Adam

Adam Bede is George Eliot’s first novel, published in 1859, written under the pen name used by Mary Ann Evans. The protagonist, Adam Bede, is almost too good to be true. He is an upright, moral and popular young carpenter, who is in love with the vain and shallow Hetty Sorrel. She, of course, loves the dashing squire, Arthur Donnitthorne, and conducts a clandestine affair with him, resulting in her pregnancy and his (albeit unknowing) abandonment. Young Bede appears to have his eyes permanently closed, believing Hetty to be repentant of even thinking of Donnitthorne, not knowing quite how far the affair has gone beyond thinking, and he still wishes to marry her. Such falls from grace as Hetty’s may not go unpunished, of course, so after killing her infant daughter and trying unsuccessfully to summon up the courage to commit suicide, Hetty is arrested, tried and condemned to death. Enter the pious and lovely Dinah Morris, a cousin of Hetty’s and a kind of lay preacher. She persuades Hetty to repent; Captain Donnitthorne returns and learns her fate and her sentence is commuted. What could possibly complete this pretty, tidy picture? Why of course – good Adam marries good Dinah who retires from the ministry circuit and they live happily ever after with their children, conceived within wedlock.

Paradise Lost is widely considered to be one of the most important and beautiful works in English literature. Written by the blind poet John Milton and published in 1667, it purports to tell the story of the conflict between God and Satan and the fall of Man, embodied in the creations of Adam and Eve as personified in the Christian biblical tradition. As drawn by Milton, Adam is, while certainly larger than life, very much of life. Set against the celestially overbearing figures of Good and Evil, God and Satan, Adam and Eve are touchingly, well, human. They live in the Garden of Earthly Delights and presumably have everything they could possibly want, including a personal relationship with God. They are warned against only one thing: eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Naturally, setting a standard for us lowly humans for millennia to come, they eat the apple and suffer the consequences. It is in this action of disobedience, however, where Adam shows himself to be a truly good Man. While Eve succumbs to the temptations of the Devil who preys upon her vanity, Adam joins her in sin simply because she is the Woman he loves. Many lessons to be learned here (perhaps not all of which Milton would approve).

In this beautiful poem by William Butler Yeats, published in his 1904 collection, In The Seven Woods, the poet touchingly decries the sin of the First Man which resulted in the curse of the separation of pleasure and labor being imposed upon mankind. Henceforward from that sin, nothing, no poem, could be brought to fruition except through toil and torture. “A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”. No thing of beauty is without its laborious origin, no love without its wearying, disheartening let-down. This is Adam’s Curse, and yet we labor on.