Defining
Round and Flat Characters
It is always somewhat dangerous
to set up ready-made categories and then apply them to
something as various as a work of art, but certain definitions can help us to a
clearer understanding of the characters we meet in Adam Bede.
A flat character is a
one-sided figure, a character who exhibits only one or two human traits,
usually in exaggerated form. Such a character's speeches and actions are never
very surprising because they always spring from the same motivations and
preoccupations, and he normally does not change at all in the course of the
book. An example in Adam Bede is Mr. Casson, the innkeeper. Mr.
Casson is very much impressed with his own importance, and whenever he appears
in the novel, he is asserting or defending his dignity. He is a man
with an inflated sense of his own importance, and that is all he is. In the
same way, Mr. Craig, the gardener at the Chase and another of Hetty's admirers,
is a know-it-all, and whenever we meet him he is dispensing (often false)
information. Real people are never as simple as figures like these. The
characterizations are superficial, static, "flat."
Round characters, on the
contrary, possess the complexity which is the norm in real life. They are
flexible and change in response to changed circumstances. Adam, for example, is
capable of being harsh, gentle, loving, cruel, violent, shy, and so on; he has
not one trait but many. And he learns a great deal in the course of the novel
and changes gradually from a rather brash and immature youth to a self-disciplined
and emotionally stable man. Adam is a "round" character, a fully
developed and plausibly human figure.
A central character is
one who plays a major part in the story and has a hand in the shaping of
events. Central characters do meaningful things and have meaningful things done
to them. Abackground character is normally not "on stage" very
much, at least in comparison with the central characters. He can serve many
purposes: he can help create atmosphere, as Wiry Ben and the other townspeople
do; he can provide comic relief, as the men at the harvest supper do; he
can provide incident, as Molly does when she drops the ale jug. But straight
background characters do not affect the plot line in any very significant way;
the drama moves around them, but it never really touches them.
The novel is so set up that the
characters fall into three ranks depending on how directly involved they are in
the novel's central conflict, the seduction of Hetty and its repercussions. In
the "inner circle" stand Adam, Dinah, Arthur, and Hetty.
These four are flanked by characters who are deeply affected by Hetty's
seduction but whose lives are not changed by it: Mr. Irwine, Lisbeth, Seth, the
Poysers, and Bartle Massey. Outside of them are ranged the vast host of
straight background figures, people who exist on the periphery of the action.
It is easy to see how, with one
great exception; the relative fullness with which each character is drawn
roughly matches his importance to the story as a whole. All the characters in
the third of our categories are "flat," while those in the
second are more extensively developed and three of the four in the inner
circle are presented completely "in the round."
This device is primarily practical.
If each character were developed fully, the novel would become unbearably long.
But at the same time, the principal characters must be presented as completely
plausible human beings if the conflict through which they struggle is to have
any meaning. So the relatively unimportant figures are merely sketched in,
while many pages are devoted to the elaboration and analysis of the members of
the inner circle.
The device also has
organizational value. The reader will obviously tend to focus on those
characters he knows most about, just as he would pay most attention to one
close friend in a group of ten people. By setting up her characters
the way she does, George Eliot leads us to fix our attention on
the central issue of the novel.
The great exception to this
scheme is, of course, Dinah; her characterization is widely considered to be
one of the novel's major flaws. Although Dinah plays a central role in Adam
Bede, she is clearly a straw figure, a plaster saint who can do no wrong. George
Eliot puts her through some slight agitation and a change of heart toward
the end of the book, but her basic view of reality does not change, as Adam's,
Hetty's, and Arthur's do. She remains at the finish what she was at the start:
a serene young woman, absolutely and totally devoted to duty, whose
too-conscious piety tends to become cloying.
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