Arthur’s Misuse of the Imagination: Sentimental Benevolence and Wordsworthian Realism in Adam Bede

Abstract

A R T H U R 'S M ISU SE OF THE IM A G IN A T IO N : SE N T IM E N T A L B E N EV O LEN C E AN D W O R D SW O R TH IA N R E A L ISM IN ADAM BEDE MASON HARRIS Simon Fraser University ^ 3 ecause Adam Bede is "a country story - full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay,"1 it seems to invite oversimplified interpretations. Critics assume that George Eliot's first novel lacks the complexity of her later work, or at least that any complexity it possesses must be in conflict with its pastoral elements. Part of the problem in getting a clear perspective on this novel arises from a tendency to concentrate critical attention on the rather idealized Adam and Dinah as representatives of the author's values, while passing over Arthur, who does not belong to the pastoral community and whose affair with a tenantfarmer 's niece almost destroys it, as a rather ordinary seducer treated with conventional Victorian moralism. In a recent book on George Eliot, Neil Roberts expresses a widely-held view of the novel when he says that it presents a "static moral drama" enacted in an "absence of social and historical analysis" because Arthur's sin is only "a matter of private morality" unrelated to his grandfather's acquisitiveness as landlord.2 I shall argue that this seduction is very much a matter of class, and that Eliot's sense of historical process, if somewhat muted by nostalgia, is still active in the novel. A close study of the psychology behind Arthur's crime will show the vital thematic use Eliot makes of his aristocratic status and his participation in the literary taste of the later eighteenth century (Arthur turns twenty-one in 1799). As the well-intentioned heir to his grandfather's estate, Arthur reveals much about the influence of unconscious snobbery in rationalizing the exploita­ tion of social inferiors, while as a reader of fashionable fiction who scorns the first edition of Lyrical Ballads he provides a contrast to the narrator's Wordsworthian realism, revealing what the imagination should not be both in art and life. This contrast also suggests a turning point in the history of taste and sensibility. The moral vision of Adam, Dinah, and their author has something in common with the Romantic concept of the imagination (in Dinah's case mixed with the best aspects of the religious revival), while Arthur, thoroughly imbued with the aristocratic taste and social attitudes of his period, reflects the limitations of the old order and thus helps to show how the novel's narrative English S tudies in Can ad a, iv , 1, Spring 1978 42 vision looks forward to the needs of Eliot's own time as well as celebrating the virtues of the past. The timing of the action, with a leisurely account of the rustic community through the summer of 1799, while crime, suffering, and new insight come in the winter and spring of 1800, suggests a sense of transition between past and present. Hetty, the "lost lamb," is rejected by the rustic community but rescued by Dinah, whose Methodism has been nurtured in a bleak industrial town and who recognizes no distinctions of rank.3Again, the new insight which enables Adam to bear the pain of Hetty's fall foreshadows Eliot's mid-Victorian religion of humanity.4 On the other hand, Arthur's ideal vision of his future reign as Squire is based on the world-view of a ruling class soon to become obsolete. In her depiction of the semi-feudal community of Hayslope, Eliot makes much of the dignity of labour as manifested in the Poysers' farm and Adam's workshop, while old Squire Donnithorne, whose income derives from posses­ sion of fields which others till, represents the least admirable aspect of this society; as Mrs Poyser angrily remarks to the Squire, "I know there's them as is born t'own the land, and them as is born to sweat on't" (353). The limitations of the aristocratic world-view...