Transformation of Rage. Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ