NOVEL

A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. The THEME of a piece of fiction is its controlling idea or its central insight. It is the unifying generalization about life stated or implied by the story. To derive the theme of a story, we must ask what its central purpose is: what view of life it supports or what insight into life it reveals . --No story is the same to us after a lapse of time, or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

JANE AUSTEN
Since Jane Austen deals with life, she deal with morality and is therefore a moralist though not an explicit one. Pride and Prejudice is basically a didactic novel and her preoccupation is with the way people behaved. Though publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female s entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity. In her work, Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices of upper class England. She distinguishes between internal merit (goodness of person) and external merit (rank and possessions). Though she frequently satirizes snobs, she also pokes fun at the poor breeding and misbehaviour of those lower on the social scale. Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England she depicts is one in which social mobility is limited and class- consciousness is strong. One of the first novels written in the English language, and one of the wittiest, Jane Austen s Pride and Prejudice has delighted readers for nearly two hundred years. First published in 1813, during a time when England still faced the grave threat posed by Napoleonic France, Pride and Prejudice offers an intensely personal story in which the drawing rooms of upper middle class society are the setting for the extended courtship of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. In a society in which women scramble to find husbands amid the stumbling blocks of financial snobbery and class prejudice, Austen s novel celebrates the ultimate triumph of romantic love over all impediments. The novel is written in light, airy, sparkling prose, and its pages are filled with quick-witted, immensely entertaining dialogue. Austen herself feared that Pride and Prejudice, for all its popular appeal, was rather too light and bright, and sparkling, to be considered a serious novel. In addition to the delightful dialogue and happy ending, the novel offers an unforgettable portrait of a particular society with all of its charms and blemishes. Darcy and Elizabeth move through a landscape dotted with brilliantly-drawn characters, from Elizabeth's parents the idiotic, marriage obsessed Mrs. Bennet and detached, droll Mr. Bennet to the pretentious and self-righteous clergyman, Mr. Collins, and the rakish, gold-digging militia officer Wickham. The novel s scenery is limited to well-appointed homes and estates, but its exploration of the human condition is unlimited.

Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners; comparable to Shakespeare s comedies in the delight it takes in conversation and wordplay. It is also a pitch -perfect piece of social commentary, brilliantly dissecting the foolish, class-based prejudices of its characters, from the too-proud Mr. Darcy (who eventually reforms himself) to the snotty Miss Bingley and the absurdly self-important Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Best of all, it never oversimplifies. Austen's prose expertly skewers the wellborn and the lower classes alike. Even in its most biting moments, the novel never loses its sense of good cheer, and never ceases carrying its readers toward the destination they desire: the final triumph of true love over all obstacles. IRONY is central to Jane Austen s vision of the world. The word irony implies a difference between the appearance and the reality. It is employed to show the contradiction between how things should be and how they are, between what a person says and what he does, and between how a person sees him and how the other people take him. Such contrasts form the raw material of Jane Austen s comedy. Elizabeth Bennet s words in Pride and Prejudice point to some of the sources of Jane Austen s irony. She says, Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can . (chp 11) Love & Marriage: "Underneath the sheen and proper culture of Jane's world, where there is something primeval, basic, and predating; it is a world where men are trapped, women must find mates in order to survive. It is world where economic facts are not to be denied." --It is a book about the complex subject of men hunting for wives and ladies hunting for husband, and all the ironies involved in such pursuits. --the novel makes clear in the figure of Charlotte Lucas, that to give oneself to a man without desire is a polite forum of prostitution . A marriage which breathes either financial or sexual consideration is not approved by Austen. This is Austen most bitter indictment of the marriage custom of England, where a girl must sell herself in order to find room and board." --A Cinderella theme is almost complete; a not very attractive young girl of unpromising family and background is about to be rescued by the prince. --Love at first sight is a pleasant notion for foolish minds, but it cannot be a dependable guide for marriage. True love and good marriage must be based on time, thought and calm deliberation. (Austen) --A marriage without love is not a worthwhile endeavour SOCIETY, VIRTUES, CHARACTERIZATION: --Human nature is particularly prone to Pride. (Mary) --Jane Austen once said that "Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked" --Jane Austen observes objectively, Like Fielding she does not interrupt her stories with her personal comments. Her novels are free from intrusion by her. There are no moralizing stories. A moral purpose is certainly there but the reader is allowed to reach by his o wn efforts. -- Austen believes that society has a crucial role in promoting virtue. She has a profound sense that individuals are social beings and that their happiness is found through relations hips with others. --"By limiting her range she secures complete mastery over every inch of ground and achieves complete unity of effect. Her sphere may be narrow but within it she is perfect. What she loses in width she gains in depth. "

-- I read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. What a pity such a gifted creature died of so early. Trollope remarked about Austen s works. -- Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language, which was usual to her as an educated lady. -- As critic A. Walton Litz comments, in Pride and Prejudice one cannot equate Darcy with Pride, or Elizabeth with Prejudice; Darcy s pride of place is founded on social prejudice, while Elizabeth s initial prejudice against him is rooted in pride of her own quick perceptions. -- In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes. --I must confess that, I think her as delightful a creation as ever appeared in print. (Austen abt Elizabeth) --Greatness of a writer or a novelist in an art of his/her characterization. In the art of characterization, Jane Austen stands in the leading row of great masters of characterization like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Fielding and Eliot. PRIDE AND PREJEDICE --It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife . (Mrs Bennet) --She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. --The business of her life was to get her daughters married." (About Mrs. Bennett, Chapter 1) --She is tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. (Mr. Darcy to Mr. Bingley about Elizabeth Bennet, Chapter 3) --You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. --I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine. (Liz abt Darcy Cp 5) --Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us. (Mary Chp 5) --If a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal it, he must find it out. (Liz, Chapter 6) --Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life" vs "I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable." (Charlotte chp 6 vs L Bracknell) --Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. Then he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of h er dark eyes. He was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were

not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware. (Chp 6) --A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment. (Darcy to M Bingley Chp 6) --Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and so metimes an indirect boast." --You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine, but which I have never acknowledged. (Darcy to Elizabeth, Chp 10) --She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man. (Elizabeth about Darcy fixing his eyes on her, Chp 10) --Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger. (Chp 10) --There is in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome. (D/BR Chp 11) --I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough...My temper I dare not vouch for -- I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. -- My good opinion once lost is lost for ever. " (Chp 11) --I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who could make you so. Elizabeth to Mr. Collins whose marriage proposal she has refused, Chapter 19. --I wish you very happy and very rich, and by refusing you hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise. Elizabeth to Mr. Collins, Chapter 19. --An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do. Mr. Bennet to Elizabeth, Chapter 20. --There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it ; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense." she distinguishes love (obviously of her family, for instance) and who she thinks well of -- she has a critical mind and isn't afraid to think of people with a critical and perhaps skeptical view. (Elizabeth, Chapter 24) --Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all. (Elizabeth, Chapter 27) --Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains. (Elizabeth, Chapter 27) --But his pride, his abominable pride his shameless avowal of what he had done with respect to Jane his unpardonable assurance in acknowledging, though he could not justify it, and the

unfeeling manner in which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not attempted to deny, soon overcame the pity which the consideration of his attachment had for a moment excited. (Elizabeth on her feelings towards Darcy, Chapter 34) --How despicably have I acted!' she cried. I, who have prided myself on my discernment. I, who have valued myself on my abilities! (Elizabeth after she reads Darcy's letter and realizes she had no reason to despite him as she had, Chapter 36) --Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable (Mary, Chapter 47) --Ah! Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman. (Lydia, Chapter 51) --Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude ... have any possible claim on me. (Elizabeth to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Chapter 56) --For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? (Mr. Bennett, Chapter 57) THOMAS HARDY Hardy's long literary career witnessed and encompassed the most artistic and literary changes of the modern era. During his time, the genre of Victorian era flowered and faded erstwhile avantgarde movement known as modernism dominated the English Literary landscape. In his ornate, wordy style, and his sensitivity to issue of class, Hardy seemed a characteristic Victorian novelist but his writing increasingly revealed a sensibility and a moral code that seems to discard the strict Victorian social and sexual mores. His philosophy was out of place in V ictorian England and presaged the coming social and cultural upheaval of modernism. Contemporary readers tend to take for granted the notion that literature does not convey, or even attempt to convey, absolute truth. Since the modernist movement at the beginning of the 20th century, literature has tended to pose questions rather than define answers . One of the hallmarks of modern literature can be said to be unreliability: authors and readers recognize that literature is difficult; it is not to be trusted, or to be taken at its face value. The structure of this book is concentrated, to reflect the tight organization of the action. Book first, the longest book, sets the stage and introduces the characters. Book second brings Clym and Eustacia together and sees the marriage of Thomasin and Wildeve. Book third shows the split between Clym and his mother and his marriage to Eustacia. Book fourth tells of the terrible accidents that lead to Mrs. Yeobright's death. Book Fifth sees Clym and Eustacia separate, bringing about the tragic deaths that end the main action. Book Sixth, a kind of epilogue, shows the marriage of Thomasin and Diggory. The heath proves physically and psychologically important throughout the novel: their relation to the heath defines characters, and the weather patterns of the heath even reflect the inner dramas of the characters. Indeed, it almost seems as if the characters are formed by the heath itself: Diggory Venn, red from head to toe , is an actual embodiment of the muddy earth; Eustacia Vye seems to spring directly from the heath, a part of Rainbarrow itself, when she is first introduced; Wildeve's name might just as well refer to the wind-whipped heath itself. It is, in chapter one, a

place perfectly accordant with man s nature. The narrator's descriptions of the heath vary widely throughout the novel, ranging from the sublime to the gothic. No reliable statement can be made about it. All of the novel's characters prove themselves deeply flawed, or--at the very least--of ambiguous motivation. Clym Yeobright, the novel s intelligent, urbane, generous protagonist, is also, through his impatience and single-minded jealousy, the cause of the novel s great tragedy. Diggory Venn can either be seen as a helpful, kind - hearted guardian or as an underhanded schemer. Similarly, even the antagonistic characters in the novel are not without their redeeming qualities. Hardy wants to make it clear that life is unclear. He wants to emphasize the mystery of existence. He doesn't believe that life offers simple, clear-cut answers, nor does he imagine that human beings, or his characters, can be judged as either completely good or completely bad. His point of view, then, could rightly be called ambiguous. He may directly criticize Wildeve in one passage, for example, but then his narrative suggests that Wildeve is not responsible for everything that happens to him and Eustacia. He may number all of Eustacia's worst faults, but somehow most readers still feel that Hardy is, like Clym, fascin ated with her. --He shows that life is filled with disasters and tragedies, but he says that new life will continually spring up to replace the old. Although Hardy frequently shows a sense of humour, many readers have felt that he puts too much emphasis on the unhappy aspects of life. He would argue against that charge, saying that he simply reported life as it is, and the true report just happens to be filled with unhappiness. Is that the thinking of an objective observer, or a pessimist? --For Hardy, romantic passion can be dangerous. Another kind of passion, uncontrolled anger, can also have unfortunate consequences. The only feelings, which can be trusted, are moderate . Hottempered reactions are generally a mistake, as well. --Hardy is deemed pessimist because he considers that man is born to suffer and he is called fatalist because he thinks that destiny is antagonistic to man and that it governs human life, allowing very little free will to human creatures and often inflicting undeserved sufferings upo n them. Hardy s conception of life is essentially tragic. As Austin never wrote a tragedy, Hardy never attempted a comedy. He holds an opinion: Happiness is an occasional episode in the general drama of pain . Hardy feels that man is born to suffer and the glory of man lies in his power of bearing his catastrophe. It appears that his mind is trained in the Greek literature, which was the first attempt to project a mighty clash between man s dreams and realization. Hardy also portrays this conflict, but with a slight difference. In Greek tragedy, Fate is some of supernatural power holds responsible of the catastrophe, while in Shakespearean tragedy, man is solely responsible for his actions their consequent disaster. Hardy combines both these concepts to carve his own view of tragedy. In his stories, destiny is as much responsible for the disaster, as a character himself. --Egdon Heath: Nature is always considered as a living agent , by Hardy, which is always so strong and influential, that his hu man characters can never escape from its clutches. Egdon Heath also depicts such qualities. It contrasts with the human existence. Eustacia feels the heath, as her

cross , her shame , and eventually it becomes a potential cause and the place of her death. Nature is also hostile to Mrs. Yeobright, as Heath kills her by a venomous creature from its own bosom. TRON is primarily "the novel of Egdon Heath." Its sombre beauty combines with twilight to 'evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. the glory of Egdon can best be felt when it is dark for the place is 'a near relation of the night.' the beauty of the Egdon is not beauty of conventional kind, "the beauty called charming and fair." its beauty of a tragic kind, it has 'a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.' solitude is strongly marked on its face. the melancholy beauty of Egdon shuns everything brilliant and welcome the dark. "the storm is its lover, and t he wind is its friend" the darker part of the Heath remind one of the Hell of Dante's Divine Comedy. and the whispering of the wind in the hallows seem like the agonized cries of the soul in agony. --Clement (Clym) Yeobright A man of about thirty who giv es up a business career in Paris to return to his native Egdon Heath to become a schoolmaster to the poor and ignorant (Hardy himself gave up a successful career as a London architect and returned to his native Dorchester to become a writer). "The beauty here visible would in no time be ruthlessly overrun by its parasite, thought." Clym is the "native" to which the book's title refers. Clym is somewhat unpractical rather, too simple to plan properly for his goals. And his flaw lies in the fact he goes too far, selflessly but unplanned, for his aims, and thus injures himself, both physically and spiritually, causing poor eye sight in the first case and tension through disharmony with his mother and wife, in the second case. He fails to strike a balance between his duties (to his mother), his ambition (for teaching) and his love (for Eustacia). As the author states: Three antagonistic growths had to be kept alive: his mother s trust in him, his plan for becoming a teacher, and Eustacia s happiness . --Eustacia Vye A raven-haired young beauty who chafes against her life on the heath and longs to escape it in order to lead the more adventure-filled life of the world. Some of the heathfolk think she is a witch. Hardy describes her as "the raw material of a divinity" whose "celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon." We find Eustacia fascinating one moment, exasperating the next. Even the other characters of the novel find her unpredictable, and their reactions to her vary widely. Is she a goddess or a witch? Like all of us, Eustacia must make do with the situation that faces her: she must either accept or change her fate. Her tragedy is that she refuses to accept it but fails to change it. She is too contradictory; she is too special and rare. Obstacles that arise in the way of her love serve merely to inflame her passion. they do not deter her from her course. --It can be noted through the treatmen t of Clym, that Hardy s general view about the human nature is essentially noble and sublime, but tragic. His main characters portray the higher values of human traits of tolerance and bearing of misery, the eyes of the reader. Human will is not free but fettered . (hardy) The plot of the novel lacks the terrific and terrifying logic of cause and effect that marks the plots of the greatest tragedies. That, yet operates the way it does more accidental than necessary . --Fate has a terrible power; you cannot control it by wealth or war . Shakespeare

--what the Greek only suspected, we know well; that their Aeschylus imagined, our nursery children feel --Chance is the incarnation of the blind forces, controlling human destiny . RETURN OF THE NATIVE --you are not worthy of me. i see it yet i love you. --say what you will, try as you may, you will love me all your life-long --i determined you should come, and you have come. I have shown my power. --How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me... I do not deserve my lot! --It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monoton y. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities. --To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebel lious woman saturnine." --According to Mrs Yeobright "He (Wildeve) is one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and no woman would have seen any thing to dislike." --i belong to one man; nothing can alter that. and that man i must marry for my pride's sake."....."i wish all woman were as good as I" --I knew her before today, though perhaps it would have been better if i had not. but she is nothing to me, and i'm nothing to her. (Diggory) --To be loved to madness- such was her great desire. --[to] want of an object to live for that's all is the matter with me! --A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity. --An impishness of circumstances in vades our life and becomes the cause of our undoing . --The marriage is not a misfortune in itself. It is simply the accident which has happened since that has been the cause of my ruin . --A place perfectly accordant with man s nature. --The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people chan ged, yet Egdon remained." --She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody after wearying of Wildeve."

--If I had known then what I know now, that I should be living in this wild heath a month after my marriage, I--I should have thought twice before agreeing." --There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down! --The day you shut this door against my mother and killed her." --How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of? --... for what I have done no man or law can punish me." GEORGE ELIOT --A psychological novel is a type which analysis the motives, impulses, inner conflicts, and mental processes which move its character to act in a particular way. --the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child -murder, made to her by a girl in prison." --Some critics have claimed that George Eliot could not be a moralist, for she herself was immoral in her life that she had been living with Lewis without marriage. But if we consider through the view of human values, she did not commit any immoral act. Lewis wife had left him, and George Eliot wanted to console him and second marriage is not allowed in Christianity. She wants people to look upon the sufferings of people around them and pity them. She feels that even the weakest person has something to be admired and no one can reach the ultimate happiness, unless he maintains content relationship with human beings. She believes that sufferings are essential for the development of personality, because sufferings mould a man. These are a kind of blessings for life. Through the medium of sufferings, an egoistic self passes and matures. She shows her characters suffer and learn a lot. --George Eliot has been considered among the last of Victorians but first in the modern novelists. There are many traits of her writings, which distinguish her from her fellow writers. Among these, one is her psychological approach towards the story and characters. Though she was not an academic psychologist yet her approach is undoubtedly penetrating and psychological. It is Eliot s art of X-ray , which makes her different from her contemporary writers. She dissects the soul of her characters and brings out their inner struggle. She is more interested in the inner drama of her characters than the outer actions. Eliot s intellectual observation and reasoning are of par excellence. Her novels deal with moral conflict she goes into the obscure and mysterious depths of human nature and brings out the spiritual conflicts and moral disorders, which cause the run and downfall of an individual. All her tragedies are caused by some moral lapse and Eliot shows, how the slightest moral weakness, slowly brings the individual to bear his own fate within his own self . She expresses: Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds . --Adam Bede is remarkable, not less for the unaffected Saxon style which upholds the graceful fabric of the narrative, and for the naturalness of its scenes and characters, so that the reader at once feels happy and at home among them, than for the general perception of those universal springs of action which control all society, the patient unfolding of those traits of humanity with

which commonplace writers get out of temper and rudely dispense. The place and the people are of simple, and the language is of the simplest; and what happens from day to day, and from year to year, in the period of the action, might happen in any little village where the sun shines. -- Eliot has beautifully handled the struggle of Arthur s mind and heart. She is particularly good in expressing how temptation triumphs. No other English novelist has shown such a picture of moral defeat, as Arthur s gradual yielding to his passion for Hetty. A critic says: George Eliot can follow the windings of motives, through the most tortuous labyrinths, for firmly grasped in her hand is always the central clue . --Freud describes the same principle working in paranoids. When a weak man is introduced to extreme guilt, he eventually closes all the doors reaching to his mind and thought. George Eliot skillfully brings out the struggle of Hetty s mind, her fear o f sin and its consequences. The moments of her confession before Dinah are especially important. It is here when Eliot shows that how such a weak person longs for some sympathetic support and trusts in it. Eliot reveals another psychological reality that everyone either consciously or unconsciously strives after the ideal goodness . Adam is shown good, but his goodness is not an ideal one for he has an intense feeling of his self-righteousness. --It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat and to turn sharp sound upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own -- Eliot beautifully expresses the fact that an ordinary weak man cannot bear the acute stress and tension of realizing his sin. --she is concerned in writing a realistic novel and build up her reputation as a believable representation of eighteen century country life in England. --physical setting of Adam Bede has a symbolic, as well as realistic, aspect. --Eliot distinguished her characters according to character with a precision which many writers of dialogue do not observe --Insignificant people can also stir up evil tempers. Eliot --Eliot considers the balance and harmony between the moral and physical realms of paramount importance in human life, and who projects her enthusiasm in the creation of Dinnah, the woman with the face of an angel and hands if a working woman. --Adam Bede is to a great extent a novel about human motivations. -- We do not know if our literature anywhere possesses such a closely true picture of purely rural life as Adam Bede presents . ADAM BEDE --he is concerned with serving God in his everyday action..while Seth believe that take no thought for the morrow Adam feels that God helps them as helps theirsens. --his natural urge is to reject the people who don t act in a way he thinks proper. his pride sometimes prevents him in reacting sympathetically towards others. (Adam) --Arthur s confidence in his virtue is matched by Adam s confidence in his ability to solve all problems and control the course of his own life

--All that Hetty does reveals her vanity and immaturity; all that Dinah does reveals her serenity and goodness Dinnah is as unselfish as Hetty is selfish --She likes the feeling of keeping Adam at her sid e but feels no inclination at al to marry him she is made out of a stuff with a finer grain than most of the women. it was like a dreaming of the sunshine and awaking in the moonlight (A abt D) feelings between Adam and Dinnah is natural and strong. we make our decisions freely but we make them in the context of certain circumstances. Men are often deceived by a pretty face into thinking that the owner of it is good. All that glitter is not gold (Eliot) she created a fictional world in which, as in reality, a significant part of the drama takes place in the minds of people as they struggle to unde rstand and to deal with a situations in which they find themselves. "Which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women." (Hetty) "It was one of those faces that make one think of white flowers with light touches of colour on their pure petals" (Dinnah) When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of but are severity . Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds . There is no despair as absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow . Arthur makes it possible for Adam and Poysers to remain at Hayslop. Thus, he Drin ks the bitter cup of repentance to the full . Men s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease sorrow was more bearable now hatred was gone He created the mind he believed in out of his own, which was large, unselfish, tender There is a sort of wrong that can never be made up for . Even the slightest slip will be visited on us . --Arthur James points out: A weak woman is indeed weaker than a weak man --He tries to forget Hetty, but it results only in the more intensified thoughts of her. It can be seen when he blames Mr. Irwine for his feelings . If Irwine had said nothing, I should not have thought half so much of Hetty s as of Meg s lameness .