Adam Bede (Eliot, 1859)

George Eliot. Adam Bede. Pub. 1859. Ed. Carol A. Martin. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

Bk I

• opening epigram from Wordsworth’s Excursion, they shared a sense of the ethical use of "ordinary life" (cf Ashton 1996)
• 5 magic of Egyptian ink conjuring and chrono precision (June 18, 1799) constituting the ambit of her realism— and after that very brief direct address we drop right into the story world in a sustained way
• 6-7 pungent dialect
• 9 AB and engineering, deflecting religious controversy: "Look at the canals, an’ th’ aqueducs, an’ th’ coal-pit engines...a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon.”
• see note: Bede preaches from Ben Franklin, and later there’s confusion between advice literature and the Bible
• 20 Dinah has no "smile of conscious saintship," whhxh you can imagine Dorothea having in Middlemarch
• 23 D saw Wesley preach as a child
• 33 D’s refusal of Seth and desire to remain unmarried: an overextension of sympathy, back around toward selfishness? And Seth saying he cares too much for her: are there limits we should put on sympathy? And then extending it to the reader ff didactically or analytically: what do we owe one another? What do we owe the fictional?
• 35 how lightly too she switches between privileged insight, from the stranger (Townley) to narratorial omniscience to Seth
• 36 "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that tragic dramatist..." But how does this famous passage relate to 21 where the narrator distances herself from "those who think that nature has theatrical properties"?
• 42 then also the question of responsibility and/versus sympathy: Adam saves his money and supports the family but Seth gives his away (or his mother says he would) out of religious feeling. Complex moral obligations.
• 43 the bit about Lisbeth confusing Franklin for the Bible (see 9): "Well, how’m I to know? It sounds like a tex." The rhetorical/generic contestedness of the aphoristic and its relation to ethical behavior. Price 2000
• 46 the supernatural portent of the willow wand: see the note— she seems to make an analogous case that, if Adam is complex enough to be practical and to believe folk beliefs, that her realism is capacious enough to include effective representation of what might be interpreted as supernatural
• 49 Irwine a much less egregious "pluralist" than Stanhope in Barchester Towers
• 54-5 Irwine’s liberal philosophy of social and religious freedom, negative liberty
• 57 gloss from GE’s notebook about "St Catherine in a Quaker dress" highlights the way the archival models a theory of the incompleteness of the literary text
• 58 "I might get up as pretty a story of hatred and persecution as the Methodists need desire to publish in the next number of their magazine"— again proximity between the periodical and the literary here, the precisely temporally defined realism (again with the news on 61)
• 65 the "happy irregularity" of Hall Farm, not unlike Bleak House ("a chancery suit" is even mentioned on the next p)
• 75ff first proper intro to the "distractingly pretty" Hetty Sorrel
• 80 the switch back to see a different scene that started at the same time (from Arthur/Hetty to Irwine/Dinah) a milder version of what she does repeatedly in Daniel Deronda
• 105-6 the quiet suggestion of Adam’s interest in Hetty framed by Dinah’s presence in the house
• 113-4 interesting how analytical and abstract is her foreshadowing of what will befall Arthur, how his actions will not only have consequences for himself
• 120 wonderful description of Arthur and Hetty together (and his passionate indecision on 121)
• 123 "Hetty had never read a novel": a technology for shaping the conditions of possibility
• 124 moment of sexual encounter framed by inadequacy of language and then by the conditional tense and classical allusions
• 130 Martin Poyser’s "antithetic" nature frames in terms of an imagined Hebrew textual scholar
• 137 the counterpoint of the assumed consequences of Arthur’s actions Hetty has vs those Arthur did on 126
• 139 drawing together Adam and Arthur and Hetty through a sort of narrator free indirect discourse meditating on an idealized version of marriage, or, its free indirect discourse from Adam’s perspective that isn’t introduced as such. Anyway it’s interesting the way this narrational business links the households when the scenes of the novel are so clearly delineated between them
• 144 an actual scene of opening the Bible at random and interpreting (and acknowledging that Dinah was able to tell where she opened just by looking)
• 147 shrewd— confession over coffee vs in the "rigid old forms"
• 156 "I dare say, now, even a man fortified with a knowledge of the classics might be lured into an imprudent marriage"— compare to Hetty not reading novels on 123, the question of the ethical utility of literature
• 157 nice quote about networks of agents: "Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged."
• 158 Irwine has the intuition and the chance to intervene but doesn’t, is too trusting, like Dorothea’s uncle in Middlemarch when she wants to marry Casaubon (and here it sets up the famous "In which the narrative pauses a little")

Bk II

• 159ff "In which the story pauses a little"
• she uses the metaphor of a defective mirror
• then that of being faithfully true in a witness box under oath, a narrative technique that Collins radically literalizes in the structure of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, especially
• broadly similar argument to Trollope in The Warden
• 160 "Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult."
• then drawing a griffin vs Dutch paintings, ie, Gerard Dou’s The Spinner’s Grace, which she might have seen at Munich: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dutch/dou1.html
• 162 "All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! ...But let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy."
• art and theory that are not extreme
• 163 old Adam’s Wordsworthian affective natural theology
• 170 Totty almost as cutesy as Eppie "toal hole" in Silas Marner
• ff just really dense direct narration and description of country life unmediated
• 176 scene in the churchyard interesting for thinking about character space (Wolloch)
• 180 the church service a "channel" for Adam’s sensibility
• 210ff Massey’s reading lesson
  • one on 212 is a dyer— surely Eliot would have had the "dyer’s hand" of Shakespeare’s sonnet 111

Bk 3

• 225 extensive description to illustrate how imminent time, season, and weather are with social, agricultural, biological, and other meanings
• 260 Hetty drops her locket at the dance, giving Adam forebodings about whether she has another suitor
• 261 Adam comes up with an "ingenious web of probabilities" to account for Hetty’s locket— web a negative image, as with Hetty’s "web of folly" on 227
• perhaps an unexpected affordance of the illiberal rural class system represented here: the individual must imagine herself as part of a social totality

Bk 4

• 267 interesting: since Adam has little historical awareness he must find people to admire in the present around him (ironically thinking of Arthur just before catching him and Hetty in flagrante delicto)
• 276 lucid on Arthur trying to think tactically about responding to Adam
• 283 "Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds" and following note
• 285 Providence (not divine) and moral action
• 286 the letter from Arthur to Hetty conveyed by Adam as promised (what does it contain?)
• 290 wow— Adam straight up tells Hetty that Arthur can’t actually be thinking of marrying her
• 299 again kind of a diptych narrative structure where she puts Dinah’s letter to Seth before Arthur’s to Hetty— comparative?
• 300 "this cold and trembling: it swept from the very ideas that produced it"— as so frequently in Middlemarch and Deronda especially, the affective and physical power of ideas
• 302 "She had wept them all away last night, and now she felt that dry-eyed morning misery, which is worse than the first shock, because it has the future in it as well as the present."
• 304 farmers like Poyser thinking "taking a wage" by becoming a servant (Hetty wants to be a lady’s maid) is déclassé— fine grained class differences within class as well
• 312 and around— Mrs Poyser confronting the old squire— then on 316 Irwine says of her, "She’s quite original in her talk, too; one of those untaught wits that help to stock the country with proverbs.” The editor refers to her being popular with readers — I wonder what that reception was like?
• 318 analyzing Adam’s unwise/unlikely love continued love for Hetty: much like the Aristotle epigram from Daniel Deronda p 429— part of realism is improbable or unrealistic things happening

Bk 5

• 331 the narrator can be overly pedantic about Hetty’s limitedness: future Eliot narrators are more nuanced with this theme (it sets up her development ff, it’s the analytical passages/descriptions that feel cold)
• it’s a trope that gets reimagined with other forlorn, inexperienced young women striking out on their own: Maggie after the boating incident in Mill on the Floss, even some echoes with Gwendolen and Mirah in Daniel Deronda
• 333 "She knew no romances, and had only a feeble share in the feelings which are the source of romance"— this theme of the experience expanding use of reading novels gets much more developed with Gwendolen in Deronda
• 334 "the beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food— it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on."
• 336 Hetty’s roundabout 7-day journey would take 2 hours by car today, and Leicester (though a transport hub) is out of the direct path from Nuneaton to Windsor
• 366 the other shoe drops: Hetty has been arrested for child murder (the earlier clearest hint she’s expecting is when the landlady in Windsor checks for a wedding ring, p. 337)
• Where is the boundary between sensation fiction and realism, and how firm is it? How does representation of female sexuality affect it? Hetty’s story and Gwendolen’s plot in Deronda really push at it
• 369 the old squire dies
• 371 Poyser family honour lasts "as far back as its name was in the parish register" until Hetty’s crime — interesting documentary image
• 379 In Adam’s disconsolation Irwine steps in as (mostly secular) moral anchor, and he again recenters the theme of moral culpability on unintended consequences
• 380 "Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease." Of course this isn’t germ theory, it’s a miasma theory of ethics
• 383 Now Adam has a sense of tragic insight that throws experience into relief like Hetty did on her walk (though hers led her to despair)
• 386 at least in what I’ve read of this period courtroom scenes are rare other than in Bleak House
• 387ff witness testimony of what Hetty did
• 393 Arthur coming home, "Now his real life was beginning," an ironic inversion of the tragic experience that gives Adam and Hetty similar insight
• 405 Hetty confesses to Dinah
• 414 Arthur shows up to save Hetty from execution at the last
• 415 Martin confirms Hetty to be transported
• 418 even in the end Arthur thinks he can be the benefactor, leaving so others can stay, which isn’t socially possible for the Poysers
• interesting how closeness to Hetty and what she does oscillates in this section of the book: so close to her as she travels and despairs, but then the crime itself and the consequences of it are mainly imagined socially, a narrative illustration of Eliot’s moral point

Bk 6

• 423 Totty’s "baby" a little reminiscent of Maggie’s fetish in Mill on the Floss
• 433 it’s rare that the epigrammatic/analytic/didactic is voiced by a character rather than the narrator, but here it is by Dinah: "we must learn to see the good in the midst of much that is unlovely."
• 435 Wesleyan cheap reprints
• and then onto 436: the use of pain for changing us for the better, a force that changes forms
• 445 wonderful description of Adam reading "his large pictured bible" which "serv[es] him for history, biography and poetry"
• 447-8 Lisbeth worrying Adam into seeing Dinah loves him
• 450 "How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love?"
• 451 Adam in talking to Seth about Dinah says he’s worried their mother "Speaks without book," without authority. This has been part of the patterning of how the novel thinks about ethical action on intention, the repeated patterning of preaching on a specific text, ethical basis and the use of example to understand consequence— Dinah is "too entirely reliant on the Supreme guidance," too inclined to speak with book, whilst Hetty and Arthur toss the book out the window.
• 459 "Fine old Leisure" paragraph, "that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time"
• 460 harvest time nature description very natural theology / Wordsworthian
• 464 narrator analyzes the origins of the harvest song at the Poysers’ dinner in a Higher Criticism way, reminiscent of debates over Homer
• 472 as Adam comes in sight of the Stonyshire he knew when looking for Hetty: "But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters[.]"
• 473 we cannot return to "narrower sympathy" and this isn’t a bad thing
• 482 Adam says Arthur told him, "...you told me the truth when you said to me once, ‘There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.’"