Title: Rethinking Wordsworth’s "Twaddling Stuff" : Sympathy and Narrative in Eliot’s Adam Bede
Abstract:Although George Eliot acknowledges Wordsworth’s influence by quoting his poetry for the epigraph of Adam Bede, Eliot’s response to Wordsworth in the novel is not a straightforward celebration. efficac...Although George Eliot acknowledges Wordsworth’s influence by quoting his poetry for the epigraph of Adam Bede, Eliot’s response to Wordsworth in the novel is not a straightforward celebration. efficacy of Wordsworthian rhetoric, which aims at the education of sympathy, is questioned in Arthur’s dismissal of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and his later victimization of Hetty. By reproducing the narrative of The Thorn through the action of Arthur, one of Wordsworth’s readers, Eliot connotes the limits of Wordsworthian sympathy and her subsequent departure from it. Wordsworth’s poems in the Lyrical Ballads center on the problematization of sympathy. poems explore the possibility of an imaginary exchange between human beings’s sensations and feelings by having the narrator examine his own ways of perceiving and conceiving others. As a result, many of the poems expose the distance between the narrator’s projection and the actual circumstances of his subject-matter. Interestingly, Dinah in Adam Beck is a character who repeats the Wordsworthian narrator’s problem in establishing sympathetic connection with others. In her attempts to understand Hetty, Dinah gets absorbed in her own ego and thus fails to sympathize with Hetty. Yet, unlike Wordsworth’s poems, Eliot’s ensuing narrative in Adam Bede shows that such a failure of sympathy leads to
certain consequences. While Wordsworth’s poetry usually foregrounds the narrator’s consciousness and thereby puts a stop to the narrative progress in the temporal plane, Eliot ruthlessly narrativizes the consequences of an individual’s misrepresentation. problem of misrepresentation also burdens Eliot as a storyteller. Dinah, who is first introduced as a narrator figure in the novel, delivers spectacular sermons, but her mode of narration fails to create a lasting sense of presence for her audiences. Eliot attempts to distance her own narrative from Dinah’s by resorting to the metaphor of Dutch Paintings, which stand for a faithful representation of reality. However, her other metaphor, the defective mirror, points to the problem of self-projection and undermines the model of narrative embodied in the metaphor of Dutch Paintings. Trapped in between the desire for truthful narration and the realization that any narrative is partially the reflection of subjectivity, Eliot’s narrative experiments in Adam Bede foreshadow the dilemma of the modem storyteller.Read More
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
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