Adam, who is religious in a naturalistic way, and Arthur and Hetty, who are not religious at all, have pride in them and must learn humility through experience.

Dinah, the completely religious woman, realistically recognizes the existence of evil and is patient and humble.

Religion in George Eliot's novels seems to mean a respectful attitude towards the great unknown. This area of human experience is symbolized by the tapping at the door in Chapter 4 which, though a superstition, turns out to be a valid portent of death, by the force of blind circumstances, and by God. The other cause is that part of reality which is beyond man's control. These actions, prompted by 'natural' urges rather than by a 'civilized' use of intellect and will, form one of the two primary causes of suffering in the novel. We noted in the commentaries that the seduction, the fight between Adam and Arthur, and Hetty's abandonment of her child all take place in the woods. This division is supported by another one - that between controlled and uncontrolled human actions. The crisis of the novel takes place in Stonyshire (in a town called Stoniton, as a matter of fact) and it is here that the three Loamshire people discover the meaning of 'irremediable evil.' Adam, Arthur and Hetty, on the other hand, take a much more optimistic view of things and must learn what Dinah already knows. Dinah lives in Stonyshire she is familiar with the darker side of life, accepts human suffering as necessary and inevitable, and knows how to deal with it. Taking this world to represent life, we can see that Eliot is dividing experience into the pleasant and the unpleasant - giving us symbols for the 'light' and 'dark' sides of life. The 'world' of the novel thus divides into light and dark, or hopeful and gloomy areas. Hayslope in Loamshire, on the other hand, is a pleasant spot where the farmers are prosperous and the workers comfortable there are no factories, but only small neighborhood businesses like Jonathan Burge's workshop.

Snowfield, Dinah's home town, is located in Stonyshire as the names indicate, this is a bleak, forbidding region in which people eke out a poor living on the rocky hills or else work in a factory. It is obvious that the names of the two counties mentioned in the novel and the names of the two towns where principal characters live are significant. These patterns point up contrasts and support, by an appeal to the visual imagination, some of the book's central ideas. George Eliot communicates the meaning of her novel partially by employing symbolism in the description of the physical world in which her characters live.

Local Color and Comic Relief in Adam Bede.

Adam bede by george eliot