The Emergence of Bourgeois Family and Sexual Oppression in George Eliot's Adam Bede

• Main Author: Aslı DEĞİRMENCİ
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Ankara University 2017-12-01
• Series: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi
• Subjects: George Eliot; English Novel; Adam Bede; Gender; Family
• Online Access: http://dtcfdergisi.ankara.edu.tr/index.php/dtcf/article/view/2099

This study examines George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) as a work depicting the agricultural working class of a rural community sixty years before its publication, at the end of the eighteenth century, and also argues that Adam Bede not only depicts a rural working class community in their daily existence but also offers an insight into the formation of the emerging class of the bourgeoisie. The private and public institutions, namely family and the church, also play a vital role in determining the gender and class boundaries, and maintaining the social order, which we can see clearly at the end of the novel. By giving specic examples from the novel, this paper depicts how with the slow and steadfast approach of industrialization, the values of capitalism as well as the bourgeois class enter the community of Hayslope. By contrasting the communal household of Poyser with the individual characters, Adam and Dinah and the family they start together, the ending of the novel is interpreted in the light of Frederick Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) in which he states that the communistic household (a model which the Poyser family in the novel exemplies) as opposed to the later patriarchal family, did not have gendered labor, and the family labor had a public character and a concern for society.