Maturity
and education of Dinah
Introduction: Dinah, too like
Adam is immature in the beginning. She is not a fully integrated and mature
personality. She also lacks the balance of head and heart. The novel shows how
through the love of Adam, she attains this balance and becomes a fully
integrated and mature personality. Thus, it is also sent that marriage between
Dinah and Adam is not an artistic failure, but promotes the central
philosophical and intellectual purposes of the novelist.
Her Lack of social vitality: She
is presented as having compassionate, true and selfless devotion to God, but
she strikes one as having very little genuine vitality. She is all heart. She
retreats from social and family life because it diverts her attention
from God. Creeger says, “The cause of her retreat is the fear of selfishness
and hardness resulting from too great abundance of world by goods. She is
unwilling to become fully involved in life. In this respect, she is like her
creator. She observes the human condition, with sympathy and compassion; it is
true, but without involvement. Selfless is a world frequently used to describe
her but selfless means not only something different from selfish; it means also
lacking in self. To lack this sense of human identity is to become
something either less or more than human – a god, perhaps, a
divinity.” Creeger further says, “Such a psychological state represents a
complete withdrawal from life, and withdrawal is a characteristic of Dinah.
Whenever life begins, Dinah retires to Stonyshire. The most notable retreat is
when Adam has told her of his love. She says, “I must wait for clearer
guidance: I must go from you.” Hetty was incapable of growing up, Dinah is
afraid to. ”
Her Maturity: We are not
permitted to see the process of her maturity by which she overcomes her fear
and this is a serious flaw in the novel. Adam waits for Dinah to return from
her Sunday preaching not at her home, but on a hill top. Here, he discovers
that Dinah has undergone a change, the power of love for him has
in sense over-come her fears; she feels like a divided person without him.
Dinah is domesticated in the end. It is not to be regretted.
Religious views through Dinah:
One of the aspects of the life that have significant bearing on the story is
the effect of Methodism and church religion on the Hayslope community.
Methodism has been described as a movement of reaction against the apathy of
the Church of England that prevailed in the early part of the eighteenth
century. Its leaders were John Wesley and Charles Wesley. Evangelism denotes
the doctrinal counterpart of Methodism. Seth Bede and Dinah Morris are
ardent but sober Methodists. On the whole, the Hayslope people are either
indifferent to or mildly interested in Methodism. Among church people, there is
a perceptible hostility towards Methodism, which seems to be the result of an
apprehension lest Methodism should drive people away from the church and thus
affect its stability and revenues. This hostility is best exemplified in Joshua
Rann who approaches the priest with a complaint againstthe activities of
the Methodists that they should be barred from preaching in Hayslope. The
church also has sober people such as Mr. Irwine who deals all these matters
patiently. The warning against being ‘over-spiritual’ is one that recurs
in GEORGE ELIOT’s novels. Fortunately, the best representative of
Methodism in Adam Bede is Dinah Morris can hardly be accused of being
over-spiritual.
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