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THE ECONOMICS OF “A BIT O' VICTUAL,” OR MALTHUS AND MOTHERS IN ADAM BEDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Lana L. Dalley
Lana L. Dalley*
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton
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Extract

Hetty Sorrel's economic self-interest is impossible to ignore, as is its sexual nature. George Eliot tells us that Hetty is “quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her” and is determined to exchange her physical charms for a life of luxuries (96; ch. 9). Hetty's attraction to the young, wealthy Arthur Donnithorne is unabashedly opportunistic. While Hetty is searching for Arthur, once she is aware of her “swift-advancing shame,” the narrator reveals the turn of her thoughts: “He would not marry her and make her a lady; and apart from that she could think of nothing he could give her towards which she looked with longing and ambition” (364; ch. 35, 372; ch. 36). And it is certainly not unusual for economic considerations to figure in the Victorian marriage plot; Mary Barton's attraction to Harry Carson is predicated on his ability to make her a lady; Rosamond Vincy marries Lydgate in the hopes that his relationship to the landed gentry will, quite literally, pay off. It is the lethal turn of Hetty's material self-interest – the murder of her illegitimate child – that makes her story exceptional. I suggest that Hetty's desire to “purchase” Arthur's social prestige and her ultimate rejection of maternal responsibility intersect with Malthusian economics. The central action of the story, infanticide, signifies one of the chief topics of Malthusian debate. T. R. Malthus and his followers suggested that economically imprudent marriages were akin to an unthinking infanticide because the newlyweds would likely be unable to feed the children that would arise from their conjugal relations; they also registered child-murder as one of the checks to population, classifying it as “one of the worst forms of vice and misery” (1803: 71; ch. 3). In this essay, I read food and the life-and-death economics of food in Adam Bede as a register for Malthusian concerns about sex, family, responsibility, and dependence. In the novel, these concerns are not only for fathers – which is Malthus's own emphasis – but also for mothers. Although published in 1859, the novel is set in 1799, a year after the first publication of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and three decades before the Poor Law reform developed in response to Malthusian analysis. It is in this context that I propose reading Adam Bede alongside Malthus's Essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , September 2008 , pp. 549 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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