Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kneale, Douglas

Titel

Hetty's Hanky

Ist Teil von

• English studies in Canada, 2005-06, Vol.31 (2), p.123-150

Ort / Verlag

Edmonton: Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Quelle

Free E-Journal (出版社公開部分のみ）

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Eliot would not have her judged apart from her treatment, which alone determines our view of the moral quality of the character. [...]while Adam Bede's structure and style reflect a judicial standpoint, Eliot gives us plenty of clues throughout the novel to suggest that things are more tangled than a forensic perspective might admit. [...]Thomas Rymer's ironic observation on Othello-"So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Schor goes on to relate "the rise of the detail" since the eighteenth century to "the birth of realism" but more specifically to a "conceptual space" governed by "the laws of sexual difference" (4)-an observation not irrelevant to Adam Bede. 2 See Welsh, Strong Representations, especially 48-99 (on Fielding and Scott) for a study of one kind of evidence-circumstantial evidence-and its relation to both legal history and the history of the novel. 3 An online search of Adam Bede in Project Gutenberg shows that while the word "consequences" appears numerous times throughout the novel, the words "responsibility" and "responsibilities" never appear and the word "responsible" appears only once, in Chapter 41, in the Rev. Irwine's crucial statement: "[T]he problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed, is one that might well make us tremble to look into it" (468). Hetty wears the latter openly: our first sight of her in Chapter 7, when Arthur admires her in the dairy, reveals the loveliness of "the contour of her pink and white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-coloured stuff bodice" (128); when Adam visits Hetty at the Hall Farm in Chapter 20, she is described as wearing "her neckerchief pushed a little backwards on this warm evening" (276); and for the birthday feast in Chapter 22, Hetty has decided that "at the dance this evening she was not to wear any neckerchief" (294). [...]while neckerchiefs have their public semiotics, the "little pink silk handkerchief" seems to belong to a private or secret system of signification.