Tried by Earthly Fires: Hetty Wesley, Hetty Sorrel, and Adam Bede

Tried by Earthly Fires: Hetty Wesley, Hetty Sorrel, and Adam BedeAuthor(s): Alicia CarrollSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Sep., 1989), pp. 218-224Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044947 .

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218 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

that had begun to be prepared for, before I knew that the world held Es- tella" (p. 330)-intimate that he views himself as a passive victim of a destined occurrence. But in regarding himself as paradoxically both a crushed usurper and the owner of the pavilion ("my stronghold")-the sultan who actually cuts the rope-Pip reveals the moral ambiguity of his situation, as well as the idea that the blow is at least to some degree self-inflicted. Indeed, his ingratitude to Joe and Biddy, his succumbing to snobbery, and his sur- render to the illusion that Miss Havisham plans to give him Estella have certainly contributed to his vulnerability.

If we are aware of the modifications made by Pip in his reference to "The History of Mahoud," they may reinforce our sense that while he may be seen as a pretentious usurper claiming a station above his birth, he is at the same time entitled to the higher status he has been given, for he is a decent, sensitive person who is far more of "a true gentleman at heart"- the ideal referred to by Herbert Pocket's father (p. 204)-than characters like Compeyson or Drummle. By altering "The History of Mahoud" to fuse the roles of the sultan and his enemies, Dickens emphasizes-for readers conscious of the changes-the paradoxical nature of a hero who is blame- worthy yet also deserving of sympathy and approval.

STANLEY FRIEDMAN

Queens College, City University of New York

TRIED BY EARTHLY FIRES: HETTY WESLEY, HETTY SORREL, AND ADAM BEDE

It is well known that George Eliot researched Adam Bede by reading Robert Southey's Life of Wesley (1820).1 It is virtually un- known in Eliot scholarship, however, that John Wesley had a sister named

C 1989 by The Regents of the University of California 'For Eliot's research on Adam Bede, see George Eliot: A Wrzter's Notebook, 1854-1879

and Uncollected Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Vir- ginia, 1981), pp. 23-27.



GEORGE ELIOT S ADAM BEDE 219

"Hetty."2 Her life story, retold in the Life of Wesley, is strikingly similar to Hetty Sorrel's tragic role in Adam Bede (1859). Like Hetty Sorrel, Hetty Wesley was ruined by "folly and vanity." Seduced and left pregnant by an insincere admirer, she too was ostracized and condemned to a life apart from community and family. The extent of Eliot's reading in the Life of Wesley implies that these similarities are more than coincidental. Indeed, close examination of Southey's account reveals that Hetty Wesley may be a heretofore undiscovered source for the fictional Hetty Sorrel.

Discussing the specific historical sources of her fictional characters shortly after the novel's publication, Eliot asserted that "there is not a single portrait in 'Adam Bede'; only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new combinations."3 This process is clearly visible in Adam Bede, where not one but five female figures influence the creation of Hetty Sorrel. These literary and historical figures include Mary Voce, who was hanged for in- fanticide in 1802, Hester Mason of George Henry Lewes's novel Rose, Blanche and Violet (1848), Ruth Hilton of Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth (1853), Hester Prynne of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), and finally, Hetty Wesley.4 In Adam Bede, all of these figures are indeed crucially reshaped or newly "combined" to create not a portrait of any one single woman, but the impact of Eliot's manifold critical vision.

Pursuing that vision, scholars have discussed at length all but one of the above-named sources for Adam Bede's Hetty Sorrel. Indeed, the only critic even to mention the connection is Valentine Cunningham, who briefly remarks that "reading the Life of Wesley may even have given George Eliot the name Hetty: Southey discusses at some length the unhappy love life of Wesley's sister Hetty (Mehetabel)."5 Clearly, Cunningham does not pur- sue the connection beyond the nominal.

In Southey's Life of Wesley, the recounting of Hetty Wesley's life is much more than a discussion of the "unhappy love life of Wesley's sister." Sou- they's version, part of a chapter on "Wesley's Sisters," begins as follows:

2Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of Methodism, ed. Maur- ice H. Fitzgerald, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), I, 314-16; Hetty Wes- ley's story is told in these three pages and all subsequent quotations from Southey's Life of Wesley are to be found therein.

3The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), II, 503; hereafter cited as GEL.

4Sources of the Hetty Sorrel character are well documented. See Eliot's own "The History of Adam Bede," GEL, II, 502; Blanche Colton Williams, George Eliot: A Bi- ography (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 150; Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Blooming- ton: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), p. 70; and Edward Stokes, Hawthorne's Influence on Dickens and George Eliot (St. Lucia, Australia: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1985), pp. 122-46.

5Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 149.




Mehetabel [Wesley] ... had a life of more unmingled affliction. In the spring freshness of youth and hope her affections were engaged by one who, in point of abilities and situation, might have been a suitable husband: some circumstances, however, occasioned a disagreement with her father; the match was broken off, and Hetty committed a fatal error, which many women have committed in their just but blind resentment-she married the first person who offered.

In his account, Southey uses stock nineteenth-century language to suggest the seduction of a youthful female innocent, the irresponsibility or un- suitability of her lover, and a suspicious crisis that precipitates a hasty wed- ding to someone else. Southey implies that the unmarried Hetty Wesley was pregnant. The somber tone of his narration and Hetty Wesley's own writings support his implications.

Described by her brother Charles as "a gracious, tender, trembling soul" and "a bruised reed, which the Lord will not break," the fallen Hetty Wesley experienced the same type of last minute conversion under pressure that Hetty Sorrel experiences in Adam Bede. Southey quotes from a letter in which she describes her conversion with characteristic irony. Believing herself to be near death, she writes:

But now my health is gone.... And though I am cut off from all human help or ministry, I am not without assistance; though I have no spiritual friend, nor ever had one yet, except perhaps once in a year or two, when I have seen one of my brothers, or some other religious person, by stealth; yet (no thanks to me) I am enabled to seek Him still, and to be satisfied with nothing less than God.... I have been so long weak, that I know not how long my trial may last; but I have a firm persuasion, and blessed hope, (though no full assurance,) that, in the country I am going to, I shall not sing Hallelujah and Holy, Holy, Holy, without company, as I have done in this.

In this description of her conversion to Methodism, Hetty Wesley counters each of her concessions to salvation with a reference to her tem- poral suffering. With her anger and sorrow resounding so clearly over her gestures toward Wesleyan piety, it is small wonder that Hetty Wesley failed to convince most of her family of her newfound devotion. Characteristically ironic and outspoken, Hetty had never been able to undo the damage wrought by her moral lapse. Indeed, it is clear that at the time this letter was written in 1743 (at least fourteen years after her affair), Hetty was still "cut off" from much of her family.6 The rift begun during the crisis over her affair and resulting pregnancy had never healed. At that time, only the earnest preacher sons, John and Charles, along with one loyal sister, Molly, believed that Hetty's penitence was sincere. Soon Hetty herself be-

6Southey does not date the correspondence from which he quotes in Life of Wesley. The date of this letter is gathered from MaIdwyn Edwards, Family Circle: A Study of the Epworth Household in Relation to John and Charles Wesley (London: Epworth Press, 1949), p. 168; further citations appear in the text.




came the subject of angry debate between the two religious leaders and their parents, Samuel Wesley, the formidable rector, and his equally rig- orous wife, Susanna.'

In his biography of the Wesley family, Family Circle, Maldwyn Edwards explains in detail the events that led up to this family crisis. Perhaps the most "uneasy in [her] eighteenth-century frame," Hetty was, among the ten surviving children, the "most lovely, most spritely, most talented, and [finally] most unhappy of them all." She was, Edwards continues, the "su- preme vindication of the early training given to the daughters" (pp. 132, 135). Her father, the difficult, tyrannical Samuel Wesley, "had given her extra attention in her studies because he recognized the early signs of men- tal power" (p. 154). Hetty Wesley went on to publish poetry, she learned Latin and Greek, and she "could write like a master" (p. 135). But unfor- tunately her natural gifts could find no "purpose" within the narrow con- fines of eighteenth-century society. Her troubles began in earnest when she fell in love with a young lawyer. It was at this point that Hetty and her father met with a "collision of temperament. Samuel disliked lawyers in general, and this suitor of Hetty, in particular.... Forbidden to meet him openly, she made clandestine appointments" (p. 155). Eventually Hetty and her suitor ran away. It is unclear whether she was under the impression that they would marry or not. Even if they had intended to marry, however, the irascible and possessive Samuel Wesley would not grant his consent. Though the details are unclear, Hetty, soon separated from her compan- ion, found herself pregnant and then forced into marriage with the al- coholic, illiterate family plumber, William Wright, whom even Southey ad- mits was "every way unworthy" of her.

This crisis, Edwards remarks, "involved the whole family in an angry quarrel."8 Samuel Wesley, the matriarch Susanna, and most of the Wesley daughters believed that Hetty's penitence was feigned. Her transgression outraged Samuel whose uncompromising morality led him to feel that Het- ty's "shame was his own." Moreover, the daughter's disgrace added a gnaw- ing irony to her father's already unpopular reputation as the zealous pastor of a small, tightly knit, and unreceptive rural community. Shocked when he learned that his father actually intended to disown Hetty, John Wesley urged forgiveness to no avail. Indeed, the father took the son's reproaches as a further affront; he was "deeply hurt," embarrassed and enraged by the younger preacher's accusation of uncharitableness (Family Circle, pp. 155, 159). Eventually, even John had to admit that his father was "incon- ceivably exasperated against" Hetty.9 To push her cause any further was to risk being cast out of the family circle himself. The matter was resolved when Samuel and Susanna proceeded to act on their moral duty as they

7See Edwards, Family Circle, pp. 159-63. 8Maldwyn Edwards, Sons to Samuel (London: Epworth Press, 1961), p. 29. 9The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. John Telford, 8 vols. (London: Epworth

Press, 1931), I, 39.




so clearly and vehemently saw it; they disowned their twenty-seven-year- old daughter and forbade the rest of the family to have any contact with her. Finally only her brothers John and Charles Wesley visited Hetty and then only "by stealth."

While Southey's account of Hetty Wesley's story is not so explicit, it is equally tragic. He quotes from an epitaph written during an illness in which she expresses the irreversability of her position.

Destined while living to sustain An equal share of grief and pain, All various ills of human race Within this breast had once a place. Without complaint she learn'd to bear A living death, a long despair.

These images of "grief and pain" bespeak the lifelong sentence Hetty Wes- ley's error resulted in. Her only hope lay in salvation after death; her earthly life was irredeemable. Ironically, while her own brothers forged a religion that sang hymns to a "filial Deity," addressing their followers as "Sister" and "Brother" and urging others to "do all the good that you can in all the ways that you can," John and Charles Wesley could not rescue their sister. 10 They could comfort her only as preachers who promised even- tual salvation and absolution in heaven. Earthly help was not in their power.

Clearly, Southey's Hetty Wesley is thematically similar to Eliot's Hetty Sorrel. Having broken almost sacred codes of familial morality, both the historical Hetty Wesley and the fictional Hetty Sorrel find their once- comfortable lives irretrievably ruined. The Wesley daughter found herself "cut off" from her family because of her "public" disgrace and resulting pregnancy. Her life, once removed from the circle of the rural Epworth parish, became a "living death," a daily "trial." Likewise, Hetty Sorrel dreads the scorn of her family whom she knows will "cry shame" at her pregnancy."I Her Uncle Poyser feels the extent of that shame as Samuel Wesley did, and vows that he will "not go nigh her, nor ever see her again"; he too is overcome by a "scorching sense of disgrace, which neutralise[s] all other sensibility" (II, 200). Ultimately "forsaken of all," the fictional Hetty also finds charity with her Methodist preacher kin, Dinah. Like John Wesley, Dinah seeks to indoctrinate her "sister" Hetty into her Methodist faith. Yet Hetty Sorrel, like Hetty Wesley, seeks not God but "human contact" in Di- nah's filial embrace (II, 246, 248, 249). Finally, the lots of both Hetty Sorrel and Hetty Wesley are much the same; both end their lives "cut off" from

'?See Rupert Davies, Methodism (London: Epworth Press, 1985), pp. 96, 91. "George Eliot, Adam Bede, Illustrated Cabinet Edition, 2 vols. (Boston: Dana

Estes, n.d.), II, 254. Subsequent references to this edition appear in the text by vol- ume and page number.




community and family. Once cast out, neither can reenter the closed circles of family and parish.

The fictional and the historical accounts, moreover, share similar language. Indeed, as the "more than commonly pleasing" Hetty Wesley is de- picted in "the spring freshness of youth and hope," so too is Hetty Sorrel's beauty like "fresh-opened blossoms . . . [like] a bright spring day. Hetty's was a spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things" (I, 114). Named for the wild red sorrel that awaits cutting down near the novel's opening, as well as for that "bruised reed" Hetty Wesley, Hetty Sorrel too is described as a natural entity whose beauty and youth only make her more vulnerable to seduction.

Introducing the result of that seduction, Hetty Sorrel's pregnancy, Eliot's language again reflects that of Robert Southey and Mehetabel Wesley in the Life of Wesley. She writes:

It is too painful to think that [Hetty] is a woman, with a woman's destiny before her,-a woman spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous poisoned gar- ment, chaining all at once her fluttering, trivial butterfly sensations into a life of deep human anguish. (I, 346-47)

Here Eliot stresses the "folly and vain hopes" that led to Hetty's lapse just as Hetty Wesley herself blamed her own "folly and vanity" for what Southey calls her "fatal error." The fatal quality of the sexual lapse is stressed re- peatedly in both the Life of Wesley and Adam Bede. In the former, pregnancy is an initiation into a "living death, a long despair," while the latter Hetty's pregnancy is "rancorous" and "poisoned." The fictional Hetty's seduction itself shares in this quality; as Adam says, it is the "sort of wrong that can never be made up for" (II, 375). Moreover, while Hetty Wesley meets a "life of more unmingled affliction" despite the promising "spring freshness of [her] youth and hope," Hetty Sorrel meets a "life mingled with shame" against the backdrop of "young ignorance" and "vain hopes" (II, 140).

Finally, Hetty Sorrel's error leaves her too beyond the realm of earthly or "human help." Just as Hetty Wesley's family left her "cut off" from all but her preacher brothers, so does Hetty Sorrel's family "cast her off" until she is "forsaken of all" except her preacher cousin, Dinah (II, 222, 246). And, just as the Wesley brothers offered their sister religious guidance, so too Dinah Morris offers Hetty Sorrel spiritual guidance and charity. For both fictional and historical Hetty, though, neither "religious fears [nor] religious hopes" transcend earthly sorrow. Instead, both seek to "lean on" the human charity that their preacher relatives offer (II, 157, 250). When Hetty Sorrel, like Hetty Wesley, attempts to reach for the Wesleyan God, she does so in order to gain "human contact," emphasizing the tenets of Eliot's religious humanism within the traditions of Wesleyan Methodism.

Sister to the founders of that religious movement, Hetty Wesley once




attracted the interest of both secular and religious biographers.'2 It now appears that George Eliot may have shared that interest. Striking and pro- found in theme and language, the similarities between the fictional and historical tragedies suggest that Hetty Wesley may indeed have influenced Eliot's conception of the Hetty Sorrel character. Sharing similar legacies with the already established sources of that character, moreover, the ar- ticulate Hetty Wesley brings not her exact "portrait" but her presence to Adam Bede. Newly combined there with the presence of other fallen women, Hetty Wesley's story and its context of Wesleyan Methodism lend strong resonance to Eliot's ideals of human charity and earthly redemption.

ALICIA CARROLL

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

'2Wesley family biographers and historians like Rupert Davies and Maldwyn Ed- wards address Hetty Wesley in the works quoted above. The novelist Arthur Quiller- Couch also wrote a biography in novel form of Hetty Wesley's life, Hetty Wesley (Lon- don: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1903).



Documents

Tried by Earthly Fires: Hetty Wesley, Hetty Sorrel, and Adam Bede