In the Prison
- What kind of person would actually want to spend time in the Stoniton prison? Hang on, because you're about to find out. As Chapter 45 opens, a woman with a "sweet clear" voice is asking to enter the Stoniton jail (45.1).
- An elderly gentleman outside the jail remembers this woman "preaching on the village green at Hayslope," and the woman reveals that she's there to see Hetty Sorrel (45.3). If you haven't guessed that the "woman with a sweet clear voice" is Dinah, please go back and re-read Adam Bede.
- With wonderful cordiality on the part of the whole prison staff, Dinah is shown in to Hetty's cell. And there's Hetty, looking more shell-shocked than ever. Dinah has come to stay with her to the last. Hetty feels as though she's "sinking helpless in a dark gulf" (45.31).
- So what can Dinah do, exactly? She can sit with Hetty and be her "friend in trouble" (45.35). And maybe, just maybe, she can also lead Hetty to God. As Dinah explains, there is "some one who has been walking with you all through your hours of sin and trouble" (45.41). And no, she isn't talking about Eliot's busybody of a narrator.
- Yet to truly, truly receive God's companionship, Hetty will need to "confess the wickedness" she has done (45.45). The two women clutch hands and pray, and Dinah calls out to God to "Melt the hard heart. Unseal the closed lips: make her cry with her whole soul, 'Father, I have sinned'…" (45.54).
- And you know what? It works. Hetty confesses all her crimes and temptations. How she thought of killing herself while she was on the road. How she "seemed to hate" the baby and, in a moment of panic, abandoned it to die (45.60). How she had haunting visions of "that place in the wood where I'd buried the baby" (45.62).
- At the end of it all, Hetty asks Dinah if "God will take away that crying and the place in the wood" (45.62). Dinah doesn't have a yes-or-no answer. Instead, they pray once more.
- Whew, has this been a bleak chapter. Let's hope Eliot starts throwing in some descriptions of Totty, or Adam's dog, or anyone else who'd lighten the mood.