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Happily Ever After In Adam Bede By George Eliot - College Essay

Happily Ever After In Adam Bede By George Eliot

In her novel Adam Bede, George Eliot uses some of the conventions of the Romantic novel while violating others. In the end the book asks us, as readers, to answer the fundamental question posed in so many books written within the Romantic tradition: Do the hero and heroine live happily ever after? But this is not the mindlessly vacuous posing of that question that we come across in so many works, for Eliot is far too intelligent a writer simply to ask us whether a particular romantic pairing will turn out well. Rather, behind the question of what happens to particular characters is - for Eliot as well as for ourselves - the larger question of what makes a human life happy. It is Eliot's ...

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story is taken up by Bede's attempt to save the superficial and misguided Sorrel from the fate that she seems unable to avoid. Indeed, she seems determined to embrace a fate that must in the end cause grief as she allows herself to be seduced by the squire, Arthur Donnithorne.
Donnithorne, of course, abandons her as soon as he has been successful in winning her. In her grief over losing the squire she agrees to marry Adam - but then discovers that she is pregnant. She gives birth to a son who dies in a decidedly ambiguous way. We are never entirely sure to what extent she may be responsible for the baby's death. She is condemned for murder, although her sentence will later be commuted to transportation to the colonies for life, a commutation that mirrors our own confusion over the extent to which she is guilty. In the end Adam marries Dinah Morris, a young Methodist preacher, a woman who is as wise and good as Hetty is not and is capable of bending both emotions and morality to ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 8/27/2015 08:57:43 AM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1114
Pages: 5

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