severity toward others" (Christ 131).
Adam’s attitude toward Arthur and Hetty repeats the pattern of his attitude toward his parents. Even before he realizes they are actually having an affair, he is openly outraged at Arthur’s involvement with Hetty and provokes him into a fight. Yet he has trouble seeing any wrong in Hetty even after it becomes clear that she has abandoned her baby. Adam’s reluctance to feel hostile toward Hetty is related to his reluctance to be angry with his mother. His dream, which recounts the events in the Bede household shortly after Thias’s death, shows Adam’s close identification of Hetty with his mother. When his mother approaches, accidentally waking him, he is not startled to see her because she had been present "with her fretful grief" throughout his feverish reliving of the day’s events. Yet Hetty, too, had "continually" appeared in the dream, "mingling … in scenes with which she had nothing to do"; and "wherever Hetty came, his mother was sure to follow soon" (152). Adam’s dream suggests that he has transferred his attachment to his mother, who has always loved him with "idolatrous love," to his "preoccupying fancy" with Hetty (161-62).
When Adam learns of Hetty’s interest in Arthur, he does not express anger toward her openly. Instead, his aggressiveness takes the form of an intrusion on her relationship with Arthur. By insisting that Arthur not see Hetty again and that he write her a letter breaking off the relationship, he is cutting off all possibility that Arthur will be able to help her. At the time of the intrusion, Adam is not aware that Hetty is pregnant, nor is he aware that Arthur really does care for her more than he has let Adam know. His intrusiveness, however, is inappropriate and ends up making the situation worse. It is perhaps Adam’s bitter jealousy (370), more than an interest in Hetty’s welfare, that makes him insist on the letter, which he gives to Hetty himself after he tells her that Arthur "care[s] nothing about [her] as a man ought to care" (367). As Bruce K. Martin argues, "Adam thus indirectly contributes to the child-killing" by "remov[ing] from Hetty’s mind the possibility of consulting Arthur until it is too late" (759).
Adam’s inner struggles center on his inability to see Hetty realistically. Even before he sees her with Arthur in the woods, her locket (a gift from Arthur) drops to the floor in front of Adam; he fears she has a lover, but then rationalizes that she "might have bought the thing herself" (333). After he delivers Arthur’s letter to her, he still hopes that she will become interested in him: "She may turn round the other way, when she finds he’s made light of her all the while" (370). He continues to hope for her love by "creat[ing] the mind he believed in out of his own" (400). When he learns that Hetty has been accused of infanticide, he finds it impossible to believe: "'It’s his doing,' he said; 'if there’s been any crime, it’s at his door, not at hers. … I can't bear it. … it’s too hard to think she’s wicked'" (455). At the trial, when it becomes clear that Hetty is guilty, "It was the supreme moment of his suffering: Hetty was guilty, and he was silently calling to God for help" (481). Later, in the "upper room" scene with Bartle Massey, Adam is still having trouble accepting the truth about her: "I 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
