In Adam Bede and Mrs. Dalloway, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf dig into the depths of female identity, particularly as it intersects with youth, by surfacing systems of visual surveillance and aesthetic expectation. Hetty Sorrel, orphaned, butter-making beauty and Elizabeth Dalloway, privileged daughter of partygiver Clarissa, are intrinsically different characters and yet tethered completely to the same condition. Both coming-of-age, Hetty and Elizabeth are constantly characterized by appearance and each girl must steer through the fog between their inward selves and objectification. However, where Eliot produces a heroine or anti-heroine who actively engages in a beauty economy centered on the male gaze, Woolf expertly captures a young woman caught in the web of societal expectations that leads to psychological suspension. Through a nature-blended, pronounced use of floral imagery, and symbolic crumbs of the color pink, both novels show femininity’s particularly painful overlap with youth in relation to the tight-knit trappings of patriarchal society. While Hetty Sorrel’s pregnancy and tragic demise operates differently to Elizabeth’s “howling” dog (Woolf 166), the persistence of the male gaze remains greatly apparent in its fracturing of female selfhood. Hetty Sorrel cannot understand herself as worthy without Arthur and Elizabeth is internally disclosed. Moreover, Hetty’s characterization is grounded entirely in her physical beauty—her “round rose cheeks and coquettish dark eyes” (Eliot 247) that operate as her primary form of social currency. Immediately, Eliot links Hetty’s beauty to “kittens, or very small downy ducks” that create little “rippling noises with their soft bills” and more specifically, “a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you” (Eliot 92). This description of Hetty, crystallizes her beauty in animal-like innocence, signifying her behavior is somewhat learned based on how others respond to her. Her thinking is also imaginative and aesthetically defined, framed below moral levels, through an active tunnel between nature and society. However, the extent to which her beauty is able to intoxicate others, namely Arthur Donnithrone and Adam Bede, also emphasizes her lack of emotional intelligence and ethical engagement. What Hetty does understand, however, is how her beauty makes her feel: “she liked to feel that this strong, skilful, keen-eyed man was in her power, and would have been indignant if he had shown the least sign of slipping under the yoke of her coquettish tyranny” (Eliot 108-109). This “coquettish tyranny” is the very construction of Hetty, whose relationship to dress, adornment and the color pink, triumphs over all else. The constant self adornment she exercises becomes blurred with her sense of self, her own authorship. Thus, fortifying Hetty’s internalization of the very system that defines her. Interestingly, Eliot describes Hetty brushing “together her hair before twisting it up, doing it with that air of excessive indifference which belongs to confused self-consciousness,” after Dinah sits down beside her (Eliot 174). Through the simple, ritualistic act of hair-brushing, Eliot ties, or more specifically, “twists” Hetty’s vanity with her own confusion, or lack of emotional depth. Hetty’s “confused self-consciousness” is not a barrier to her ability to dress herself deliberately—with precision and care for, “if ever a girl looked as if she had been made of roses, that girl was Hetty in her Sunday hat and frock” (Eliot 203). To an extent, Eliot grants Hetty her own form of agency through fashion while emphasizing her expertise on appealing to the male gaze. She links Hetty directly to roses and the color pink, “for her hat was trimmed with pink, and her frock had pink spots” and frankly, “there was nothing but pink and white about her, except in her dark hair and eyes and her little buckled shoes” (Eliot 203). With pink signaling soft feminine appeal and roses being something picked for display and time sensitive, Eliot establishes Hetty as a beautiful, cultivated “thing” that will be discarded at a certain point. The perishability of flowers provides some facet of a throughline for Hetty’s eventual end. Flowers, when wilted, no longer have value. And once, Hetty is caught and brought into confinement, neither does she.
Still, Eliot’s use of floral descriptions and pink symbolism indicates the very things that give Hetty meaning, and the momentum she needs to develop a stronger sense of self. She may be unable to think very logically but she is deeply versed in the act of innocence as performance. As a result, she remains afloat in her dreams, that “were all of luxuries: to sit in a carpeted parlour, and always wear white stockings; to have some large beautiful earrings such as were all the gown, and something to make her handkerchief smell nice” (Eliot 109). Even in reality, Hetty is plunged in her own world, one of severe disillusionment, walking “along by the hedgerows on honest Adam’s arm, quite as well as if she had been an elegantly clad coquette alone in her boudoir. For if a country beauty in clumsy shoes be only shallow-hearted enough, it is astonishing how closely her mental processes may resemble those of a lady in society and crinoline, who applies her refined intellect to the problem of committing indiscretions without compromising herself” (Eliot 348). It seems Hetty’s reality is not one she chooses to take part of, meaning she develops by internalizing her desire for luxury things and a status in which Arthur might marry her. Interestingly, while Hetty lacks the emotional, social, and financial resources to free her, Woolf’s character, Elizabeth Dalloway, comes from a privileged background. Woolf writes, “Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They lived with everything they wanted” (111).
And yet Woolf has strategically replaced “she” with “they,” signifying Elizabeth does not actually have “everything” she wants but that her family has the necessary resources to provide her a comfortable, happy life. Contrary to Hetty, Elizabeth is situated in a far more liminal position, nearly sandwiched between the perceptions others have of her, and her own blooming, identity. Her beauty is first marked by difference—Woolf physically separates her from the “fair-haired; blue-eyed” Dalloways. Instead, Elizabeth is described as “dark” with “Chinese eyes” and an “Oriental mystery” (Woolf 104). Elizabeth’s nonconformity however, is embedded in her beauty, which speaks to her dual appeal and alienation. She does not ask for the attention she receives nor wants it, constantly craving “the country” and to “do what she[s]” with the company of her father and dogs (Woolf 161). Furthermore, for Elizabeth, beauty is not currency—it may affect how others perceive her, but there is no evidence in Woolf’s text of her using it for a specific purpose. Instead, unlike Hetty whose self-worth is regulated by male attention, Elizabeth is “really awfully bored” by all the men constantly falling in love with her (Woolf 114). Rather than facilitating connection, her beauty frames her loneliness, further conveyed through Clarissa who ““[can] not in the least understand” why her daughter had become so serious, “like a hyacinth sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no sun” (Woolf 104). As a result, Elizabeth exists throughout the novel in limbo, between hidden potential and a flimsy self identity that pulls her into an emotional paralysis that she never successfully navigates by the end of the novel. She has no alternative mode of which to understand herself. Her wanting to “become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament” is underscored with her being “rather lazy” (Woolf 16). Whether or not the description is accurate, her laziness could very well just be a symptom of her emotional paralysis, and the lingering fatigue or illusion of it. For then Woolf writes, “what lay slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor, to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms; it was just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms, an impulse, a revelation, which has its effects for ever, and then down again it went to the sandy floor. She must go home. She must dress for dinner” (Woolf 116). By ending the moment with “she must go home” and “she must dress for dinner,” Woolf emphasizes the tyranny of Elizabeth’s Mother and the domestic sphere she might go down (Woolf 116). After Elizabeth realizes “it was later than she thought” she turns “back down the Strand” and Woolf reminds her readers that she is a Dalloway by actively attaching the last name to Elizabeth which is not initially attached to her: “Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody” (Woolf 115). Just a few moments later, Woolf writes, “Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the Westminster Omnibus” (Woolf 118). An additional layer of meaning may also be found in the deliberate “Westminster Omnibus” versus simply “Omnibus.” As Elizabeth returns, so does her sense of place, specificity, and direction, contradicting what appears a rather magical and hypnotic riding experience where “the beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded freely like a rider, like the figure-head of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture” (Woolf 115). Elizabeth’s bus ride appears to be her moment of freedom, as she is attributed a blankness—backhanded by the canvas-like description that chisels her down to how others will perceive her regardless.
Similarly, after reading Arthur’s letter, Hetty looks into the mirror, and Eliot writes that in the “old dim glass” she sees “a white marble face with rounded childish forms, but with something sadder than a child’s pain in it. Hetty did not see the face—she saw nothing—she only felt that she was cold and sick and trembling” (Eliot 363). Both women, in these moments, are painted as marbled sculpture—idealized, objectified, and aloof, in their moments of emotional disfiguration. Woolf and Eliot also utilize color to intensify the symbolic palette of their descriptions—Hetty’s active association with the color pink, somewhat differs from Elizabeth's who naturally appears to register with the color of fawn. The brown-toned petticoat she wears on the Omnibus is the color of something that exists in habitat and environment. It becomes a tangible record of her interiority, an additional piece of evidence that compliments her love for the country. Elizabeth also identifies with the natural world through her barking, biting, fox terrier. Unlike Hetty who loathes animals, but is compared to them constantly, Elizabeth’s dog becomes a vehicle which anchors her character entirely in the sense that she sees herself through a language quite different from her mothers. While most people, including Clarissa, hear "barking and barking," Elizabeth understands that the dog might actually “want something” (Woolf 141). It is no accident that during Clarissa’s party the dog has to be shut up and put away because it is a threat to the safety and enjoyment of the partygoers. Propelling Elizabeth’s loneliness is Clarissa’s inability to properly “see” her—a point made earlier by Woolf through nature imagery. Additionally, though deeply loving, Richard Dalloway’s perception of his daughter also poses limitations. He thinks, "if he'd had a boy he'd have said, Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored his Elizabeth” (111). Sandwiched inside is “the” Elizabeth being conveyed as a something rather than someone, though at least Peter Walsh acknowledges it. So, when Elizabeth shows up to her Mother’s party in a pink frock, the moment becomes highly contextual, borderline theatrical. The two red curtains that frame Elizabeth, suggest her character as someone physically situated between the walls of a stage, given the performative nature of parties, especially one thrown by Mrs. Dalloway.
Whereas Hetty’s pink is self selected and self assertive, Elizabeth’s pink signifies exposure. At the party, Woolf’s placement of Elizabeth creates the argument that in a pink frock, Elizabeth is farthest from herself whereas Hetty is entirely herself. The pink frock, seemingly frivolous and decorative, proves to be speculative, deceitful, and the very foundation for which Elizabeth and Hetty have come to understand their existence, what it means, and who shapes it. Although both girls wear the dress differently, their performance, self-negotiation, and double consciousness remain constant whether one is standing on polished party floors or the street. The societies surrounding both of them and the floral imagery that treads along, brings forth the fountainhead of female consciousness as something constant, flooding, and factitious. Hetty’s emotional and physical demise and Elizabeth’s poor dog who is still howling, brings no ideal ending for either of them except the exposing of a subtle, universal, female throughline.
