H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e9 2script. We would be intrigued to learn more of her view of Paul, but
are allowed no access to it. The narrative, so to speak, is stacked
against her. It is prejudiced in its very structure, as the real- life
Miriam was not slow to point out. The same might be said of
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which refuses to hand the
microphone to the cold- blooded Clifford Chatterley. Instead, he is
presented almost entirely from the outside. We might contrast this
with Tolstoy’s sensitive treatment of the unappetising figure of
Karenin in Anna Karenina. It also differs sharply from Lawrence’s
treatment of Gerald Crich in Women in Love. Gerald represents
much that his author finds abhorrent, but he is superbly well real-
ised all the same. He is shown from the inside, in so far as he has
any spiritual inside to be shown. Clifford Chatterley, by contrast, is
reduced to a stereotype so that the novel may write him off with a
minimum of effort. He is also disabled, and Lawrence is not at his
most admirable when dealing with people in wheelchairs.
George Eliot’s Adam Bede allows the reader some access to the
inner life of Hetty Sorrel, a young working woman who is seduced
by the lascivious local squire, has an illegitimate child as a result,
kills the baby and ends up having to be rescued from the gallows.
A good deal of this high drama is presented from the outside, as
though Hetty lacks the kind of inner depths that might prove
worth plumbing. She is more an object of pity than a full- blooded
tragic figure. Her surname ‘Sorrel’ suggests sorrow, but it also
means a kind of horse, which is not quite as respectful. The narra-
tive finally packs Hetty off into exile, thus clearing the way for
Adam, the hero of the piece, to choose a rather more high- minded
wife than this empty- headed milkmaid. There is no such one-
sidedness in Eliot’s finest novel, Middlemarch, in which the narrator
behaves like a judicious chairperson in a public debate, ensuring