「鏡」と「洞察の力」 : Adam Bede論

George Eliot started to write Adam Bede shortly after completing her first tentative stories compiled as Scenes of Clerical Life. The theme of Adam Bede is not different from that is manifested in Scenes of Clerical Life; the protagonist's aquisition of 'the art of vision' after a good deal of hard experiences. Adam is to aquire it through his ordeals of his father's death and his beloved Hetty's unpardonable guilt. In the process of his aquisition of 'the art of vision', Eliot's imaginary 'mirror', which she as 'a sorcerer' holds for us to show 'the past', enables us to enlarge our vision and to have sympathetic feelings towards others. Eliot shows us by her 'mirror' the visions of the workshop where Adam works as a carpenter, Adam's home, the Poysers' home, the Donnithornes' home, and the wood. Each of them has in it a discord, which eventually entangles itself with one another to a tragic event of Hetty's guilt in the wood; the orderliness gets gradually lost. Adam, like Adam in the Garden of Eden, hankers for the orderliness, which propensity is manifested in his character; he is severe not only with his father but with others. Eliot reveals the shallowness of his mind through the eyes of several characters. Adam is to dissolve the difference between the appearance and the reality of the mind of those whom he associates with. In this paper the process of Adam's aquisition of 'the art of vision' is examined in reference with Eliot's 'mirror'.

公開日:2010年1月24日で登録したコンテンツは、国立情報学研究所において電子化したものです。