An Exploration Of Hetty Sorrel’s Act Of Infanticide And The Ethical Dilemma In Adam Bede

This thesis attempts to explore the relationship between the narration of Hetty Sorrel’s act of infanticide and the ethical dilemma hidden within the Victorian Britain in the text of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). It addresses the existence predicament of the unwed mothers faced in the 19th century Britain and the role the patriarchal ethical order played in the confrontation of woman’s moral depravity. Eliot takes the case of Mary Voce (the prototype of Hetty Sorrel)’s act of infanticide as the stimulus to conduct her anxiety over her double identity both as a woman and a social being. The act of infant-killing itself has caused enough public anxiety and has triggered the social attention of this transgressive action. George Eliot’s sympathy enables her to capture the discontinuities, contradictions, and bewilderments of the Victorian Age, while Hetty Sorrel’s act of infanticide is one of those bewilderments under the social circumstance. The presence of illegitimate offspring and death sentence laid upon the transgressor produced by the period’s deviant culture posed a moral and ethical dilemma:did Victorian society regard motherhood as the main principle above all or does the deviant behavior of violation endanger the authority of the patriarchal ethical order in some other way? The patriarchal ethical order embraces mother’s unconditional love for her child and approves the virtues of being caring and self-sacrificing. In the presence of this monolithic ideology, Eliot’s dualistic ethic lies in the tension between her social identity as a woman and her subjectivity as a human being. Woman’s social identity can only be acknowledged by obeying the social moral principles, but abandoning her independence as a unique person may also lead to her unfulfilling life. By eliciting Hetty Sorrel’s transgression of sexuality, Eliot brings her meditation over the question of how to fulfill a woman’s life by making the right ethical selection.