SOURCE: “Adam Bede and Myth,” in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Winter, 1972, pp. 39-52.

In the following essay, Wiesenfarth looks at the roles Hebrew, Greek, and Christian mythology play in Eliot's presentation of realism in Adam Bede.

George Eliot told John Blackwood that Adam Bede was filled with “the breath of cows and the scent of hay.”¹ She never said a word about its being filled with Adam, Prometheus, and Jesus. Adam Bede, however, is impregnated with allusions to Hebrew, Greek, and Christian mythology. The reviewer of Stahr and Mackay, the translator of Strauss and Spinoza, the disciple of Feuerbach and Müller, the student of Sophocles and Aeschylus is as present in Adam Bede as the house- and dairy-keeper of Griff House, Nuneaton.² But the fact remains that George Eliot chose to speak of the realism of her work.³ So the question must be...