Marvelous Treatment Of The Moral Vision And Movement In George Eliot's Adam Bede

George Eliot was a great woman writer of the Victorian Age. She read a lot and showed special interest in religion, history and philosophy. Her seven novels and other writings disclose her profound knowledge in morality, religion and philosophy. The psychoanalysis in her novels is excellent. This essay chooses Adam Bede, one of her successful novels in the early period of her writing career, to discuss its artistic meaning. Throughout the novel, George Eliot repeatedly draws portraits of the mind in vision, and vision is the key to the artistic meaning of Adam Bede. The change of the vision scenes marks the change of the character and the change of their states of mind. The central image patterns and themes and much of the dramatic action of the novel draw symbolic meaning either tangentially or directly from the most literal implications of the term vision. Some visions or dreams do help the character nearer to a realistic vision of the moral life, others initiate or contribute to the movement away from clear vision. Therefore, this brings the two antithetical movements toward and away from vision; this paper is not a study of imagery but rather a study of the thematic movements in which imagery is an essential element. It is important to keep in mind that the meaning of " vision" is not absolute, it is always relative, it can be a vivid picture of daydream, or it can be one's insight, or it can be people's way of looking at things, I have illustrated this point clearly in my paper.The main body of this paper is divided into three parts. The first part of this paper introduces the negative movements away from moral vision: Hetty's dream world, Arthur's fairy tales, and faultiness of Adam's early vision, all these three character's movements forcefully remind us the influence of one's own strength and weakness of moral aspect, and the influence of one's vision. The second part illustrates the positive movement toward moral vision. Adam Bede initiates into a new state of being and begins his new recording of the world through many pains and sufferings, his " baptism" is carried out by his school teacher, Bartle Massey, who help him enlarge his moral vision. The third part is the merging of the movements, while both the negative and positive movements gradually subsides into each other, there begins the regeneration of the new positive movements represents by Arthur and Hetty's regret and the marriage of Adam and Dinah.