EAGENotS <3 Pt. 4

I finally actually read Adam Bede by George Eliot

You didn’t think I forgot, did you? ME?! Let a summer¹ go by without reading something by George Eliot? Impossible. As longtime readers well know, I’m addicted to this woman. She is my favorite author living or dead, and for the past however many years, I’ve read a novel by her per year (coincidentally in the summer, which makes it Eve’s Annual George Eliot Novel of the Summer (EAGENotS)). First, while I was still in school I read Daniel Deronda, which is definitely her most fun novel and not discussed enough (okay, okay, I haven’t read Felix Holt, the Radical yet, so I can’t say that definitively, but I’m fairly confident—ha ha ha).

After that, I read Middlemarch, which is obviously her masterpiece. To be frank, part of my dedication to working my way through the rest of her novels stems from a desire to get back around to the beginning and reread my favorites (which thus far—again, Felix might be a dark horse!—are Middlemarch (the greatest novel in the English language) and Daniel Deronda (you never forget your first)). I hit Silas Marner in 2022, The Mill on the Floss (underrated) in 2023, Romola last year. So I was faced this year with a choice between the aforementioned Felix Holt and…Adam Bede. Longtime readers may also recall that Adam Bede should have been the first Eliot novel I ever read, also for a college class. Famously, I did not read it when I was supposed to. Cristina, if you’re reading this, I know you forgive me.

Felix Holt, to be frank, sounds like it’ll be a bit of a slog, so I decided to face my fears and begin again with the novel I had given up on all those years ago (6 I think). And! It turns out I actually made it to page 104 my first time around, which isn’t half bad. I know this because my copy from college is still dog eared there, and my charming annotations (“farmers NOT methodists,” “wartime?” “important,” “Chad’s Bess=slut,” “Seth loves Dinah,” “Adam <3” “wow,” “selfish bitch,” etc.) end there as well.

there she is <3

My 20-year-old self was not totally at fault for giving up—I was busy with other things (forging lifelong friendships, trying to track down even just one godforsaken Busch Light at the frat party du jour, etc. etc.). Plus, Adam Bede is not as immediately accessible as some of Eliot’s other novels. It opens on a scene in “the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared in the year of our Lord, 1799.” Dinah Morris, a methodist—a dissenter—is in town staying with her aunt and uncle, and she’s going to preach on the green that very night. The five workmen discuss this unusual occurrence in dialect that somewhat challenges the reader in her attempt to distinguish each man’s view of good religion.

However! Powering through the early pages proves to be worth it (I now have the authority to say). Adam Bede—by the way, named for one of the carpenters in the aforementioned workshop, the one who believes that a man who works hard and is useful is “just as near to God as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning”—is Eliot’s first pronouncement of her Novelistic Goal and her first attempt at achieving it. She will give a faithful account of the daily lives of ordinary people. What do we love about Middlemarch if not the startlingly familiar characters and the almost strangely recognizable hopes / concerns / loves / fears that fill their days.

You may be wondering how it is that I’m so certain of Eliot’s Novelistic Goal, and while I have historically scored very high in reading comprehension amongst my age group, Eliot also spells it out for us quite plainly. After introducing us to the setting and the players (I’m getting around to it myself, I promise), Eliot’s narrator interjects with a chapter aptly entitled, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little.” Predicting that her readers may wish her to “improve the facts a little,” and “make them accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess,” she has her rebuttal prepared. In short, over her dead body.²

She will not fold to the audience’s desire for unreal action and excitement, nor to their thirst for virtuous heroes and obvious villains, just so that everyone can feel comfortable in knowing who to admire and who do despise. She views her role as a novelist in an instructional light. If you cannot use her pages as a practice ground for tolerance, pity and love towards the mere mortals that fill them—“more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people”—then she fears you will never learn to tolerate, pity and love the “real breathing men and women” that populate your real, breathing days and life. Beyond the way we treat the people we meet and know personally, Eliot—okay Eliot’s narrator, yeah, yeah—believes that her novel (as a work of Art, capitalization hers) also has a role to play in society at large:

In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them.

File that away in your “still eerily relevant today” folder. More to come. But first! Who are Eliot’s common, coarse people?

I’ve mentioned dear, sweet, Godly Dinah. She’s a methodist, and a woman preacher, but she gets away with it because she has such a serene presence. Seth Bede certainly thinks so—he’s also a methodist too, and quite in love with her, but she feels that God has called her to dedicate her life to His ministry, which makes marriage impossible. Seth’s brother, Adam is the hero of the story, a man destined to succeed in the world, and he’s like also really tall and hot. Adam and Seth’s father is a drunk and their mother is a nag. Adam loves Hetty, who is a kittenishly beautiful, extremely shallow young girl with many other admirers to boot. One of them is Arthur Donnithorne, who will become the squire and owner of the estate when his grandfather dies. Hetty’s uncle Mr. Poyser rents the Hall Farm from The Donnithornes and, with his wife, Mrs. Poyser, who is also Dinah’s aunt, manages it efficaciously. Arthur has a crush on Hetty because she’s so beautiful, and Hetty has a crush right back because he’s handsome, and mannered, and if he’d marry her she’d have all the dresses and ribbons she could ever want. He won’t marry her though because she’s below her class. Watching over the whole of it is Mr. Irwine, the rector, a kindly, level-headed man who if not rapturous in his dedication to God, provides sufficient Sunday churching for everyone in Hayslope who is not a methodist, which is everyone except for Dinah and Seth and one other guy who’s really not very relevant. I should mention that Mr. Irwine has a fantastically glamorous and regal mother and two old maid sisters.

That’s mostly everyone, and what do they do? What happens to them? Well, mostly just ordinary things. Eliot syncs her tale with the rhythms of a Hayslope, a fictional rural town so like the real rural towns dotting the English countryside at this time. The pace of life derives from the farming cycle, and thus depends upon nature. We hope along with the characters that it will not rain before the hay is brought in, and we go into the orchard to pick currants before they overripen as they always seem to do. Against this charming backdrop, as promised, Eliot challenges her readers with characters who do not fit easily into boxes. The heroes are frustrating, the misbehaved are un-hate-able. In fact, it is mostly good natured carelessness (okay, and maybe a little selfishness) that set into motion, step by presumably harmless step, the great tragedy of the novel.

Whaaat!? Tragedy? Yeah, I realize that my cutesy little catalogue of characters may have given the impression that this is some kind of provincial romcom. No spoilers! But it’s not that. Eliot’s inspiration for the novel was the true story of Mary Voce, who, in 1802, murdered her infant child (begotten extramaritally) using a teacup full of cyanide, was tried for the crime, and sentenced to death by hanging. Horrible, right??

But back to the harmless step-by-step and good-natured carelessness for a minute. One of Eliot’s central themes in Adam Bede is what I will call for brevity’s sake, human error. Her characters make mistakes, do the wrong thing, and act without thought to the consequences of their actions, but there is no malice. There is no villain. An error may be classified as “human” when it is made in some way understandable, even forgivable, because it is either well-intentioned (someone just trying their best) or committed in ignorance. These misjudgments are what Eliot deals in.

She lovingly (because she does love humanity) exposes our deficiencies of understanding and our propensity to commit errors, and the primary mode of exposure, at least in the first book, is her focus on outward appearances. Everything is not always as it seems, and nowhere is this more clear than in our relationships. We have a questionable tendency to make assumptions about each other based on the surface level alone. She playfully warns her reader off this appearance-based guessing game when, after describing Mrs. Poyser’s hawkish supervision over her spotless kitchen she says, “do not suppose, however, that Mrs. Poyser was elderly or shrewish in her appearance; she was a good-looking woman.” She shows Dinah’s surprise at discovering that Mr. Irwine, a man she disagrees with religiously, has a countenance “as pleasant as the morning sunshine.” The outside doesn’t always match the inside.

The disconnect is most obvious—and most consequential—in Hetty. She is described as a member of that rare “order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads of not only men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women,” but her insides do not match. She’s so focused on the way she looks—and on the material in general—that she does not tend to the insides. To the reader, there’s something unsettling about Hetty. Her fellow characters can’t seem to see, or aren’t willing to believe that the external loveliness doesn’t extend inward. Adam in particular sees none of Hetty’s shortcomings, none of her selfishness. Eliot tells her reader not to judge poor Adam too harshly,

Pray ask yourself if you were ever predisposed to believe evil of a pretty woman—if you ever could, without hard head-breaking demonstration, believe evil of the one supremely pretty woman who has bewitched you. No: people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.

She makes us realize that we too are at risk of falling under the spell of beauty, of giving too much credence to the way things look. But if the tendency is questionable (and may result in a chipped tooth), it is also necessary. We have to make our way through the world on impressions alone—gathered and knit together by our imperfect hands (minds). The unfortunate thing for us in the year of our Lord 2025, is that appearances have become even more important (social media, the predominance of the visual medium), and even more difficult to trust (Ozempic, plastic surgery, facetune (lol), AI, etc.).

Which brings us back to our “still eerily relevant today” folders. What are we to do? I fear we can do nothing else but rely on instinct. All beauty isn’t bad after all, and sometimes things are the way they seem. Adam is both pleasant and imposing to look upon, and his spirit is good and strong (even strong-minded). Dinah has a pure and open face and has a pure and open heart. Even Hetty’s beauty isn’t inherently bad—it’s lovely!

It is not our appreciation of beauty that needs curbing, rather our instincts for recognizing what lies beneath that need sharpening. For that, I prescribe getting out more. Among the common people yes, but really among any people at all. Intuition doesn’t work through a screen and it must be fostered. Once you see it a few times, completeness of body and spirit is really not so hard to recognize after all.

1. Summer isn’t over until the fall equinox (Sept. 22nd this year). If you feel differently, you’re wrong.

2. If you’ve read Adam Bede and want to discuss the plot points therein that do require some slight suspension of disbelief, please get in touch. I can’t get into it here.