Transformation of Rage. Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

      Dinah’s anger is not acknowledged, but it is evident in her words and actions. Hetty, like Bessy, is a likely target for Dinah’s aggressions because the community already looks down on her, her self-esteem is low, and she is the least capable of fighting back. Yet perhaps more importantly, Hetty represents the side of herself that Dinah is unwilling to acknowledge: the sexual (the affair with Arthur) and the aggressive (the murder of the baby). In attacking Hetty, Dinah is attacking the threatening forces in her own nature. Several times Mrs. Poyser refers angrily to Dinah’s asceticism (121, 236, 518), as though she is aware that there is something wrong with Dinah’s failure to acknowledge any normal physical needs. Dinah’s denial of natural needs suggests that she is "lacking in self," or in a "sense of human identity"; her "fear of accepting full maturity" (Creeger 236, 237) is reflected, in psychoanalytic terminology, in her persistent archaic idealized self-image, and is a sign of defective self-development (Russell 139, 144). Dinah identifies only with her "ideal self" as she splits off and projects her unacceptable traits onto others. Hetty answers Dinah’s need to get rid of her "bad self."

      After Adam’s proposal, Dinah goes away again to think it over. A few weeks later, when Adam goes to see her, Dinah, apparently having undergone a transformation that enables her to accept her feelings for Adam, finally declares her love: "It is the Divine Will. My soul is so knit with yours that it is but a divided life I live without you" (576). Like Adam, who has gone away and returned, she comes back to Hayslope and finds her place in the community. Like Adam's, however, her new life comes at Hetty’s expense. It is only after Hetty’s guilt is made clear to the community and she is exiled that Dinah finally replaces her in Adam’s affections.

      Kohut’s view that rage is the reaction to the sense of loss of connection to parental figures is thus well illustrated in the story of Arthur's, Adam's, and Dinah’s treatment of Hetty. Their scapegoating of her is a transference of anger felt toward missing or disappointing parent (figure)s. Hetty as fallen mother and child murderer becomes the symbol of failed parenthood who must be banished to make way for her replacements as the characters grow beyond their infantile self and parental images. At the same time, Hetty is the symbol of the abandoned and murdered child, whose suffering enacts the characters' sense of abandonment, along with their unacknowledged murderous wishes toward missing or inadequate parents. Reliving and working through unresolved childhood feelings, as in psychoanalytic therapy, is a way of integrating parental images in the mind. In Kohut’s terms, the characters have attempted to complete their self-structuralization through a transference, in order to rework the process of "transmuting internalization" (Analysis 49) that should normally have occurred in childhood.

      Critics have wondered why Eliot seems unable to see her favored characters in Adam Bede and other novels as they come across to the reader. F. R. Leavis is among those who have pointed to a "distinctive moral preoccupation" (28) which, as Barbara Hardy suggests, leads Eliot to idealize certain "charmless" characters in order to provide her readers with a "moral example" (Novels 39). Dinah, Dorothea, Romola, and Daniel Deronda are examples in her fiction of idealized hero(ines) portrayed in sharp contrast to an extremely self-centered and/or immature character: Hetty, Rosamond, Tito and Tessa, and Gwendolen Harleth. Such contrasting of idealized and villainous characters is in part Victorian literary convention, and in part Eliot’s deliberate attempt "to illustrate the moral truths of her religion of humanity" (Fulmer 28). Eliot’s blind spots, however, can perhaps best be explained by the psychoanalytic concept of splitting, defined by Otto F. Kernberg, the object relations theorist, as a "central defensive operation of the ego at regressed levels" which occurs when the neutralization of aggression in the mind "does not take place sufficiently" (6, 29). Kernberg explains that "probably the best known manifestation of splitting is the division of external objects into 'all good' ones and 'all bad' ones" (29). Splitting is manifest in Eliot’s art not only in her contrasting characters, but also in their development: although her story is abruptly cut off, Hetty is portrayed in more convincing detail than Dinah, a shadowy ideal who is more often than not offstage. Eliot’s failure to see the aggression in her idealized character–in this case, Dinah, and to a lesser degree, Adam (whose aggression is in part acknowledged, in part denied)–is an aspect of the phenomenon of psychic splitting and, as such, constitutes a denial of the aggressive impulses in herself. In Kernberg’s terms, Dinah and Hetty represent two conflicting, or "unintegrated" self-images. Hetty, the split-off, bad side of the author’s self is banished from Hayslope, and banished from the novel. The failure of the ending of Adam Bede(Hetty’s disappearance and the marriage of Adam and Dinah) thus reflects the author’s fear of the aggressive impulses coming from within herself.

      Carol Christ has shown how Eliot’s concern with the repression of anger is evident in her repeated use of providential death in her fiction both "to avoid . . . and prohibit aggression … in her characters" (132). This chapter has extended such critical insights by showing how Kohut’s self-psychology illuminates the patterns of indirect expression of aggression in the characters in Adam Bede, explains some of the problems noted by critics, and suggests their connection to the author’s fear of her own aggressive impulses. In the chapters to come, I will argue that the author’s aggression, like that of the characters in this novel, derives from her sense of disconnection from parent figures, beginning with the sense of separation from her mother following the deaths of the twins, and reinforced later by each of her parents' deaths. Moreover, because the novel was begun only a few months after the estrangement from her remaining family, in May of 1857, when she had informed her brother Isaac of her liaison with Lewes, I believe that her aggression was intensified by her more recent sense of disconnection from them.

      Eliot’s first novel establishes the patterns that will be repeated in the later novels. The aggression that is evident but denied in the characters in Adam Bede follows from their lost sense of connection to parent figures. Hetty’s and Arthur’s weak sense of self, Dinah’s repression of feelings, and Adam’s guilt over his murderous anger will reappear in other characters in the fiction. Moreover, Kohut’s idea that the development of a firm self-structure depends more on the effect of a child’s total environment than on such major events as the deaths of parents is also illustrated in Adam Bede. The failed development that has resulted from missing or destructive elements in family environments is seen in a larger social context. Eliot’s portrayal of character extends beyond the nuclear family; it demonstrates the way in which social expectations and/or social position may affect self-esteem, and may either enhance or inhibit growth. Finally, the application of Kohut’s self-psychology to a study of Adam Bede also shows how narcissistic rage, a "dangerous feature of individual psychopathology," may be transformed into an "equally malignant social phenomenon" ("Thoughts" 382), whereby family and social groups turn innocent victims into scapegoats in order to compensate for their own sense of inadequacy.

TWO

      Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss

      George Eliot began The Mill on the Floss in January 1859, shortly after the completion of Adam Bede. Her first reference to it is a journal entry on the twelfth: "We went into town today and looked in the Annual Register for cases of inundation.” According to Gordon Haight, she "copied . . . several passages, mostly of 1771, describing ships driven on to flooded fields, bridges washed away, and a family rescued from the upper storey of their house–all of which appear in the final pages of the novel" (Biography 302). By the end of March, she described the novel to her editor John Blackwood as one "as long as Adam Bede, and a sort of companion picture of provincial life" (Letters 3:41). Dorlcote Mill was drawn from her memory of Arbury Mill near her birthplace, but it took some searching to find a suitable river (one capable of a catastrophic flood) on which to base her story. After a search in Weymouth in early September, she and Lewes finally decided on the Trent, in Lincolnshire, during a later trip out of Gainsborough (Haight, Biography 305). Besides the details for the setting of her mill and river, Eliot found it necessary to consult a lawyer for details for her characters' lawsuit (Letters 3:180). As in the case of Adam Bede, however, the novel grew primarily out of a combination of memory and imagination: "My stories grow in me like plants," as she expressed it early in the process of writing her second novel (3:133).

      Eliot