Adam Bede, the Exemplary Commoner

In the current Age of Social Distancing I am re-reading my favorite Jane Austen and George Eliot novels.

And what I am finding out is that Nothing Has Changed. If you read Jane Austen you read about women having Satisfactory Emotional Experiences, each one depending on where Austen puts the character in the emotional Bell Curve of feminine experience.

And one of the most important parameters is the extent to which the character publicly exhibits her emotional state. Austen's heroines tend to keep their emotions guarded. Her villains and idiots tend to let it all hang out.

A good example of this is Mansfield Park where the three sisters, Mrs. Price, Mrs. Norris, and Lady Bertram, are all examples of what not to be: Price a helpless emotional victim, Norris a vile emotional bully, and Bertram a lazy emotional zero.

But whatabout Fanny Price, the timid heroine of the book? Well, she is an emotional hurricane, feeling everything to the very depths of her being, but being the poor cousin taken in by the Bertrams, she cannot express her emotions publicly.

You can see that this is a problem when you decide to dramatise Mansfield Park for TV. How do you show Fanny being emotionally overcome when she first meets the stern patriarch Sir Thomas? Or her delight when it turns out that she will not have to live with her monster Aunt Norris? Or her helpless love for her cousin Edmund who is the only person at Mansfield Park that treats her like a human being?

For instance, there is the scene where Edmund helps Fanny write a letter to her beloved brother William.

Fanny's feelings on the occasion were such that she felt herself incapable of expressing; but her countenance and a few artless words conveyed all their gratitude and delight, and her cousin began to find her an interesting object.

The point of Mansfield Park to my mind is all about a Commoner girl thrown into a nest of Gentry swells. How on Earth does such a girl survive it? The answer, of course, is steadfastness and principle, living to rule.

The same thing applies to George Eliot's great novel Adam Bede, that I would subtitle "Story of a Commoner."

But first an aside. What happens in the first scene in the carpenter shop where Adam and his brother Seth work? The men interact with a Culture of Insult. No kidding. You mean that back in the day in George Eliot's England, the men were insulting each other in an almost friendly way just like men do today? I Can't Believe They Did That.

And when Adam goes home to his mother after working late, what happens? She issues into an orgy of Complaint -- about just about everything.

You mean to say that George Eliot knew all about the masculine Culture of Insult and the feminine Culture of Complaint? So it's not just me making it up? Well I Never.

Anyway, the whole point of the novel, from beginning to end, is the examination of Commoners trying to do the right thing. They do it, of course, by reference to the Bible, trying to understand its maxims and their application to their own lives. Both Adam Bede and his heroine the Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris are always pondering the right action to take. In comparison their antagonists, Hetty Sorrel and Arthur Donnithorne are governed by their emotions and instincts, do not think about the consequences of their actions and turn out badly.

Aside: Adam Bede was written shortly after Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter featuring the lovers Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. You tell me that George Eliot wasn't commenting on the unlikely duo in Massachusetts, who do not "head out West" as any real -- rather than fictional -- youngsters would have done in their situation.

The Introduction to my copy of Adam Bede speaks about the book being about "ordinary people" who had not previously appeared in English novels except as "clowns and buffoons and criminal types."

Such people were disenfranchised in Victorian times as to political power and, until George Eliot came along, were more or less disenfranchised as citizens of the English Novel.

But really, what has changed? Today the ordinary Commoner is just as despised and disenfranchised as ever. The whole point of the wokerati and the Get Trump movement is to stop any effort of Commoners to secure a decent treatment from the modern state that is run by for and on behalf of the Educated Gentry. And as to the enfranchisement of Commoners in today's American or English Novel! Well, Darling! The Very Idea!

The point, of course, is that George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, was born a Commoner, daughter of a carpenter that became a steward or land-agent. He is represented in Middlemarch in the character Caleb Garth, whose daughter Mary Garth refuses to marry the unsteady Fred Vincy until he shows himself "willing and able to live seriously, practically and sincerely." La Wik.

Mary Garth is a Commoner. Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, is Gentry. Dorothea can afford to make a few mistakes in life. And she does. But not the Commoner Mary Garth. She better get it right first time. And she does.

See, my line is that we are in the middle of a great Culture War to determine whether 21st century Commoners have the right to live our ordinary lives free of the oppressive cultural hegemony of Gentry liberals.

What Gentry liberals want you to believe is that the only thing is to do the Don Quixote thing and tilt at windwills until the poor helpless victims of the world are all saved. But if you are a Commoner you should stand aside until the glorious lefty effort to bend the arc of history towards justice is complete and all the medals and sinecures have been handed out to deserving liberals.

I say there is a word for the culture of the left and its cultural and poitical agenda.

That word is: Injustice.

And the place to start to understand all this is in the pages of Adam Bede.