The plot of Adam Bede is much better constructed, more coherent and well-knit, than that of many a contemporary novel. The novel is a compact whole, it is like a well-constructed building from which not a single brick can be taken out without damaging the whole structure. There are four different stories in the novel (a) Adam-Hetty love story (b) Arthur-Hetty Sorrel love-story (c) Adam-Dinah love-story, and (d) The mutual relations of -Arthur and Adam. Adam Bede is plotted to hold in balance two interrelated stories by means of ironies duplications and contrasts. The first story relates to its titular hero's search for independence and a partner for life, while the second is concerned with his beloved Hetty Sorrel's seduction by his friend Arthur Donnithorne. The first story ends in its saddened hero's marriage with the Methodist woman-preacher Dinah Morris, while the second leads to Hetty's transportation for the murder of her child through Arthur and Arthur's voluntary exile from Hayslope.
The novels of George Eliot are "organic wholes" inasmuch as the story, the character and the social environment are well-integrated. The social environment forms the outer circle which envelopes the inner circle.In Adam Bede the life of Hayslope envelops the tragedy. We come to know all grades of its society, artisans, labourers, farmers, rector, schoolmaster, innkeeper and Squire. It is an active community in which most men or women have work to do and their character is affected by that work.
There is also thematic unity. The story grows like a plant out of the idea or theme that, failure to resist temptation is a moral weakness, and any yielding to temptation is sure to be followed by divine punishment and consequent suffering. This theme is inter-linked with the theme of moral enlightenment, self-education and regeneration. The moment of dis¬enchantment, when- all illusions and self-deceptions are shattered, comes to all alike. This is illustrated by the stories of Arthur, Hetty and Adam. Such are the themes out of which the story evolves step by step, logically and inexorably, and the characters and their stories are seen but to be the exposition or illustration of these themes and ideas.
"The central tragedy is intimately connected with this background. The full effect of Arthur's yielding to the sensual appeal of Hetty's childlike prettiness and of all that ensues depends upon the relations of both characters to their world. The pride and well-grounded self-respect of the Poysers, established in the reader's mind by the vivid pictures of their surroundings, their working day, their home life, their Sunday observance, and the neighbours' opinion of them, all play their part in causing the tragedy and in heightening the bitterness of its effect. "Arthur's upbringing, his relations with his grandfather, the Squire, his high conception of the love and esteem he will earn from all his dependants when he inherits the land, determine the price he must pay for his weakness. There is no part of what we have learnt of the outer circle that does not affect our sense of the inner. In its setting this commonplace story becomes widely significant. The simple, well-contrived pattern conveys the sense of a social structure enclosing four human beings as completely as the soil encloses the roots of a growing plant and, in doing so; it illustrates one aspect of the author's vision of life."
It may also be mentioned that the novelist has succeeded in capturing the slow, leisurely pace of rural life, as it was lived in, isolated communities like that of Hayslope, before the coming of the railways. Dorothy V. Ghent says in this connection, "the pace of Adam Bede is set to Mrs. Poyser's clock, to all that, slow toil and activity that have made daylight and living valuable. Slower, organically, invisibly slow at the months of Hetty's pregnancy; the Poyser's clock, the clock at the Chase, do not keep this time with their eights and nines and half past nines. This other deep, hidden animal time drags the whole pace down to that of poor Hetty's journey in despair, a blind automatism of animal night where the ticking of the human clock cannot be heard."
Even the best of us have their faults and weaknesses and so has Adam Bede, despite its being one of the best constructed novels of the age. Its ending particularly has come in for a good deal of criticism. It has been pointed out that the marriage of Adam and Dinah is not properly motivated, and so it seems unnatural and forced, a mere yielding to contemporary conventions that the hero and heroine of the novel must be happily united at the end. In this connection Lettice Cooper's comments are interesting and worth quoting at some length: "The weakness of the book, besides the oppressive virtue of Adam and Dinah is, as with many Victorian novels, the sacrifice of probability to plot, and the tidiness of the ending. George Eliot was moving towards a new kind of novel in which representation of life was to be more important than the resolution of a plot, but she was still partly bound by the old convention: Hetty's pardon, so dramatically and improbably brought to the place of execution by Arthur Donnithorne, is an artificial device to spare the reader. In the relationship between Hetty and Arthur and in all that grows out of it, there is a sense of destiny which is falsified by this resolution. Again while Adam's love for Hetty is utterly convincing, and the thing that brings him most to life as a human being, his final marriage to Dinah has none of that inevitability, but seems like a mechanical device to round off the story."
But these are flaws in a rich tapestry of rural life of the time, the farm, the cottage, the workshop, the Rectory, the great house. It is a picture of a society based on the land, a society still stable, a hierarchy in which each order has its own rights. The novel has its faults, but they are minor faults and they in no way detract from the novelist's skill in construction. It should be judged in the context of the age in which it was written and not by modern standards.
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