Realist Territory

Abstract This chapter shows how Adam Bede’s realist conventions frame the real as spectacle, simultaneously inviting readers into the novel’s idealized scenes of domesticity and establishing the rreal as a fantasy that readers can only observe. The novel literalizes the frames of realist convention, using space as a metaphor for ideological position. Adam Bede’s realism reproduces a cultural imaginary in which the reader, imagined as viewer or spectator, stands at the threshold of—and is invited to imagine entering—a space constructed as simultaneously real and fantasmatic. The novel’s replacement of Hetty by Dinah, relying on a repeated image of a woman in a threshold, exemplifies its replacement of individual fantasy with realist fantasy for Adam Bede, as he learns—as readers must as well—to replace his initial desires with those the novel constructs for him.