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Monday, June 16, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters I-V)
Welcome to the inaugural post of our Adam Bede summer reading project. The plan is to work our way through the novel in instalments; see here for the preliminary schedule. At each deadline, I’ll put up a basic post inviting comments. For June 17, we were to read at least the first five chapters. I look forward to seeing your comments, questions, critiques, objections, and appreciations. The only guidelines I’d like to propose are the following (though I’m in no position to enforce them and not inclined to police them):
1. Let’s be cautious about “spoilers.” Some of us have read the novel before, or have read enough about it to know the story. Others are new to it. I’ve found that opinions are often divided on the issue of “spoiler alerts.” Personally, I think it’s nice to allow other readers to enjoy suspense and surprises, especially in a long book when curiosity about what happens next can be both pleasurable and motivating. Others see little or no value in such deference to plot, or argue for the interpretive benefits of knowing key developments ahead of time. Perhaps we can compromise by alluding to events beyond the ‘assigned’ material obliquely or elliptically, if the occasion arises.
2. By all means let’s bring in critical or contextual knowledge from “outside” the novel if we think it bears interestingly on our reading. But let’s avoid doing so in a way that shuts down discussion--by, for instance, implying that everything we might think of to talk about here has already been said, and better, by others--or that we can’t talk intelligently about this book unless we’ve read 86 others.
3. It’s summer: let’s have fun and not be snarky.
Though I won’t usually do this kind of thing in my initial posts, I thought that this time I would provide one additional bit of contextual material myself right up front. In 1856, just before she turned her hand to fiction, Marian Evans published two (now famous) essays in the Westminster Review that (though ostensibly reviews of other people’s books) were manifestos for what would become her own brand of moral and aesthetic realism: “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and “The Natural History of German Life.” The latter is most obviously relevant to Adam Bede, and so, by way of an overture to the novel, here’s an excerpt:
The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the chequered shade and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humour twinkles, the slow utterance, and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal the camel, than of the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. . . .
The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master’s corn in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging-letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairymaid into filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.
Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin’s indignation, are surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced boddices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet of char-women and stocking-weavers. But our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers,”--when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan,”--when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,--when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers, --more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.
This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.
We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character--their conception of life, and their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish’s colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of Boots, as in the speeches of Shakespeare’s mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humour, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve in some degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtezans, would be as obnoxious as Eugène Sue’s idealized proletaires, in encouraging the miserable fallacy, that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself. If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbours may be settled by algebraic equations,--the dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their moral sensibilities,--the aristocratic dilettantism which attempts to restore the “good old times” by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture,--none of these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the People, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining-agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on different sections of the working-classes, but unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry,--the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or towards development,--and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.
And now, let the games begin!
Comments
Here are some comments and questions on the first five chapters:
What’s up with the “elderly horseman” who stops to watch, first Adam, and then the preaching on the Green, in Chapters 1 and 2? Does he serve as a kind of proxy for ‘us,’ the reader, presumed outsiders to the village community he observes? He does give the narrator a convenient device for the lush descriptions of the scenery.
And, speaking of the narrator, so far the intrusive commentary does not seem as well integrated into the novel’s overall structure here as it does in Middlemarch (though that’s hardly a fair comparison, even for another GE novel). Still, there are some moments that show the same ability to move from the poignant personal detail (say, the pathos of Mr. Irwine’s “superfluous” sisters) to a broader philosophical insight or moral demand (in this case, recognizing the way “insignificant people . . . play no small part in the tragedy of life”). This is the kind of didactic intrusion that turns some readers off, I know. Of course, in the mid-19th century, it would hardly have stood out, though I realize that does not necessarily answer the question of its aesthetic (or other) value or effect. Answering that question, though, will in turn depend on what we think a novel is supposed to do…so what, so far, does this novel seem to think it is supposed to be doing?
I’m very interested in the things going on with religion in these early chapters: Mr. Irwine’s tolerance and the extended commentary on his lack of doctrinal severity; Adam’s version of what seems like Carlyle’s “Gospel of Work,” and his speech about sensing the “sperrit o’ God in all things and all times--weekday as well as Sunday--and i’ the great works and inventions, and i’ the figuring and the mechanics”; and, of course, Dinah’s preaching.
I’m also struck by the emphasis on inheritance here, especially through Adam, Seth, and their father, and then Mr. Irwine and his mother and sisters. Why does it bring out such a melancholy tone? For instance: “Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement” (Chapter IV).
On that elderly gentleman, I’m wondering whether or not he’ll later be given a name and a position in local society. It seems a bit strange simply to introduce some unnamed individual simply to . . . observe the preaching?
Note that, in the first chapter, we’re told there are five men working. Four are introduced by name rather directly. But it’s awhile before we’re introduced to the fifth. But we are introduced to him. So, when will the stranger be given a name?
On religion, I’ve got a question. This novel is set at the turn of the 19th century. In America at that time we’re at the beginning of a wave of revivalism, the so-called Second Awakening. Was there a similar wave of revivalism in England at that time?
Some first thoughts:
The passage about family likeness is striking, because it’s tone is--as so often the case with Eliot--more balanced than the narrator implies.
Think of where she ends up: “It is such a fond anxious mother’s voice that you hear as Lisbeth says . . . “
Lisbeth is a mother who’d drive any Adam to distraction, but Eliot has smoothed the way for us to accept that her querulous tone emerges from love. We drive each other crazy in the family, not because we’re truly distant or separate, but because we resemble one another so closely. (Cf. Freud on the narcissism of minor differences.)
Anyway, all of this is just to say that this is a lovely example of Eliot providing a philosophical narrative comment that is slightly at odds with the emotional valence of her scene. I’ve always read this as deliberate--as a way of unleashing quite different different principles, both having their validity.
(An enjoyable first five chapters. This is my first time reading the novel...)
I’m always interested in how Eliot portrays people she wants the reader to find attractive.
To start with, the best word I can think of for the way she sets up Adam Bede in these early chapters is: “hunk.” He is a big hunk of man, “strong,” incredibly competent and devoted, un-self-conscious yet ambitious ("peppery"), etc.
And Dinah too. Though Eliot clearly has reservations about the disruption to everyday life posed by her rigorous reformism, Dinah’s beauty seems to resonate with nearly every male character.
We often think of Eliot as a novelist doing philosophy. And she is. But she’s also a writer intensely interested in representing human beauty as something intimately associated with, but not subsumed by, the moral soul.
The man on horseback fascinates me as well, and I’m probably reading into it, but I wonder if he’s related to the virtues of the romance tradition that Eliot’s narrator laments are lacking in Seth:
“we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.” (82)
The narrator outright says “Poor Seth” (82) at Seth’s bad experiences with horses, whereas Adam would seem to fit nicely into that role as our specifically Saxon hero, and the guy on the horseback evidently admires Adam a lot. I wonder, are we meant to ask ourselves which hero we’d prefer?
For some reason I thought that June 17 had come early, and so I commented in the older thread about chapters 1-5.
But a bit about “The Natural History of German Life” as quoted above:
“The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining-agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on different sections of the working-classes, but unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry, [...] his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.”
This is a political essay, at least in part, since it concerns social and political reform. So I think that it’s only fair to call on political critique. Politically, that’s quite an annoying idea.
Note that greater realism is not being touted here because truthfulness is held to be a good. There is some generic codswallop about people being in sympathy when they learn more about each other, yes. But in the main, it’s the author as police spy. Look at who *isn’t* being addressed.
First of all, the idea that “the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry” might write books is dismissed. Because of course they would have first-hand experience—but they are can not speak. The upper classes? Aristocratic dilletantes: “It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses [...]” Which leaves the middle classes. But the “landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining-agent” etc., although their work brings them into contact with the lower class, have only scattered observations, and the “professional” seemingly only has an axe to grind. No, what’s needed is someone exactly like George Eliot, to really tell the truth about the lower classes so they can be socially reformed.
The Communist Manifesto was, after all, published in 1848. Eliot writes disparagingly of socialist Eugène Sue’s “idealized proletaires” and directly attacks the idea that “the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism”. So this is essentially a right-wing tract, attacking what a more sympathetic reading of contemporary socialism would have to call straw men.
And as political positioning it doesn’t really describe Eliot’s own early work very well. From above: “We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.” But who is Adam Bede in Chapters 1-5 but this selfsame heroic artisan, working (ironically) Stakhanovite style all night on the coffin… And the other characters, so far, are firmly on the heroic-to-sentimental range. Perhaps she found herself later, but quoting this passage in relation to this early work seems to make it an advertisement for an Eliot that we haven’t seen.
I like Joel’s suggestion that the rider has something to do with the romantic expectations that might make us consider Seth and Dinah “beneath our sympathy.” When he first sees Dinah in Ch. 2, he is “struck with surprise” because she is neither “ecstatic” or “bilious”; a bit later, the narrator mocks him for maybe being “one of those who think that nature ... ‘makes up’ her characters.” He is won over by listening to Dinah and then impressed at her ability to win over her other listeners--and he rides away once that is done, as if his work too is over. So does he play ‘us,’ the readers who needs to be won over, who might have the wrong expectations, etc.? But then, as Joel notes, he admires Adam right away--so is there any lurking irony in the ease with which he (and we?) admire Adam (who is definitely a “hunk,” I agree)? We’ve just been taught that Nature does not in fact set up characters so there can be “no mistake about them,” after all. Hmmm.
Looking at the Seth and Dinah interlude again while I thought about this, I was struck by the passage about the close approximation of Seth’s love to “religious feeling”: “Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty: . . . our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.” This reminds me of Dorothea in Middlemarch remarking the way hearing the organ played made her sob, and also of Dorothea’s attempt to give a spiritual explanation for her reaction to the beauty of her mother’s jewels in Ch. 1. Is Dinah’s sermon (presented with remarkable detail, sympathy, and respect, I thought, for a writer who has broken with Christianity) to be seen as “just” another such aesthetic experience? Mr Irwine, we learn later on, sees religion as important primarily for its “hallowing influence” rather than its doctrines.
. . .I was struck by the passage about the close approximation of Seth’s love to “religious feeling”. . .
It seems to me that, while it’s not Dante on Beatrice, this is standard-issue romantic love.
While reading Dinah’s sermon I was reminded of a passage from Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. The book takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between a distinguished director and his students. At one point the director suggests that “you are playing the scene in the last act of Hamlet where you throw yourself with your sword on your friend Paul here, who enacts the role of the King, and suddenly you are overwhelmed for the first time in your life with a lust for blood.” The director goes on to ask whether or not “it would be wise for an actor to give himself up to such spontaneous emotions as that” and to assert that:
...these direct, powerful and vivid emotions do not make their appearance on the stage in the way you think. They do not last over long periods or even for a single act. They flash out in short episodes, individual moments. In that form they are highly welcome. We can only hope that they will appear often, and help to sharpen the sincerity of our emotions, which is one of the most valuable elements in creative work. The unexpected quality of these spontaneous eruptions of feeling is an irresistible and moving force.
To be sure, Dinah is not an actor playing a role, but one doesn’t have to be an actor playing a role in order for this kind of thing to happen. I’m wondering if that’s what happened during her preaching and is what gave it its force - recall Bessy Cranage’s reaction.
I’ll confess that despite being fairly well-read I’ve never been a fan of 19th Century novels. The language is too indirect and the narrative structures seem unpolished, generally. Despite that prejudice, chapters 1-5 have been enjoyable so far. I do have an observation regarding current and historical events as they pertain to the action, though: Eliot seems to idealize Dinah’s preaching, going out of her way to reinforce the idea of the positive impression. I have to wonder if this is an effect of her distance from the “revivalist” movement. Having grown up in an area where revivals and a certain stringent vein of Christianity are considered “normal,” I find it difficult to consider her a sympathetic character.
It’s also stylistically interesting that two of the characters who’re to provide the conflict have barely been introduced in these first five chapters. In my edition, it’s seventy pages without a word of dialogue from the “love interest.”
The chap on the horse is, I have always believed, emblematic of the wistful generic ‘backward glance’ Eliot gives us in the novel, set some time before it was written. Looking carefully at the words, one sees that the rider deliberately ‘stopped’ and ‘turned round to have another long look at the stalwart workman’. Isn’t Eliot, in this superb novel, inviting us, too, to pause and to take ‘another look’ at what was a vanishing breed even then?
I couldn’t stand not remembering, so I peered ahead and the rider does, in fact, reappear--though briefly and not as a major player, and not, I think, in a way that will add much to our thinking about how his attitude towards what he sees reflects on the novel more generally. I really like Sue’s comment, above about asking us to take another look at a particular world and moment in time. In a chapter coming up soon (I’m into next week’s installment now), there’s a remark about the novel’s action happening “nearly sixty years ago,” which invokes the subtitle of Scott’s Waverley ("Tis Sixty Years Since")...a reminder, that is, that this is a historical novel. There is definitely an elegaic tone, in some of the descriptive passages especially.
That said, does Adam himself seem a nostalgic figure? I’m not sure. In some respects he seems associated with modernity (e.g. his educational aspirations, his business acumen) but some of his values, especially regarding work and craftsmanship, seem held out as throwbacks to a time when men were not alienated from their labour (if I may use that Marxist language a bit casually)--working from love, not by the clock.
Also, when we move from the landscapes to the people, there seems to be no sentimentalizing (keeping in mind the excerpt above from her essay, these are not Dickensian villagers, “preternaturally virtuous").
About Bill’s earlier question on whether there was a ‘wave of revivalism’ at this time...I don’t know the answer except in the specific context of Methodism, which the notes to my Oxford edition indicate GE had pretty thoroughly researched.
I’m interested in the question of ‘nostalgia’ which you raise, Rohan, as I think in many ways the tension of the novel’s structure exists on that precarious balance between what actually was and what was thought to be. Hence, it is not so much that Adam himself is ‘a nostalgic figure’ but that the ‘backward glance’ renders him so. It is ‘the long look’ which produces the crystallized image we are given to examine vicariously, I think.
Some notes on Methodism that seem pertinent:
Methodism began as a revival movement within the Church of England. It’s not very clear to me just how it became separated from the Church, but this passage in the Wikipedia is telling:
Wesley insisted that Methodists regularly attend their local parish church as well as Methodist meetings. Although Wesley declared, “I live and die a member of the Church of England”, the impact of the movement, especially after Wesley’s clandestine ordinations in 1784, made separation from the Church of England virtually inevitable. In 1784 Wesley made provision for the governance of Methodism after his death through the ‘Yearly Conference of the People called Methodists’. He nominated 100 people and declared them to be its members and laid down the method by which their successors were to be appointed.
For half a century after the death of John Wesley (1791), the Methodist movement was characterised by a series of divisions, normally on matters of church government (e.g. Methodist New Connexion) and separate revivals (e.g. Primitive Methodism in Staffordshire, 1811, and the Bible Christian Movement in south-west England, 1815). The second half of the nineteenth century saw many of the small schisms reunited to become the United Methodist Free Churches and a further union in 1907 with the Methodist New Connexion and Bible Christian Church brought the United Methodist Church into being.
It looks as though Adam Bede is set in a time when tension between the Methodists and the Church of England was growing.
Now, consider consider some passages from Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton UP 1999). First some definitions (p. 16):
...from the mid-seventeenth century at least, a “formalist” was understood as one who had the form of religion without the power, while an “enthusiast” was someone who falsely claimed to be inspired. Both terms came to the fore with the Puritan emphasis on “inward” or “heart” religion. Puritans used the word “experience” to talk about this dimension of inwardness.
Now, on similarities among the views of Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley (p. 48):
First, both Edwards and Wesley defined true religion in opposition to both formalism and enthusiasm. Second, they both equated true religion with vital or heart religion as manifest in conversion and a continuing process of sanctification. Third, they both defended the possibility of a direct of immediate experience of the Spirit of God and they both argued that authentic experience must be tried and tested in practice.
That last is important. For just how do you know that your experience is, in fact, authentic? That is, the experience itself is not self-verifying.
So, in the second chapter we see a lay Methodist preacher. But the narrator doesn’t present her directly to us. Rather, the narrator presents her through this elderly stranger on horseback. Why the mediation? That is, given the importance of experience in Methodist practice and doctrine, why put the preaching and the preacher at a further remove?
Another passage (p. 63):
Ironically, Wesley and the Methodist tradition embraced as integral to the task of reforming the church and spreading scriptural holiness precisely things that Edwards and the Reformed tradition viewed as the cause of enthusiasm and thus sought to avoid. Wesley not only eschewed any rigorous distinction between natural and supernatural, he also built the Methodist movement by mobilizing a vast network of lay leaders with no formal training and creating innumerable lay-led small groups. Since the ultimate criterion for juding experience was the “fruits of the Spirit,” he sought to avoid enthusiasm by formalizing his use of lay leadership and small groups and providing them with strict standards and practical guidelines.
Greetings! I read about your summer project on Critical Mass on Tuesday, and was very excited about the prospect of reading Adam Bede with you all. I am an academic librarian who plans to join you, at least for as long as I keep up with the reading.
I’ve enjoyed the first five chapters very much. Like the poster before me, I too was thinking some notes on Methodism would be helpful. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
More fundamental for all Methodists than these standards are the inspired Scriptures, which are declared by them to be the sole and sufficient rule of belief and practice. The dogmas of the Trinity and the Divinity of Jesus Christ are upheld. The universality of original sin and the consequent partial deterioration of human nature find their efficacious remedy in the universal distribution of grace. Man’s free co-operation with this Divine gift is necessary for eternal salvation, which is offered to all, but may be freely rejected. There is no room in Methodism for the rigorous doctrine of predestination as understood by Calvinism. While the doctrine of justification by faith alone is taught, the performance of good works enjoined by God is commended, but the doctrine of works of supererogation is condemned.
More on Methodism in Britain and the separation from the Church of England here:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10237b.htm
I find it quite interesting that John Wesley encouraged women to become lay preachers, and that George Eliot chose to depict one of these women in her first novel. Dinah comes across to me as kind of peculiar but such a strong person, more than a match for poor Seth!
[On a practical note, can I format my comments?]
Julie, this might be a bit off-topic, but, as a librarian, would you feel comfortable recommending the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia as a disinterested source of information on a Protestant denomination?
Here’re some examples from the entry on “Protestantism”:
“The “universal priesthood of believers” is a fond fancy which goes well with the other fundamental tenets of Protestantism.”
“The belief in the Bible as the sole source of faith is unhistorical, illogical, fatal to the virtue of faith, and destructive of unity. “
“To sum up: the much-vaunted Protestant principles only wrought disaster and confusion where they were allowed free play; order was only restored by reverting to something like the old system:symbols of faith imposed by an outside authority and enforced by the secular arm. No bond of union exists between the many national Churches, except their common hatred for “Rome”, which is the birthmark of all, and the trade-mark of many, even unto our day.”
“Protestantism claims roundly 100 millions of Christians, products of the Gospel and the fancies of a hundred reformers, people constantly bewailing their “unhappy divisions” and vainly crying for a union which is only possible under that very central authority, protestation against which is their only common denominator. “
To be fair, the entry on “Methodism” is more-or-less free of value judgment, though I cannot evaluate its historical accuracy. It remains, however, 90 years old.
Hi Jonathan,
Point taken about the bias, but I’m certainly not “recommending” the Catholic Encyclopedia “as a librarian” any more than Bill Benzon is “recommending” Wikipedia “as a scholar.” I do think it’s a handy source for some things.
Julie
Welcome, Julie.
On a practical note, can I format my comments?
Yes, a limited set of tags can be used, though you’ll have to add the html tags manually or use a text editor and then past your comments into the box.
And now, back to the book ...? The ‘mediation’ of the presentation of Dinah is, I think, to focus the reader on how she would/might appear to a curious but disinterested bystander. Think Dr. Johnson:
‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’
This idea of the female preacher as a ‘curiosity’ is very much a feature of the time of the novel’s setting (in fact, I thought even Wesley was against women preaching).
Dinah as a specific type of ‘independent woman’ is, I believe, closer to Eliot’s driving motivation, here, and this develops when she is increasingly the comparative with Hetty, whose own striving to be ‘independent’ follows the more usual romantic route, albeit somewhat perilously!
I just read that about Wesley, too. Here’s a snippet from a review in Church History by Catherine A. Brekus of the book John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism by Paul Wesley Chilcote:
He also describes the theological transformation of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, from an early opponent of female preaching to its most influential defender. In an often-quoted letter to Mary Bosanquet written in 1771, Wesley claimed that some women possessed an “extraordinary call” from God that exempted them from “ordinary rules of discipline” (p. 143).
I like the idea that Eliot is interested in Dinah as a specific type of independent woman. I was struck by Dinah’s remarkable statement that “I desire to live and die without husband or children.”
Thanks, Julie, interesting to read of that flexibility and a rare contemporary instance of what I venture clumsily to call ‘positive particularisation’ in favour of women!
Given Eliot’s own extraordinary life, reflected in her always moving generic sensitivity, I think Dinah is very special and not to be categorised only by her vocation, despite its importance. Indeed, this reading of her can be off-putting to readers in our increasingly secular world.
(Can’t wait to be able to discuss Hetty without giving too much away - this is a great blog!)
I’m really glad to see new people joining in; thanks to The Reader and Critical Mass for helping advertise our little project!
I too am getting anxious to discuss Hetty. Amardeep’s comment about Eliot’s interest in “human beauty as something intimately associated with, but not subsumed by, the moral soul” is particularly provocative once she’s brought into the picture. I deliberately made these first installments pretty short to make it easy for people to keep up amidst their other commitments. On the other hand, as momentum builds (?) we can revisit the issue. In the meantime, though, we can try to restrain ourselves about Chapters 6-10 until Tuesday.
About Dinah’s “desire to live and die without husband or children”: she goes on to say that she has “no room in my soul for wants and fears of my own.” Because I haven’t read Adam Bede closely in a while but I reread Middlemarch all the time, parts of AB keep sounding like echoes of the later novel--this bit made me think of Dorothea telling Will that she has no desires. This is never a good thing for someone in a GE novel!
I’m late to this party, for various work and other related reasons. But I’m now up to speed: I re-read Adam Bede’s opening for the first time since, oh, since I taught it last, which was probably last century.
Some general observations, at an oblique angle to the comments on this thread. By ‘at an oblique angle’ I mean, generally, not as perceptive or critically fertile, but off the top of my head. I shall strive to be more properly part of the discussion later on.
So. [1] I’m struck by how obviously Eliot sets up a binary thematic (the obviousness here may, of course, actually just be my over-familiarity with the novel) of paired terms of greater and lesser. It struck me reading the slightly forced jollity of Eliot’s description of Mr Casson at the beginning of chpt. 2:
Mr Casson’s person was by no means of that common type which can be allowed to pass without description. On a front view it appeared to consist principally of two spheres, bearing about the same relation to each other as the earth and the moon: that is to say, the lower sphere might be said, at a rough guess, to be thirteen times larger than the upper, which naturally performed the function of a mere satellite and tributary. But here the resemblance ceased, for Mr Casson’s head was not at all a melancholy-looking satellite, nor was it a ‘spotty globe,’ as Milton has irreverently called the moon; on the contrary, no head and face could look more sleek and healthy, and its expression, which was chiefly confined to a pair of round and ruddy cheeks, the slight knot and interruptions forming the nose and eyes being scarcely worth mention, was one of jolly contentment[.]
That earth-moon pairing, on a symbolic level, kept chiming out at me as I read: Adam is a better carpenter, and bigger man, than Seth; the church is better and more important than the pub, the gentry speak English better than the yokels and so on. I take it to be Eliot’s way of feeling textually into the larger project of the book: two big themes, the relationship between Man and Woman, and the relationship between the Gentleman and the Common man; in both cases one is traditionally taken to be bigger or better than the other, and the purpose of the novel is to suggest that matters may not be as straightforward as tradition admits. Dinah, by preaching, is doing work traditionally associated with men; but doing it better than many men (better in many ways than Adolphus Irwine for instance). Hetty prefers Arthur Donnithorne to Adam because the former is a gentleman; but there’s little question who is the better man. These two large vectors, gender (men-women) and class (gentry-commons), are the shaping forces for the whole novel.
[2] I realised, with a belated sense of my own stupidity, that I’d always hitherto misunderstand the image with which the novel starts:
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.
I had always, without thinking much about it, assumed that the sorcerer used the ink in drop form, as a miniature black crystal ball; but of course (Rich’s comment is apropos) the ink is dropped into a bowl of water, and the resulting curling skin is ‘read’. Rich doesn’t like the image:
The first sentence starts out elegantly, encapsulating a writer’s pretension to represent the world with their work. It ends jarringly, though, because the method of divination through ink-pools was classically used to see visions of the future. People didn’t go to diviners to see the past. Therefore the beginning feels sabotaged somehow, limited by the writer’s lack of scope (Egypt is “exotic” and therefore not necessary to get right), especially in conjunction with the picky specification of village name, date, dating system, but no country. I gather that one is supposed to assume England, of course, which now seems provincial, not imperial, as a mode of thought. The sorcerer must be specified to be Egyptian, the carpenter and builder is of course English.
A good point, although what interests me more is the idea of spreading out implicit in the image: take something small and concentrated (an icon: the wise and foolish virgins) and spread it out over six hundred pages. Or more to the point, look at religion not as a super-refined essence, but as a manifestation of something spread out over the whole country; as a popular phenomenon, including those often excluded by ordinary religion and society—hence Methodism. So not Jesus as a single elevated focus of godhead, but Jesus as a carpenter amongst, in chapter one, a whole bunch of carpenters. This is to say Methodism is figured here as a way of spreading religion amongst the people. It’s perhaps a stretch to see this image, of ink spreading, as the symbolic establishment of a principle the novel as a whole is going to develop at length.
[3] Check out the on-going Librivox recording of the novel; I recommend it. The reader of Chapter One in particular struggles manfully with the Midlands dialect dialogue, and goes so far (hurrah) as actually to sing the ‘Awake my soul’ hymnal. (Though it’s not finished, it’s mostly good to download; some of the readers are better than others, as is often the case, but the better ones are definitely worth checking out).
I despised the 19th century novel in English as a truly heathen undergrad so avoided it like the plague in favour of continental novelists and English poetry. As such I’m surprised to have enjoyed the first 5 chapters as much as I have, so thank you for that.
Also, I wonder whether it is just my bias that makes me think this is evidently (rather than just factually) Eliot’s first full length novel - I agree with Rohan on the clumsiness of the ‘intrusive commentary’. Having said that, I think Eliot’s narratorial interventions, while they smell of 18th century providence, are self-deprecating enough to allow us to ‘trust the tale’, and interestingly disavow Romanticism.
On the other hand, I like and assent to Adam’s binaries, especially wrt the ‘common man’ and the gentry. The exploration of the development of the proletarian is a fascinating subject, but I wonder whether Eliot’s comments in “The Natural History of German Life” on the ‘social novel’, and the relationship between the working class and its propensities, are specific to her view of a specifically English situation? I note that Eliot published in 1859, and set the start of the tale in 1799. She was writing presumably with an eye on European developments which were not yet (and would not be) manifest in England, but which erupted on the continent in 1789 and 1848. So while she may be critical of a Marxian stereotypical view of the proletarian, she’s happy (as has already been noted) to celebrate artisanship (undivided labour), to blur the boundaries of rigid classes (there is an aspirational quality to Adam), and to scare simple country girls out of their wits for the sake of a pair of ear-rings. Would she be similarly sanguine in the face of French socialists and Prussian peasants? Or as I have always feared, is it unseemly to ask such questions of the ‘English’ 19th century novel?
Hmmm, I would really like to participate, but I am not sure where my ideas fit into this academically extremely well informed community. So I’ve put them up on my blog at http://clicheniche.wordpress.com, along with other random musings.
Eliot has set up some big themes at the very onset of the book, but I am wary to jump right in and predict where she will go with them. What I am anticipating is how she will tie them all up --- or if she will. I didn’t expect to have a sense when reading Adam Bede of being in the middle of a page turner, but I’ve already missed one train station while reading it (true story!) and wouldn’t be surprised if I missed more.
Welcome Zachary! I liked your take on the Egyptian sorcerer. Hope you don’t mind if I quote it here:
The flourish with which Eliot compares herself to ancient and arcane Egyptian sorcerers with her very first sentence still lingers and each new scene is like another part of the parchment being touched by the magic ink that is opening it up thread by pulped thread that absorbs it greedily. Indeed, this very comparison she indulges in right at the beginning not only presages the lightning sleight of hand she will pull on the reader at regular intervals through the novel, but also warns us that here is a novelist who commands her readers and characters from a great height and is very aware of it.
I think I’ll leave your delightful pantsing trope over on your blog. We here at The Valve have certain illusions to maintain, don’t you see, and pantsing is not the sort of thing aspire to around here.
Or more to the point, look at religion not as a super-refined essence, but as a manifestation of something spread out over the whole country; as a popular phenomenon, including those often excluded by ordinary religion and society—hence Methodism. So not Jesus as a single elevated focus of godhead, but Jesus as a carpenter amongst, in chapter one, a whole bunch of carpenters.
How dumb am I that I never made the “Jesus as a carpenter” connection! This would have been not long after the controversial showing of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents,, too.
I despised the 19th century novel in English as a truly heathen undergrad so avoided it like the plague in favour of continental novelists and English poetry. As such I’m surprised to have enjoyed the first 5 chapters as much as I have, so thank you for that.
If I only had a loonie for every time I’ve heard something like that from students in my 19th-century fiction classes...I have a whole intro lecture now that I call “Bleak Expectations.” I wouldn’t necessarily expect Adam Bede to be the novel to convert such a “heathen,” but it’s great to hear that so many people are enjoying it. I know one person following along with this project who is taking his copy with him on a trip to Senegal--so our influence is going global, too!
Zachary: I too really enjoy the narrator’s remark about women and dogs that you quote in your own blog post. I agree that the fun in it is the slippage between different points of view--the sense of exposing a sly truth that “we” first acknowledge and then feel ashamed of. And how far does the narrator really collude in the misogyny? There are several markedly outspoken women in AB, from Lisbeth the Complainer to the fabulous Mrs Poyser--I clearly remember, from earlier readings, my pleasure in the chapter called “Mrs Poyser ‘Has Her Say Out.’” And Dinah, of course, is the major key variation on this theme. Somehow it seems the narrator sucks “us” in and then distances herself after exposing our shame (is this narrator male or female, by the way?).
Bill,
thanks for your comments. I noticed a rather embarrassingly convoluted construction in the stuff you quoted, upon re-reading it, but I guess I will have to let go of it.
Your question on the mediation at the green intrigued me. I didn’t mind the unnamed horseman and the double perspective we get from the author herself—the horseman’s perspective, and then the author’s perspective on the horseman (where she wryly surmises he is the kind of person who think that Nature intends individuals to play certain parts.)
I enjoyed this because it allowed me to observe the religious drama without needing to draw judgment on it just yet. As you observe in another post of yours, Dinah seems to exhibit flashes of evangelical fervor that I think might overwhelm the reader if it had to be experienced “directly.” Watching from a remove is safer, and allowed me to move my gaze more easily from speaker to audience, than I could have, had I been sitting in the audience myself.
Concerning Christ = carpenter = Adam (yes “Adam"), it’s interesting that though Marian Evans had once been a devout Christian, that was not the case at the time she wrote AB. And then we have Dinah and her calling to preach. Is that central to her independence (from men?) or only contingent? Did she feel free to follow her calling because she was independent, or was it her calling that made her independent? Again, this from an author who was very independent, with her secular outlook being one aspect of her independence.
I am entering this discussion a bit late, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
Like a few other posters above, I am fascinated by the unnamed horseman. To me, he is an invitation into the story. An Everyman. He is curious about the “prophetess” yet continues on his way, and--for now--exits the story. But, for that brief moment, he was me, ready to engage in the story and invest in the characters. This is a brilliant move on Eliot’s part, in my opinion.
Who is the horseman? Does he reappear, with a name? As a first-time reader of this novel, I am intrigued by him. He seems to be high-minded (he is traveling perhaps between major cities?) and is aware of the “dileck” yet doesn’t seem to speak it?: “I know it very well...”, he claims.
If nothing else, my interest is held, an excellent example of narrative form, I think.
Also, I am distracted by Eliot’s forays into direct commentary; it seems amateurish to me for some reason. I’d love to know why this is the case. To be continued.