Читать книгу Transformation of Rage - Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone - Страница 9

After the completion of "Janet’s Repentance," the third and last story in Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot wrote her editor, John Blackwood, on September 5, 1857, that "I have a subject in my mind which will not come under the limitations of the title 'Clerical Life,' and I am inclined to take a large canvas for it, and write a novel" (Letters 2:381). On October 17 she wrote, "My new story haunts me a good deal, and I shall set about it without delay. It will be a country story–full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay" (387). She began writing on October 22. After she had finished the novel in November 1858, she recorded in her journal her "History of Adam Bede,” where she explains the germ of her story: an anecdote told her in 1839 by her Methodist aunt, Mrs. Samuel Evans, of a visit to a "condemned criminal, a very ignorant girl who had murdered her child and refused to confess–how she had stayed with her praying, through the night and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears, and confessed her crime." Eliot had begun thinking, shortly after beginning to write the Scenes, of blending this story "and some other recollections of my aunt in one story with some points in my father’s early life and character" (502).

She carefully researched the background of her novel, which takes place in 1799 in the county of "Loamshire," a symbolic re-creation of Staffordshire, where her father had come from his childhood home in Derbyshire (re-created in the novel as "Stonyshire"), as a young man to begin his career as a carpenter. Eliot gleaned from Southey’s Life of Wesley the details she needed for her characterization of Dinah, her Methodist preacher, about women’s preaching, visions, the divination of God’s will, visits to prisons, and preaching in the open air. She also searched the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1799 for details of vegetation and weather for her setting. As Gordon Haight observes, "her concern for details helps explain the sense of authenticity, the remarkable density of background her realism achieves" (Biography 250). Yet she emphasized in her letters after the novel was published that the story had developed out of her imagination: "There is not a single portrait in Adam Bede. . . . The whole course of the story–the descriptions of scenery or houses–the characters–the dialogue—everything is a combination of widely sundered elements of experience" (3:155). Regarding her accurate rendering of the local dialect, she stresses that she "never knew any Derbyshire people, or Staffordshire either, except my father and his brothers," and that she had visited her paternal relatives only a few times while she was growing up (157).

It would be hard to overstate the success of Adam Bede. It was published on February 1, 1859; by the middle of March, Blackwood wrote to congratulate her upon being "a popular as well as a great author" (3:33); he added that "the sale is nothing to the ring of applause that I hear in all directions." In June, her friend Barbara Bodichon wrote, "I wish you could hear people talking about AB”(108). In July, Charles Dickens wrote to say that "Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences of my life. . . . The conception of Hetty’s character is so extraordinarily subtle and true, that I laid the book down fifty times, to shut my eyes and think about it. I know nothing so skilful, determined, and uncompromising. The whole country life that the story is set in, is so real, and so droll and genuine, and yet so selected and polished by art, that I cannot praise it enough to you" (114–15). G. H. Lewes wrote his son in March 1860 that Bede "had had greater success than any novel since Scott (except Dickens). I do not mean has sold more–for 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin' and 'Les Mysteres de Paris' surpass all novels in sale; but in its influence, and in obtaining the suffrages of the highest and wisest as well of the ordinary novel reader, nothing equals 'Adam Bede'" (275).

The scope of the novel reaches far beyond its provincial origins. One twentieth-century critic, U. C. Knoepflmacher, has rightly seen the novel as Eliot’s reinterpretation of the fallen and redeemed Adam of Milton’s epic (Novels 91-126). Although the title character is the primary focus of the author’s theme of "tragic growth" (Hardy, Novels 39), Eliot attempts to show "an enlargement of moral sympathy" (Gregor 24) on the part of all four major characters–Adam, Arthur, Hetty, and Dinah. Many twentieth-century readers have difficulty accepting Eliot’s message, however, because of the treatment of Hetty, the character who is convicted of infanticide and banished from the community of Hayslope. Critics who have puzzled over the author’s apparent harshness toward Hetty include Knoepflmacher, who calls Hetty’s early disappearance from the novel her "execution by her moralistic creator" (Novels 124), and George Creeger, who suggests that Hetty is "the victim" of her creator’s own "hardness" (231). Mason Harris, who refers to Eliot’s "unforgivable" refusal to portray Hetty’s further development after her exile, objects to the novel’s ending on the grounds that "the reconstructed, Hetty-less pastoral of the ending seems to refute the whole process of the novel" ("Hetty" 189, 194). Other critics who have objected to the ending of the novel on similar grounds include Michael Edwards, who feels that its power "is diminished by Adam’s lack of guilt as regards Hetty" (218), and Murray Krieger, who suggests that "our discomfort with the conclusion is our sense that the transformed pain is not evident enough" (219).

My purpose in this chapter is to show how Heinz Kohut’s "self-psychology" illuminates the problems that critics have noted in Adam Bede. I will argue that Eliot’s portrayal of the inhabitants of the village of Hayslope shows that the community victimizes Hetty; each of the major characters, Arthur, Adam, and even the idealized heroine, Dinah, is shown using Hetty as a scapegoat. At the same time, I will show how Kohut’s theory about the relationship between incomplete self-development and rage helps to account for the aggressive behavior of the characters. I will then explain how Eliot’s apparent failure to see the extent of the aggression she portrays in her characters constitutes a denial of the aggressive impulses within herself. Finally, I will point to some of the ways in which the patterns in Adam Bede are repeated in the later novels.

Kohut’s psychology of the self defines psychoanalytic cure as a process of self-structuralization that results in a productive life, rather than simply as the resolution of oedipal conflict (Cure 7). His version of the well-known definition of mental health (the ability to work and to love) is "the capacity of a firm self to avail itself of the talents and skills at [its] disposal, enabling [the individual] to love and work successfully" (Restoration 284). To Kohut, the role of parents is central in the development of a firm self-structure, which he believes depends more upon the effect of the child’s total environment, than on "gross events," such as the deaths of parents (187-91). One step in the formation of the "bipolar self" occurs as a result of the infant’s early "mirroring," or interaction with a supportive parent figure; this stage is necessary for the development of a healthy self-esteem. Another step occurs as a result of the child’s "idealization" of a parent figure–a stage which precedes the successful internalization of values (Analysis 40-49, 106-9). When the process of self-structuralization is left incomplete, the result is a "self-disorder," defined by the persistence of archaic self and parent images that have not become integrated into the mature structures of the personality (Russell 140).

Instead of emphasizing the growth from dependence to autonomy, as does traditional psychoanalysis, Kohut emphasizes the changed nature of the relationship between self and "self-objects" (Cure 52). He believes that throughout life human beings need healthy attachments to empathic self-objects which replace their infantile self-objects, their parents. Kohut’s view of aggression is also different from the traditional view of it as the manifestation of an innate drive. He sees rage as a reaction to the feeling of loss of connection between self and empathic parental object, or, to put it another way, as a reaction to the sense that the integrity of the self has been violated. Rage results from "the breakup of the primary self-experience in which, in the child’s perception, the child and the empathic self-object are one" (Restoration 91).

In Adam Bede, Eliot portrays characters who suffer from varying degrees of disorders of the self, resulting from their lack of the parental and community support that is necessary for the development of a firm sense of identity. Eliot’s characters have lost their parent(s), yet at the same time, because of their unresolved need for them, have failed to separate themselves from their infantile parental image(s). In their need to attach themselves to an infantile object, Arthur, Adam, and Dinah choose Hetty, who functions in the community both as a fertility/mother figure and as a child figure. As the characters struggle to grow beyond their childhood attachments and find replacements for them, however, they need to kill off their old parental images as symbolized by Hetty–hence their banishment of her.

Although Eliot seems to blame Hetty for her flaws, her presentation of the harsh family and social conditions that lie underneath the surface of the Eden-like county of Loamshire shows that Hetty has been victimized by its inhabitants. She has been effectively excluded from the community of Hayslope from the time of her arrival. Orphaned at age ten, she has come to live with her aunt and uncle, the Poysers, who are conscientious about the formalities of caring for her, but who treat her differently from their own children. Hetty’s grandfather, who is part of the household, also treats her differently from his son’s children, because he still resents her mother’s marriage to a man beneath the Poysers' status.

Building on Creeger’s view of Hetty’s "hardness" as "childish . . . egocentricity" (228), Harris sees Hetty not as an "adult sinner," but as a "confused child" ("Hetty" 179), essentially "abandoned" by her relatives. Her relatives' rigid incapacity to accept her as part of their "respectable" world has resulted in her "arrested development" (180). She has not been able to find an appropriate role in her family or community; her status is somewhere between that of the servants and the Poysers' own children. To Harris, Hetty’s lack of parental support has prevented her development of the "sense of an inner self" that she needs to be able to assess the values imposed on her by the Hayslope "shame-culture" (193, 184). Extending Harris’s analysis, one may note that, as Eliot portrays her, Hetty has not completed the steps in the creation of the constituents of Kohut’s bipolar self. Her intense need for mirroring is shown in her Narcissus-like tendency to gaze at length at her reflection, either in a polished surface or a mirror (117, 194, 199, 294–96, 378). Her failure to internalize values is reflected in the way that "shame . . . was poor little Hetty’s conscience" and "religious doctrines had taken no hold on [her] mind" (382, 430).

Contrasting the usual view of Hetty as "a temptress" with his own interpretation of her as "a little girl," Harris demonstrates that her feeling for Arthur is not "sensual love," but a "Cinderella-fantasy" (182-83). Hetty’s propensity for looking at herself in the mirror, along with her self-defeating involvement with Arthur, who she dreams will provide her with wealth and importance, suggest her need for self-completion. In the scene in her bed-chamber, she gazes at her image while imagining that Arthur is with her: "his arm was around her, and the delicate rose-scent of his hair was with her still" (195). Hetty is searching for her identity by attaching herself to Arthur, who has the established place in Hayslope that she longs for.

Hetty’s treatment of babies and children reenacts her own sense of abandonment. She hates children as much as she hates the lambs and the baby chickens on the farm. When Hetty gives birth to her own child after she runs away from home, she is not able to behave as a mother normally would. "I seemed to hate it," she later confesses to Dinah. Earlier in the confession she says, "And then the little baby was born, when I didn’t expect it; and the thought came into my mind that I might get rid of it, and go home again. … I longed so to go back again." Hetty’s already weak sense of self deteriorates further when she leaves Hayslope, the only source of her identity and values. Her primary thought, when she thinks of murdering her child, is to "go home again" (498). In her confusion, however, "by burying the child, but not completely, Hetty tries both to kill it and to let it live" (Harris 187). Hetty is ambivalent, and rather than actively killing the baby, she abandons it in the woods. Thus the murder takes the form of passive aggression.

The characterization of Arthur, whom Harris calls Eliot’s "first extensive study of unconscious motivation" ("Misuse" 45), reveals that his inadequate self-development, although less severe than Hetty's, sets him up for his destructive interaction with her. While Arthur feels his future position in Hayslope is secure, his background has some parallels with Hetty's. For one thing, he has no parents. His mother has died only three months after his christening, and his father is missing. All we know about his father is that Arthur’s godmother, Mrs. Irwine, has a low opinion of him (108), just as Hetty’s relatives have a low opinion of her father. Like Hetty, Arthur’s lack of adequate parent figures creates his ongoing need for the firm support that would enable him to complete the process of his self-structuralization.

Just as Hetty is treated with indifference by her grandfather, so Arthur feels at times "positively hate[d]" by his (302). He also feels controlled by him. As he says to Mr. Irwine, "My grandfather will never let me have any power while he lives" (215). In the same conversation Irwine tells him that his mother (Mrs. Irwine) has prophesied that Arthur’s "lady-love will rule [him] as the moon rules the tides" (216). Arthur replies after a narrative interlude, "A man may be very firm in other matters and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman" (216). Arthur’s sense of being controlled is easily transferable to other relationships; he is susceptible to "woman’s witchery." Furthermore, like Hetty, his lack of family support has resulted in his failure to internalize firm values. Eliot comments that Arthur "lived a great deal in other people’s opinions and feelings concerning himself" (216). As Harris says, Arthur "depends on the approbation of others rather than an inner sense of self [and has] a moral sense based mainly on shame" ("Misuse" 53, 54). He shares to a lesser degree Hetty’s need for self-completion, yet also like Hetty, chooses a self-defeating relationship.

Arthur is described as having a "loving nature," but Eliot’s irony becomes clear in the subsequent description of his treatment of the "old gardener." When Arthur was seven, he impulsively kicked over the old man’s pitcher of broth. Finally realizing that it was the man’s dinner, he "took his favorite pencil-case and a silver-hafted knife out of his pocket and offered them as compensation. He had been the same Arthur ever since, trying to make all offences forgotten in benefits" (356).

Although Arthur is too concerned about other people’s opinions to be openly aggressive, he evidences a pattern of behaving aggressively and then seeking atonement by giving up something he possesses. In the incident with the old gardener Arthur takes out his aggression on someone whose social status is beneath his own. His relationship with Hetty follows the same pattern: it is an assertion of his power over the lower classes. The sequence of events that occurs at the time just before Arthur becomes involved with Hetty suggests that although his actions with Hetty appear to be impulsive, they are actually a reaction to his sense of being controlled by his grandfather. Arthur is disgruntled because "there was no having his own way in the stables; everything was managed in the stingiest fashion" (172). Then he learns that his horse is lame and feels "thoroughly disappointed and annoyed" (173). He goes out for a ride on the other horse that is available to him, and by the time he returns is unable to resist breaking his resolution not to see Hetty. In his dressing room after lunch, he feels that "the desire to see [her] had rushed back like an ill-stemmed current." He rationalizes that he will "amuse himself" by seeing Hetty that day "and get rid of the whole thing from his mind." Then he goes to see Hetty in the wood (174-75).

The affair is not simply a matter of Arthur’s failure to recognize his own frustrated sex drive, which Harris asserts has been "sublimated" into "sentimental musing over Hetty" ("Misuse" 45). Sexual fantasy and behavior can also serve as a defense, for example, against "hostile aggression" (Coen 895). Arthur, feeling controlled and therefore angry at his grandfather, expresses his frustration and need for power in the involvement with Hetty. Yet he also feels he is under her power, or "witchery." As often as he determines to do so, he is not able to end the affair and separate himself from Hetty, who is as much an extension of his fantasies as he is of hers. Just as Hetty’s fantasies are about the luxuries of the social position that would be hers as Arthur’s wife (144, 181, 199, 296), so Arthur’s are about his life as squire after his grandfather’s death (170, 483). Arthur’s inadequate sense of his own identity, which depends to such an extent on his future inheritance from his grandfather, makes him susceptible to the need for completing himself in the relationship with Hetty, in which he can act out his fantasy of being loved by the lower classes for his philanthropic works after he takes over his grandfather’s position in the community.

Arthur does finally suffer from the pain he has caused Hetty. His atonement, however, follows the pattern of his atonement with the old gardener: an attempt to rectify aggressive action by giving up possessions. He gives up his position as squire and goes away. Yet his exile is only temporary. He is eventually able to return and find a place in Hayslope. Hetty, by virtue of her position in the community, is the one who must bear the full weight of the consequences of their behavior.

Eliot attempts to show her title character Adam undergoing a transformation from an inner "hardness" to a capacity for sympathy for others (Creeger 234-35). The description of Adam’s family life points to the source of his hardness as his lost "sense of distinction" as "Thias Bede’s lad" since the onset of his father’s alcoholism during his late teenage years. Adam’s "shame and anguish" (92) had caused him to run away from home, but he had returned because he did not want to leave his mother and brother Seth with the burden of enduring the situation without him. Kohut explains that shame results in rage, and in the shamed individual’s ongoing readiness to seek revenge ("Thoughts" 380-81)–a reaction that Eliot similarly depicts. By the time Adam’s story opens, his shame has turned to rage, which shows itself in his propensity for fighting (211) and in his severity toward his father (86). Adam focuses all his anger about his family situation on his father, although it is clear that his mother Lisbeth has her own problem of "idolatrous love" (87) for Adam and her obvious preference for him over Seth.

Adam’s anger toward his father culminates in his actions on the night of his father’s death. He is furious because his father is out drinking when he should have been working on the job of making a coffin for a man in a neighboring village. While Adam stays up to finish the job himself, he thinks of his father’s continuously "worsening" behavior (92), but feels determined not to run away from the situation again, although he feels his father will be a "sore cross" to him for years to come. At that moment he hears a rap "as if with a willow wand" on the house door, goes to the door to look out, sees that no one seems to be there, and thinks of the superstition that the sound of a willow wand rapping on the door means that someone is dying (93). After he hears the sound again and still sees no sign of his father, he reasons that Thias is probably "sleeping off his drunkenness at the [tavern]." Not wanting to succumb to superstitious thinking, he determines not to open the door again, and for the rest of the night hears no more knocking. The next morning, however, Seth discovers that Thias has drowned during the night, "not far from his own door," as Mr. Irwine says later (137).

Carol Christ notes that Thias’s death "occurs as a magical fulfillment of Adam’s anger" (131); Krieger suggests that "the resentfulness Adam feels . . . brings him close to wishing his father dead" (211). It is possible to interpret Adam’s hearing the sound of the willow wand not only as a manifestation of his sense of foreboding, but as his wish for his father’s death. It is also possible to interpret Adam’s decision not to open the door again despite his father’s expected arrival as a form of passive aggression, and as an indirect contribution to his father’s death. In any case, Thias’s death causes Adam to repent his "severity" toward him (97). And this repentance, in Eliot’s view, turns out to be the first step of the process "in which Adam learns to overcome his angry severity toward others" (Christ 131).

Adam’s attitude toward Arthur and Hetty repeats the pattern of his attitude toward his parents. Even before he realizes they are actually having an affair, he is openly outraged at Arthur’s involvement with Hetty and provokes him into a fight. Yet he has trouble seeing any wrong in Hetty even after it becomes clear that she has abandoned her baby. Adam’s reluctance to feel hostile toward Hetty is related to his reluctance to be angry with his mother. His dream, which recounts the events in the Bede household shortly after Thias’s death, shows Adam’s close identification of Hetty with his mother. When his mother approaches, accidentally waking him, he is not startled to see her because she had been present "with her fretful grief" throughout his feverish reliving of the day’s events. Yet Hetty, too, had "continually" appeared in the dream, "mingling … in scenes with which she had nothing to do"; and "wherever Hetty came, his mother was sure to follow soon" (152). Adam’s dream suggests that he has transferred his attachment to his mother, who has always loved him with "idolatrous love," to his "preoccupying fancy" with Hetty (161-62).

When Adam learns of Hetty’s interest in Arthur, he does not express anger toward her openly. Instead, his aggressiveness takes the form of an intrusion on her relationship with Arthur. By insisting that Arthur not see Hetty again and that he write her a letter breaking off the relationship, he is cutting off all possibility that Arthur will be able to help her. At the time of the intrusion, Adam is not aware that Hetty is pregnant, nor is he aware that Arthur really does care for her more than he has let Adam know. His intrusiveness, however, is inappropriate and ends up making the situation worse. It is perhaps Adam’s bitter jealousy (370), more than an interest in Hetty’s welfare, that makes him insist on the letter, which he gives to Hetty himself after he tells her that Arthur "care[s] nothing about [her] as a man ought to care" (367). As Bruce K. Martin argues, "Adam thus indirectly contributes to the child-killing" by "remov[ing] from Hetty’s mind the possibility of consulting Arthur until it is too late" (759).

Adam’s inner struggles center on his inability to see Hetty realistically. Even before he sees her with Arthur in the woods, her locket (a gift from Arthur) drops to the floor in front of Adam; he fears she has a lover, but then rationalizes that she "might have bought the thing herself" (333). After he delivers Arthur’s letter to her, he still hopes that she will become interested in him: "She may turn round the other way, when she finds he’s made light of her all the while" (370). He continues to hope for her love by "creat[ing] the mind he believed in out of his own" (400). When he learns that Hetty has been accused of infanticide, he finds it impossible to believe: "'It’s his doing,' he said; 'if there’s been any crime, it’s at his door, not at hers. … I can't bear it. … it’s too hard to think she’s wicked'" (455). At the trial, when it becomes clear that Hetty is guilty, "It was the supreme moment of his suffering: Hetty was guilty, and he was silently calling to God for help" (481). Later, in the "upper room" scene with Bartle Massey, Adam is still having trouble accepting the truth about her: "I thought she was loving and tenderhearted, and wouldn’t tell a lie, or act deceitful. . . . And if he’d never come near her, and I’d married her, and been loving to her, and took care of her, she might never ha' done anything bad" (503–4). Adam is struggling to separate himself from his fantasy of Hetty, who symbolizes his lingering parental image of the loving young woman who belongs only to him.

When Adam is forced to face the truth about Hetty’s affair and infanticide, and when he finally forgives her and Arthur, he becomes free of her (and his mother's) hold on his mind. The sign of his transformation is his participation in "a kind of Lord’s Supper" (Creeger 234) with Bartle Massey in the "upper room" before Hetty’s trial. Just before he takes the bread and wine, Adam agrees to go see Hetty in the prison and says, "I'll never be hard again" (475). Finally, in the chapter entitled "Another Meeting in the Wood," he even repents of his "hardness" toward Arthur: "I've no right to be hard towards them as have done wrong and repent" (514).

His own suffering after his father’s death, and his vicarious participation in Hetty’s suffering after the infanticide, have extended his capacity for "sympathy," which in Eliot’s novels must be preceded by "the recognition of difference: between oneself and another" (Ermarth, "Sympathy" 25), as in the case of Adam’s changed view of Hetty. Adam’s participation in Hetty’s guilt causes him to "look upon every sufferer, regardless of guilt, as worthy of sympathy" (Martin 750). In psychoanalytic terms, his identification with Hetty and her suffering is apparently therapeutic because at the same time that he separates himself from his childhood image of his mother, he also transfers his wish for his father’s death onto Hetty’s murderous act. Through Hetty’s suffering, he is cleansed of his own guilt; Hetty is the sacrificial lamb whose suffering makes Adam’s redemption possible. Eliot calls his "deep, unspeakable suffering" a "baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state" (471). She tries to suggest that he has become a more complete human being, ready for a mature love for Dinah. Yet in her portrayal, Adam’s growth occurs at the expense of Hetty, whose murderous act and subsequent punishment are in part a consequence of his aggressive intrusion on her relationship with Arthur; thus Eliot’s attempt, in her reworking of the themes of Milton’s epic, to show Adam’s transformation in terms of the nineteenth-century "religion of humanity," as Knoepflmacher explains the scene (Novels 112), becomes a perversion, rather than a reinterpretation, of the idea of baptism.

In a scene in his mother’s cottage shortly after his father’s death, Adam hears a foot on the stairs and imagines it is Hetty; but instead, Dinah, the "reality contrasted with a preoccupying fancy," enters (161–62). This is the first hint that Dinah will be able to replace Hetty in Adam’s affections. His love for her becomes "the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow" (574). He and Dinah marry and find their place in Hayslope. Painful memories remain, but in Eliot’s view Adam has regained his Paradise.

Although Eliot attempts to idealize Dinah, she emerges as a character with unresolved needs expressed in destructive interactions with Hetty. Like Hetty and Arthur, Dinah has lost both her parents. She has been raised by her Aunt Judith, Mrs. Poyser’s sister. When Dinah visits the Bedes' home early in the novel, she tells Lisbeth about her orphaned background and "how she had been brought up to work hard, and what sort of place Snowfield (in Stonyshire) was, and how many people had a hard life there" (157). Yet Dinah does not appear to suffer any ill-effects from her hard life. Lisbeth tells her, "[Y]e look as if ye’d ne'er been angered i' your life" (156). She is referring to Dinah’s apparently compliant nature, which Lisbeth thinks must at least have made the aunt’s task of bringing up a child a little easier.

The possibility that Dinah’s calm exterior is in part a cover for anger is born out in her preaching and other aspects of her ministry. During her sermon, her voice is all calm and compassion until "she had thoroughly arrested her hearers" (71). Then "her utterance" becomes more "rapid and agitated," as she emphasizes the listeners' "guilt . . . wilful darkness, [and] state of disobedience to God" (72). She begins to single out individuals, focusing in particular on Bessy Cranage, who "had always been considered a naughty girl . . . [and] was conscious of it" (73). She accuses Bessy of paying more attention to her earrings and clothes than to her "Saviour" and warns her that when she is old, she will "begin to feel that [her] soul is not saved" and "will have to stand before God dressed in [her] sins." Toward the end of Dinah’s pointed message, which, as Christopher Herbert suggests, amounts to "an attack" on her (415), Bessy bursts into tears; finally, "a great terror [came] upon her," and she threw her earrings "down before her, sobbing aloud" (75).

Dinah repeats the pattern of her attack on Bessy when she "intrude[s]" (Krieger 205) on Hetty in "The Two Bed-Chambers," a chapter intended to show the striking contrasts between Hetty, who is "strutting about decked in her scarf and earrings" in front of her mirror (201), and Dinah, who is looking out the window of her room at a "wide view over the fields" (202). Dinah closes her eyes in prayer, is interrupted by a sound from Hetty’s room, and begins to think about her. Feeling "pity" for Hetty’s lack of "warm, self-devoting love" and "a deep longing to go now and pour into Hetty’s ear all the words of tender warning and appeal that rushed into her mind" (203), Dinah goes to her room and with very little introduction says, "It has been borne in upon my mind tonight that you may some day be in trouble" (205). She offers to help in any future time of need, and in her homiletic style reminds Hetty to seek strength from God, who will support her "in the evil day." When Dinah sees that Hetty is reacting "with a chill fear" to her prophecy, her "tender anxious pleading" becomes "the more earnest" until Hetty, "full of a vague fear that something evil was sometime to befall her, began to cry." Interpreting Hetty’s reaction as "the stirring of a divine impulse," Dinah begins to "cry with her for grateful joy," but Hetty becomes "irritated under Dinah’s caress," and pushing her away impatiently, sobs, "Don’t talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to frighten me? I've never done anything to you. Why can’t you let me be?" (206).

Dinah’s style of ministry is in sharp contrast to Mr. Irwine's, who has more a "live and let live" (103) attitude toward his flock. When Arthur comes to see him about Hetty, Irwine refrains from giving him advice because he has already warned Arthur not to get involved with Hetty. Moreover, Irwine has no idea how close he is to an involvement, and is trying to let Arthur take the initiative in any confession or request for advice. Conversely, he very firmly takes the initiative in advising Adam, who he knows has a propensity for violence, not to get into another fight with Arthur. Irwine speaks to him in a rational tone about the consequences of acting out of blind fury and then leaves him to his own thoughts. His behavior indicates that he believes that Arthur and Adam have the capacity to make the right decision. Dinah’s behavior toward Bessy and Hetty indicates that she thinks they are lost souls incapable of any right behavior without her help.

Dinah does not actually see Hetty again until the prison scene, where Hetty’s "hardness" is melted (497) as she finally makes her confession to Dinah. Although Eliot tries to show Dinah as facilitating Hetty’s breakthrough in this scene, her earlier departure from Hayslope is another indication of Dinah’s (in this case, passive) aggressiveness toward Hetty. Dinah repeatedly expresses interest in helping Hetty, but she goes away without leaving an address, and by the time she reappears, it is too late to help, except by listening to her final confession in the prison cell.

Dinah tells Seth she feels "called" to return to Snowfield, although "[her] heart yearns" over her aunt’s family "and that poor wandering lamb, Hetty Sorrel" (78). When she is almost ready to leave, Dinah again expresses interest in Hetty, who she says will be in her intercessions (187), and in "The Two Bed-Chambers" scene, Dinah expresses her fear that Hetty "may someday be in trouble" (205). While Dinah is away, Seth receives a letter from her, which refers to her sense of foreboding about her aunt’s household (375). When Adam goes to look for Hetty, however, although he believes she is visiting Dinah in Snowfield, he finds that Dinah is out of town and learns that she has not left any address. After Hetty is accused of infanticide, Dinah is still missing and no one knows for certain where she is. The family tries to send her a letter, but they have no idea whether she receives it. Dinah does not reappear until Hetty has already been sentenced, when she visits her in the prison. Dinah’s departure and failure to leave an address at a time when she senses that something might be wrong belie the expressions of concern for her aunt’s household. Eliot’s idealized Dinah thus expresses aggression indirectly both in the form of intrusiveness and passivity.

Dinah’s anger is not acknowledged, but it is evident in her words and actions. Hetty, like Bessy, is a likely target for Dinah’s aggressions because the community already looks down on her, her self-esteem is low, and she is the least capable of fighting back. Yet perhaps more importantly, Hetty represents the side of herself that Dinah is unwilling to acknowledge: the sexual (the affair with Arthur) and the aggressive (the murder of the baby). In attacking Hetty, Dinah is attacking the threatening forces in her own nature. Several times Mrs. Poyser refers angrily to Dinah’s asceticism (121, 236, 518), as though she is aware that there is something wrong with Dinah’s failure to acknowledge any normal physical needs. Dinah’s denial of natural needs suggests that she is "lacking in self," or in a "sense of human identity"; her "fear of accepting full maturity" (Creeger 236, 237) is reflected, in psychoanalytic terminology, in her persistent archaic idealized self-image, and is a sign of defective self-development (Russell 139, 144). Dinah identifies only with her "ideal self" as she splits off and projects her unacceptable traits onto others. Hetty answers Dinah’s need to get rid of her "bad self."

After Adam’s proposal, Dinah goes away again to think it over. A few weeks later, when Adam goes to see her, Dinah, apparently having undergone a transformation that enables her to accept her feelings for Adam, finally declares her love: "It is the Divine Will. My soul is so knit with yours that it is but a divided life I live without you" (576). Like Adam, who has gone away and returned, she comes back to Hayslope and finds her place in the community. Like Adam's, however, her new life comes at Hetty’s expense. It is only after Hetty’s guilt is made clear to the community and she is exiled that Dinah finally replaces her in Adam’s affections.

Kohut’s view that rage is the reaction to the sense of loss of connection to parental figures is thus well illustrated in the story of Arthur's, Adam's, and Dinah’s treatment of Hetty. Their scapegoating of her is a transference of anger felt toward missing or disappointing parent (figure)s. Hetty as fallen mother and child murderer becomes the symbol of failed parenthood who must be banished to make way for her replacements as the characters grow beyond their infantile self and parental images. At the same time, Hetty is the symbol of the abandoned and murdered child, whose suffering enacts the characters' sense of abandonment, along with their unacknowledged murderous wishes toward missing or inadequate parents. Reliving and working through unresolved childhood feelings, as in psychoanalytic therapy, is a way of integrating parental images in the mind. In Kohut’s terms, the characters have attempted to complete their self-structuralization through a transference, in order to rework the process of "transmuting internalization" (Analysis 49) that should normally have occurred in childhood.

Critics have wondered why Eliot seems unable to see her favored characters in Adam Bede and other novels as they come across to the reader. F. R. Leavis is among those who have pointed to a "distinctive moral preoccupation" (28) which, as Barbara Hardy suggests, leads Eliot to idealize certain "charmless" characters in order to provide her readers with a "moral example" (Novels 39). Dinah, Dorothea, Romola, and Daniel Deronda are examples in her fiction of idealized hero(ines) portrayed in sharp contrast to an extremely self-centered and/or immature character: Hetty, Rosamond, Tito and Tessa, and Gwendolen Harleth. Such contrasting of idealized and villainous characters is in part Victorian literary convention, and in part Eliot’s deliberate attempt "to illustrate the moral truths of her religion of humanity" (Fulmer 28). Eliot’s blind spots, however, can perhaps best be explained by the psychoanalytic concept of splitting, defined by Otto F. Kernberg, the object relations theorist, as a "central defensive operation of the ego at regressed levels" which occurs when the neutralization of aggression in the mind "does not take place sufficiently" (6, 29). Kernberg explains that "probably the best known manifestation of splitting is the division of external objects into 'all good' ones and 'all bad' ones" (29). Splitting is manifest in Eliot’s art not only in her contrasting characters, but also in their development: although her story is abruptly cut off, Hetty is portrayed in more convincing detail than Dinah, a shadowy ideal who is more often than not offstage. Eliot’s failure to see the aggression in her idealized character–in this case, Dinah, and to a lesser degree, Adam (whose aggression is in part acknowledged, in part denied)–is an aspect of the phenomenon of psychic splitting and, as such, constitutes a denial of the aggressive impulses in herself. In Kernberg’s terms, Dinah and Hetty represent two conflicting, or "unintegrated" self-images. Hetty, the split-off, bad side of the author’s self is banished from Hayslope, and banished from the novel. The failure of the ending of Adam Bede(Hetty’s disappearance and the marriage of Adam and Dinah) thus reflects the author’s fear of the aggressive impulses coming from within herself.

Carol Christ has shown how Eliot’s concern with the repression of anger is evident in her repeated use of providential death in her fiction both "to avoid . . . and prohibit aggression … in her characters" (132). This chapter has extended such critical insights by showing how Kohut’s self-psychology illuminates the patterns of indirect expression of aggression in the characters in Adam Bede, explains some of the problems noted by critics, and suggests their connection to the author’s fear of her own aggressive impulses. In the chapters to come, I will argue that the author’s aggression, like that of the characters in this novel, derives from her sense of disconnection from parent figures, beginning with the sense of separation from her mother following the deaths of the twins, and reinforced later by each of her parents' deaths. Moreover, because the novel was begun only a few months after the estrangement from her remaining family, in May of 1857, when she had informed her brother Isaac of her liaison with Lewes, I believe that her aggression was intensified by her more recent sense of disconnection from them.

Eliot’s first novel establishes the patterns that will be repeated in the later novels. The aggression that is evident but denied in the characters in Adam Bede follows from their lost sense of connection to parent figures. Hetty’s and Arthur’s weak sense of self, Dinah’s repression of feelings, and Adam’s guilt over his murderous anger will reappear in other characters in the fiction. Moreover, Kohut’s idea that the development of a firm self-structure depends more on the effect of a child’s total environment than on such major events as the deaths of parents is also illustrated in Adam Bede. The failed development that has resulted from missing or destructive elements in family environments is seen in a larger social context. Eliot’s portrayal of character extends beyond the nuclear family; it demonstrates the way in which social expectations and/or social position may affect self-esteem, and may either enhance or inhibit growth. Finally, the application of Kohut’s self-psychology to a study of Adam Bede also shows how narcissistic rage, a "dangerous feature of individual psychopathology," may be transformed into an "equally malignant social phenomenon" ("Thoughts" 382), whereby family and social groups turn innocent victims into scapegoats in order to compensate for their own sense of inadequacy.