Resistance and Reconciliation of Children in George Eliot’s Novels

Introduction

George Eliot, the focus of this study, is one of the writers who portray the anxieties, ambiguities, and uncertainties of fatherhood of her time. Eliot began writing for the Westminster Review and, in 1851, at the age of 32, became its assistant editor. While at the Westminster Review she wrote as “Marian Evans,” but later, she chose to write novels under the male pseudonym of “George Eliot” in an attempt to escape the stereotype of women’s writings being regarded simply as romances. This pseudonym was a way to ensure that her work would be taken seriously. According to F. B. Pinion (1983), she adopted “‘George’ for her nom de plume because it was her partner’s name and ‘Eliot’ because it was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word” (p. 4). Eliot actively participated in debates while trying to hide her female identity under her male pseudonym. Although she has been described as a lady struggling between both genders, Eliot (1856) herself, writing in the essay “Silly Novels of Lady Novelists,” in Westminster Review denied showing any gender identity in her works, preferring universal values to a gendered point of view (p. 451).

Eliot’s relationship with her father has been a subject of discussion among many scholars as it went through many ups and downs. Her father, Robert Evans, was a man of great physical and moral strength who worked as a master carpenter, a forester, and toward the end of his life, a land agent. She sketches many traits of her father’s character, like trustworthiness, competence, industriousness, and firmness, into the characters of Adam Bede and Caleb Garth.

Her father had High Church leanings and at home she was raised in the Church of England. She attended Trinity Church with her father. Separated from her home and, living at boarding schools, she was influenced by both evangelical Christian and church-dissenting (Christian) friends such as Maria Lewes. At that time she read books like An Inquiry into Origins of Christianity (1838) by Charles Hennell and was attracted to a Calvinist form of Christianity although she remained under the Church of England and refused to attend Trinity Church. Her father felt shocked and perceived it to be “a cause for social shame, a threat to his standing in the new community” (Bodenheimer, 1994, p. 64). This was the genesis of one of the main themes in Eliot’s literary works: the father-daughter relationship. Eliot’s refusal to attend Anglican Church services with her father created a great conflict between them (Pinion, 1983, p. 17). This conflict, which Bodenheimer (1994) calls “Holy Wars” has attracted scholars to study its influence on the depiction of father-daughter relationships in her writings.

Eliot’s dispute with her father undoubtedly molded her representation of the fathers of her time, but this conflict should be considered as only one factor among others, including the impact of the historical changes on family life in the 19th century, which is also presented in other writings of and about the time. Some of the studies are reviewed here.

Family Fortunes by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (2002) recounts the shaping of middle-class culture in the dynamic period of the 19th century. Davidoff and Hall show that the modern family structure acquired its distinctive form due to changes in the economic and political situation. By holding the central place in the family, the father was decisive and his failure was seen as “poisoning the family relationships” (pp. 333–334). Hence, the father struggled to maintain the family; they were all dependent on his success. Davidoff and Hall also show that many late 18th and early 19th century fathers were more emotionally involved with their children, and most of the fathers took their responsibilities seriously, doing the best for their families.

In Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, Broughton and Rogers (2007) present a key insight into studying the historical, cultural, and psychological aspects of fatherhood in the Victorian era, giving an interdisciplinary penetration into fatherhood by analyzing 19th century legal cases, franchise reform, employment records, literature, paintings, advertisements, memoirs, and autobiographies, with notable attention to class diversity and the experiences of working-class fathers. The analyses in the book of the stereotypical image of fatherhood in the paterfamilias uncovers, in a convincing way, intimate and involved fathers, as well as authoritarian and austere fathers.

The Tregi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood by Sanders (2009), based on the personal experiences of 14 “high-achieving Victorian men,” is also a remarkable study of the Victorian fathers. Sander’s study covers well-known personalities such as Prince Albert, George Henry Lewes, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and Charles Darwin. She discusses a “wide range of fathering styles,” analyzing unpublished journals and letters, diaries, autobiographies, and more. She also uses examples from fiction and periodicals written by those fathers whom she studies, that is, Dickens, Darwin, and Carlyle. By looking into their private lives and writings, Sanders manages to capture concise experiences of fatherhood. Mapping their historical background, she asserts that “because of his public profile . . . each father had the opportunity to clarify or develop the conditions in which fathering was performed.” All the fathers included in her study are actively engaged with their families, and they fail nevertheless because “fatherhood had failure built into its very purpose and fabric” (pp. 193–196).

The evolution or change of fatherhood is seen in novels written after the Industrial Revolution. For instance, Markwick (2007) tries to analyze Anthony Trollope, saying:

Trollope’s novels advance a consistent theme of masculinity; within which men achieve their true potential by embracing their feminine side . . . They openly acknowledge the pleasure and satisfaction of close involvement in the nurturing of babies and children. (p.24)

Bridgham (2011) also makes investigation about fathers presented by Trollope and Gaskell. According to Bridgham, Trollope’s and Gaskell’s fathers are able to effectively balance their professional duties and domestic responsibilities. Moreover, Bridgham asserts that both novelists, express anxieties about the conflicting concepts and practices of fatherhood, rejecting “the traditional notion of Victorian patriarchal authority that placed fathers dictatorially at the head of all their families’ decisions.” Both novelists “present fatherhood as a negotiated relationship between authority and affection, private conscience and public responsibilities” (p. 118).

Jabeen et al. (2020) study the representation of changing role of fathers during the dynamic time of 19th century in early novels of George Eliot. They argue that to cope with the pace of time fatherhood went through ups and down to fulfill their duties as breadwinners (p. 73).

To sum up, in the 19th century, fiction writers of this time were deeply involved with the shift in the father’s role. The anxieties of those writers consequently resulted in their writings which mirror the society of the time and era and create a world where characters yearn for the return of the model father. Critics so far, as we have discussed above, have already done much in order to understand why and how regarding fatherhood with the novelists both as a group and as an individual.

This study attempts to examine the resistance of children regardless of gender in Eliot’s novels. It also explores how the resisting children in Eliot’s novels ultimately accept their fathers’ perspectives and ideologies. In her presentation of patriarchy and authority, Eliot aims to find ways to redefine, rather than shun fatherhood. Because fatherhood is inherently important, and George Eliot’s writings are a historical, albeit subjective, record of the development of a type of fatherhood that is still linked to societies of the world today, the study of fatherhood, is not only meaningful but also necessary to the understanding of the human society.

Literature Review

Before discussing the resistance and embracement of children, some of the studies done about the resistance of the children in Eliot’s novels are reviewed, and then it will be shown how this study of resisting children in Eliot’s works is different from these studies.

Nord (1993) has analyzed the father-daughter relationships in Eliot’s novels and in her essay “Feminism, History, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel” she points out that:

George Eliot and indeed the heroines of her novels are to be understood above all as victimized but heroic daughters, those pivotal figures in the Victorian family who maintain family equilibrium through their relationship to the father and who are destined to be the shaping force behind social organization as the nuclear family breaks down (p. 375).

The empire of fathers in the novels of George Eliot is always challenged by the daughters. Emerick (1990) asserted in her doctoral dissertation “Irresistible Forces” that the daughter’s struggle and desire in the 19th century was for self-definition and independence from the father’s domination. She asserts that Emma Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s Emma, Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Dorothea Brook in Eliot’s Middlemarch“manifested a profound desire to possess the comfort and security of the father or the figure they love in conflict with opposing desire to transcend the confines of the home in order to define one’s self as fully as possible” (p. 20). By analyzing these three heroines in the novels of three female writers, Patricia discovered the struggle of the daughters to obtain a place of their own in the Victorian society. The struggle of these heroines is not always against their fathers but rather against authoritarian figures in general. This authoritarian figure can be called the “father figure” because father is a symbol of authority, power, and kinship. In the 19th century, patriarchy was the prevailing social structure, in which women started to think about their existence and meaning. To ensure their independence, to be defined, and to have an identity, they showed their will and determination and participated in the realm of male-dominated activity.

Sadoff (1982) has given the same argument in her Monsters of Affection where she has described the father-daughter relationships in Eliot’s novels as “Scenes of Seduction.” Sadoff has related the depiction of the fathers in Eliot, Dickens, and Bronte’s fiction to their own childhood experiences. She has observed that “These story-telling sons and daughters write against or attempt to punish the father who prohibits, abandons or deprives” (p. 19). She has taken Freud’s primal fantasies that is, “the primal scene,”“seduction,” and “castration” as the center of her theoretical model. She has studied the heroines of George Eliot through the account of “Seduction Scenes.” Judith Wilt in “Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorians” and Deirdre David in “He Would Come Back” also have referenced the “seduction” drama in Daniel Deronda and have argued that Gwendolen “killed” her stepfather by killing Grandcourt. They both have studied the stepfathers and father figures in Daniel Deronda from the Freudian perspective of the female castration complex (David, 1981; Wilt, 1987). Another study, “Distant Fathers: Disjointed World of George Eliot” points out Eliot’s presentation of physically or emotionally absent fathers resulting the lack of authority, guidance and financial support to children. The study concludes that Eliot “seeks and yearns for a perfect fatherhood by showing some shortcomings of the father and its effects on the lives of their children” (Jabeen & Naiyin, 2013).

While the proceeding studies of fathers in Eliot’s fiction showed the struggles of daughters against the patriarchal forces, the focus of this study was on the resisting children in George Eliot’s novels was not gender specific (i.e., Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Adam Bede in Adam Bede (1859). George Eliot’s conflict with her own father undoubtedly shaped her depiction of fathers, but in order to study her novels, the historical changes cannot be ignored. Moreover, it was argued that the resisting children come back to embrace the biological father either physically or emotionally.

Maggie Tulliver

The heroine of Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie Tulliver, the most passionate heroine of Eliot, is a victim of the narrowness of a patriarchal society. With her dark complexion and wilful nature, she seems very unconventional in the environment—Eliot describes her as “a small mistake of nature.” According to Paris (1956):

The central action of The Mill on the Floss arises out of the mutual incompatibility of Maggie Tulliver and her environment. Maggie’s nature demands spiritual, intellectual, and physical gratifications which the materialistic, aesthetically barren community of St. Ogg’s is unable to provide (p. 21).

Ermarth (1974) describes Maggie as being “fatally weak” because the social norms of St. Ogg’s consider her to be an “inferior, dependent creature” who cannot be helped to “mobilize her inner self” to achieve independence. Ermarth asserts that:

By internalizing crippling norms, by learning to rely on approval, to fear ridicule and to avoid conflict, Maggie grows up fatally weak. In place of a habit of self-actualization she has learned a habit of self-denial, which Philip rightly calls a “long suicide” (p. 590).

The social norms serve as patriarchal forces on her. From the beginning of her story she is reminded to obey and follow her father’s commands. Her intellectual and spiritual nature needs to be satisfied, but this is not possible in St. Ogg’s. Yet, she couldn’t break away family ties despite her brother’s harshness and her own rebellious nature toward his authority. “I desire no future that will break the ties of the past. But the tie to my brother is one of the strongest. I can do nothing willingly that will divide me always from him” (Eliot, 1860, p. 426). She is shackled to her brother by the norms of the society.

Eventually when Maggie, being too idealistic, becomes the victim of the patriarchal society, fights to achieve self-definition. Ultimately, she discovers the philosophy of life by Kimpe and is able to reconcile with her environment. Her passionate nature cannot be satisfied with what society gives her. She wants to read books and be a scholar, which is not the right destination for a girl according to the social norms. Instead, she is supposed to do “patch work” and learn household chores. For her father, she is too intelligent for a girl, and although Maggie shows and expresses her love for Tom, she always finds sunshine and protection in her father who, in her sorrows, strokes her head and says “never mind, my Wench.” When the father loses his consciousness and memory because of the shock of his financial crisis, Maggie gives the touching embrace to her father. When the latter momentarily rouses from his stupor and recognizes “the little wench,” the narrator exclaims: “Poor child! It was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread and endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish” (Eliot, 1860, p. 452). Maggie has to endure and surrender because her father fails to understand her love and her struggle for an independent life.

How Tom imposes his decision on Maggie is reflected in the scene from the “Red Deeps” chapter v in Book V, where he finds Maggie meeting with Philip and drags her away “as if he was compelling a culprit from the scene of action” because “she was disobeying her father’s strongest feelings and her brother’s express commands” by her secret meeting with the son of their rival, Mr. Wakem. Tom holds the same attitude as his father and makes Maggie pledge on their “father’s Bible” never to see Philip again, otherwise she would be “a disobedient, deceitful daughter, who throws away her own respectability by clandestine meetings with the son of a man that has helped to ruin her father” (Eliot, 1860, p. 327).

At this time, Maggie resists and confronts Tom for the first time and her “long-gathered irritation burst into utterance”:

Don’t suppose that I think you are right, Tom, or that I bow to your will…..You have been reproaching other people all your life; you have been always sure you yourself are right….You have always enjoyed punishing me; you have always been hard and cruel to me; even when I was a little girl, and always loved you better than anyone else in the world, you would let me go crying to bed without forgiving me (Eliot, 1860, p. 331).

Tom consistently reminds her of her “duty” to protect the family’s honor, but for her, his authority is undermined because of his scolding of her and Philip. She refuses to accept his authority over her:

So I—will—submit to what I acknowledge and feel to be right. I will submit even to what is unreasonable from my father, but I will not submit to it from you. You boast of your virtues as if they purchased you a right to be cruel and unmanly, as you’ve been today. Don’t suppose I would give up Philip Wakem in obedience to you. The deformity you insult would make me cling to him and care for him the more (Eliot, 1860, p. 332).

Maggie starts her rebellion toward Tom but she does not show any resistance toward her father, because Mr. Tulliver never imposes his authority on her. Sadoff (1982) calls Tom a “figurative father” who “provides Maggie the discipline and punishment her father refuses her” and he fills the place a father vacated and fills it with more authority than did the father” (p. 84). At this point between Maggie and Tom begins, in Tom’s words, the “wide distance.”

After this incident, the internal debate begins in Maggie about duty toward her family and her love for Philip. She experiences a conflict between “the inward impulse and outward fact which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature” (Eliot, 1860, p. 212). After the death of her father she seems more efficient and willing to fulfill the family duties than Tom. She says, “I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others.”

Later, Maggie breaks the family tradition, but then leaves Stephen and comes back to her brother. As Cottom and Eagleton (1987) says, “Maggie Tulliver rejects respectability—the narrow middle-class version of traditional gentility—in favor of morality, returning to St. Ogg’s without marrying Stephen Guest after having floated down the river with him in so suggestive a manner” (p. 89).

Maggie’s return to her brother shows her morality in two aspects: first, for her, by choosing Stephen, she betrays Philip and Lucy, and second, she cannot demolish her early affection and deeply rooted love for her father and brother. George Eliot gives her autobiographical character the route which she herself wants to take in her own situation. The emphasis is only on the morality. Maggie and Mirah both show their inclination toward morality, one by escaping from her demolishing father and the other by valuing her promises to be obedient to the family’s “respect.” Maggie describes her motto very well:

Many things are difficult and dark to me but I see one thing quite clearly, that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I didn’t obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused (Eliot, 1860, p. 49).

Maggie does not have any choice but to return to her roots. Her father’s tender and affectionate behavior never allows him to be harsh to her or to command her in an authoritative way. Tom, even when his father is still alive, turns to be the authority figure and fulfils this gap in disciplining and punishing Maggie for her wrong doings.

Although Tom loves his sister, he considers it his right to punish her. “He was very fond of his sister, and meant always to take care of her, make her his housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong” (Eliot, 1860, p. 36). It seems to me that after the death of their father, Tom holds a double authoritative role for Maggie, and he regards himself as a substitute of the father’s authority over Maggie, and at the same time he fulfils the wish of Mr. Tulliver as the rival of Wakem family. Indeed F. B. Pinion describes this rivalry as “undying hatred of Wakem as a sacred duty” and regards Mr. Tulliver as “primarily responsible for the train of events which leads to her tragedy” (Pinion, 1983, p. 111). As the paternal representative, Tom does not allow Maggie to contact with Philip Wakem and scolds her for disobeying the family law. Her oppression is clearly described by the narrator:

Her brother was the human being of whom she had been most afraid, from her childhood upwards: afraid with that fear which springs in us when we love one who is inexorable, unbending, unmodifiable —with a mind that we never mould ourselves upon, and yet that we cannot endure to alienate from us,… she almost desired to endure the severity of Tom’s reproof, to submit in patient silence to that harsh disapproving judgment against which she had so often rebelled: it seemed no more than just to her now—who was weaker than she was? She craved that outward help to her better purpose which would come from complete, submissive confession—from being in the presence of those who looks and words would be a reflection of her own conscience (Eliot, 1860, pp. 340–341).

Because Maggie, in her childhood, has such an affectionate father to soothe him as his “little wench,” she is “rebellious” toward “harsh disapproving judgment.” Nevertheless, now that that affection is replaced by Tom’s double authoritative role, who is very much inclined to punish her, she is brought to a “submissive confession.” He is “harsh and severe” to carry out the father’s orders not to forgive Wakem. He always acts as the protector of the family’s respect, for which he cannot endure any violence by Maggie to ruin their honor. She does not have complaints for her father except the promise that her father takes on the family bible, which she tries to resist, even after the father’s death, leaving Tom as “a symbolic punitive father” (Cole, 2011, p.170) who is empowered to continue his father’s mission. Maggie could successfully resist Tom, but she submits herself to him because of her father’s name, and her feeling that she is sitting on “a low stool at her father’s knee, leaning her cheeks against it.” Tom complains, saying “you have disgraced my father’s name.” Respectability, “the narrow middle-class version of traditional gentility” in Cottom and Eagleton’s (1987, p. 115) words, is the basis for every action of the bourgeoisie of the 19th century.

Maggie’s embrace also shows an autobiographical aspect. According to F. B. Pinion in his book A George Eliot’s Companion:

Maggie’s story springs from George Eliot’s condemnation by a Grundyan society and more intensely from the yearning for reconciliation with her brother Isaac, after her marriage with Lewes. …… The flood which unites them in death had been in the author’s mind long before she completed the planning of her novel (Pinion, 1983).

Like Maggie, Eliot’s father was a business man, who married a woman from a higher social class, whose sisters were self-satisfied and rich. Like Maggie, Eliot didn’t fit traditional model of feminine beauty. In her youth she was considered an “immoral” woman because she was living with a writer George Henry Lewes and most offended character was her brother Isaac. In the novel Eliot draws on her own experiences with once beloved but rigid and controlling brother to depict the relationship between Maggie and her brother Tom. When George Eliot wrote The Mill on the Floss, she had already cut herself from her past. As Dorothea Barrett says, “estranged from her own brother Isaac because of her own life decisions, her parents and recently her sister have died, she had changed her name, class, location, profession and belief-system. It is from this other side of George Eliot in her characterization of Maggie that The Mill on the Floss gains its tension and complexity” (Barrett, 1983). Eliot herself describes the purpose of writing the story of Maggie in these words:

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie-how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts (Eliot, 1860, p. 4).

In the beginning of the novel the first person narrator shows the writer’s own experience and her involving in the story of Maggie by describing the inner feeling of the characters.

Mirah Lapidoth

Now let us look at another daughter, Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda, who gets rid of her tyrannical father. Her story is one of a woman oppressed by her own father, a gambler and a former actor. Though her past experience and her suffering by the hands of her father lacks dramatic effect, her story reflects the oppression and repression of a 19th century woman by the patriarchal society. It also shows their effort to gain power and independence—a fight against the boundaries and limitations which society forces upon women.

When Mirah first appears in the story, she tries to drown herself out of despair, only to be rescued by Daniel. She confides in Daniel, telling him how her father takes her away from her mother and brother at the age of six, and how she escapes to search for them in London. She explains how her father has put her on stage in melodramas, farces, and vaudevilles, exploiting her voice for his idiosyncratic and financial gains, changing her name to Lapidoth, and never bothering to inquire if she is willing to do the work, all with the ultimate plan of selling her. She recalls how “it was painful that he boasted of me, and set me to sing for show at any minute, as if I had been a musical box.” (Eliot, 1876, p. 175). Pell (1982) calls him “the most obviously and destructively inadequate father, who clings to his children like a leeching ghost” (p. 44).

Thus, to Mirah, all affection from her father looks shallow and pretentious. Her father, in fact, works hard to teach her dancing, acting, and singing; however, Mirah never feels pleasure in singing and dancing due to her father’s culpability in her separation from her mother and brother. She describes how it is “no better than a fiery furnace” and how a fellow singer says that she has turned into a “singing bird.” And so, with the passage of time, a feeling of rebellion grows inside of her, culminating in Mirah’s escape from her father at the point of his greatest abuse.

Running away from her father proves that Mirah’s character is strong. For 12 years she is alone in the clutches of her father and she keeps alive the memories and early teachings of her mother. She remembers the Hebrew hymns her mother would sing for her. And although her father would never allow her to go to a Jewish synagogue, her belief is strong, saying, “I will not separate myself from my mother’s people. I will always be a jewess” (Eliot, 1876, p. 310). As Jones (2003) observes, “she is a strong and fervent woman who has already demonstrated that she would stand for her beliefs and principles—to the death.” (p. xxxiii) At one point, Mirah even tries to convince her father to return to her mother and brother, but the realization that her father will never listen and fulfill her demands, adds to her growing feelings of rebellion and helps lead to her ultimate escape.

Mirah’s feelings for her father are complex. Although terrified of her father, Mirah has a soft corner in her heart for him, saying, “I knew he was fond of me and meant to indulge me, and that made me afraid of hurting him; but he always mistook what would please me and give me happiness” (Eliot, 1876, p.178). Mirah is also unshakably loyal to her father: “I was forced to fly from my father; but if he came back in age and weakness and want, and needed me, should I say, ‘This is not my father?’ If he had shame, I must share it. It was he who was to me for my father, and not another” (Eliot, 1876, p. 310).

Although Mirah’s feelings of hatred toward her father are a response to what her father has done to her, she is really “forced” to leave him, showing how, as Cole (2011) puts it, “even the malignant father can arouse the child’s tenderness” (p. 181). So a child can never be separated from the father or the roots.

Maggie and Mirah contrast with each other in their expression of resistance to the father. While Maggie is not persistent in her resistance and fails to achieve independence and fulfilment of her desires, Mirah runs away from her father despite of having doubts about how to find her mother and brother in London. Maggie is idealistic and passionate about achieving independence, but she keeps going back and forth in her struggle and is unable to eliminate affection for her father. When Dr. Kenn suggests that she leave St. Ogg’s, Maggie replies: “If I could but stop here . . . I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay, I should feel like a lonely wanderer—cut off from the past” (Eliot, 1860, p. 442). The realization of early affection for her childhood makes Maggie reconcile with the situation and share in the sorrows of her family. Yet, Mirah has to attain her freedom in any way possible, whether she could find her mother and brother or not. In Cole’s (2011) words, “Mirah embodies the ‘heroism’ of the ill-used child that Eliot celebrates in this novel” (p. 182).

Adam Bede

Another resisting character is Adam Bede, the titular character whose animosity and anger toward his father ultimately ends with feelings of sympathy and reconciliation. The context of Adam Bede (1859) occurs in the beginning of the 19th century in the far-off village of Hayslope. Adam, being a hardworking carpenter, unable to bear any interlude in his work, encounters a short but ponderous and solemn event that offends his ethics and changes his personality. Although Adam’s father does not play any direct role in the story, his drunkenness and idleness affects the other members of the family. He is called the “wandering father” who comes back in the “dark hours and sleeping off his drunkenness.” At a critical point in the story, Adam returns from his work and finds an unfinished coffin that his father is supposed to have built for a family in the town. Adam shows his outrage for his lazy and alcoholic father. Adam embodies the industriousness of the working class, especially the diligent youth of the time. Nelson (2007) makes analysis of the youth of the time and of its progressive thinking:

Indeed, popular economic tracts such as Samuel Smiles’s bestseller Self-Help offered young working-class men alternative role models to their fathers, inviting them to pattern themselves after men of higher social status and, it was implied, better character. In a sense, the Victorian ethic of optimism, which held out the possibility of higher wages and increased comfort for the industrious and thrifty members of the working classes, simultaneously expressed a willingness to see an increased emotional distance between the successful working-class son and what his father represented. After all, if the son succeeded in improving his economic, educational, and class standing, by some lights he had already done his duty by his parents (p. 94).

Thus, Adam proves himself to be a passionate working youth of Hayslope. Along with his harshness and anger for his father, he still has memories of good times when his father used to take him to work to learn carpentry. His father is a “fine and active fellow then” (Eliot, 1859, p. 44). Adam feels proud to tell others, with a “sense of distinction . . . I’m Thais Bede’s lad.” Then the time comes when Adam’s father brings upon himself shame and anger due to his drunkenness. Adam still remembers the first “night of shame and anguish” when he discovers his father drinking and singing a song “fitfully” with his drunken fellows, saying “scenes of the sad past, and probably sad future, floating before him and giving place one to the other in swift succession” (Eliot, 1859, p. 57). Thus, Adam’s anger turns to his moral sensibility when he contemplates how he behaves in his own past and then he thinks about his father’s efforts and successes. These thoughts lead Adam to abandon his decision to leave his family and lead him to the resolution of his dilemma—to take the father’s place within the family. Although Adam does leave home out of vexation to find his fortune, the thought of his mother and brother forces him to come back to bear everything along with them. Henry (2008) comments on Adam’s dutiful behavior, saying, “The childhood memories that bind Adam to his alcoholic father, together with his dutiful actions toward his mother and brother confirm him as the novel’s moral center. Adam is superior morally because he is bound to his place, his parents and his brother” (p. 56). Thus, Adam learns from his experience that he cannot stay away from home, and his progress in life is bound up with the roots of his family.

As Adam develops ambivalent feelings toward his drunken father and decides to substitute himself as dutiful provider and the father figure of the Bede family, he is meant to be an idealized character. The first words uttered by him in the story, when he is “carving a shield in the centre of a wooden mantelpiece,” show his faith in duty and work which becomes his goal of life:

Awake, my soul, and with the sun

The daily stage of duty run;

Shake off dull sloth (Eliot, 1859, p. 4).

He wants to feel and make himself a part of the society:

I like to go to work by a road that’ll take me up a bit of a hill, and see the fields for miles around me, and a bridge, or a town, or a bit of steeple here and there. It makes you feel that world’s a big place, and there is other men working in it with their heads and hands besides yourself (Eliot, 1859, p. 123).

In Adam Bede (1859), duty and work become overwhelming ideas, such that the aloofness of a father like Thais Bede is strongly felt and shakes up the characters related to him. What makes the characters like Adam Bede, Dinah, and Poysers ideal characters is their sense of dutifulness as they are defined and prescribed regarding what they should do. They are playing their roles in their families and the society and, thus, they are always within the society. Adam constructs the overdue coffin neglected by his father, replacing his father in the work. But his ethics of work are different from those of his fathers. He resists the way of life of his father and even withstands the early education his father has given him. Like the case of Tom in The Mill on the Floss (1860), his education is not useless but it is not enough for him. Jenkins (2014) comments on Adam’s resistance:

Adam educates himself by attending a night school for workers, and thus doesn’t owe his education to his father. Adam Bede physically replaces his father in his workplace, but then emerges from the space via his own efforts rather than from material inheritance. His life makes his father’s life “immaterial” (p. 94).

After a 9 years gap in the story we come to know that the skilled carpenter, Adam, is one of the rare intimate biological fathers to his two children and the extended family of his brother and mother. Thus, Adam voices Eliot’s notion of being connected to one’s roots or origin, saying, “We can’t be like the birds, as fly from the nest as soon as they’ve get wings, and never known their kin when they see ’em and get a fresh a lot every year” (Eliot, 1859, p. 45). For Adam, humanity and morality lie in faithfulness to one’s own family; he is bound to his place, his parents, and his brother. The overcoming of the father’s shortcomings with Adam’s recognition of his responsibility and duty to his family shows that the father’s place in the family must be filled by someone in his absence to tie together the family and, in a wider context, all of the society. Adam recognizes his family duties as well as his duties to the society of Hayslope. So Adam is an example of Eliot’s model character, which she presents along with all of the flawed characters. If Thais Bede is an absent father, aloof from his family, Adam comes forth as a substitute father, the model father:

Adam Bede, Maggie Tulliver, and Romola all try to break ties by physically leaving home; all are compelled by conscience to return. The family-likeness analogy for the relationship between past and present carries some of the same implications. We are responsible for not cutting our roots abruptly and violently (Henry, 2008, p. 15).

All these characters are inclined to leave home because they have conflicts with their fathers; however, they have to return to their roots, and therefore also to their fathers and embrace them. It is George Eliot’s belief that she keeps her characters attached to the family.

Conclusion

It has been concluded here that George Eliot creates her characters to be tied with the fathers. Her victimized children try to overcome the shortcomings of their fathers by re-evaluating the fathers through different ways of resistance. Mirah Lapidoth, in Daniel Deronda (1876), runs away from her father, eliminating his selfish world from her life. Maggie Tulliver, of Mill on the Floss (1860), rebelliously resists her father’s notions and, symbolically, the middle-class patriarchal ideology. The titular character of Adam Bede (1859) shows his outrage and resentment toward his father for neglecting his duty. All these children’s resistance ends with their reconciliation with their fathers. Maggie comes back to embrace her brother, thus embracing her origin. Adam Bede comes home, shedding his outrage, when his father dies. Mirah Lapidoth ultimately reveals the soft corner she has in her heart for her father. Therefore, the fathers have a crucial place in the lives of these children, and, for them, to know about the father means to know about their identity and their roots.

The children’s reconciliation with their fathers stresses the importance of family and natural bond, as is made explicit in Adam Bede (1859):

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement (Eliot, 1859, p. 89).

The analogy of “family likeness” implies that, although it has sadness, it is still natural. The natural bonds cannot be broken; the roots cannot be abandoned. Yet there are many differences that are the result of different brains and thinking. According to Henry (2008), Eliot affirms Wordsworth’s paradoxical formulation that “The Child is Father of the Man” from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (p. 15). Eliot shows the relationship of the child and father as “yearning and repulsion” and the “heart-strings” keep tied to the roots and the origin.