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“THE USUAL SAD CATASTROPHE”: FROM THE STREET TO THE PARLOR IN ADAM BEDE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2004
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A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.—Matthew Arnold THE ONLY SURPRISING THING about the above concise narrative is its location, not in a broadside or newspaper, but in Matthew Arnold's “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865). Six years after the publication of George Eliot's Adam Bede, Matthew Arnold finds, or postulates, an “infanticidal woman” named “Wragg” and uses her as a symbol of all that is imperfect in Great Britain. He offers her in answer to the “retarding and vulgarising” (21) self-satisfaction he sees about him, the falsity, jingoism, and hyperbole of politics. But he is not using her as a symbol of the oppressed, ground under by those politics; rather, she represents the dreary reality that gives lie to the nationalist smugness of the Philistines, both of which necessitate the role of the critic. And the first thing upon which he focuses, rather than her actions, is her name: “Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names. Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!” (23–24). Her worst crime, it becomes apparent, is being plebian: of being, in fact, poor. Her next is a consequent lack of taste: “And ‘our unrivalled happiness;’–what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,–how dismal those who have seen them will remember;–the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child!” (24). Eliot's Hetty Sorrel has a much prettier name, and for most of the narrative her surroundings are bucolic. Eliot, however, is no more a Romantic than Arnold. She reacts against the stock sentimental image of the “infanticidal woman” as victim, and while at first glance Hetty Sorrel may seem a prototype, or rather, a culmination, of the outcast wanderer figure so common in both Romantic texts and popular literature, she is nevertheless part of the same field of representation as Arnold's wretched Wragg. Eliot's biographer Frederick Karl makes direct comparison between her elitism and that of Matthew Arnold (423); in fact, he draws a series of comparisons throughout the volume. A sense of beleaguered conservatism, a nostalgic nationalism, and anxiety about the laboring classes and working-class sexuality as a troubling marker of that worrisome group, all come together in the figures of both Wragg and Hetty. Eliot's text is not sentimental. It reinterprets the familiar wrenching tale of the abandoned woman, alone on her doomed journey, but with close attention to realistic psychological detail. Hetty is simultaneously the beautiful heroine of the folkloric ballad, the lonely outcast of Romantics such as Wordsworth, and the temptress and even murderess of the lurid “good nights” sold on the street, but she is transmogrified by the parameters of the realist novel and fixed, like a specimen ready for study, by Eliot's avowedly dispassionate eye.
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