Infanticide and Respectability: Hetty Sorrel as Abandoned Child in Adam Bede

Abstract

I N F A N T I C I D E A N D R E S P E C T A B I L I T Y : H E T T Y S O R R E L A S A B A N D O N E D C H I L D I N A D A M B E D E MASON HARRIS Simon Fraser University x id a m Bede has usually been enjoyed and interpreted as a celebration of pastoral community, a loving backward look at a long-vanished rural world. Yet much of this novel’s interest, especially for the modern reader, lies in its combination of nostalgic retrospect with “modern” problems not usually found in a pastoral. In particular, Hetty Sorrel’s unwed pregnancy, desperate flight, abandonment of her child, and trial for its murder, seems to many readers the most striking episode in the novel. Eliot’s vivid depiction of Hetty’s flight has attracted some excellent criticism: both Barbara Hardy and Ian Adam analyze the remarkable way in which the narrator merges with Hetty’s consciousness to bring us the immediate experience of a con­ fused and inarticulate character.1 Our admiration for Eliot’s achievement here, however, has tended to raise questions about Hetty’s relation to the novel as a whole. The modern reader is likely to be put off by an apparent harshness in Eliot’s commentary on Hetty throughout much of the novel — a harshness which seems oddly in contrast to her sympathy during the flight episode; some have seen Hetty’s fate as a severe punishment for sexual love. Most serious, because most threatening to the novel’s integrity, is the influential view that the realism of Hetty’s “Journey in Despair” simply does not belong to the rest of the novel. In his well-known essay, “The Two Worlds of Adam B ede” Ian Gregor argues that most of the novel is old-fashioned pastoral, while Hetty’s flight represents the intrusion of a modern “fiction of moral and philosophical inquiry” incompatible with the pastoral tradition.2 If we accept this con­ clusion then we must consider the character at the centre of the plot and the modern reader’s interest an inspired accident, and relegate the rest of the novel to a charming but obsolete literary genre. The vital issues raised by Hetty’s disaster become irrelevant to Eliot’s depiction of the world of Hayslope , and her fall seems a matter of private sin played off against a background of “immemorial” rustic virtue.3 The real question lies not in the rather abstract matter of genre but in the novel’s sense of community, especially in the opposition between Hetty E n g l is h St u d ies in C anada, ix, q, June 1983 and her aunt and uncle Poyser, who represent the best aspects of the re­ spectable tenant farmers of Hayslope. Despite the fine studies of Hetty’s flight, surprisingly little criticism has been directed to her relation to the Poysers, and this is the area we must explore if we are to get beyond the inhibiting view of her as a separate case. Only if she belongs to the Poysers can she be shown to belong to the novel as a whole. In his convincing interpretation — published a quarter of a century ago and still one of the most important essays on Adam Bede — J. R. Creeger takes the novel out of the realm of “pastoral” (in the simple sense intended by Ian Gregor) when he demonstrates that Eliot’s admiration for the Poysers is not unqualified, and that Dinah’s Methodism provides a critical perspec­ tive on the world of Hayslope.4 Hetty is usually seen as quite different from the apparently warm-hearted Poysers, but in emphasizing the difference be­ tween their values and Dinah’s Creeger suggests that Hetty does indeed belong to Hayslope: she is “ a perfect representative of the LoamshireHayslope world: she has its fertility, and she has its beauty, which never­ theless conceals an essential hardness.” 5 He argues that the effect of her “ordeal is to externalize the hardness...