Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Greiner, Rae
• Anderson, Amanda
• Shaw, Harry E

Titel

Adam Bede: History's Maggots

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to George Eliot, 2013, p.105-116

Ort / Verlag

Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley-Blackwell Online Books - All Titles (includes Withdrawn titles)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Commencing on 18 June 1799, its scenes pungent with wood shavings, Provence roses, and grassy milk, Adam Bede opens into the past. More figuratively, infanticide in Adam Bede thematizes the relation between (female) artist and her literary offspring, along with its lineage. Realistically rendering “painstaking honest men” engaged in vital but underappreciated labor, Adam Bede portrayed subjects considered far less suitable for art than murder, ordinary people doing unremarkable things. Equally surprising, the “maggot”—a minor trope in the novel, indicating a mind gripped by silly ideas—brings George Eliot's close association of history and triviality into focus. Adam Bede certainly emphasizes the benefits of long labor, including the husbanding of harsh soil, and Darwin's worms seem the zoological equivalent of Eliot's rough humanity, the dumb, unsung heroes of the age. The novel offers a less gradualist account of human truths unattainable by empiricism or the slow accumulation of metonymic detail.