When Bad Things Happen to Bad People: Liability and Individual Consciousness in "Adam Bede" and "Silas Marner"

Abstract

A large portion of George Eliot's first full-fledged novel Adam Bede (1859) is devoted to recognizing and adjudicating the ways in which individuals can be held responsible for their actions. It is, perhaps, needless to say that Eliot falls heavily on the side of accountability. The outcomes of the novel's major plot points-Adam's guilt about his father's death, Arthur's carelessness with Hetty, and Hetty's murder of her child-all illustrate one of the novel's underlying premises: people eventually pay for their wrongdoing. Despite its centrality to the plot, however, Eliot's credo of personal responsibility has generally received only glancing critical attention. This apparent lack of interest in debating Eliot's criteria for a liable act (or for retribution) seems to derive from the ease with which the novel makes and unmakes its guilty parties.1 That is, because Eliot presents the reader with a seemingly self-contained and coherent account of the novel's own methods for doling out rewards and punishments, the novel itself licenses an unproblematized critical attitude towards the function of liability. Ultimately, bad actions are punished; characters pay for their moral infractions-through the judicial system, through more local forms of social censure, or by way of internal rituals of self-condemnation. Conversely, good actions are rewarded; virtuous characters get married, prosper, and enjoy the admiration of their communities. The proportionality of these end results helps the reader feel satisfied that the characters got what they deserved. How Eliot administers such doses of moral castigation and approbation, not the logic of liability that underwrites it, has been the focus of critical debate. Critics tend to identify two separate, and seemingly incompatible, projects at work in this novel: first, a depiction of the chain of cause and effect within a social community, and, second, the representation of a moral system that sees beyond the external world of cause and effect in order to identify and punish the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Accordingly, critics have poured their energy into reconciling Eliot's moral commitments with her deterministic or realistic ones. For those concerned with Eliot's desire to depict a world rigorously regulated by laws of cause and effect, the imposition of a moral order at the end of the novel seems to fly in the face of the project. For those who