DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Expressive Things in Adam Bede

Authors

Barabar Hardy

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

A drop of ink is the first thing in the first sentence of George Eliot's first novel: 'With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner farreaching visions of the past.' Like many objects in Adam Bede, this one is more complicated than first appears. In its generalized imaging of magical creation, ritual and prophesy, it is an invocation, introducing and solemnizing the other object with which it is twinned and compared, the real drop of ink at the end of the author's pen which has actually written this sorcerer's ink-drop into existence: '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. .'. Two ink-drops, one impersonal and 'single', the other particular and the first of many, compound an elaborate creative fiat, and the movement from the first drop to the second forms a suggestive and apt paradigm of the ordinary magic of fictional transformation, as it creates an imaginative expansion from the small convex drop of ink on the pen, the tool of this author's trade, via the sorcerer's apparatus of ink-drop-mirror, to the large interior space of Jonathan Burge's workshop, which contains the carpenters and the unobtrusively introduced tools of their trade - plane, hammer, screwdriver, chisel- with the objects they are making. The first drop of ink starts a move from the brilliantly self-conscious introduction of the artist to the actual work of writing the first scene, set in a workroom. The whole exercise makes a quiet, cunning, democratic and wonderfully unsentimental link between three acts of making, the sorcerer's, the novelist's and the carpenter's - apparently but not actually in that order, because in this narrative conjuring trick the writer's ink-drop precedes but also succeeds the sorcerer's. That significant 'single' shows the artist's playful awareness of what she is doing, and 'roomy' describes the ink-drop on her pen as well as the workshop. George Eliot's creativity is self-delighting, as it embodies knowledge and thought in dynamic, affective and sensuous forms.

The things in the narrative introduction and in the workshop, the tools (pen, plane, hammer, screw, and others unnamed) and the objects being made (novel, carved shield, door, and others undesignated), are part of a formal but discreet presentation of narrator and workmen. The fictional characters are variously and sufficiently introduced through their making: Adam's skilled carving of a shield, Seth's forgetfulness about door-panels, and the plane, screwdriver and hammer thrown down by the three other men on the first stroke of six. The writer's inkdrop is a powerful nonce object (though with links beyond this novel to Marian Evans's actual pens and several fictional ones),2 but the carpenter's tools and work turn up in later scenes: Adam makes two coffins and a firescreen, and promises to mend a spinning-wheel; Arthur remembers making superfluous thread-reels and round boxes when he was a boy being taught carpentry by Adam; in a second moment of absent-mindedness, Seth forgets a basket of tools which is picked up by Adam and dropped before he attacks Arthur in the wood; Seth is making a workbox for Dinah, just before Lisbeth mentions her attachment to Adam, but we never see him finishing or giving it. The metaphor of carpentry flows into idiolect and sociolect: 'You don' see such women turned off the wheel every day' (Ch. 14).