Adam Bede, George Eliot

It's a mark of how tastes have changed, that Adam Bede was popular when it was first published, but both the story and theme are hardly engaging to me. "The world of Adam Bede": farming folk and dialect, and the plot of a poor girl seduced by a rich man, is neither scandalously exciting nor profoundly moving.

But such is George Eliot's gift that I learned to become interested in the fate of the characters.

Adam: I do not know why he is the title character, and do not admire him. He is made out to be strong, earnest, handsome, truly compassionate, and good, physically and emotionally and morally. There are probably many people like him in the world, but I would not like to marry them for I find moral righteousness like his hard and binding. I feel sorry for his brother Seth, who is secondary in status and affection to him always: his long suffering mother, Lisbeth, favours Adam blatantly although Seth is very good and gentle to her, and he has to win Dinah Morris's heart. I am disappointed that Dinah married him, and eventually gave up female preaching: all throughout the novel it was so clear that she had a vocation and was fitted to it, and that she was happy in it - to have her change her heart in the final chapters is sudden and such a damper on her independent spirit. I think George Eliot wanted to show that Adam finally arrived at a woman who was fit for him, but I do not think Adam is good enough for Dinah! I am not satisfied that he is giving her a love which "sprung out of his love for Hetty, and would not violate his memory of Hetty." A second choice to a woman much inferior?

This book has the only happy ending I have read yet in George Eliot. Oh, I suppose it is not very happy: Hetty and Arthur are both punished, Arthur most of all I think, while Adam is rewarded with love and success because he was honorable. Very idealistic - and dull. I prefer the note of tragedy and unwittingly hurtful character interactions in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. Those characters are so much more truthful and larger-than-life. Adam and Arthur and Hetty are too unrealistically good-hearted, despite their actions.