Chapter 17 in Adam Bede is an interesting chapter indeed. It is a perplexing chapter in this novel that changes the perspective of what’s going on in the novel, instead of letting the novel advance further—the way it had been for the past sixteen chapters. This serves as a break from how the author had been going about telling this story, because it changed from a romanticized perspective to a realistic perspective. Instead of talking about the plot itself, it stops and analyzes the realistic truth about how the author, Eliot, reflects on the characters in a completely different time period. She goes off into a rant, practically, about how her characters are always demanded to fit perfectly within the lines of either a protagonist or an antagonist, and she decides to draw the line between realism and fantasy. She illustrates that in life, there’s a lot of grey area as opposed to this black vs. White mentality.

The idea of realism is also speculated in 19th Century British Critics of Realism. It starts off with the claim, “When a realist writer depicts a dressmaker, G.H. Lewes wrote, ‘she must be a young woman who makes dresses, not a sentimental “heroine”, evangelical and consumptive…” (Freedgood 1) On one hand there is a young woman in real life who has responsibilities and needs to work in order to support a herself. She is the opposite of a sentimental heroine because she has been forced to mature, instead of allowing herself to remain overdramatic and spoiled, like a child. She doesn’t look like a heroine, either—she looks like a normal girl with less than perfect features.

Eliot stresses how a real person isn’t someone who is beautiful, perfect and knows the right thing to do and say. She says, “I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind” (Eliot 1). A real person isn’t always admirable—and words certainly cannot always be put in the mouth of a real man. Fantasy and fiction is totally different from realism, in which real emotions come out at the wrong times and flaws are all over peoples’ faces. This chapter is all about realism being shown in a fiction story—for once. Showing that characters have flaws and have emotions and feelings like the rest of us makes us realize that we don’t have to be just like the people in the fiction world. We realize that we can be imperfect, instead of thinking that we are subject to a happy ending just like our favorite fairy tale.