Daniel Deronda

This is a meticulously constructed novel, and an excellent reminder that propaganda does not make good art.

The novel is famously divided into two halves: Gwendolyn Harleth’s moral struggle and growth as a result of her unfortunate marriage to Henleigh Grandcourt and Daniel Deronda’s discovery of his Jewish ancestry and heritage. The uneven fit of the two halves is equally well known. I for one found the Gwendolyn half a great deal more interesting than the Daniel half. More troubling for me, however, was that I felt that the elements of the Daniel half ended up casting a nasty shadow of religiously sanctioned misogyny on the Gwendolyn half.

I don’t know whether George Eliot intended the misogyny. From the little I’ve read about her from a Google search, I would guess not. However, this reading of the novel was one that I could not reject given how deliberately and meticulously she worked to construct it. We see the novel’s careful construction right down to its minutiae: Gwendolyn’s turn at the gambling tables that opens the novel and sets the moral theme of not profiting from other’s misfortunes is echoed in the novel’s end with the return of the degenerate Lapidoth, who has become a gambling addict. Similarly, the locking away of the ugly portrait in the wainscot that so terrifies Gwendolyn at the start of the novel is echoed at the end with the story of Gwendolyn locking away a sharp silver leaf (an object of beauty) so that she will not be tempted to use it to achieve an evil end.

Wherein do I find the misogyny? I find it in the presentation of Gwendolyn, Mirah, and Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein. With Gwendolyn and the Princess, we have two wilful and proud women determined to carve out their own successes in the world within the narrow confines of the life avenues available to them. Both are punished for this. Mirah, the docile obedient woman, is the one who finds happiness.

In the deliberate mirroring of the stories of Mirah and the Princess, Eliot pushes the theme of submission to Judaism. Hence, Mirah finds happiness as the Jewess who embraces her heritage and will only marry another Jew. And hence the Princess is scourged for rejecting her Jewish heritage to pursue success as a singer. Both reject the tyranny of their fathers: Lapidoth forces Mirah to sing and to reject her religion and culture, while the Princess’s father forces an obedience to Judaism on her that she finds repugnant (“I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying your father.”; “He never comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called ‘the Jewish woman’ under pain of his curse.”)

However, while Mirah’s rejection of submission to her father is rewarded, the Princess’s rejection of a similar filial submission is punished by a debilitating illness. This is even though she has followed the path of choosing the higher life of art, a choice ordinarily -- in the novel's terms -- seen as praiseworthy. It would seem that choosing this higher life is not enough to redeem her disobedience to her father's will. In contrast, Klesmer, a Jew and a man, is presented in praiseworthy terms for choosing the higher life of art untainted by material desires even though he too rejects his Judaism, being a universalist and marrying a non-Jew.

The Princess’s father is even lauded as being “as exceptional a Jew a Mordecai” (that veritable saint). Despite his tyranny over his daughter, therefore, we are to regard him as a man of “ardent zeal and far-reaching hope”, one of the men who “were the creators and feeders of the world -- moulding and feeding the more passive life which without them would dwindle and shrivel into the narrow tenacity of insects, unshaken by thoughts beyond the reaches of their antennae.” The only difference between the one submission to paternal tyranny and the other is that one form of tyranny is for wealth and the other is for religion.

This choice of presenting the Princess's story in this way has an impact on how we read the Gwendolyn story. Gwendolyn is punished for entering into a marriage where she wants to dominate her husband by finding out that he has a stronger will than her. Gwendolyn is made to suffer under Henleigh's thumb as she is not able to do what she wants.

However, being forced to submit to male authority is not itself the problem. The novel presents it as acceptable for Gwendolyn's will to be subject to her uncle's, a clergyman, and to her potential employer's, a bishop. Even her relationship to Daniel is couched in terms of submission to his superior moral authority. Accordingly, Henleigh's will is bad not because it overpowers Gwendolyn's but because it is exercised for non-religious reasons: social success.

Again, I must emphasise that I am not saying that Eliot was a misogynist. However, she could have made different artistic choices. She could have, for example, presented the acts of the Princess's father as being unacceptably selfish, while also making clear that the Princess was being punished not for abandoning Judaism but for being a selfish woman. She chose not to do so. Instead, she chooses to state in terms that the Princess's illness was divine punishment for deliberately thwarting her father's Zionist iron-will that she should present him with a grandson who would be a fervent Jew. She also praises the Princess's father for his Zionist fervour.

I would conjecture that Eliot felt pressed to make these artistic choices because she did not want to cast any kind of aspersions on Zionism. And she may also have felt it necessary to make the Princess's father a fervent Zionist so that she could then have her hero take up the Zionist cause while giving him a plausibly Victorian reason for doing so (genetics) despite bring brought up a Christian and an Englishman. Essentially, then, her pro-Zionist views ended up dictating her artistic choices, driving her down one route rather than another.

Sadly, these choices have an impact on the other story that she tells, the Gwendolyn story, and how it can be read. Consider a counterfactual hypothetical: What if the Gwendolyn and Daniel story had been written as two entirely separate novels? If that had been the case, then the theme of not benefiting from another's suffering would come to the fore without the Mirah/Princess stories to highlight Gwendolyn's desire for a husband to dominate. I could then see the Gwendolyn story as being pro-feminist and anti-materialistic. And without Gwendolyn's submission to Daniel's moral authority, the Daniel story would simply be unreflectingly pro-Zionist to a fault, with its anti-feminist elements then an ancillary incident of this partisanship. The unnatural forcing of the two stories as one causes echoes and reverberations as they end up commenting on one another, throwing into sharp relief certain features that would otherwise be less evident.

Consider another counterfactual hypothetical: what if the Princess's father had been Arabo-Muslim agitating for a new caliphate, Mirah a Burkah-clad woman wanting a Muslim husband to marry (if you find this far-fetched, I would note that Mirah approves of the segregation of men and women in a synagogue), Mordecai a Sunni imam, and Daniel Deronda a new convert off to Iraq? In that context, wouldn't a novel condemning a woman for rejecting her father's faith so that she could follow her own secular ambition while praising her "sister" for rejecting secularity in favour of religious submission to her saintly brother be seen as piously anti-femminist? And all the more so if a third woman who wants to marry a man to dominate him is punished for this, but finds salvation in submitting to the superior moral authority of the new convert? If so, it would be wrong to accord a special treatment to the novel here simply because the named faith is a different one.

Despite its wildly excessive length and several bone-jarring plot twists, Daniel Deronda should please the majority of those who enjoyed Middlemarch. It succeeds in three areas. First, it tells how a frivolous, air-headed young woman acquires moral depth and wisdom. Second, it comments brilliantly on the institution of the "nephew", i.e. the young person raised by a male who denies being his father. Third it contains a superb discussion on what was the very new idea at the time the novel was published of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.
Virtually all readers are delighted by the tale of the glamorous heroine Gwendolen who upon becoming suddenly impoverished marries for money so as to provide for her mother and sisters. Gwendolen will quickly discover that not even her dazzling beauty can prevent her being subjected to the control and psychology cruelty of a nasty husband who knows how to use his advantages of being rich and living in a male-dominated society in order to dominate her. George Eliot's handling of Gwendolen's story is unquestionably brilliant. It is the second and third threads that give readers trouble.
The story of Daniel, the apparently illegitimate son of a British baron who will eventually discover that his mother is Jewish, succeeds much less well than that of Gwendolen. As a teenager, Daniel asks his tutor why so many popes had nephews. At the end of the discussion Daniel concludes that his best course in life is to love the man who is bringing him up although not acknowledging that he is Daniel's father. At the same time, Daniel accepts that he can never inherit either the title or the estates attached to it. Unfortunately, George Eliot bungles the denouement of this sub-plot. When Daniel meets his mother, he learns that the baron was not in fact his father but in fact a Jewish cousin of his mother. I suspect that George Eliot made this preposterous choice to remove the Baron as the biological father in order to make Daniel Deronda's decision at the very end of the novel to move to the Middle East in order to assist in the creation of a Jewish Homeland seem more sensible by virtue of his having not one but two Jewish parents. However, much as I disliked the final plot twist, I still found that overall George Eliot told the tale of Daniel, the nephew, very well.
George Eliot's discussion of the Jewish question is likely to disturb many contemporary readers primarily because the terms of reference are so different from those of today. Jewish Emancipation had been enacted in Britain in 1858 while Daniel Deronda was published in 1876. The Jewish characters in the novel then are reflecting on their less than 20 years of experience as full citizens in Great Britain. They do not know whether it would be best to assimilate completely into the Christian society or to try to retain a strong Jewish personality. The Zionist movement will not be formed until 1897 but wealthy English and French Jewish families have been sponsoring Jewish settlers in the Middle East since the 1850s. For George Eliot, the point of reference is the movement for Italian unification which had begun in the 1820s and finished in 1871 when the newly formed Kingdom of Italy moved its capital to Rome. In Eliot's view the probability of success had been very low when the movement began but had succeeded after fifty years of struggle. The key to establishing a Jewish homeland in the Middle East was simply for its partisans to be as tenacious as the Italians. On the final page of the novel, Daniel Deronda is sailing to the Middle East determined to as resolute as Mazzini. For any reader who is comfortable with George Eliot's analysis of the issue of a Jewish homeland, Daniel Deronda is a novel that succeeds brilliantly in every area.

Once upon a time, I was on a long train journey, and one of my compartment's neighbors, watching me reading for a lengthy period in a frozen silence, asked me which word in human's vocabulary was the most valuable. My reply was spontaneously uttered, "Love". The man was surprised. He said he had expected me to answer "soul" or "God". I just laughed and replied, "Love is enough as Love is God." Well, it should be enough. But, maybe not anymore. Anyway, at that time I certainly felt that while raising on the ray of love, one can enter the enlightened kingdom of everything that God has created. In a way, but again depending on the key of interpretation, it is better to say that love is God than to say that truth is God, because the harmony, the beauty, the vitality, the joy and the bliss that are part of love are not part of truth. Truth is to be known, heard, voiced; love is to be felt, experienced, as well as known. The growth and perfection of love lead to the ultimate merger with God, whatever that means for each of us.
We like it or not, the greatest poverty of all is the absence of love. The man who has not developed the capacity to love lives in a private hell of his own. A man who is filled with love is in heaven – earthly or not, it doesn’t matter, it’s enough if it’s also mentally and physically, spiritually experienced. A human can be seen as a wonderful and unique plant, a plant that is capable of producing both nectar and poison. If a man lives by hate he reaps a harvest of poison; if he lives by love he gathers blossoms laden with nectar. I guess each one has a similar experience. Like it or not, one cannot avoid it. If I mould my life and live it with the well-being of everything in mind, that is love. But Love results from the awareness that you are not separate, not different from anything else in existence. I am in you; you are in me. This love is religious and it is the truest one.
I replied that love is God. That is to me the ultimate truth. But, love also exists within the family unit. This is the first step on the journey to love, and the ultimate can never happen if the beginning has been absent. Love is responsible for the existence of the family and when the family unit moves apart and its members spread out into society, love increases and grows. When a man's family has finally grown to incorporate all of mankind, his love becomes one with God.
Without love a human being is just an individual, an ego. He has no family; he has no link with other people. This is gradual death. Life, on the other hand, is interrelation. Love surpasses the duality of the ego. This alone is truth. The man who thirsts for truth must first develop his capacity to love—to the point where the difference between the lover and the beloved disappears and only love remains. When the light of love is freed from the duality of lover and the beloved, when it is freed from the haze of seer and seen, when only the light of pure love shines brightly, that is freedom and liberation. Or, better said, that’s supreme freedom.
I wondered what I could say about love!
Love is so difficult to describe. Love is just there. You could probably see it in my eyes if you came up and looked into them.
I wonder if you can feel it as my arms spread in an embrace.
Love.
What is love?
If love is not felt in my eyes, in my arms, in my silence, then it can never be realized from my words.


Quotes:

***
“My dear boy, you are too young to be taking momentous, decisive steps of that sort. This is a fancy which you have got into your head during an idle week or two: you must set to work at something and dismiss it. There is every reason against it. An engagement at your age would be totally rash and unjustifiable; and moreover, alliances between first cousins are undesirable. Make up your mind to a brief disappointment. Life is full of them. We have all got to be broken in; and this is a mild beginning for you.”

***
“In any case, she would have to submit; and he enjoyed thinking of her as his future wife, whose pride and spirit were suited to command everyone but himself. He had no taste for a woman who was all tenderness to him, full of petitioning solicitude and willing obedience. He meant to be master of a woman who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have been capable of mastering another man.”

“he had wanted to marry Gwendolen, and he was not a man to repent. Why should a gentleman whose other relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic life? What he chiefly felt was that a change had come over the conditions of his mastery, which, far from shaking it, might establish it the more thoroughly. And it was established. He judged that he had not married a simpleton unable to perceive the impossibility of escape, or to see alternative evils: he had married a girl who had spirit and pride enough not to make a fool of herself by forfeiting all the advantages of a position which had attracted her; and if she wanted pregnant hints to help her in making up her mind properly he would take care not to withhold them.”

“When you undertook to be Mrs. Grandcourt, you undertook not to make a fool of yourself. You have been making a fool of yourself this morning; and if you were to go on as you have begun, you might soon get yourself talked of at the clubs in a way you would not like. What do you know about the world? You have married me, and must be guided by my opinion.”

***
“Her griefs were feminine; but to her as a woman they were not the less hard to bear, and she felt an equal right to the Promethean tone. she had a confused state of emotion about Deronda—was it wounded pride and resentment, or a certain awe and exceptional trust?

“though it was her hunger to speak to him which had set her imagination on constructing this chance of finding him, and had made her hurry down, as birds hover near the water which they dare not drink. Always uneasily dubious about his opinion of her, she felt a peculiar anxiety to-day, lest he might think of her with contempt, as one triumphantly conscious of being Grandcourt's wife, the future lady of this domain. It was her habitual effort now to magnify the satisfactions of her pride, on which she nourished her strength; but somehow Deronda's being there disturbed them all. There was not the faintest touch of coquetry in the attitude of her mind toward him: he was unique to her among men, because he had impressed her as being not her admirer but her superior: in some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience, as one woman whose nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.”

“It did not signify that the other gentlemen took the opportunity of being near her: of what use in the world was their admiration while she had an uneasy sense that there was some standard in Deronda's mind which measured her into littleness?”

“Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an uneasy, transforming process—all the old nature shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleasures perturbed, but still showing wholeness and strength in the will to reassert itself. After every new shock of humiliation she tried to adjust herself and seize her old supports—proud concealment, trust in new excitements that would make life go by without much thinking; trust in some deed of reparation to nullify her self-blame and shield her from a vague, ever-visiting dread of some horrible calamity; trust in the hardening effect of use and wont that would make her indifferent to her miseries.
Yes—miseries. This beautiful, healthy young creature, with her two-and-twenty years and her gratified ambition, no longer felt inclined to kiss her fortunate image in the glass. She looked at it with wonder that she could be so miserable”

“Gwendolen's appetite had sickened. Let her wander over the possibilities of her life as she would, an uncertain shadow dogged her. Her confidence in herself and her destiny had turned into remorse and dread; she trusted neither herself nor her future.”

“With all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually possessed. They must be rather old and wise persons who are not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about themselves reflected in other minds; and Gwendolen, with her youth and inward solitude, may be excused for dwelling on signs of special interest in her shown by the one person who had impressed her with the feeling of submission, and for mistaking the color and proportion of those signs in the mind of Deronda.”

“But, as always happens with a deep interest, the comparatively rare occasions on which she could exchange any words with Deronda had a diffusive effect in her consciousness, magnifying their communication with each other, and therefore enlarging the place she imagined it to have in his mind. How could Deronda help this? He certainly did not avoid her; rather he wished to convince her by every delicate indirect means that her confidence in him had not been indiscreet since it had not lowered his respect. Moreover, he liked being near her—how could it be otherwise?

She was something more than a problem: she was a lovely woman, for the turn of whose mind and fate he had a care which, however futile it might be, kept soliciting him as a responsibility, perhaps all the more that, when he dared to think of his own future, he saw it lying far away from this splendid sad-hearted creature, who, because he had once been impelled to arrest her attention momentarily, as he might have seized her arm with warning to hinder her from stepping where there was danger, had turned to him with a beseeching persistent need.”

***
“To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years, and I'm not sure but they have the best of it. The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.”

***
“No," said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms with an air of decision. "You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out—'this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.' That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping from bondage.”

5 stars for the book itself. But 4 for my personal enjoyment.
George Eliot tackles quite a few themes in this book: women's role in society, marriage, work, social identity, illegitimacy, the role of Jews in society, Zionism, etc. etc. It is ambitious, bold, and beautifully done.
But I didn't love it as much as Middlemarch. The characters are too close to caricatures. While there are some really lovely comparisons and themes, there was almost too much going on. And when she really wants to make a point (particularly about Jews), she hits you over the head with it a few times just to make sure you get it.
Less snarkiness, more idealism.
I did love the contrast between the three women who all try and make a career on the stage, particularly with Daniel Deronda's Mom flat-out asking why she should accept the traditional role of wife and mother when she was designed with looks and voice to do so much more?
It was a powerful but not fun read.

Disliked this so much that I'm questioning my seventeen-year-old self's taste for having loved Middlemarch. A real existential crisis.

Although I probably would have liked this better if it remained focused on Gwendolen instead of Daniel.

2022: Second time reading this and Daniel Deronda has proved to be one of my all the time favourite books.

2020: What a journey this book was. I have been slowly going through this on audio for the whole month and I have officially become a George Eliot fan. Daniel Deronda is a slow moving book, filled with incredible characters that feel human. Gwendolyn in the beginning of the book is childish and selfish and while she continues being so during the novel, I was very pleased how everything was tied together. The other main character, Daniel Deronda, finds his heritage and the meaning of life through a Jewish woman Mira who he saves from committing a suicide. I am awed how sensitively this novel talks about Jewish people; it is refreshing to read a Victorian novel that portrays Jews as a human beings instead of caricatures or pictures of evilness. All in all, one of the best novels I have read this year so far.

This is a dense and difficult book, but it contains several powerful and inspiring stories. George Eliot has a fierce control over plot; truly she is a master of the genre. Its only flaw - one that will put a damper on many a reader’s enjoyment - is that it is excessively verbose and filled with extemporaneous reflections that, though relevant, lead nowhere.

Still, I am in awe of Eliot’s mastery of the novel. This tightly plotted and impeccably paced novel is populated with fascinating characters that feel like flesh and bone. It also has a brilliant sense of time and place; I could at all times imagine myself standing in the described locations and being able to picture exactly where each character was and what they were doing.

The variety of opinions, classes and viewpoints reflected in the novel make for one of the most nuanced and comprehensive pictures of Victorian England I have read so far, far from the myopic portrayals of the life aristocratic that characterise so much of the age’s literature. Special mention must be made of the Jewish subplot; it is fascinating, refreshing and mind-boggling in equal measure to read such a sympathetic portrayal of Jews and Zionism coming from the same time that produced characters like Fagin.

At first I hated Gwendolyn Harleth. By the end of the book, she had become one of my all-time favourite characters. Starting out as a spoiled coquette, the events in the novel take her on a psychological journey that will drastically change her. But what Eliot nails is that Gwendolyn doesn’t change at her core; what changes is her understanding of right and wrong, and her will to be a better person. It’s much more subtle and believable than a character arc that has her become a different person entirely.

The eponymous Daniel Deronda, the moral compass of the novel, is an incredibly difficult character to write without him coming across as holier-than-thou. However, he is superbly pulled off, to the point I found myself admiring his actions and hoping to be able to emulate them in life one day.

Another thing Eliot does very well is foreshadowing. Both the first time we meet Gwendolyn and Lord Grandcourt we see them carrying out actions that will reverberate in our memory as we see their stories unfold.

The eventual coming together of the two main characters (Gwendolyn and Deronda), well past the halfway mark, is one of the best moments of character psychology I have ever seen. Our two protagonists are so radically different from one another, had any circumstance in their lives been slightly different, they would never have clicked the way they do. Watching them observe each other, figure each other out and work against their own prejudices is priceless.

Even the ending, though cathartic as was typical in the day, does not necessarily tie everything up with a nice bow. The characters’ feelings are messy and far from neatly tied up. I’d go as far as to say all are left open enough to let our imaginations explore the many possible turns their lives could take forthwith.

“Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive: but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions⁠—there will be newly-opening needs⁠—continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant” (839)

This was an odd book with elements that I find difficult to fit together. I have seen the book described as Eliot’s “Jewish” book and that theme is certainly present, most obviously through the parts of the story devoted to Daniel Deronda. By contrast, the parts of the book devoted to Gwendolen Harleth are centered on machinations of the wealthy and privileged as they devote themselves to engineering often loveless, sterile matrimonial and familial relationships that are designed to hold on to or fortify wealth. The only obvious link between Gwendolen’s and Daniel’s narratives is a decidedly one-sided love story. It hardly seems like the sort of thing you build a 900-page book upon.

It is true that readers are also given a picture of poor Jewish families that is set in clear contrast to wealth. The stereotypes that follow the Jewish people come out of the mouths of precisely the people you would expect to hold such prejudices. But just as it hardly seems that this book is simply a love story, it also hardly seems to be Eliot’s point to merely draw attention to prejudice as a kind of banal social commentary.

I think that we are meant to see a parallel between Gwendolen and Daniel — two people who are where they appear to belong but who are stranded, just out of phase, not quite fitting in, lacking motivation toward some higher purpose. Gwendolen lives among the wealthy but belongs to a family of uncertain wealth that is, ultimately, lost. Daniel is orphaned and living with relations — among family but not quite. Both lack a place. They have settled where life has scattered them but they don’t find an environment that supports their growth. This theme of displacement and scattering is repeated in other characters: Rex Gasciogne and Mirah Lapidoth (Cohen) most notably. It’s a thematic gesture toward the diaspora for sure but one that seems imagined not only geographically but economically and socially as well.

I think that this dissatisfaction and displacement lead both Gwendolen and Daniel to seek out people to help them find where they belong and to find a path back. They are both looking for teachers. And both find teachers: Daniel in Mordecai (Ezra) and Gwendolen in Daniel. What they find in those teachers is, at first, a jarring course correction from their directions in life and then a motivation to learn and find a new purpose and direction that leads them somewhere they can belong. Deronda literally takes up the task of Zionism but I think readers are supposed to see establishment of a Jewish state in a figurative as well as a literal way.

Maybe it’s because of recent and ongoing events in the Middle East, but I find what I take to be Eliot’s allegorical use of Zionism a little troubling. This conflict has deep, deep roots and it certainly would have been something in the air in Eliot’s time as well. So, finding a kind of purity in that pursuit as it reflects the realization of virtuous and inspired motivation could probably stand to be poked a bit.

… but not by me. Once through this book is enough for my lifetime. I’ll take Middlemarch over this one please.