Hetty Sorrel's lack of sympathy

Adam Bede (1859) is a terribly irritating book. A book full of wonderful things, and it might be nice to write more appreciatively about those one day. But a first and perhaps only post shouldn't trivialize and evade the issue. It has to be about Hetty Sorrel. (Spoilers will follow immediately, by the way.)

The tools of the joiner, from Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Art (1703 edition)

[Image source: Woodworking Tools 1600 - 1900, by Peter C. Welsh (1966), who tells us that the illustration shows the "workbench (A), fore plane (B. 1), jointer (B. 2), strike-block (B. 3), smoothing plane (B. 4 and B. 7), rabbet plane (B. 5), plow (B. 6), forming chisels (C. 1 and C. 3), paring chisel (C. 2), skew former (C. 4), mortising chisel (sec. C. 5), gouge (C. 6), square (D), bevel (F), gauge (G), brace and bit (H), gimlet (I), auger (K), hatchet (L), pit saw (M), whipsaw (N), frame saw (O), saw set (Q), handsaw (unmarked), and compass saw (E)".]

George Eliot was writing her novel in Munich, Dresden and Richmond; a world away, in a more than geographical sense, from anything Hetty could comprehend. Yet she set out to comprehend Hetty with the same almost reckless ambition to write the impossible that gives us e.g. Poyser's labourers at the Harvest Supper (Ch 53). 

We know how magically George Eliot can bring out a character who can talk: Adam's querulous mother Lisbeth is the best example in this novel. Lisbeth is self-pitying and bullying and obsessive but no-one could mistake her for being narrow; George Eliot shows us how in spite of her shortcomings, in fact because of them and inseparably from them, she has a terrifyingly keen perception. 

But Lisbeth uses her voice as a weapon. With Hetty the challenge was quite different, to portray one of the many people on this earth who have very little to say, whose life and interests have no use for talk. (Hetty and Arthur in the wood are pure chemistry.) George Eliot chose to make a central character of a type that, I think, she could not understand and so could only describe by negatives; vain, self-absorbed, motivated by shallow triumphs over her peers, hard-hearted, narrow, uneducated and ignorant. No amount of defensive persiflage can hide those judgments. 

Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face and the hard, unloving, despairing soul looking out of it—with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with her eyes fixed vacantly on the road before her, never thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger comes and makes her desire that a village may be near.

What will be the end, the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it?

God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery!

(Ch 37)

I'm annoyed by this, for example. The narrator claims that his heart bleeds for Hetty, yet his unsparing judgments don't really back that up: it suggests that he falls for Hetty, as people do, merely because she gives off so kittenish or duckling-like an air (see Ch 7). And it's quickly apparent that the narrator's present concern is with educated people, with the potential Arthur Donnithornes who might thoughtlessly bring misery on girls like Hetty; he simply cannot maintain interest in Hetty for her own sake, she must be used to underline a moral. (I think this narrator is plainly intended to be male, like the author's pseudonym.)

And I'm not sure if the author herself sees that these judgments of Hetty in fact rebound on the Poysers who Hetty is so ungrateful to. If Hetty has grown up so self-absorbed and alienated, explanations aren't far to seek (especially in Ch 31). The underlying lack of sympathy between the good Poysers and their orphaned dependent is, after all, mutual: but old Martin is the only person who is barefaced enough to say it like it is; that is, until Hetty's arrest; then they throw her off entirely. 

Thus the Poysers confer (in the midst of calmly dismissing Hetty's request to "go as a lady's maid"):

“Thee’dst be sorry to part wi’ her, if it wasn’t for her good,” said Mr. Poyser. “She’s useful to thee i’ the work.”

“Sorry? Yes, I’m fonder on her nor she deserves—a little hard-hearted hussy, wanting to leave us i’ that way. I can’t ha’ had her about me these seven year, I reckon, and done for her, and taught her everything wi’out caring about her. An’ here I’m having linen spun, an’ thinking all the while it’ll make sheeting and table-clothing for her when she’s married, an’ she’ll live i’ the parish wi’ us, and never go out of our sights—like a fool as I am for thinking aught about her, as is no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.”

(Ch 31)

Surely the categorical judgment outweighs the alleged foolish fondness, for which Mrs Poyser can offer no explanation. I infer that it's important for her to believe in her own fondness for her husband's niece and to talk it up. Perhaps because she really feels that Hetty's neatness in the diary and exceptional beauty enhances her household's prestige. Perhaps because fondness is what she obscurely senses she ought to feel though she doesn't. Perhaps because a general belief in her fondness for Hetty is important to the Poysers' credit in the community. Or perhaps Mrs Poyser too isn't immune to the charms of kittens and ducklings. 

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Doesn't the book's judgment, in seeming defiance of its author, fall just as heavily on her hero Adam, besotted with a pretty trophy of whose life and interests he knows nothing? (Adam is apt to assume Hetty might share his own interest in geology, ants, etc.)

Far more so, in my opinion, than on Arthur Donnithorne, who acts by his own selfish nature, but therefore naturally, and who alone gives Hetty what she has lived for. Yes, he would have abandoned her in due course. We know that Hetty feels she could have borne being cast aside, if he was still kind to her, as he would have been (Ch 35). And would he ever have allowed his child to die and his forsaken lover to be wandering the roads alone? Certainly not; it was only Adam's violent and misguided and - yes - selfish - intervention that precipitated all that. 

The warning to the do-gooders was there, earlier, in Hetty's response to Dinah (for even Dinah doesn't escape stricture):

... and for the first time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She pushed her away impatiently and said with a childish sobbing voice, --

'Don't talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to frighten me? I've never done anything to you. Why can't you let me be?'

(Ch 15)

It's a good point, and a good question. Hetty has assuredly not done anything to Dinah. So it's reasonable to suppose that Dinah's unquietness is about what Hetty may do to her in the future. Which is, to bring shame on her family...  Would that be such an unfair inference? 

*

Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot.... they are enormously different authors, not least in their contemporary reputations... yet it's interesting to trace some parallels.

They both began as translators from the German. (Bear with me, I know this isn't serious ... at least not yet.)

They were both late starters, as novelists. Scott was nearly 42 when Waverley was published; when Adam Bede appeared in February 1859, George Eliot was 39. As novelists they were beginners, but as writers they had secure reputations, though of extremely different kinds. Neither put their real name on the title pages. 

Accordingly, the youthful leads of their debut novels were a lot younger than the authors were. 

And perhaps because of that remarkable psychological inhibition that makes writers very nervous about trying to portray a later era than their own, both authors chose to set the action of their novels well back in time. We don't readily think of Adam Bede as a historical novel, but it too might have borne the subtitle, 'Tis Sixty Years Since: it begins in 1799. 

The deeper and more troubling relationship, however, is with The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Hetty's hopeless journey to Windsor is like a dreadful parody of Jeanie Deans' journey to the south; though it was not at Windsor that Jeanie met Queen Caroline, but at another royal residence, Richmond Lodge. (Coincidentally or not, George Eliot was actually living in Richmond when she wrote this part of her novel.) 

Both novels arose from actual infanticide cases. Scott based The Heart of Midlothian on the story of Helen Walker of Irongray, Dumfries, who in around 1730 obtained a pardon for her sister Tibby, under sentence of death for infanticide. John McDiarmid wrote this account of the case in 1830: 
http://www.kirkcudbright.co/historyarticle.asp?ID=143&p=25&g=4 .

Adam Bede drew on the case of Mary Voce, "Executed on Nottingham Gallows, on Tuesday, March 16, 1802, for the MURDER OF HER OWN CHILD". I quote from Henry Taft's contemporary broadsheet , celebrating Mary's penitence and turning to God. George Eliot's Methodist Aunt Samuel had been one of the devout visitors to the condemned cell. (The two novels are also connected by the devout religious temperaments of Jeanie / Dinah. And -- but maybe I'm becoming frivolous again -- by taking an unconscionable time to end.)

Effie Deans had a sister to walk south on her behalf. Hetty had no-one. She may have an aunt and uncle, but no brother or sister. Nor is there any hint that she ever had a friend. No-one, least of all Dinah or Adam, has ever interested themselves in Hetty's interests, in her elegance and deftness and dreams, foolish or otherwise. The lack of sympathy that Hetty evinces is a perfect mirror of the lack of sympathy shown to her by her "family".  

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The story turns on sex and pregnancy, topics on which, in the usual Victorian manner, nothing can be said outright except by coded hints and significant silences. That's irritating, too. (This same kind of information management contrives to prevent us finding out if Hetty's baby was a boy or a girl.)

How do the Poysers and Adam fail to notice that Hetty is pregnant? It seems incredible, but I must admit that George Eliot does her best to account for this. Hetty herself isn't sure she's pregnant until November, shortly after Adam's proposal. Then Mrs Poyser is confined to her room from Christmas until early in February*, so she doesn't see much of Hetty, who is working unusually hard downstairs (maybe hoping to induce a miscarriage). It's when Mrs Poyser becomes active again that Hetty's agitation becomes unendurable: she must kill herself or run away. (The Hall Farm is an exemplary shame culture; Hetty has thoroughly taken that on board, if nothing else.)

[*The same reason Mrs Saddletree, in The Heart of Midlothian, is unaware of Effie Deans' pregnancy.]

And Hetty is not yet in such a very advanced stage of pregnancy. The most likely date when she becomes pregnant is the first of August, when Arthur arranges to meet her at the end of the coming-of-age party (Ch 26). At the beginning of February, she's perhaps just six months pregnant. 

It follows that her baby, born around the first of March, is seriously premature, a birth brought on by the terrible stresses of Hetty's wanderings. Even in those days, a seven-month baby might survive; this was reputedly the case for both Kepler and Isaac Newton. But it wasn't very likely, especially in Hetty's circumstances. 

*

I've questioned how far George Eliot herself would have subscribed to the things I've been arguing here. One reason to think that she might have done, is the extraordinary way in which the novel treats Hetty's story from the moment when she's on the condemned cart and Arthur Donnithorne rides in, a Jeanie Deans of sorts, waving the pardon that is no pardon. Hetty's transportation keeps her alive in our minds, but softened heart or no -- and the author is too honest to pretend that Hetty really experiences any religious emotion, even if Dinah has persuaded her into confession -- no-one at Hayslope forgives her for what she's done or expresses the slightest wish of seeing or hearing of her again. It's we the readers who would like to know more of Hetty's story, but the novel baulks us cruelly: "... And the death of the poor wanderer, when she was coming back to us, has been sorrow upon sorrow" (Dinah, in the Epilogue). Whatever Hetty found in Australia, it wasn't apparently a new life. It must have been desolate enough, to want to come back to Hayslope.  In the mean time, no-one mentions her name. I'd like to think that the author (recalling The Heart of Midlothian, perhaps) perfectly intended that uncomfortable shadow to lie across her quiet ending.

View from the bench behind the church at Ellastone

(Image source: https://walkswithwelf.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/ellastone-and-the-weavers/ . Photograph by Dave Welford, illustrating his lively account of a ramble from Ellastone to the Weaver Hills.)

Hayslope is generally accepted as being based on Ellastone, Staffordshire (close to the Derbyshire border). George Eliot's father, Robert Evans, spent the early part of his life there, working as a carpenter. Her uncle lived there, and Mary Ann Evans did visit the area several times, in particular in 1839-40 (See http://moorlandsoldtimes.blogspot.com/2013/04/george-eliot-and-staffordshire.html).  She must surely have passed through Ellastone with her father on their journey from Ashbourne to Alton Gardens (letter to Miss Lewis, 23 June 1840).

But though Hayslope is based on Ellastone it is not Ellastone. Ellastone's proximity to the River Dove is its major topographical fact, but George Eliot didn't want a river playing in the background of Dinah's preaching. Hayslope is a dry-sounding name. In the landscape of Adam Bede there is only the brook (Chapter 4) in which Thias Bede drowns, and the pool in the Scantlands (Chapter 35) where Hetty thinks of drowning herself. It is not just at Hayslope; the novel is everywhere shy of rivers. Hetty's journey takes her to Stratford-upon-Avon  (a painful mistake) and eventually to Windsor, beside the Thames, but the imaginative vision of Adam Bede blanks out those rivers, too. There's something thirsty about Adam Bede; a spiritual thirst. It's strikingly in contrast to George Eliot's next novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860). 

*

Adam Bede: complete online text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/507/507-h/507-h.htm#link2HCH0004

I stayed away from the wider conversation while I tried to gather my thoughts and write this post. Now I'm dipping in and, of course, discovering that I'm not being very original.

I was pleased to find that much of what I've said was more comprehensively laid out in Jennifer Gribble's "The Hidden Shame: Telling Hetty Sorrel's Story" (Sydney Studies, 1996):  https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229391466.pdf .

And this is a brilliant exploration of the contradictions in Adam Bede, George Eliot and Victorian society: Rosemary Gould's "The History of an Unnatural Act: Infanticide and 'Adam Bede'" (Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 25, No. 2 (1997), pp. 263-277): https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058389 .

I also enjoyed reading R.E. Sopher's "Gender and Sympathy in Adam Bede: The Case of Seth Bede" (George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies No. 62/63 (September 2012), pp. 1-15): https://www.jstor.org/stable/42827899 ; focussing on another character who troubles our idea of the values Adam Bede may seem to uphold.