What George Eliot’s ‘Adam Bede’ Taught Me About Hope
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Each of us can probably recall at least one big event in our lives that didn’t unfold the way we thought it would. Maybe we didn’t get accepted to the college we most wanted to attend, our career plans took a U-turn, or a relationship we thought would go the distance suddenly crumbled. The characters in George Eliot’s Adam Bede know a little something about dashed hopes – and the story of Adam’s perseverance also teaches us about how they might be restored.
First published in 1859, the novel has fascinated generations of audiences with its story of Hetty Sorrel and the two men who compete for her affections: Adam Bede and Captain Arthur Donnithorne. It’s compelling and relatable, sure, but it’s instructive, too: a course in the fighting kind of hope that extends past wishful thinking and persists when situations go wrong.
Eliot’s narrator begins by painting a picture of how not to hope. Hetty and Adam each let their imaginations run away with them, to detrimental effect. Arthur’s attention to Hetty convinces her that he desires the same romantic future as she does. But just as she’s building a pretty picture of their life together, he abandons her. Hetty is devastated, but she soon convinces herself that Adam will offer her the redemption she seeks. She doesn’t really love him, but at least, she figures, marrying him will distract her from her grief: “one of the first results of sorrow is a desperate vague clutching after any deed that will change the actual condition… She did not care what she did, so that it made some change in her life” (306).
Meanwhile, Adam, who has been pining for Hetty all along, interprets her newfound attention as something it is not, “attributing imaginary virtues to her” (318) and fashioning an image of her heart out of his own self-perception, “which was large, unselfish, tender” (319). Neither character sees the other as they truly are, and both hopes are frustrated when Hetty is later accused — and found guilty — of a terrible crime.
To the cynic, then, Adam Bede is a cautionary tale about the dangers of getting your hopes up. It warns us against disillusionment and flights of fancy by showing us how blinding — and therefore damaging — ideals can be when not rooted in a sense of reality.
To the optimist, however, the story offers a much different perspective. It’s true that what we find in the pages of this novel is not a sunny, sugar-coated optimism that banks on everything being “okay.” But if reality is what we’re after, we’ll find it in Adam’s perseverance in the face of loss, and in a deep-seated, hard-won hope that comes from reckoning with the worst, and still finding something good in it.
In a chapter called, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” the narrator divulges her reasons for writing this tale. It would be contrary to the purpose of the realism she desires to convey, she explains, to paint idealized characters. We know that people are inherently flawed! Not only does this disclaimer discourage us from being too hard on Adam when his imagination gets the better of him; it also prepares us to read the hope that crops up later in the novel as something profoundly real and central to the human experience.
When Adam falls for Dinah Morris, the itinerant Methodist preacher who offers Hetty redemption, it seems at first like he’s committing the same error as Hetty, looking for a distraction in his grief when Hetty doesn’t turn out to be the person he thought she was.
But there’s something much deeper and more beautiful happening here. Adam considers that his love for Dinah is rooted in the sorrow he felt over Hetty, and in seeing how Dinah saw the latter through her trial. Adam loves Dinah not as a last resort, but as the fruition of his dreams for love: “…Dinah was so bound up with the sad memories of his first passion, that he was not forsaking them, but rather giving them a new sacredness by loving her… his love for her had grown out of that past: it was the noon of that morning” (449).
Painful as the past is, Adam recognizes that he wouldn’t have known true love if his relationship with Hetty had worked out exactly the way he imagined or hoped that it would. Because he was willing to see in his sorrow the seed of something ultimately good and beautiful, Adam demonstrates for us a tenacious hope – the kind that walks through difficulty to glorious new life.
It isn’t that Dinah is a replacement for Hetty, or that Adam believes the two women are interchangeable. Rather, the hopes that Adam kindled in the “morning” of his early desire for love become something brighter and clearer in the “noon” of what he feels for Dinah, which redeems his broken memories.
Perhaps our second-choice college brought us friends we couldn’t now imagine our lives without. Maybe the career that didn’t lift off the ground gave us the time we needed to explore a new hobby or find a line of work we enjoyed even more. Maybe, like Adam, we had to watch one relationship fall apart in order to find one better, stronger, truer.
All this is not to say that when we’re walking through a dark valley, we should slap on our best Pollyanna grins anyway because we know that things will be fine. Pain is not something to just blithely “get through” or “get over,” especially when it extends far deeper than any of the examples I mentioned above, and it feels like we will never see the other side of it. But nor is it ever the end of the story.
And if Adam Bede teaches us anything, it’s this: perhaps the joy we most deeply desire is found, not in the things we were sure would bring it to us, but in unscripted moments, plot twists, and broken hopes restored.
References: Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
