Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
-
Francesca D’Alfonso
Francesca D’Alfonso is research fellow of English Literature at the University of Molise. Her fields of research are late Victorian literature and culture, the American novel of the second half of the twentieth century, and translation studies. She has authored on John Fante and Arnold Bennett. In addition to several articles on Victorian and contemporary writers, she has recently co-edited a collection of essays on Jane Austen and published a new Italian translation of George Eliot’s
Silas Marner . She is a member of the editorial board ofTraduttologia and a member of CUSVE.
Abstract
Starting from an analysis of realism as expressed by George Eliot in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, this paper intends to investigate the way in which law is enforced in a case of infanticide. In particular, in Eliot’s novel the crime is committed by the beautiful and naive Hetty Sorrel whose tragic destiny is a consequence of her seduction by the aristocratic Arthur Donnithorne. Hence her condition of a fallen woman and, accordingly, the trial culminating in the sentencing to hanging. Significantly, Hetty’s silence before the jury in the courtroom is interrupted thanks to the intervention of Dinah Morris, her Methodist cousin who, meeting the prisoner in solidarity and sympathy, will have from her a full confession of the events.
About the author
Francesca D’Alfonso is research fellow of English Literature at the University of Molise. Her fields of research are late Victorian literature and culture, the American novel of the second half of the twentieth century, and translation studies. She has authored on John Fante and Arnold Bennett. In addition to several articles on Victorian and contemporary writers, she has recently co-edited a collection of essays on Jane Austen and published a new Italian translation of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. She is a member of the editorial board of Traduttologia and a member of CUSVE.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
