Transformation of Rage. Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone
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