Delicate Beauty Goes Out: Adam Bede's Transgressive Heroines By Lori Lefkovitz T X ~nHE languagein which George Eliot describesher heroines'beauty in Adam Bede records a transitionin nineteenth-centuryvalues. Here, Eliot's physicaldescriptions facilitate the delicateheroine's going out in two senses of the phrase:going safely out into the marketplace and going out of fashion. Through her descriptions,Eliot not only frees the delicate heroine to go out without subjecting her to risks that the delicate heroine typicallyfaces, risksof rapeor death, but Eliot also attemptsto reconcilecom- peting and mutuallyexclusive styles of beauty by creatinghealthy delicacy, a beautythat is both spiritualand sexual.She does so by appealingto and under- mining literature'scodes of delicacy. Eliot revises the connotations of delicate beauty by doubling and ex- changingthe Poysers'beautiful nieces for one another, as Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morrisdisplace one another,not only in the novel'seconomy and struc- ture of desirebut also as meaningfulfigures of beauty.Eliot changesthe tradi- tion of the delicate heroine by recoveringa sense of delicacy hidden in the word'slinguistic history. In Dinah'sand Hetty's names, in the adjectivesap- plied to each, and in the objects with whicheach is associated,Eliot alludesto a code of delicacy. Among the images in that code are the pet, the bird, the flower, the Medusa, and the corpse. Insofar as the readerrecognizes the connotationsof these emblems,we applythe appropriatecharacteristics to the persondescribed. In this readingof the novel's characterizationthrough its descriptions,I will occasionallytrace such an allusion, or pause to add somethingabout the historicalbackground againstwhich references to such thingsas pets, flowers,and corpsesemerge in Adam Bede as ambiguousfigures for the delicateheroine's beauty. My point is that neglect of language'spower to negate woman throughambiguous ideali- zations of her imagehas resultedin criticalfailures to understandthe meaning of woman'sdelicate health in the nineteenthcentury. Apparentlyin evidencein Adam Bede is the positive value of delicate health:Dinah is as morallystrong as she is physicallyfrail, Hettyas weakwilled as she is robust. Illness seems to be redemptive:the guilty lovers, Hetty and Arthur, are each recoveredin the eyes of the readeras they grow morally strongerin illness.One readeraccordingly observes that "inEliot's novels those unacquaintedwith infirmity. tend to have shortmemories and little imagin- 84 ation."l Eliot will, however, exchange these religiousvalues for naturalistic ones by challengingthe time-honoreddichotomies between sexuality and spir- ituality, health and delicacy.2 Shortly before Adam Bede begins, Dinah Morris,a Methodistpreacher who lives among the poor in Snowfield, comes to visit her aunt and uncle Poyser in the relativelycomfortable village of Hayslope. She had come to recoverher health, which is naturallyfrail. Withinthe novel'sfirst pages, her delicatebeauty is the talk of the carpentryshop, whereSeth Bede is teased for his affections,and soon the indelicacyof a young womanpreaching is the buzz of the village. We see Dinah firstthrough the eyes of a stranger,who is struck by "theabsence of self-consciousnessin her demeanour"as she preaches.The passageevokes an icon of the spirit;three times the adjective"delicate" is used; she is describedas havinga face of "uniformtransparent whiteness with an egg- like line of cheek and chin";a "lily"in Quakerdress, she has "one of those faces that makeone thinkof whiteflowers with light touchesof colour on their pure petals."3The flower'spurity and the egg's fragilitydefine Dinah's charac- teristic qualities, both superficialand essential: the readerregards Dinah as characteristicallypure and fragile. In the novel'sdescriptions of Dinah, the referencesto the lily connecther to the beautifulheroines for whom Richardsonis famous. Pamela and Clar- issa and their lily-whitedescendants are, however, impossiblecontradictions. As one classic formula has it: "If the villain pursuesher, she must not show either speed or endurancein her flight. Delicacy holds her helpless;chastity must be defended.It is an unfailingdilemma."4 Apocryphal literature provides another source for the connotations of floral delicacy. Susannahis a flower (her name means both lily and rose), the innocent beauty upon whom the eldersspy, and a favoritesubject of visualrepresentation. Although this flower is accused of harlotry,her chastity is proven in a court of law. By the nine- teenthcentury, flowers were literallyassociated with chastityand in the 1860s, flowerswere "seriouslysuggested as a means of reducingthe high rate of il- legitimacyin Cumbria."5While the lily connotes the delicacyof frail pallor, the rose wears the blush and bloom of health. In Adam Bede's descriptive system, Hetty and Dinah are rose and lily respectively. 'Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 196. 2Cf. Peter Cominos, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious Conflict," rpt. in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age edited by Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1972). 3George Eliot, Adam Bede, with foreword by F. R. Leavis (New York: New American Li- brary, 1961), p. 34. Subsequent references will be given in the text. 4Robert Palfrey Utter and Gwendolyn Bridges Needham, Pamela's Daughters (New York: Macmillan Co., 1936), p. 41. 5Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 234. 85 86 THE KENYON REVIEW As Dinah Morris speaks, vain little Bessy Cranage takes to "studying Jinah's nose, eyes, mouth and hair, and wondering whether it was better to have such a sort of pale face as that, or fat red cheeks and round black eyes like her own." Even small-minded Bessy has a vague notion that types of beauty are legible and that the difference between the look of frailty and the look of health is a difference in meaning. The Poysers are concerned both for their niece's frail health and her public displays, and when the Reverend Irwine and the young Captain Arthur Donnithorne pay an unexpected visit, Mrs. Poyser fears that Dinah will be duly chastised. Instead the Reverend is so impressed that he concludes to himself, "He must be a miserable prig who would act the pedagogue here," by discour- aging her public preaching. When he asks aloud, "And you never feel any em- barrassment from the sense of your youth -that you are a lovely young woman on whom men's eyes are fixed?" Dinah replies, ". I've preached to as rough ignorant people as can be in the villages about Snowfield -men that looked very hard and wild -but they never said an uncivil word to me." By convincing the learned Reverend that only "a miserable prig" would disapprove of Dinah Morris and by emphasizing (several times in the novel) that she goes among "rough, hard and wild men" without provoking disrespect, Eliot undermines a tradition within literature that had long associated the beauty of female delicacy with domestic confinement. The reader, after all, would not wish to be characterized as a "miserable prig." Betrayed in the question that the Reverend asks Dinah is the concern that ex- posing her beauty may lead to some harm. Eliot has another Dinah in mind, and Irwine's question may be motivated by his own recollection of the Dinah he would have read about in Genesis 34. Dinah, only daughter born to the matriarchs and patriarchs, is not much of a heroine. We are told merely that she "went out to visit the women of the land; and when Shechem . the prince of the land saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humbled her."6 Shechem is so taken with his victim, however, that he determines to marry her and asks leave of Jacob to do so. The biblical narrator offers only one moralizing sentence: "The sons of Jacob came in from the field when they heard of it; and the men were indignant and very angry, because he had wrought folly in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, for such a thing ought not to be done." Leah's sons, therefore, devise a plot. They agree to the marriage and to dwell as neighbors among Shechem's people on the condition that the Hivites agree to circumcise all of their males. On the third day following the opera- tion, when the men would have been most sore, Simeon and Levi slaughter them and take "Dinah out of Shechem's house." When Jacob declares that his sons' deviousness has jeopardized his own position in the community, they protest: "Should he treat our sister as a harlot?" 6Translation from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, revised standard edition, edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). LORI LEFKOVITZ 87 In some contemporarybiblical criticism, the story is understoodas a political and historical parable. It accounts for, among other things, the declineof the tribesof Simeonand Levi. AlthoughDinah seems to functionas the innocent victim of a rape for whose sake her brotherstake excessivere- venge, classicalcommentary derives lessons from the story that imply a more aggressivefemale actress. In midrash,the literatureof late antiquitythat interpretedthe Bible and much influencedartists who gave the Westerntradition its images of biblical types, we find an origin for the blame-the-victimparadox. Commenting on the creationmyth of Adam and Eve, one midrashist-rememberingDinah-under- standswhy man must subdue woman: "Man must master his wife, that she go not into the marketplace, for every woman who goes out into the marketplace will eventuallycome to grief. Whence do we know it? From Dinah, as it is written,And Dinah . went out, etc."7"To go out," in an age when women acted within the boundariesof the tent, was not an innocentactivity. If Dinah'sbrothers are loathe to have her treatedas a harlot, the rabbis have no such qualms. BecauseJob says that his wife speaksas a "vilewoman," the rabbisconclude that Job must be marriedto Dinah.