George Eliot: The Character sketch of Hetty Sorrel
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Q- Hetty Sorrel has been described as a central figure, justify?
Q- Character sketch of Hetty Sorrel.
Hetty Sorrel is a beautiful girl. She is the niece of Martin Poyser, the husband of the immortal Mrs Poyser. According to George Creeger, Hetty is a perfect representative of the Loamshire- Hayslope world.
Moreover in her case the landscape (nature- background) keeps on changing in keeping with the changes in her fortunes and career. In the novel, George Eliot's presentation of nature- background is strictly utilitarian, as is that if Hardy in Tess of the D'urbervilles.
Hetty Sorrel is the niece of Martin Poyser, the husband of the immortal Mrs.Poyser. She lives at the Hall Farm with her uncle and aunt, because her mother is dead and there is none else to take care of her. Adam Bede is, by and large, the story of her suffering, and hence Henry James is right in considering her to be the central figure in the novel, and one of the most successful female figures of the novelist.
She is a young girl of seventeen, of exceptional physical charms. The novelist has tried to convey the full flavour of her various beauties but through a series of sense-impressions: " It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears, it is of little use for me to say how lovely was the contour of her pink and white neckerchief."
Hetty is beautiful, but her beauty is deceptively soft. She has the softness, and beauty and fertility of Loamshire, but also its core of hardness. Mrs- Poyser is able to see through it and perceive the core of hardness that lies within. She admired Hetty's beauty, but she saw her faults:
"She's so better than a peacock, as'ud strut on the wall, and spread its tail when the sun shone if all the folks; the parish was dying", she complained to her husband. The hardness which Mrs- Poyser had noticed in her niece.
Like young, beautiful girls of seventeen in general, Hetty was frivolous and vain. She was quite conscious of the fact that she had a number of admirers and this made her vain and self-centred. Hetty Sorrel is a vain, dairy maid who hopes to gain a higher place in society by using her beauty. Infact her dreams were all of luxuries and finery.
Hetty is not only vain but also coquettish. She knew that Adam was the best and most suitable of her admirers, but she had no wish to marry him for he was poor and unable to provide her with the fineries which she loved, but still, she encouraged him. She turn to Adam and agree to marry him, when she had lost all hopes of Arthur's ever returning to her, and when she also knew that Adam was doing well, that he was on the way to prosperity, and that he would be able to offer her the comforts she yearned for. She thinks of her own well-being, of the gratification of her own desires, and no thought of Adam's happiness enters into her head, so egocentric and self-centred is she.
Even during their first meeting, Arthur's attentions intoxicate her and transport her to a world of dreams and fantasy. Henceforth, she thought more if Arthur Donnithorne than of Adam and his troubles. When Hetty realized that Aurthur loved her, she became thoroughly conscious of her own beauty. The scene in her bed- chamber showed her at her vainest. Dinah's serious talk upset her, not because she responded to it, but because she had the timidity of a luxurious, pleasure- seeking nature which shrinks from the hint of pain.
But poor, beautiful Hetty was destined to face great pain and her lovely dreams ended in tragedy.The parting with Arthur was a double pain to her. She was driven to desperation and contemplation of suicide by fear of shame and disgrace.
She gave birth prematurely to her child in the house of a stranger, Sarah Stone, the next evening, feverish and half-crazy, she went out and tried to escape from her shame by abandoning her baby in the woods. Its crying haunted her and she returned but too late.
At the trial her stubborn silence arouses great indignation; she is found guilty of child -murder and is condemned to death. At the last moment Aurthur arrives with a document, showing that her sentences has been commuted to transportation, and we are told that Hetty is released after eight years and that she die on her way back home.
Loamshire-Hayslope world is rich, fertile and beautiful world. In this beautiful and fertile world, the kittenish Hetty has lived a sheltered life, entirely free from the cares and worries which are the common lot of humanity. The result has been that she has grown up without maturity. The process of maturity is a process of continuous contact with the misery and wretchedness of life, but poor Hetty has known no such contacts, she has had no experience of sorrow and suffering, the result has been that she has remained a wilful child, without any experience of real life, yet required to act in a responsible and mature way in an adult world.
In the end we can say that, the novelist has been too hard upon Hetty as she was destined to face great pain and her lovely dreams ended in tragedy.
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George Eliot: Hetty's Character