Transformation of Rage. Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ