtroom is interrupted thanks to the intervention of Dinah Morris, her Methodist cousin who, meeting the prisoner in solidarity and sympathy, will have from her a full confession of the events.

Illiberalism and the Exception in George Eliot's Early Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-407
Author(s):  
Neal Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
The Public Sphere

Over the past two decades, studies of the Victorian novel have been enriched significantly by a growing body of scholarship looking to the literature and letters of the period to affirm for the twenty-first century the theoretical and practical value of liberal conceptualizations of critical detachment and communicative decision-making procedures. In the process, the works of George Eliot (1819–1880) have come to be understood not only as modeling forms of critical detachment and rational decision-making but also as important contributors to what Amanda Anderson has identified as “the emergence of the [Habermasian] public sphere in Enlightenment Europe, a historical condition in which critique, argument, and debate inform developing political practices and institutions,” which “helped to consolidate … the legitimating force of public opinion and the rule of law, the successor to now delegitimated forms of absolute sovereignty.” However, I will argue here that Eliot's early writing in particular demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in the power of liberalism and its political procedures and that Eliot's early work in fact exposes the illiberal tendencies embedded in these procedures. Rather than asserting the authority of the public sphere, Eliot's important early novelsAdam Bede(1859) andThe Mill on the Floss(1860) consistently look beyond themselves, so to speak, to a providential authority that exceeds the tenets of realism in their efforts to resolve conflict and provide closure to the novels. For each novel, aesthetic coherence is secured not through “critique, argument, and debate” but through recourse to metaphysics and to extrasocial and/or extraprocedural decisions. In the following pages I align this phenomenon in Eliot's early writing with the controversial German legal scholar Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception in order to argue that, by appealing to the logic of providence to resolve their most intractable legal and ethical problems, these early novels in fact demonstrate Eliot's awareness of the practical limitations of proceduralism as a legitimate decision-making instrument.

“George Eliot” and “Adam Bede.”

1883 ◽  
Vol s6-VIII (197) ◽  
pp. 266-266
Author(s):  
B. T. Elsmore ◽  
E. Walford
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Adam Bede

“LOVE YOURSELF AS YOUR NEIGHBOR”: THE LIMITS OF ALTRUISM AND THE ETHICS OF PERSONAL BENEFIT INADAM BEDE

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 543-560
Author(s):  
Ilana M. Blumberg
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Early Death ◽  
Personal Benefit ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Volume Exploration ◽  
Early Novel

In the work of George Eliot, a “past evil that has blighted or crushed another” is often “made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves” (Adam Bede573; ch. 54). Eliot's early novelAdam Bedemight be read as a three-volume exploration of the moral difficulties inherent in a narrative pattern premised on such inequality of lots. The seduction of Adam Bede's first love, Hetty Sorrel, her pregnancy, subsequent act of infanticide, transportation, and early death darkly prepare the path to the hero's joyous union with Dinah Morris, who guides him through the story's most painful, educative hours. Adam's union with Dinah, the narrator tells us, is deeper, more powerful, and more pleasurable than any with Hetty might have been because of the knowledge through suffering that Adam attains; “what better harvest from that painful seed-time” can there be than this second love? (578; ch. 55). Yet Hetty embodies all the loss and destruction that enable Adam and Dinah's redemptive future while enjoying no such redemption herself.

THE ECONOMICS OF “A BIT O' VICTUAL,” OR MALTHUS AND MOTHERS IN ADAM BEDE

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 549-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lana L. Dalley
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Child Murder ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Illegitimate Child ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Landed Gentry

Hetty Sorrel's economic self-interest is impossible to ignore, as is its sexual nature. George Eliot tells us that Hetty is “quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her” and is determined to exchange her physical charms for a life of luxuries (96; ch. 9). Hetty's attraction to the young, wealthy Arthur Donnithorne is unabashedly opportunistic. While Hetty is searching for Arthur, once she is aware of her “swift-advancing shame,” the narrator reveals the turn of her thoughts: “He would not marry her and make her a lady; and apart from that she could think of nothing he could give her towards which she looked with longing and ambition” (364; ch. 35, 372; ch. 36). And it is certainly not unusual for economic considerations to figure in the Victorian marriage plot; Mary Barton's attraction to Harry Carson is predicated on his ability to make her a lady; Rosamond Vincy marries Lydgate in the hopes that his relationship to the landed gentry will, quite literally, pay off. It is the lethal turn of Hetty's material self-interest – the murder of her illegitimate child – that makes her story exceptional. I suggest that Hetty's desire to “purchase” Arthur's social prestige and her ultimate rejection of maternal responsibility intersect with Malthusian economics. The central action of the story, infanticide, signifies one of the chief topics of Malthusian debate. T. R. Malthus and his followers suggested that economically imprudent marriages were akin to an unthinking infanticide because the newlyweds would likely be unable to feed the children that would arise from their conjugal relations; they also registered child-murder as one of the checks to population, classifying it as “one of the worst forms of vice and misery” (1803: 71; ch. 3). In this essay, I read food and the life-and-death economics of food in Adam Bede as a register for Malthusian concerns about sex, family, responsibility, and dependence. In the novel, these concerns are not only for fathers – which is Malthus's own emphasis – but also for mothers. Although published in 1859, the novel is set in 1799, a year after the first publication of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and three decades before the Poor Law reform developed in response to Malthusian analysis. It is in this context that I propose reading Adam Bede alongside Malthus's Essay.

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