In their forthrightly entitled article, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, Elaine and English Showalter note that:

Few taboos evoke as forceful and as universal a response as that surrounding menstruation. Even the redoubtable Marquis de Sade, who took a prurient delight in moldy feces and decapitated dogs, appears to have regarded menstruation with faint distaste … Small wonder that even Victorians as open-minded as Florence Nightingale and John Stuart Mill maintain an almost complete silence on the subject. (p. 83)1

‘Unlike sexual activities’, the authors continue, ‘menstruation has no literary reflection, true or false.’ Since the Showalters wrote their article critics have become very ingenious at uncovering the repressed consciousness of nineteenth-century fiction – most aggressively in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s polemic, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’.2 None the less, the menstruating woman has not been located and the Showalters’ claim about ‘no literary reflection’ would seem to hold up. There is, however, one exception. Not surprisingly, it is to be found in the toughest-minded of the mid-Victorian novelists, George Eliot.

In what follows, I shall attempt to read the critical middle chapters of Adam Bede as a contemporary Victorian woman of the world might have read them – looking shrewdly between the lines for hints, clues, and coded references. Chapter 27, ‘A Crisis’, begins with specific time-markers (George Eliot is unusually precise about days, weeks, and months in this section of the narrative, a feature which might well alert our notional woman reader).3 It is, as the crisis looms, ‘beyond the middle of August’ – the 18th, as we later learn. It is coming up to harvest time in Loamshire, and the local farmers are anxious that the high August winds will damage the crop of wheat, which is ripe in the ear but not as yet gathered in: ‘If only the corn were not ripe enough to be blown out of the husk and scattered as untimely seed’.

Untimely seed is being spilled elsewhere. As we apprehend from hints earlier, Arthur and Hetty are meeting in the Chase for clandestine sexual assignations. Walking through these woods at sunset on 18 August, Adam comes across Arthur and Hetty kissing. In his innocence, the young carpenter supposes that the intimacy which he has accidentally witnessed has gone no further than kissing and cuddling. Adam confronts Arthur who – with secret relief – quickly discerns that Adam has not realized how far his misconduct with Hetty has gone. Furtively, the squire notes that ‘Adam could still be deceived’. Deceived, that is, not as to the fact that he has stolen Hetty’s heart, but that he has stolen her virginity as well. The two young men come to blows, fighting ‘with the instinctive fierceness of panthers in the deepening twilight’. Adam, the stronger man, eventually knocks Arthur out.

Chapter 28 of Adam Bede opens with a chastened Donnithorne informing his victorious opponent that ‘I’m going away on Saturday, and there will be an end of it’. Adam – who is not entirely a fool – inquires as to whether the affair is only a matter of ‘trifling and flirting, as you call it’ and, on being dishonestly reassured on the matter, he demands that a letter be written, disabusing Hetty of any expectation that Arthur can ever marry her. In Chapter 29 Arthur concludes that Adam ‘must be satisfied, for more reasons than one’. Arthur dimly sees as his salvation Adam going on to marry Hetty, and never – till his dying day – finding that she has been seduced.

As George Eliot insinuates, Arthur also sees the awful prospect (among other awful prospects) that Hetty may be pregnant:

A sudden dread here fell like a shadow across his imagination – the dread lest she should do something violent in her grief; and close upon that dread came another, which deepened the shadow. But he shook them off with the force of youth and hope. What was the ground for painting the future in that dark way? It was just as likely to be the reverse … There was a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly.

The first dread is that Hetty may kill herself. The second dread, as any wide-awake Victorian adult reader would apprehend, is that she may be with child. Trusting to his luck, as have multitudes of reckless young men before him, Arthur resolves to keep Adam in ignorance. Somewhere too, at the very back of his mind, will be the unformed idea that surely – if she does find herself in trouble – Hetty will know some old woman somewhere who will help her get rid of the unwanted thing.

Chapter 30 describes the delivery of Arthur’s letter via Adam. Hetty, before reading it, is also quick to perceive that Adam does not realize how far things have gone between her and Arthur. Chapter 31, ‘In Hetty’s Bed Chamber’, shows Hetty reading the letter that will ruin her life. It contains the awful sentence:

I know you can never be happy except by marrying a man in your own station; and if I were to marry you now, I should only be adding to any wrong I have done, besides offending against my duty in other relations of life.

Clearly enough, Arthur is advising Hetty to marry Adam, and better do it quickly to be on the safe side. The letter finishes with the instruction, ‘Do not write unless there is something I can really do for you’. He leaves an address – we infer he is still worried about the possibility of pregnancy.

As the narrator puts it, Hetty’s ‘short poisonous delights’ (by which we may assume that the meetings in the Chase were fumbled and dubiously joyful) have ‘spoiled her life forever’. Chapter 33 opens with the harvesting of the barley and the gathering of the season’s apples and nuts. It is the annual harvest festival celebrated by country folk on 29 September every year: ‘Michaelmas was come, with its fragrant basketfuls of purple damsons, and its paler purple daisies’. Assuming a last sexual encounter on 18 August, Hetty will still be unsure whether her own fruitfulness is to be added to that of the season. If her period is a week or two late, that could well be the effect of the shock of Arthur’s letter.

Mrs Poyser notes a ‘surprising improvement in Hetty’. The girl is, for a change, quiet and submissive. She is also setting her cap at Adam, which is slightly odd. Hetty is described smiling at her young suitor, ‘but there was something different in her eyes, in the expression of her face, in all her movements Adam thought – something harder, older, less child-like’. In Chapter 34 we are told it is now 2 November: and on this Sunday, on the way back from church, Adam proposes to Hetty. He notices as he does so that she exhibits of late ‘a more luxuriant womanliness’. This we may gloss as a fuller physical shape – particularly around the bust and waist. Hetty accepts Adam’s proposal. Why, since she still loves Arthur, she should do so is not made immediately clear. But, at this stage, we may suspect a half-formed idea that if the wedding comes off quickly, she may still be able to pass off the child she fears she is carrying as Adam’s – this, surely, is what a cunning dairymaid like Arabella Donn would have done in Hetty’s place. (As will emerge later, I do not think this construction is entirely fair to Hetty.)

Assuming that Hetty was impregnated on her last encounter with Arthur, 18 August, and that date was midway between her periods, she will be, by 2 November, two months pregnant. Disastrously for her, Adam in his prudence postpones the wedding until March next, by which time he will have been able to build the extension to his mother’s house, where they will live as man and wife. Over the subsequent months Hetty’s forlorn hopes (that she is not after all pregnant, that she may be able to disguise the child as Adam’s) slip away. By the time she runs away from Hall Farm to find Arthur at Windsor in February, Hetty must be six to seven months pregnant.

Why has no one, particularly the lynx-eyed Mrs Poyser, noticed Hetty’s advanced condition? One reason is that, like Mrs Saddletree at a similar juncture in The Heart of Midlothian,4 Mrs Poyser is made to be indisposed: ‘confined to her room all through January’ by a bad cold. But it beggars credulity that Mrs Poyser would not at some point over half-a-year have noticed the change in Hetty’s shape, more so as they would have to share the same bathing facilities and the dairymaid would be obliged to strip off her outer clothing in the heat of her daily work. When Hetty faints in the Green Man public house the publican’s wife, on unlacing the young woman, immediately perceives what is up (‘Ah, it’s plain enough what sort of business it is!’). Why then is it not plain to Mrs Poyser? One may plausibly guess that Hetty’s guardians have noted her condition. But they assume, logically enough, that Adam is the child’s father. At this period of history in rural communities it was the rule rather than the exception that the bride would be with child at the altar. The Poysers might be surprised that the upright Adam would indulge in such immoral behaviour, but in a plighted couple premarital intercourse would not necessarily have been a matter of outrage or even much comment – so long as everything were made well in the church.

Hetty, of course, knows differently. In a passage in Chapter 35 recollecting her state of mind over the wretched months of her secret trial, there occurs the following: ‘After the first on-coming of her great dread, some weeks after her betrothal to Adam, she had waited and waited, in the blind vague hope that something would happen to set her free from her terror.’ Under its circumspect expression, this is one of the more remarkable passages in Victorian fiction. While the unworldly male and juvenile readers might construe the sense here as Hetty waiting for a letter or some miracle, no mature woman reader could miss the import of what is being said. The ‘something’ in early November that Hetty is desperately waiting for that will ‘set her free from her terror’ is her period.

What we may reconstruct is the following. After her last love-making with Arthur in mid-August, and the subsequent non-appearance of her period, Hetty was vaguely apprehensive (like him), but nothing more. As a demure young lady, brought up in a well-regulated religious household like the Poysers’, Miss Sorrel would have had only the vaguest idea of where babies came from or – more precisely – the physiological signs and changes characteristic of early pregnancy. On her betrothal to Adam, it was appropriate (indeed a sacred duty) for Mrs Poyser to impart to her young ward ‘the facts of life’ (such maternal tuition was common well into the twentieth century, before schools got into the ‘sex education’ business). Now she knew what the missing period meant, Hetty experienced her ‘great dread’, and desperately prayed all through November and December that her period might belatedly come (Mrs Poyser would have told her that, for a girl her age, only recently past puberty, the occasional lapse of a month or so would not be unusual). When, as the year drew to its end, the ‘something’ did not happen, the full horror of her situation would have been tragically clear to Hetty: in her maidenly ignorance she had accepted Adam’s proposal while carrying another man’s child. Having told Hetty the facts of life, Mrs Poyser – noticing Hetty’s interesting condition around January or February – would naturally assume that the young hussy could not wait to put her new knowledge into practice. Typical.

To return to the Showalters’ claim with which this chapter began. This, surely, is a clear ‘literary reflection’ of the great unmentionable, menstruation. It is clearly something rather unusual, but doubtless there are other similar coded references in Victorian fiction that the radar of contemporary women readers might pick up.

Notes

1. Victorian Studies (September 1970), 83–9.

2. Sedgwick’s essay, which was originally a paper delivered at the MLA annual convention, is printed in Critical Inquiry, 17: 4 (Summer 1991), 818–37.

3. Although modern readers frequently complain that Hetty’s pregnancy is invisible, Victorians felt that it was obtruded – by precise dating references – too forcibly on the reader. See, for instance, the Saturday Review (26 Feb. 1859): ‘The author of Adam Bede has given in his adhesion to a very curious practice that we consider most objectionable. It is that of dating and discussing the several stages that precede the birth of a child. We seem to be threatened with a literature of pregnancy’. The review is reprinted in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, (ed.), David Carroll, (London, 1971), 73–6.

4. See the chapter ‘Effie’s phantom pregnancy’, above.