Adam Bede: Sympathy, Causation and Victorian Philosophy - Essay Example

Adam Bede: Sympathy, Causation and Victorian Philosophy George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans, sought in her novels to give people both a sense of how actions led to consequences through laws of causation and how those consequences had moral or immoral results. “The story of most of George Eliot's novels is that of a character's mental growth, a central movement surrounded by several sub plots concerned with the mental growth... of more peripheral characters. The moral education of the human being – his movement from egoism to more objective moral vision – is always a radical theme in these novels... Eliot believed that art has a social, moral mission – that its twin goals should be the destruction of egoism and the creation of sympathy for others” (Halperin, 1974). Adam Bede is no different and tries to illustrate the ideas of moral sympathy and the realist law of causation through allegory and allusion to other work, usage of established plot conventions, the utilisation of the legal system and its associated gaze as a plot point, and uses of language and character development. Eliot's mission was quite open: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies... [A] picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention of which is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment” (Parrinder, 1972). From this quote, we can deduce a few elements of Eliot's style and intent. First: She specifically associates morality with “sympathy”, or what we may call today empathy. For Eliot and thinkers like her, the moral life springs directly from human capacities to feel others' pains and be concerned for others' plight. Hume similarly declared that “sympathy is the source of the esteem, which we pay to all the artificial virtues” (Wright, 1983, pg. 232). For Hume, as for Eliot, ideas like justice and abstract codes of morality are created because, while people naturally do not greatly harm they love and are directly connected to, they find it much easier to harm those whose connections are more tenuous and abstract. But Eliot goes one step further and argues that good art can make specific and real general moral concepts and thus develop the species character of sympathy into more general “moral sentiment”. Similarly, Eliot shared with other Victorian thinkers (but not Hume) an almost ironclad certainty, or at least a belief that that certainty would be possible and valuable, in a particular model of the world and causality (O'Gorman, 2002 pg. 98; Williams, 1974). Victorian-era novelists operated from an assumption that, at least in the world of fiction if not in the world of fact, there was a clear order of things, a “rock-solid... connection between realism and a philosophy of epistemological assurance” (O'Gorman, 2002, pg. 98). Coming on the heels of the sceptical revolution, these realists tried to resist extremes of Cartesian certainty while nonetheless arguing that “scrupulous attention to detail” and accepting established models of reality would lead to successful prediction. Adam Bede, unsurprisingly, embodies and presages these developments. The setting of pastoral, country life and an idyllic farm town serves to make the later infanticide more shocking and thus help drive home the immorality of the action while opening the readers' mind to the consequences of such cruelty and wanton disregard. The people of the town are friendly and good hosts: “Take off the bridle and give him a drink, ostler” (pg. 59). They're candid, responding to questions about what Pastor Irwine thinks with simple, clear explanations and insight into Irwine's behavior. They are also humble and aware of cultural differences, helpfully explaining them to passersby: “I'm not this countryman, you may tell by my tongue, sir. They're cur'ous talkers i' this country, sir; the gentry's hard work to hunderstand 'em. I was brought hup among the gentry, sir, an' got the turn o' their tongue when I was a bye. Why, what do you think the folks here says for "hevn't you ?" - the gentry, you know, says "hevn't you" - well, the people about here says, "hanna yey." It's what they call the dileck as is spoke hereabout, sir. That's what I've heard Squire Donnithorne say many a time; it's the dileck, says he” (pgs. 58-60). By making the town so idyllic, honest, gregarious and working-class, Eliot intends to get rid of ideas of shrewdness and deceit and analyse human nature more fully and authentically. Some of the passages are less subtle than others. Chapter 15, for example, seems to have some blatant moralizing and obvious techniques: But this makes sense in light of Eliot's artistic mission, which is to open the mind and dispel evil. For example: In the conversation between Dinah and Hetty, where Dinah is hoping to help Hetty become less selfish and self-absorbed, Dinah's Bible is open to the passage in Ephesus wherein “when Paul had felt bound to open his heart in a last exhortation and warning” (pg. 204). Yet even here, Eliot's technique is more complex than merely hammering the point home. It is indicated to us that Dinah is a fervently religious woman not by telling us this but by describing her familiarity with the Bible: “There was light enough for her, if she opened her Bible, for her to discern the text sufficiently to know what it could say to her. She knew the physiognomy of every page, and could tell on what book she opened, sometimes on what chapter, without seeing title or number. It was a small thick Bible, worn quite round at the edges” (pg. 204). While there is some element of implied miracle in terms of the page randomly opening to the page that would guide Dinah, this is not made so dreadfully explicit that it undermines the subtlety of the scene. Dinah can tell that Hetty is in trouble and approaches trying to aid her with subtlety and grace. '[I]t has been borne in upon my mind to-night that you may some day be in trouble - trouble is appointed for us all here below, and there comes a time when we need more comfort and help than the things of this life can give. I want to tell you that if ever you are in trouble and need a friend that will always feel for you and love you, you have got that friend in Dinah Morris at Snowfield...Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow-men (pg. 204-205). By combining this moral sentiment with a specific intervention on the part of Dinah on behalf of Hetty, Eliot emphasizes that general, abstract morality is very rarely a useful guide to action and instead hopes to indicate to the audience how lessons in the Bible and in commonly accepted moral norms can be used in concrete situations. When Hetty asks her to leave, Dinah does. It is made clear that Hetty is in a frightened, fragile state of mind: “As for Hetty, she was soon in the wood again - her waking dreams being merged in a sleeping life scarcely more fragmentary and confused” (pg. 206). Further, the fact that Hetty does not instantly renounce her wicked ways and embrace Dinah's morality as an instant convert, unlike in some less artful works with a strong Christian influence, grounds the idea of realist causation. There is a general principle that Eliot is operating by: “It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is” (pg. 206). In short: Wisdom must be earned, no matter how wise our guides along that path. Dinah cannot unilaterally save Hetty, as much as Eliot might want her to be able to: Instead, Hetty must go through her own problems and torments. “But Hetty was simply in that excitable state of mind in which there is no calculating what turn the feelings may take from one moment to another, and for the first time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She pushed her away impatiently and said with a childish sobbing voice...” (pg. 206). What of the deus ex machina of Donnithorne's intervention and Hetty's confession leading to Hetty having her sentenced reduced to transportation? Doesn't this undermine her moral points? No. Eliot is not advocating some strict morality where those who deviate are punished; she actually says quite the opposite, that decent people must make mistakes to learn the “higher nature” of moral sensibility. Further, Hetty is not pardoned: She still has to accept punishment; but her sincere remorse, set up by Dinah's intervention, helps her. Allegory and reference to other works also helps to ground the ideas of causation and moral sympathy. The structure of the book is obviously quite similar to that of Midsummer Night's Dream: There is a love quadrangle, and the nature of the woods plays an important role; in Midsummer Night's Dream, the magical realist elements make the woods and the magic and fairies within them resolve core conflicts, while in Adam Bede, the field where the baby dies becomes an all-too-realistic source of tragedy. Thus, Adam Bede uses many techniques to establish a strong sense of a model of causation that is linked to Eliot's notion of moral sympathy as being the highest goal of art. Bibliography Bloom, H. 1994, The Western Canon. New York: Harcourt Brace. Carroll, David. 1971. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble. Eliot, George. 1954-78. The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. Ed. G. S. Haight. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eliot, G. 1859, Adam Bede. Available at:http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/eliot/bede/ Forster, E. M. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold & Co. 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