DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

'Hetty had Never Read a Novel': Adam Bede and Realism

Authors

Rachel Bowlby

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 41 (2010)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

It is not just the famous Chapter 17, 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, which makes George Eliot's Adam Bede one of the first candidates for any discussion of the tenets and aims of nineteenth-century literary realism. The question is opened in the very first paragraph of the novel - so very prominently, perhaps, and in so many dimensions, that we may miss its compacted meanings as we read on or rush on, past the beginning, to enter the narrative. Much of its meaning, of course, is not immediately available without the understandings that subsequent chapters will add, including the mid-novel manifesto; and much, as well, involves a significance that Adam Bede has acquired only in the light of later literary developments - what we might call, to adapt a word that occurs in a future historical flight towards the end of the novel, 'post-time'.

Here then is the opening of Adam Bede:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner 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. (Ch. 1, p. 7)

The passage offers its historical vision in an extraordinary combination of magic and realism. Partaking of both, joining them together, the narrator situates himself exactly between the exoticism of the sorcerer and the precision of a specific historical date. At the same time, there is a kind of contract between the showman or historian and the reader: 'This is what I undertake to do for you'. The past will appear, or reappear, in a promised future in which it is shown: it appears in reality, and it is a performance. In one way the past is a phantasmagoric spectacle, naturalized in the casual modern analogy of the diorama: while Adam works on his father's coffin, 'his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a diorama: scenes of the sad past, and probably sad future, floating before him' (Ch. 4, p. 49).3 In another way the past is a matter of ordinary dimensions of space and time, the workplace and the working day, the place the same and one day much like another. With its continuities and repetitions, this is 'a monotonous homely existence' (Ch. 17, p. 179). But Chapter 17 will seek to join the two perspectives, with the role of the sorcerer adopted by 'men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them' (Ch. 17, p. 180): they draw out a natural illumination in the ordinary and every day.