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. 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.īut there’s something much deeper and more beautiful happening here. 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. It would be contrary to the purpose of the realism she desires to convey, she explains, to paint idealized characters. In a chapter called, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” the narrator divulges her reasons for writing this tale. 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. To the optimist, however, the story offers a much different perspective. 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 cynic, then, Adam Bede is a cautionary tale about the dangers of getting your hopes up.

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. 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). 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). Hetty is devastated, but she soon convinces herself that Adam will offer her the redemption she seeks. But just as she’s building a pretty picture of their life together, he abandons her. Arthur’s attention to Hetty convinces her that he desires the same romantic future as she does. Hetty and Adam each let their imaginations run away with them, to detrimental effect. Eliot’s narrator begins by painting a picture of how not to hope.

1859 novel by george eliot