| Title | : | Daniel Deronda |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 037576013X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780375760136 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 796 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1876 |
The strange young man is Daniel Deronda, brought up with his own origins shrouded in mystery, searching for a compelling outlet for his singular talents and remarkable capacity for empathy. Deronda's destiny will change the lives of many.
Daniel Deronda Reviews
-
Recently I watched a TV adaptation of Andrea Levy's
Small Island, a book I had read when it first came out but which I'd more or less forgotten. The adaptation succeeded very well, and might even have been better than the book. The characters were credible and their motivations were clear. Their words and actions informed the viewer so well about the background to the story that the occasional narratorial voiceover seemed unnecessary.
Soon afterwards, I watched the first episode of a three-part adaptation of
Daniel Deronda, and had the opposite reaction. Nothing made sense to me. I was convinced that a large part of Eliot's intentions for the story were missing, and while the actors were all fine in their way, the words they were given to say were simply not enough. I tried to fill in the missing bits myself but couldn't. It was impossible to imagine the history and motivations that lay behind those characters and their actions, as impossible as trying to imagine the layers of messages underlying the movie title Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri until you've viewed that extraordinary film for yourself—which I've just done. If there had been a book on which that film was based, I'm certain that it could never measure up to the movie. Every frame was a billboard in itself, and the message on each was astonishingly spare and incredibly eloquent.
George Eliot is very eloquent, but there is nothing spare about her writing. You cannot pare it down and fit it in movie frames yet it is very visual in spite of that. It belongs on the page—but offers the big screen experience to the mind's eye. But you have to read all the words to see the pictures properly. I was very glad I abandoned the TV adaptation after that first episode and picked up the book instead. Right from the first page I realised that without the support of the text I could never have succeeded in fully understanding the complexities of motivation that lay behind the surface story, or indeed the scope of Eliot's project in the first place. And when I reached the end of the book, I was certain that I didn't need to watch the rest of the TV adaptation—the book had been more vivid for me that any adaptation could be.
I posted an update the day I finished the book, regretting that the reading experience was over, and a curious conversation erupted in the comments section of that update. The conversation made me realise that there are readers who tackle books as if their task were to adapt them for the screen rather than simply read what is on the page. They would like to cut massive sections, delete certain characters, and make other characters act differently so that the story might move towards an ending they think is more fitting. You could say that such an approach is a very 'creative' way of reading but you could also wonder where the writer's intentions for her work fit in that scenario.
The writer's intentions are everything for me. I may probe them and question them but I would never disregard them. A writer's work is a sacred thing, a bit like other people's religious beliefs, not to be tampered with even when we don't revere them ourselves. I mention religion because it is a major theme in this book. George Eliot became more and more interested in Judaism during the course of her life, at first in an effort to overcome her own prejudices towards the increasing Jewish population in mid-nineteenth century Britain, and then later because she had become genuinely interested in the common origin of Judaism and Christianity. This book is essentially about that preoccupation, but because Eliot is very good at creating story lines, she has inserted the Jewish themed story into an intriguing frame story. Readers seem to differ about which story is the more worthwhile part of the book, and many favour the frame story. However, I found that the two strands overlapped and echoed each other so well that I never even thought of separating or comparing them. Characters from both sections mirrored each other even if they seemed completely opposite, and the central redeemer-like figure of Daniel Deronda linked them all together perfectly. The overall shape of the book worked very well for me and I'm left in awe of George Eliot's mind as well as her writing.
The result of this unplanned reading adventure is that
Daniel Deronda now marks the beginning of my 2018 George Eliot season. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of her books, and I may possibly reread
Middlemarch as a fitting endnote.
So much for the to-read stack I selected at the beginning of January. Abandoned indefinitely!
…………………………………………………
Because I've a keen interest in Henry James, and I know he admired George Eliot's writing, I was interested to spot what might have been the germ of his inspiration for
The Portrait of a Lady. Eliot's frame story concerns a fiercely independent-minded young woman who, in spite of the general expectation, is in no hurry to marry anyone. Nevertheless, like HJ's Isabel Archer, Gwendolyn Harleth finds herself enslaved by a cold-hearted husband who is only interested in crushing her independent spirit. It seems to me that Henleigh Grandcourt and HJ's Gilbert Osmond have a lot in common.
Eliot's main story also reminded me of another Henry James plot line. I think Daniel Deronda could have been an inspiration for Hyacinth Robinson in
Princess Casamassima. They are both orphans who desperately need to discover more about their parents, and they both become deeply involved in movements they had no previous associations with.
Slim connections, perhaps, but I love finding such links. -
THE DIPTYCH
This novel was renewed my interest on how George Eliot wrote. I am highly tempted to read more about her and approach literary evaluations of her writing, but before I do so I want to read
Adam Bede and
Silas Marner and may be reread
The Mill on the Floss.
When I read
Romola I considered GE’s cosmopolitanism and breath of knowledge. These elements are also present in Daniel Deronda but with an added edge. With
Middlemarch it was the role of the narrator and the clear presence of the author that attracted me. In DD the voice of the writer is also clear but in less authorial fashion and, one suspects, speaking more often through her characters. What struck me most, and want to select for my review this time, is the structure of the novel.
It is clearly divided in two. Clearly a diptych. Already MM seemed to me to consist of two parallel stories joined somewhat seamlessly in the middle. The study of provincial evolved around two foci, the doctor Lydgate and the illuminated Dorothea. Both idealists. The twists and turnings of the plot, however, managed to link the two stories creating a middle path in Middlemarch were these two different versions of dreamers confronted each other and helped each other in correcting their reflections.
This double structure is again present in Daniel Deronda, GE’s last novel, but with a wider gap between the two panels. With almost separated frames the novel reads like a double portrait, or a diptych with two facing and complementary donors searching for an object of adoration that is however missing – for the Self is never in the other.
The two subjects pursue their mirroring images and transverse their separating frames by engaging in dialogs and verbal encounters. The twists and turns of the plot this time do not fuse their separated worlds. Only their minds bridge the gap.
Generally I do not discuss characters in my reviews, but I can't avoid it this time. In this novel, the two protagonists, the sitters in the double portrait, baffled me. Gwendolen (Gwen), potentially a highly irritating young woman, fascinated me because I thought she was such a modern character. I expected that young powerful women in today’s professional world, and who are not just capable and intelligent, but also beautiful—and I am thinking of top Wall street traders, or international lawyers of the type, of for example, Amal Aladdin--, must have a similar self-assurance and defiance and inner drive and independence and élan as Gwen. But even if these contemporary women have had a better chance to explore and exploit their abilities in their chosen fields of excellence than GE has allowed Gwen, she did not get on my nerves. I was enthralled by her modernity.
Daniel, in spite of having claimed the title of the novel, remained for me an equivocal figure. It is almost as if in my diptych Daniel—with his messianic role turned around, for he is the Christian leading onto the Jewish— is a donor who through a process of transubstantiation has become the object of adoration.
And in that transformation, the novel dims and blurs its cast of characters and becomes more and more an exploration of ideas, spirituality and politics, with a defence of Judaism and a daring proposal of Zionism.
In all this Daniel emerges as an ethereal saviour but poor Gwen succumbs and loses her leading edge.
And that is what made me wonder about how GE wrote her books and planned her work in her mind.
Did she spend half of her day doing intellectual research on the subjects that captivated her and did she then transcribe her reading into her novel in the afternoons? What was her true objective, to expand her erudition, or to mould it into something else?
I will have to put aside my curiosity for a while and continue reading her work, but with her intelligent writing and formidable abilities she certainly makes me ponder about the process of writing, that elusive act - creativity. How is it born and how does it live?
And how did Rothko paint the above diptych?
-
I finished this book about a month ago and have been letting my thoughts first simmer and then actually almost get pushed onto the back burner as our summer holidays began. Once I decided to look over my notes, I realized that a review might be quite overwhelming. Furthermore, the book did not necessarily endear itself to me more over time as many typically do when I prepare to write down my impressions. On the other hand, I most certainly acknowledge that this was an important book and quite a feat of writing on the part of George Eliot. I applaud her efforts at setting on paper her ideas regarding feminism, the British aristocracy, and racial identity, in particular that of Judaism. What I had the most trouble with was the often cumbersome reflections of the main characters which detracted from the flow of the narrative. The interactions between the characters were to me the most stimulating portions to absorb as a reader. The characterizations were well done – some characters being more interesting, even if not likable, than others.
"She had a naïve delight in her fortunate self, which any but the harshest saintliness will have some indulgence for in a girl who had every day seen a pleasant reflection of that self in her friends’ flattery as well as in the looking-glass." The spoiled and self-absorbed Gwendolen Harleth finds herself in a position she never expected to be – that of bad luck and sudden poverty. What is a girl to do in this situation? Degrade oneself by taking a position or, perhaps worse yet, accept an offer of marriage? "Her observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary state in which a woman could not do what she liked, had more children than were desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in humdrum." Saucy little turns of phrase such as this won me over and held my attention. Gwendolen was perhaps the most interesting and multi-layered character of this book.
When Gwendolen Harleth meets the saintlike figure of Daniel Deronda, their lives become connected as she attempts to better herself to become deserving of his friendship and esteem. But while Gwendolen fights her demons, Deronda struggles with his own identity crisis - one which stems from an unknown parentage as well as from a strong spiritual link to an impassioned Jewish nationalist, Mordecai. Deronda "had not the Jewish consciousness, but he had a yearning, grown the stronger for the denial which had been his grievance, after the obligation of avowed filial and social ties." Throughout this novel, Eliot illustrates the feelings of anti-Semitism which were prevalent during the 19th century. Through Deronda, however, these feelings are changed as he develops a relationship with both Mirah, to whom he is also a savior, as well as Mordecai. Deronda learns the true and principled nature of the Jewish people and their desire to achieve a national identity. "… let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West…"
Several more players are introduced into the plot, too many for me to delve into detail here. I will say that Mr. Grandcourt and Mr. Lush make my list for the most strikingly malodorous individuals – in a very amusing sort of way. They provided a nice counterbalance to the gushing wholesomeness of Deronda and Mirah. Gwendolen’s mother was a bit silly and spineless, especially in relation to her daughter.
This was my fourth George Eliot novel. While I did like it - once I plowed through the more laborious portions of it- I have to say that it is my least favorite so far. Both Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss were much more readable and engaging and I would recommend either of these – especially for a first time Eliot reader. I am glad that I read this one, and happy to add it to my list of more difficult tomes I have completed. 3.5 stars rounded down. -
(Re-read from June 07 to June 12, 2012)
I had forgotten what a hard work reading Daniel Deronda was. It has to be Eliot’s most challenging and overwhelming novel, yet such a great pleasure to read and re-read! It's enormously ambitious novel, broad in its scope, space, time and history. The setting itself is untypical of Eliot’s previous novels. It’s no longer the idyllic, provincial villages of Adam Bede or Middlemarch, but Daniel Deronda is set at the heart of cosmopolitan aristocracy of contemporary London. The politics are no longer local, but global as Eliot scrutinises the exploits of British Empire. The stakes are much higher; the individual identities are threatened and lost. The conflict is personal, yet also very social. Of all the Eliot’s novels, Daniel Deronda is the most related to our contemporary society as Eliot explores the themes of racial identity, prejudice, importance of tolerance, religion, the question of gender boundaries, imperialism and Zionism.
Gwendolen Harleth has to be Eliot's most remarkable and fascinating creation. In fact, I am in love with Gwendolen. The main reason I re-read this novel because I missed her. I missed being in her mind, to follow her cognitions, her mental anguish, her witty repartees, sheer snobbery, ambition and heedless narcissism. She is of course not the first vain or shallow female character ever created by Eliot. The ‘vain girl’ features in most of Eliot’s novels, often as a contrast to the heroine. She is there as Hetty in Adam Bede, Esther in Felix Holt, Rosamond in Middlemarch. But in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen is put at the centre of the stage and her narcissism is taken to extremes, that there is a scene where she is moved to kiss her own reflection in the mirror. Like countless other women, she suffers from the restrictions Victorian society imposed on any respectable woman. She is a dreamer and sees marriage not as a loving union, but as a way to achieve status and power. She marries Grandcourt because she thinks she will be able to manage him and make him her “slave”. Yet contrary to her expectations, the marriage turns out to be an abusive one. Gwendolen fails to realise that Grandcourt also has an iron will of his own. The irony is that her decision to marry the incredibly wealthy Grandcourt was to some extent influenced by her selfless concern towards her bankrupt family. So, her partly selfless act becomes the bane of her life. Grandcourt is bent on to be “a master of a woman who would have liked to master him”. A painful psychological struggle for power ensues between them and Gwendolen is quickly crushed by him. His secret becomes her guilt, a yoke around her neck which continually gnaws at her conscience. He breaks her spirit and she becomes withered from inside, “a diseased soul”, but is forced to play a charade of a happy wife.
I liked Deronda even if I found him to be rigid and morally superior. He is Eliot’s most feminine hero. His ostensibly ‘feminine’ quality of abundant empathy and psychological perceptiveness is contrasted with Gwendolen’s ‘masculine’ desire for power. He is the only person who sees Gwendolen for what she is behind her mask of superficial pride and cheerfulness. Naturally, Gwendolen is drawn to Deronda to help her make her life more bearable. He becomes her redeemer, in the same way as he redeems her necklace which she pawns after gambling. Her letter to him contains the most moving and tear-inducing lines of the whole novel.
But, Deronda is the man with his own set of troubles. Unsure of his true identity, he struggles to find a stable niche in society. He is the medium which Eliot uses to explore the plight of London's scorned Jewish community and the emergence of Zionism, for which this novel is perhaps most famous for.
Daniel Deronda is highly symbolic novel. All those literary references to mythology, science, philosophy, religion and mysticism, which slightly irritated me at first reading, fit perfectly in the thematic framework of the novel. The characters themselves are symbols. Grandcourt symbolises the corruption and vulgarity of English aristocracy, given to reckless materialism and hedonism. His need to crush Gwendolen could be interpreted as the Empire’s colonial ambitions to conquer and enslave the population of the Third World. Deronda’s alienation is symbolically shared by the Jewish people to a broader extent, who are scattered around the world with no actual homeland and scorned by the native population of their home countries.
Overall, Daniel Deronda is a terribly exhausting but an equally rewarding read. If you are new to Eliot, I wouldn't recommend reading this first as it might put you off Eliot forever, but her earlier works such as The Mill on the Floss. -
Now here’s a book that combines two of my very favorite things: classic British romance with – YES! – Jewish themes. Marian Evans a/k/a George Eliot even went to Frankfurt am Main to do research for the book – in the times of no less than Rav Samson Rafael Hirsch! I think I’ve found a thesis topic if I ever get to graduate school. Till then, though, I’ll have to content myself with this review. No major spoilers, but it is a pretty detailed plot summary, so if you want to be 100% safe, skip to the last two paragraphs.
In the opening scene, we meet Gwendolen Harleth (as in, sounds like “harlot”) who is on a winning streak at a roulette table. Observing her is the title character, Daniel Deronda. She feels he is judging her negatively, which disconcerts her, so she begins to lose. Within the next few scenes, he takes a mysterious action which really unnerves her. And that is the last we see of him until Chapter 16.
The story then backtracks to Gwendolen’s family life, and this is the part that is most reminiscent of a Jane Austen novel (though Eliot’s prose is much denser). Gwendolen’s social position is similar to that of the Dashwood girls; she’s not rich, but she socializes in the upper class circle of a small country-town. As a character, though, she is more of an anti-heroine than heroine. Like Lydia Bennet, she’s out first and foremost for a good time, except she’s cleverer and more calculating. She wants admirers, especially male admirers, but then scorns them without caring about how many hearts she breaks. This section of the book is called “The Spoiled Child,” and George Eliot paints the hateful portrait in painstaking detail.
Enter Mr. Grandcourt. (Read grand + court = landed gentry.) He’s way too suave for Gwendolen to scorn, and her family watches their courtship with eagerness. After all, from a financial standpoint, he’s a Good Catch. But even when Gwendolen gets evidence of his rakishness, she finds she can’t resist him. They marry.
Then the novel shifts back to Daniel Deronda, a young gentleman with no clear direction. He was a serious scholar at Cambridge and proved himself to be exceptionally kind to his friends, but he lives in the shadow of not knowing who his parents are. Rumor has it that he is the illegitimate son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, the nobleman who raised him. Daniel also believes the rumors, but loves Sir Hugo too much to confront him about it. Meanwhile, Sir Hugo’s legal heir is none other than Gwendolen’s husband, Mr. Grandcourt.
In a scene I won’t dare spoil, Daniel encounters Mirah, a Jewess. She is literally a “tinok she nishbu,” a kidnapped child raised away from Judaism. When Daniel finds her, she is nineteen years old, has escaped her captors, and is in desperate search of her family. Daniel, like Harry Potter, has “a thing about saving people,” so he joins in the search, and this leads him into the Jewish communities of London and Frankfurt.
Jews, especially baalei teshuva, will appreciate if not love Chapter 32. It includes the descriptions of the Frankfurt synagogue – taken from Rav Hirsch; I just can’t get over it! – and Mirah’s passionate declaration to her Christian friends, “I will always cling to my people.” Mirah is a bit of a Mary Sue, but she gives voice to the pintele Yid that motivates all us BTs. How in the world did George Eliot know?
The rest of the novel alternates between scenes of Gwendolen in her souring marriage and scenes with the Jewish characters, which notably includes a visionary named Mordecai who is preaching religious Zionism. Daniel, the "knight errant," weaves his way through all of their lives. (Comic relief from Daniel's friend, Hans Meyrick.) Naturally, I am partial to the Jewish sections, but from a literary point of view, the portrayal of Gwendolen is the most masterful part of the novel. No character goes through as dramatic a transformation as she.
I must reiterate that George Eliot does not reach Jane Austen in terms of prose style. At times the text is so heavy and full of extraneous detail that I suspected that like Dickens, she was paid by the word. But while Dickens was making it big with Fagin, Eliot was taking on anti-Semitism, not just by creating positive Jewish characters, but by letting her Christian characters work through their prejudices in the course of the novel. That makes her a heroine in my eyes.
The scholarly introduction to my copy of the novel included some very interesting literary history. The British critics of the time panned the book for its Jewish themes. One suggested that Eliot should have left the Jews out and just called the book Gwendolen. An anonymous sequel by that title appeared a few years later, doing more or less that by killing off the Jewish characters and continuing the story of Gwendolen and Deronda. But the Jewish community’s reaction was a mirror image of the British critics'. The Jews loved the book, though some said that the romantic themes detracted from the main point of the novel, which was Zionism. And in parallel to the anonymous sequel, the German Jewish novelist Marcus Lehman adapted the book to include only the Jewish themes. I think the whole thing is pretty funny.
Personally, I loved both parts of the book – the British and the Jewish. If you’re a fan of either genre, this is a worthwhile read. And if, like me, you’re a fan of both, chances are that you’ll find in this book a lifetime favorite you’ll be happy to immerse yourself in over and over again. -
George Eliot’s tome, Daniel Deronda, was her last novel and it is anything but an easy read. Quite frequently when the narrative began to move and become quite interesting, Eliot would veer off into another direction and leave me champing at the bit to get back to the story.
Having recently read Middlemarch, I couldn’t help feeling that these characters were all pale and colorless next to those I had just left behind. The character, Daniel Deronda, was a particular puzzle to me, with reactions that did not seem to be realistic and too much of an effort to make him a type instead of an individual. Perhaps I was just too worn out with his “goodness” to really like him. Gwendolen was understandable and flawed enough to make up for it. She was both interesting and represented the most growth and change through the course of the novel.
I started this novel with a pretty serious dislike of Gwendolen, the spoiled girl, but by the end of the novel my attitude toward her had softened. I saw her as a bit of a Hardy character, caught in the awareness of her faults, without any avenue for correcting them or atoning for her sins. Without giving anything of the plot away, I cannot help admiring her resistance of giving in to the basest reaction to her situation. At the last, I think she was much harder on herself than I would have been inclined to be.
Obviously, much of the purpose of this novel is to address the place of Jewish customs and society in 19th Century Europe. Eliot appears to have some very strong feelings about the maintenance of the Jewish people as a separate identity vs. the efforts to absorb them into the Christian society, with the loss of their own specific religion, customs and heritage. I could not help reading this novel with an eye toward what came later, the holocaust and the rise of the Jewish State. I was very interested in what I saw as the struggle to understand Jews and admit them to be on equal standing with their peers. I wonder what kind of reception this got at the time it was written.
Although I recognized Eliot’s purpose being to explain and perhaps endear us to the Jewish characters, they were the characters I could least understand. Mordecai’s almost paranormal recognition of Daniel as a like soul, Mirah’s perfection (along with Daniel’s), and the coldness of Daniel’s mother make them seem less accessible. And, she cannot resist bringing in some of the oldest and most cliched stereotypes when dealing with the Cohens...the typical Jewish family.
I did find this passage from Daniel’s mother very interesting:
”Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father’s will was against it. My nature gave me a charter.”
We are confronted with the idea that a career and motherhood cannot exist side-by-side. She is the bold woman who chooses the career. She hasn’t a speck of motherly feeling. She is painted throughout the entire episode as cold and unnatural. Superwoman had not yet been invented.
While I did find this a worthy read, it cannot live up to the precedents set by Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss to my mind. I had scheduled it to read in 2015 and had to push it over to 2016, so it feels like a personal accomplishment to have it behind me. I will be thinking about it for some time, I am sure and it may be one of those novels that grows in importance as it settles on my mind. -
This was one of those long stories that in the end were worth a read. I have previously read “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, but in many ways I find “Daniel Deronda” to be a different story that is interesting in many ways.
Our main character, Gwendolen, is quite a character. She’s selfish, attention-seeking and frivolous, and in many ways she actually reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind”. I liked reading about her a lot - especially because she does change throughout the narrative - but some people might find her too repulsive to take an interest in.
The other main character is Daniel Deronda who is, in many ways, the opposite of Gwendolen. It’s very interesting to see the way his life is parallelled to Gwendolen’s; especially because his life is in many ways different from hers. He’s considerate, caring, and he develops a fondness for Jews and wants to explore their religion and way of living in spite of them being anhorred by most white Christians in the current English society.
This is an epic tale that takes devotion to get through, but while it took me some effort to read it because of its many reflections on life (oftentimes directed directly to the reader which I wasn’t that fond of), all in all I find this work to be accomplished, entertaining and very interesting! It’s definitely worth a read, and I’m happy that I got to be acquainted with Gwendolen, Daniel and the magnificent set of characters. -
While ostensibly the story of one Daniel Deronda, a young man of (we learn) unknown parentage, raised to be an educated Englishman of worth and standing, this novel is also the tale of Gwendolen Harleth, and how their lives intersect. We are introduced to both early on and see them off and on over time as they face changes within their families, their sense of self, their future.
This is my third Eliot novel. While I found some truly wonderful prose here, as I have found in the others I have read, I was left with the impression that Eliot attempted more than she could comfortably accomplish. Her character descriptions are typically excellent, some quite amusing. She is able to skewer her people both lovingly --- and not.
As an example of the first (perhaps) there is this description of Gwendolen.
And happening to be seated sideways before the long
strip of mirror between her two windows she turned to
look at herself, leaning her elbow on the back of the
chair in an attitude that might have been chosen for
her portrait. It is possible to have a strong self-love
without self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent
which is the more intense because one's own little core
of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care; but
Gwendolen knew nothing of such inward strife. She had
a naive delight in her fortunate self... (loc 972)
As for another character, Grandcourt:
when he raised his hat he showed an extensive
baldness surrounded with a mere fringe of reddish-
blond hair...; the line of feature from brow to chin
undisguised by beard was decidedly handsome, with
only moderate departures from the perpendicular, and
the slight whisker too was perpendicular. It was not
possible for a human aspect to be freer from grimace
or solicitous wrigglings; also it was perhaps not
possible for a breathing man wide awake to look less
animated....his long narrow grey eyes expressed nothing
but indifference. (loc 2507)
But after these characterizations comes the plot and here comes also what, for me, was the problem. Here it felt as if Eliot's concern for the politics and history of her story overwhelmed the narrative. That never really gelled with the basic story of the characters. The polemics overshadowed several chapters and a few of the characters, seeming to reduce them to ciphers. But Eliot is still a powerful writer and, often, a clever and beautiful writer. I didn't find her writing about the "cause" too strident. Some of it I found very appealing. But as a whole I don't think it succeeded in bringing the story of Daniel Deronda fully to life. -
My favourite Eliot so far I think and her last novel. There are two strands to the novel. There is the attraction between Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth with all its vicissitudes. Then there is the depiction of the Jews and the Jewish question. Deronda discovers his Jewish origins and goes on a journey of discovery. Eliot even ponders the idea of a Jewish homeland as Deronda is drawn into early Zionist politics. Eliot’s approach here is in contrast with other Victorian novelists; especially Dickens and Trollope. Eliot does illustrate some of the tensions within society with the reaction of some of the other characters to Deronda as he explores his Jewish roots.
There have been attempts and proposals to amend the novel to maintain only one theme. Leavis felt the Jewish section was weak and should be removed to focus on Deronda and Harleth. Some Jewish commentators have felt that the Deronda/Harleth sections should be removed. The TV adaptation in 2002 focused on Deronda and Harleth and there was virtually no mention of the Lapidoths. Eliot certainly reflects the general attitudes towards the Jews in society at the time. The character of Mordecai is an interesting one and is based on Emanuel Deutsch. He reflects the mysticism and visionary nature of early Zionism. Of course Eliot is still a Victorian novelist and doesn’t mention circumcision, although maybe she does indirectly:
“If his father had been wicked – Daniel inwardly used strong words, for he was feeling the injury done him as a maimed boy feels the crushed limb which for others is merely reckoned in an average of accidents – if his father had done any wrong, he wished it might never be spoken of to him: it was already a cutting thought that such knowledge might be in other minds.”
Deronda does come across as being rather too good, perhaps with a bit of a saviour complex with messianic overtones:
“Persons attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had done, in proportion to the possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with some sort of redeeming influence; and he had to resist an inclination, easily accounted for, to withdraw coldly from the fortunate.”
Eliot also uses other tropes. The relationship between Gwendolen and her husband Grandcourt is a case in point, being a play on Ovid’s version of Diana and Actaeon (it has the archery, virginity and hunting) and the use of water at the end also fits, even if in an inverted way. The relationship is also an example of what would now be called Coercive Control:
“Of what use was the rebellion within her? She could say nothing that would not hurt her worse than submission. Turning slowing and covering herself again, she went to her dressing-room. As she reached out the diamonds it occurred to her that her unwillingness to wear them might have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt that she had some knowledge about them which he had not given her. She fancied that his eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How could she be defiant? She had nothing to say that would touch him—nothing but what would give him a more painful grasp on her consciousness.”
And:
“He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them his,” she said to herself, as she opened the jewel-case with a shivering sensation.
“It will come to be so with me; and I shall quail. What else is there for me? I will not say to the world, ‘Pity me.'”
It is also worth remembering Said’s critique of this novel saying:
"Eliot uses the plight of the Jews to make a universal statement about the nineteenth century's need for a home"
Said finds Deronda’s departure for the East as:
“uncomfortably close to the imperial adventurism common among Englishmen of his time and class, who go off to the colonies to find a role and make a reputation”
It’s an interesting and complex discussion which doesn’t take away from the greatness of the novel. This has been a bit of a rambling tour round some of the issues. Despite a few flaws I really enjoyed this. -
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.” -
Oh dear, I was supposed to be rereading this over a couple of months with a book group... but it's so darn gripping even on a second read that I've ended up rushing ahead and finishing it due to the proverbial 'couldn't put it down'...
My original review is below but on this reread I was struck by the extent to which Eliot seems to be setting up sections that duplicate well-known literary scenarios: the section where Grandcourt leases the 'great house' and sets off marital expectations and plans in local families is so Pride & Prejudice, and there's a Sense & Sensibility feel a little later . But Eliot sets up these comparisons only to knock them down: a far harsher social reality is given rein in this book, and we have a portrait of one of the scariest marriages, surely, in literature.
Motifs of women singing and acting tie the two main stories together in interesting ways, inviting us to compare and contrast Gwen and Mirah (), and the ending is left somewhat open, albeit in a satisfying way.
I can get anxious rereading a beloved book in case it doesn't stand up so well a second time - no problem here, this is still both a wonderful read and a radical departure for the Victorian novel.
-------------------------------------------------------
Although academically Middlemarch is always regarded as Eliot's masterpiece, I've always thought this novel deserves the title. The characters are nuanced and it's important that Gwendolen starts off as being a conventional spoilt beauty because that makes her growth and change all the more compelling and significant.
As a woman writing in 19th century England, Eliot bravely highlights the impacts of poverty and the implications for women who are forced to prostitute themselves effectively in the marriage market, since a career is out of the question. This is the dark underside of Jane Austen and an important antidote to that sunny view of male/female relationships and the economic reality behind them.
The other brave element in this book is the theme of Jewishness which was glossed over in most of the literature of this period. It is the clash and interraction of the two related prejudices of gender and race/religion that give this book its resonance and importance and its relevance to today. -
(Thursday) It may take me a while to review this - I am en route to Scotland for a walking weekend and in any case I'm not sure anything I say can do it justice.
(Sunday) Daniel Deronda is Eliot's last novel, and I have wanted to read it ever since reading
Sophie and the Sybil by
Patricia Duncker a couple of years ago. In that book Duncker reimagined the circumstances that led Eliot to create the book, and Sophie has much in common with the wilful and impulsive Gwendolen Harleth, one of Eliot's two major characters.
The book is big, complex and surprisingly modern at times, telling the parallel but ultimately separate stories of Gwendolen and Daniel. Daniel has been brought up as the ward of an English gentleman, and the story is largely about his rediscovery of his Jewish roots.
I don't want to say too much more at this stage because the book is the subject of a group discussion at Reading the Chunksters for the next couple of months, and I don't want to preempt that discussion. -
Eliot is a master of characterization and uses this gift well in exploring two important themes in English society. The first and most unique is that of antisemitism in late 19th Century English life, as well as the beginnings of Zionism. The second theme is altruism vs. egotism. Too verbose and tangential at times, but otherwise a hugely ambitious and successful social novel.
. -
I've learned two things:
1. Briefly, I am Gwendolyn
2. I can never listen to a George Eliot novel again. I love her writing. She's so eloquent, but she's so verbose that I just zone out.
I'm DNF at chapter 56. I've decided I do not care what happens to any of these characters. I probably should have read the book.
2017 Reading Challenge: a book mentioned in another book
2/22/19
Ebook reread
Nope it wasn't the audio version. This really is the worst Eliot novel I've read. So many pages for so little plot. So let down -
This ambitious novel melds the stories of two very different characters, so perhaps it's appropriate that the novel itself seems a hybrid of a little bit of a lot of what we expect from 19th-century British novelists: the sensational melodrama of Wilkie Collins; the perfection of 'good' characters a la Dickens, along with his humor and irony (though Eliot's is more subtle); the satire of marriage customs and the problem of moneymaking for females who are trained to be helpless, reminiscent of the arguably-18th-century Austen; and the morality, compassion and authorial asides of Eliot herself. As only one example of the latter, Eliot literally excuses the faults of most of the characters (excepting the one true villain of the work) in sentences as superfluous as Gwendolen's younger half-sisters.
I was intrigued by Chapter 11 whereby we 'hear' the thoughts between the spoken words of Gwen and Grandcourt upon their first meeting. Since it's early on, I hoped for more such innovation in its prose. But it is ideas, more than any other element, that are much more in the forefront, especially in the case of its eponymous character, who is obviously a Jesus-figure. He's not the only one who is almost too perfect and it's a bit of a relief for the 21st-century reader when one of these characters suffers understandable jealousy, seemingly her only 'fault'.
Literary (as well as artistic and political) allusions abound and I enjoyed those that I caught -- classical mythology and
The Divine Comedy stand out for me. Reading this novel is to know Eliot's brilliance and her genius. -
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. -
This is one of my favorite books. George Eliot probably has to be one of the best authors that I have ever read. Her psychological insight into each character is so amazing and her analysis of human nature is quite profound. Gwendolen Harleth, much as you despise her, is very vividly portrayed and there is an interesting reality in all of her words and actions. She is a revealing character and, though most people do not have her outright selfishness, yet I think most could relate to some of her characteristics to a greater or lesser degree. Daniel Deronda, on the other hand, though he is sometimes considered "too perfect" is actually another very well done character. His compassion and kindness are balanced hand by his indecisive, rather vacillating nature throughout the book. The plot is interesting and has several twists to it. I love this book and was sorry to be finished with it and look forward to reading it again.
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Daniel Deronda centres around several characters. It relates to an intersection of Jewish and Gentile society in 19th century England. With references to Kaballah, Jewish identity and the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. Gwendolen Harleth a spoiled but poised and spirited of a family of recently impoverished English gentry enters into a loveless marriage for money, with the cold Mr Grandcourt., but soon sickens of his emotional sadism. The novel centres around Gwendolen as much as it does around Daniel Deronda. It takes us through the lives of both major character's pasts ., before joining the two narratives into the present so to speak.
Daniel Deronda is the adopted son of an English aristocrat, with who Gwendolyn falls in love. Deronda rescues the beautiful Jewish actress and singer Mirah Lapidoth from suicide by drowning, introducing us to another interesting and endearing character. He then becomes intimately involved with the society of English Jewry.
Deronda later discovers his Jewish birth from his dying mother who was the daughter of a prominent Rabbi, who married her cousin. Deronda's story therefore as that of a Jew brought up as a Gentile aristocrat before discovering his identity and committing himself to the national welfare of his people is partly based on that of Moses.
The book puts some focus, mainly through conversation on the yearning of the Jewish people to return to the Holy Land to rebuild the Jewish Commonwealth. Deronda and Mirah later leave
England to help rebuild the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. This component of the novel has lead some prejudiced bigots, such as the loathsome Edward Said to condemn this 1876 classic as `Zionist propaganda'-an Orwellian charge indeed.
People like Said cannot abide the anything that relates to the right of the Jews to live in and return to their ancient homeland.
At the time of this novel's writing progressives saw the revival of nations and national self-determination as a positive thing. It was only nearly a century later that the nihilistic New Left in a sick and bizarre twist began to label the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland as an act of `colonialism'. -
Thanks to getting my book study group to read this book, I read and studied it.
People are very intimidated by length. So one person who typically reads everything didn't read this one. Others read but criticized, e.g., "needed an editor," "repetitive," or excessively wordy. One person, though, completed it in record time, and another has become an Eliot fan and has taken up Middlemarch.
The fiction I've read lately has tended to been written for the lowest common denominator, been of limited accessibility, or been such that I can see the puppet master working the strings behind the scenes. In contrast, I thought Daniel Deronda was wonderful. Not one word too many. Wise. Nourishing.
I was motivated by being a Jew to read this one. I had some faint idea of the thrust of the book, and that's why I read it (with a Jewish book study group) and not, say, Middlemarch. And I loved it. But, as I said, other group members didn't necessarily feel the same.
It took me about two months.
Now the book first focuses on the character of Gwendolyn, a spoiled rich girl. And focuses and focuses and focuses. We meet her when she's just had a gambling loss and, on the heels of that, finds out her family has lost its fortune. She's no longer a rich girl. Then we have her back story. That's the part that seemed to go on and on.
When were we going to meet the presumably Jewish guy, the title character, Daniel Deronda?
I didn't go to Wikipedia until just a day or two ago, after I had finished. I found out that Gwendolyn has been critically hailed as a key character in all of English lit. Deronda, though, has been considered "flat."
I think the critic's -- or reader's -- interests have to be considered here. The typical reader is just not that interested in the guy who is going to turn out to be the Jew.
He has been described as "too good." Well, he does have a moral compass, that's for sure. What's interesting to me is that he (or the omniscient author) thinks everything through. He lives the examined life. But when we meet him, he lacks a purpose. He's something of a dilettante. He's also something of a seducer, albeit one who seduces by being caring or sympathetic, but still! He's rather brilliant. He's overly attached and loyal to his guardian, Sir Hugo Malinger, perhaps occupying a position relative to Sir Hugo that's similar to Mr. Lush's (ugh!) position with regard to Henleigh Grandcourt (double ugh!). Is some of Deronda "flatness" that he simply doesn't conform to readers' expectations for a Jew? Or, more likely, that the critic doesn't understand or care that much about Deronda's journey?
I get it. He's a minority, so often awarded the consolation prize of "goodness" or "spirituality," etc. by the hegemonic class. Like Indians in England, or Native Americans and African Americans in America. Or women, for that matter. But is that particular consolation prize often awarded to a Jew? Hmm. If so in this case, George Eliot certainly goes to a lot of trouble over him.
I initially had something akin to the attitude that Deronda was too good, but less so as I read on. Hey! He works for me. The connection between Deronda and Gwendolyn: that's the thing. It works!
Take Gwendolyn: she is just a child. She's barely 21 when the action starts. And subsequent events don't go her way. She fails an ethical test. She is out-"crueled" by Grandcourt. She suffers and experiences temptation. She ends up having had a trauma. She resolves to do better. But, is she a tragic heroine? Would her role work without Deronda?
Maybe the critic has it backwards. Maybe it's the other way around. Consider that Gwendolyn may have been put in to hold the interest of readers who don't much care about the Jew, Jewish things, or, much less, the Jewish people. They don't know what Mordecai is waxing eloquent about and aren't that interested in finding out, if they even think anything is really there. For them we have a beautiful but selfish young English lady who gets her comeuppance and has her heart broken so maybe the light can shine in. In this viewpoint, she's there to keep readers hooked who don't comprehend George Eliot's major theme.
Who knows? Maybe Rex will show up again in Gwendolyn's future.
Deronda's love interest, the beautiful "Jewess" Mirah Lapidoth, is closer to meeting that criticism of too much goodness. She's well nigh perfect, even though abuse doesn't usually turn people into saints. Well, she does eventually exhibit a fault: jealousy.
By the way, this review may not spoil the book for you. I know somebody who (had the nerve to) first read Cliffsnotes to handle his intimidation by the book. And he said that didn't spoil the book for him. The villainy of Grandcourt, for instance, couldn't even be hinted at by Cliffsnotes, yet jumps off the page in the real thing.
I wouldn't recommend the Cliffsnotes thing, though.
Stop reading if you're worried about spoilers.
The book is a reservoir of wisdom. In fact I thought the book was a mixture of old (1876 vintage) and new, since some of the opinions and explanations the author inserts apply in the present and recent times (well, in my life) as well. For instance, like the young who can't be influenced for the better by their elders, but who find counsel (not to mention chemistry) with a member of their own generation. Like the expectation of another, older relative that you (the reader) will be obliged to carry on their uncompleted life task. Like the romantic delusions of a young woman as to her power and influence once bound by matrimony. It's surprising that these tidbits and musings hold water today; they do so through the power of literature.
This is the only book the author wrote about her own (Victorian) times. So it's not a historical novel in the usual sense. To us it's history, but it was her present.
Some of the stuff that may seem unrealistic to the average reader is real. For example, the hatred of being a Jew by Daniel's mother. I have seen this before, in the person of Rahel Varnhagan von Ense, née Levin, who, earlier in the same century, held a major Enlightenment salon in Vienna. These women were caught between a rock and a hard place: being emancipated yet not acceptable to society. If George Eliot knew about such things, it's because she'd done her homework.
Or the role of Jewish women in the theater. That too is real. "Rachel," referenced early in Daniel Deronda is Elisa-Rachel Félix (1820-1858). And there's "the divine Sarah" (Sarah Bernhardt). These were stars who attracted both love and loathing. Apparently there was a preHollywood connection between Jews and the stage.
And Herr Klesmer! So, a Jew could be allowed in society if he were a genius or a prodigy.
The antisemitic ideas sprinkled throughout this book prevent a version of what we'd call color-blindness if we were talking about Black people. Despite how uncomfortable the expression of these ideas might be for the average reader, to leave them out would constitute a genteel erasure.
For those who are fond of calling out antisemitism, here's a chance to see that not all who voice it are "evil." There can be good people who haven't had occasion to think otherwise. This book could be such an occasion.
Why I included this book on my "bibliotherapeutic" shelf:
The dominant message to Jews from Western civilization is not a pleasant one, and sometimes that's all one hears. It's woven throughout literature and art.
Depressing.
It's widely believed that with victimhood comes power.
But power thus derived is a poison pill. If you can help it, don't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Daniel Deronda lets us hear another message emanating from society.
These days, it's derided, associated with crazy Dispensationalist fundamentalists, and made fun of by my peers (sometimes including Jews whom I think don't know any better). That's the way it's swept under the rug.
It's good to hear there's a secondary message. Even if it's not dominant, it's there.
Thank you, George Eliot.
This book is an addition to two of my sub-genres. First, the category of Jews who were raised not knowing they were Jews. I have read four or five of those, but if I'm not mistaken, this is the first one that isn't post-Holocaust. It may also be my first such account that's a fiction. Second, the category of a young protagonist impacted and changed by the influence of someone in their own generation -- important to me since I myself had that experience.
I need a sixth star to rate this one. -
A masterpiece.
-
As I said in an update, I'm very much of the same opinion as the critics who stated that this book ought to have been titled Gwendolen Harleth and done without Daniel's personal part of the story. Gwendolen was an incredibly well-written character and her development over the course of the story was super compelling, as was Eliot's depiction of an emotionally abusive relationship. Her relationship with Daniel was also really interesting as she built up his influence in her head and came to rely so much on the scant conversations they had.
This opinion might just be because I found a lot of the religious and philosophical musings in the Daniel/Mordecai part of the book to be extremely difficult to understand and wade through. Eliot's language was also more convoluted than I'm used to, even having read a lot of Victorians, and sometimes I frankly just did not understand what she was saying. I am sure that smarter people have a lot to say about the book's Zionism, but readers should definitely note that it is present.
Mirah and the Meyricks were excessively saccharine in the way that only female characters in Victorian lit can be - this was even more annoying than usual because of its contrast to how real and complex Gwendolen was. Daniel's mother was also extremely interesting.
I'm glad I read this but parts of it were a huge struggle. Maybe I'm just not as smart as I used to be. -
Destined to eternally live in the shadow of Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda has the unfortunate problem of having to forge a path of its own while locked in the sphere of Jupiter’s gravity; but don’t be fooled by its obscurity, it is an absolutely formidable novel by any definition, and it may in fact be the more ambitious of the two. Each and every one of Eliot’s paragraphs is a work of art: a miniature essay of rigorous thinking, structured with beginning, middle and end; Deronda is a book with sentences that feel as though they were carved from marble and polished into a sculpted high-renaissance masterpiece. Eliot’s writing astounds me. She was from a different planet. All the superlatives. Honestly, if I gave her a pound for every time I mumbled “f**cking hell” in amazement to myself while reading this book she’d soon have been financially stable enough to sack off her whole novel-writing lark and then spend the rest of her life driving gold-plated convertible Lamborghinis really slowly along the seafront in Dubai and decorating her living room in the tasteful styles of Mar-a-Lago. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about from Chapter 69:
There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forgot all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling fiery visitation. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of unrelenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private consolation.
This is madness. The whole 850-page book is like this. (Although there are countless examples of writing like this in Daniel Deronda, I would say that the above passage is the clincher when it comes to Eliot flirting with the sublime. It will be this specific extract that I’ll remember more vividly than any other from the whole book, not least because it – as accurately as I can imagine is possible – describes the oh-so-relatable feeling of bum squeaking dread and horror you experience when Air Traffic Control unexpectedly, and yet inevitably, chop 10 miles off your arrival routing just after you make initial contact with them on the Stansted approach frequency: “err, gear down please, captain…”)
Unfortunately, in Daniel Deronda these incredible writing efforts are sometimes directed just slightly off target, like a shiny new skyscraper constructed just in time to rise out of the city and meet the economic stagnation of the great recession. And as is generally agreed, not all of it works: It is glacially paced, for one thing, and in the time it took me to read it the Elizabethan era came to an end, three Prime Ministers have come and gone, I’ve been to Mordor and back, and the seasons have blended from high Summer into the stirrings of winter. Likewise, I wouldn’t say that the representation of Jewish people is offensive given that it is intended flatteringly (it’s certainly a world away from Fagin and other 19th-century fare), but even so, it’s still a portrayal that feels slightly reductive and somewhat basic to someone of my North London roots. I’d also argue that when a book is this purist in its ambitions to represent detailed realism it must be held to a higher standard when it comes to narrative coincidences and it does bother me that every time a character travels outside of Britain, they run into someone from their immediate social group by pure chance.
Deronda is weakened by flaws like these, but it isn’t ruined by them, and these slight misjudgements are a small price to pay for what is, in truth, a book with some amazing and unique qualities. Come the ending I felt quite moved by the whole thing – there is an unignorable emotional force in Eliot’s lone voice of calm and reason, speaking resolutely and independently against the seas of 19th-century antisemitism. Perhaps if more books like this were written when we had the chance the horrors of what would later come to pass might not have been.
As it happens, when writing Deronda, Eliot took some inspiration from Wagner’s Opera The Flying Dutchman. The Dutchman is a sailor made homeless by a curse which prevents him from setting foot on dry land except for one short trip once every seven years. In the Dutchman’s metaphorical curse Eliot saw the destabilising, lonely plight of the eternally stateless Jewish people, and the Jewish characters in Deronda come and go in a similar manner, doomed to eternal wandering. She was fascinated by Wagner’s art and even met him in 1877 (a year after Deronda was published). Despite earning his place as quite possibly the most important artist of the 19th century, Wagner was, of course, one of the most notable antisemites in history (among so many other things). I like to think that with Deronda Eliot was playing him at his own games, and you could take her book as a gentle but firm correction to his ideology. It’s a work directly influenced by his style but also a rebuff of his flaws. Eliot is ingeniously using Wagner’s own miraculous art against him. I wonder if he ever read it? - I like to imagine so.
It saddens me that Deronda only has 24,685 Goodreads ratings where Middlemarch has 150,590. Middlemarch truly is a masterpiece and even though I believe both these figures should be higher I think it is particularly unfair that Deronda should be saddled with the fate of being the neglected book it appears to have become. George Eliot leaves writers like Jane Austen in the dust every single time, without fail, yet, still Pride & Prejudice sits there on its pedestal chilling out with 3,746,957 votes…
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This is probably one of the most frustrating books that I've had to review since coming to GR. I enjoyed it tremendously, in parts; and parts of it left me rather bored and wanting to put the book down. But for some reason, I couldn't ... and I persevered ... and I think I'm glad I did.
.
I say that only because while the Jewish Question left me rather befuddled as to what Eliot was trying to accomplish here, the parallel stories of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda are captivating in their own right.
Gwendolen is probably one of the most "modern" of women to come out of the Victorian writing scene -- her dilemma seems as suited to many women today, as it was to the condition of marriage in Victorian times. While I see that young women are seemingly moving forward independently with their lives, I see just as many who stay in sour and heartbreaking relationships because of financial reasons ... (and sometimes "because of the children"). Despite the magnificent strides we've made towards equality, there are many who struggle just as Gwendolen did. Her quest for autonomy, and self, mirror the angst I hear today: that search for "self-rule" hasn't lost any momentum in the 140+ years since this book was first published.
In a parallel line, Daniel struggles with his own identity, his sense of self having been robbed by not knowing the conditions or origins of his birth. In an ironic twist of fate, as can only happen in novels, he is, by birth, exactly who he wants to be: born of Jewish parents with the birthright he had longed to claim, and which now is rightfully his.
I'm completely befuddled with Eliot's attempt to inject the morality of Jewish nationalism and mysticism, especially as it is done in such a heavy-handed way. The reader finds it a struggle to weave through her convoluted reasoning -- more so because it doesn't feel that Eliot really knows what she wants to say. She simply jumps on a soap box, every 5 or 6 chapters, and rants to her heart's content, but to no purpose really.
At the centre of this Jewish reclamation is Mordecai a "consumptive visionary", whose physical condition seems to mimic the strength of Eliot's own argument: he is weakening, dying, struggling for air, and never seems to stay on point. He leaves his legacy to be picked up by Daniel -- upon whom it is thrust. It is interesting to note that Mordecai thrusts the weight of the future on someone only newly-revealed to the faith, and who himself struggles simply to understand it, let alone pick up its banner. Daniel's passion is real, if somewhat misdirected, for by his own admission, he knows not what he is doing.
The theme of consumption also rears its head in Gwendolen's life: consumed by her guilt for having robbed another woman of her due, she anguishes and withers into a mere shadow of her former self and is saved only by Daniel's faith in her. It is an irony in itself -- for she is saved by another man and not by her own strength: it is Daniel's faith in her that allows her to send him a letter to say "I will survive" rather than any intrinsic value she has garnered in herself.
It is little wonder I felt exhausted by this book: much like many of the characters, I struggled for breath between chapters, finding myself symbolically gasping/grasping for connecting ideas. They do eventually come, but one has to work really hard at achieving this knowledge.
This is not the usual George Eliot novel: I find reading her books as easy as falling off a log, into a slowly moving river; in this one, you fall into raging whitewater and struggle to keep from drowning in her convoluted ideology.
Nonetheless ...
I can't get Gwendolen or Daniel out of my head and find myself constantly re-evaluating what Eliot might have meant.
I suppose it deserves a re-read, and I must admit, will probably do just that. But also, probably not any time soon.
When I figure it all out, I'll come back to these pages to correct this rambling review. -
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. -
Daniel Deronda is not an easy book to read. If Middlemarch is a masterpiece of 19th century realism, Deronda is something else altogether. Like its predecessor, the narrative follows two main protagonists: Deronda, a young Englishman of uncertain parentage, and Gwendolen Harleth, a pretty, at times vain and spoiled daughter of a well-off family. The two meet by chance at the gambling hall of a swanky European watering place, where Gwendolen is doing her best to live in fashionable dissipation. The gentlemanly Deronda discreetly helps her when she loses everything at the roulette table. He doesn’t know that she is, in a sense, a runaway, and that her reason for being so is perfectly honorable. Gwendolen may share certain qualities with the shallow Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, but she is not entirely devoid of a sense of honor.
Gwendolen has been running away from one Henleigh Grandcourt, a rich, indolent playboy who is only one life away from inheriting vast estates and a peerage. Everyone, including her widowed mother and country parson uncle think that he is a splendid catch for her. Except that Gwendolen has secretly found out that he had fathered a number of illegitimate children with another woman, whom he is now ready to discard to be able to marry her. As long as her family remains well off, she has no pressing need to marry, and she keeps fending him off. But then all the family money is lost in a speculative bubble, and what can a pretty, essentially uneducated girl of modest talents do? She wants to sing for her supper, but is told that she is not talented and tough enough to be a professional singer. The only other alternative is to be a governess, a desperate option that she despises. She is too dutiful a daughter to let her beloved mother and sisters live poorly in a dinky cottage. Therefore, she (with a little nudge from her newly impoverished family) convinces herself that after all, Grandcourt is a suitable husband material. He seems pliable enough, and with her beauty and forceful personality, she figures out that she will have the upper hand in that marriage. She is unaware that in Eliot’s universe, marriage is a noose and a husband likes to be master. Soon, she finds herself at the mercy of the possessive, passive-aggressive Grandcourt, a control freak of the first order who is jealous of his wife’s emotional dependence on Deronda.
Gwendolen is an interesting character and her dysfunctional relationship with her husband is morbidly fascinating, but the Deronda side of the narrative suffers from the lack of character development. Deronda accidentally rescues a suicidal girl, Mirah, a Jewess who had ran away from her abusive father to find her family in London. He brings her to live with the family of Hans Meyrick, a painter friend whom he has helped in the past. In the course of searching for her long-lost relatives, Deronda develops an interest in Judaism, and under the influence of Mordecai, Mirah’s terminally ill brother, even becomes a Zionist sympathizer. But how can a goyim be a (proto) Zionist and also win the hand of Mirah the Jewess (who, despite being attracted to him is dead set against miscegenation)? Cue a letter from Deronda’s long lost mother, now Contessa Maria Alcharisi, who informs him that he IS a Jew (duh). She had given him up to be raised as an English gentleman when she decided to pursue her singing ambition.
The character of the Contessa is probably the most interesting one in the Deronda strand, although she immediately exits the stage after discharging her plot duties. Among the three women who aspire to be singing stars (Gwendolen, Mirah and herself), the Contessa is the only one who manages to succeed. But to achieve it she had to abandon her son, family and race. Success for a woman always comes at a price, often a steep one.
Deronda himself, despite being given lengthy, sometimes rambling monologues, is oddly amorphous as a character. We know that he is a rescuer of distressed damsels, and that he is almost saintly, but other than that he is a blank. Even his transformation from an English gentleman to a committed Zionist is not entirely convincing. It doesn’t help that the parts in which Eliot expounds about Judaism are perhaps aesthetically among the weakest in the book. It is mostly done through Mordecai’s rambling about ‘ruach-ha-kodesh’ and other bits of Jewish lore, as well as through scenes of a meeting, where talking heads discuss --- rather abstrusely --- proto-Zionist ideas. Eliot clearly had researched the subject extensively, but the regurgitated knowledge that she presents to the reader is patchy and quite tedious to read. Mordecai himself is so much the Suffering Jew that he virtually has no personality, a fact that holds true for most of the Jewish characters. It is surely laudable that Eliot strived to present Jewish characters in a positive light in the midst of rampant anti-Semitism in Victorian Britain, but what is gained in positive characterization is lost in the believability of the characters themselves. The Jews are too busy being model minorities to be real people.
Meanwhile, Gwendolen’s increasingly creepy husband drags her across Europe on a trip, which primary object seems to be to put the farthest distance between her and Deronda. While boating off Genoa, he accidentally drowns, thus releasing Gwendolen from the ‘empire of fear’ that he had created. Deronda, who happens to be there to meet his mother, rescues her. He notes that, while she herself did not do the deed, she actively desired her husband’s death. He also discovers that, in a vindictive move, Grandcourt had altered his will to prevent Gwendolen from inheriting the bulk of his property, bequeathing it to his illegitimate son instead. The novel’s end is inconclusive; Gwendolen learns to stoically accept her situation and Deronda, after marrying Mirah, sets off for Palestine.
Despite a happy ending for Deronda and Mirah, the tone of the novel is somber, with very little of the sarcastic wit and humor that enliven Middlemarch. At certain parts, Eliot seems to abandon realism and descends into melodrama and insipid characterization, which makes it hard to continue reading. If you absolutely have to read one Eliot novel, pick
Middlemarch instead.
3.5 stars. -
Daniel Deronda has been on my list for a loooong time and it was so satisfying to finish it. Especially since I have been listening to the audiobook on and off for months (competing library holds) and finally finished sight-reading it. Eliot is a wise author, and I love the gentle tone of her narrative voice. I struggle a bit with a certain character (Gwendolen) but much of that is due to Eliot's realism.
For those like me who met the story via the adaptation, know that the book not only provides much more background on the characters, but also a lot of end matter that the miniseries didn't adapt (there's about another episode's worth of content).
Compared to Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda just doesn't do for me personally what Middlemarch did. Such are the vagaries of taste. In all honesty I think the two meet each other in quality (though in my not-so-humble opinion, no one comes close to Eliot in British novelcraft). Yet, Middlemarch spoke to my soul in a way Daniel Deronda didn't. There are preachy sections of Daniel Deronda that are absent from Middlemarch, because Eliot heroically bears the standard of justice in a dyed-in-the-wool antisemitic society.
The literary doppelgangers in this novel provided much food for thought. What struck me the most was Gwendolen and Mirah's father, with their mutual gambling problems foiling the life choices they made. Gwendolen and also had more than a few similarities. Eliot leaves things open-ended except for a few characters, though changes have occurred. I must admit to being quite relieved when . I hate feeling like that but he was the most loathsome character. In future reads I would like to focus more on the character of Ezra. There's a lot to him I haven't plumbed yet, especially why Eliot writes him as ill and dying.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Deronda and hope to read it again. More than anything, it made me want to re-read Middlemarch. -
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.
'Daniel Deronda' is an uncomfortable book, and it will be uncomfortable so long as antisemitism exists. The work posits no questions (where did the hatred for Jewish people come from?) and delivers no answers (how did the fictional scene of casual wishes for antisemitic extermination set the stage for the Shoah?), but instead serves as a marker stone, one of the more prominent in English literature. DD is, as the introduction likes to babble on about, an imperfect work, but much as it doesn't matter if my students get ten questions perfect if the time was allotted for them to do sixty, Evans is working on a higher tier than the vast majority of novelists of both her time, those preceding, and even some of the future. Full of bad faith and undermining that both the introduction and end notes are, the editor does see fit to draw comparisons to Baldwin, who similarly posited neither answers nor solutions to the antiblackness that continues to throttle his questions of origin. Evans' warning is nowhere near as dire, but it is a portrait of warning nonetheless, as with nationalism comes country, and with country comes internationally recognized means of enacting justice. It will take another seven decades after DD for Eichmann to be extradited to Israel, but like any society aware of the hierarchy, the English like their underbelly safely digested in the history books and the scriptures, a people eradicated before a people can come again.
Gwendolyn had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection[.]
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.
He had no idea of a moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he had been told it, that they may be a resentment and disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt themselves or find a supercilious advantage.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?
This novel, more than any other I've encountered, illustrates by slow and steady degrees the concepts of the gendered spheres of influence and their artificially constructed realms of influence. Gwendolyn is the interior by conventional rote, Daniel's is the exterior by comparatively obscene freedom, and the tales told of wives and their husbands have all the reliability of the myth of the American Dream, wherein one is raised through a sacrifice of millions and used as proof of quantitative success. Grandcourt is the pinnacle of English civilization, complete with a surname reminiscent of those countries of Norman conquest, and that place on high births a sadistic, phlegmatic patriarch, replete with dictatorial leisure and socipolitical control so fine one can will understand the origins of Big Brother. As such, this is not a comfortable novel by any means, as it affords men the purest presentation of the powers they may execute and the women the purest experience of how said powers are executed upon them. This is the case for both Christian and Jewish, as the person who wrote in the introduction that all the Jewish are constructed as literal angels never looked at Klemser, or Lapidoth, or Leonora Halm-Eberstein, or any of the minor characters who argued and solicited and otherwise lived their lives in countries that had made plain to them that Jewish people did not and would never belong other than as dissolved and destroyed cultural curiosities to be claimed as heritage by and neoliberal type: the last incremental functioning of a sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive genocide.
[H]e never did choose to kick any animal, because the act of kicking is a compromising attitude, and a gentleman's dog should be kicked for him.
Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit should change precisely at the point of matrimony.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 fixed recipe.
The problem most readers probably have with this book is that there are no sinners and there are no saints; there are only systems and how well the individual survives their intersections. Gwendolyn is a Christian mirror to a Jewish couple, and each woman looks on the other as an object of abject envy while entrapped within their respective patriarchal entrapments. No woman who plays the game ever comes out a saint, and all an author such as Evans can do is tell the truth about such human beings. This is best expressed, much as Tanizaki did with
I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play — grand, with an iron will...But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.
Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father's will was against it.
Naomi and Smith with
On Beauty, by putting the pathos on the side of the close third person male narrator and the ethos and logos on the side of the little to none embodied yet still powerfully outspoken female side character/narrator obsession. There is nothing cruel or dehumanizing in letting a representative of a demographic whom the author will never be able to truly represent to speak for themselves, and if if the fates of Gwendolyn and other characters do not seem "feminist" (I have to say, 2000 pounds a year now, converted 161k pounds a year now, converted to 223k dollars, isn't bad at all), it is because, once again, feminism is being interpreted as once again stuffing a human being into a complex ideal instead of being allowed to make mistakes, compromise, and survive through the ugly tenacity such systems of gender intersected with religion intersected with historical persecution breeds among their populations. When Evans ended where she did, she had a hope that the life sustaining Jewish tracts of Ezra, replete with all the complications of Jewish human beings such as Leonara, Mirah, and Lapidoth, had outweighed all the casual wishes of extermination espoused by the perfectly bred English type. The English system may permit the Jewish to survive, but such a situation that rendered such permission of utmost necessity should never have existed in the first place.She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that 'anybody' regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers.
In the end, there are Jewish people marrying Christian people, despite the accusations of racism (one, race is far too young to meld with such a beast as antisemitism; two, antisemitism has persisted so long as to to formulate a veritable enclave of common DNA, so pardon the wariness of the oppressed and do something about the alt-right/Neo-Nazis kthx), necessary critiques of Evans' portrayals of Judaism (however much the editor attempts to undermine such credible evaluations), and an unwritten half, easy, of a book devoted to further adventures of Gwendolyn Harleth and Daniel Deronda. I wish all authors had been half as brave with their last novel, for to go out on a limb for those with little to no political power, all for the sake of a common humanity, very rarely puts food on the table. This work is, in essence, an antithesis to Tolstoy's rant in W&P's epilogue that the printing press had doomed humanity, but it does not mean DD does not stoop to using lazy metaphors for the sake of narrative impetus, or that it was a gripping ride for every one of its 900 pages. What it means is that it undertakes the dull and demoralizing work of fending off the sea lions and status quo critics and other passively murderous sorts long enough for a stereotype to become flesh and bone and bring hope to those who have been condemned to live in that stereotype for seeming perpetuity. If more authors of the past, which no personal identity stake in the matter), had taken it upon themselves to raise up those who are customarily beaten down, we may never have had a Shoah at all. The evil lies not with the imperfect life, but with the complacency that views both said life and its representations and says, oh well. It will never happen to me.
I can't say that he is not active in imagining what goes on in other people—but then he always imagines it to fit his own inclination.
Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honoured and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbours do not admire us.That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned what is.
Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans: no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way[.]
[T]here will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to – which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophising.
To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from a bridge beyond the cornfields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us. -
I've been trying to put my finger on why I found
Daniel Deronda so much more effort to read than
Middlemarch and
Adam Bede. It is just as psychologically insightful and cleverly characterised. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood for it? I found the characters interesting but not as compelling as Dorothea and the plot a little slow. I remembered the broad outline of what happened from the 2002 BBC adaptation. This starred Hugh Dancy as Daniel and Romola Garai as Gwendolen, both brilliantly cast. These memories undermined some of the suspense, I think, although they also encouraged me to read the book in the first place.
Nonetheless, I never considered giving up as the writing is so polished and the characterisation so astute. Gwendolen Harleth is a striking, well-realised, and appealingly unlikeable character, if that isn't too much of an oxymoron. Her similarities to Daniel's mother and the man she marries are deftly shown. I liked her distinctive manner of speech and ironic wit:
"Say what you have to say without apologising, please," said Gwendolen, with the air she might have bestowed on a dog-stealer come to claim a reward for finding the dog he had stolen.
Although the book is named after Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen does her best to dominate it. The split between their perspectives seems particularly clever after reading the introduction in the Penguin edition I got from the library. This discusses the initial reception of the novel, which was published in instalments. The first couple were largely concerned with Gwendolen and hold little hint of Daniel's later path. I found Daniel's relationships with Mirah and Ezra touching; they provide a contrast to his dynamics with Gwendolen and Hans Meyrick.
Although Daniel's chapters have a more ponderous quality than Gwendolen's, I think the most powerful scene in the whole novel is his meeting with his mother. By contrast, I did not find the ending as memorable. While Daniel Deronda is magnificently written, I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to. The three stars are thus more a reflection of the reader than the book itself. -
So a couple of years ago on . . . I dunno, PBS? BBC? I got hooked on a miniseries called Daniel Deronda, which was starring Hugh Dancy and Romola Garai (the reason why I tuned in) and based on a novel I had never heard of, by George Eliot, who I had heard of but never read anything by.
Hooked. HOOKED, I TELL YOU!
One is not expecting a story by an English lady authoress to suddenly delve into the plight of the Jewish people in Victorian England. One is not expecting mistresses and illegitimate children to be talked of as though it were a matter of course. One is not expecting a beautiful young woman's emotionally abusive husband to be . . . Well, I shan't tell you what happens to HIM. You'll have to read it and find out!
But do read it. Because the miniseries, though wonderful, does not quite capture the breathtaking scope of the book. I read the Barnes & Noble Classics edition, which I really liked because it has plenty of excellent footnotes, as well as an introduction to the novel, a biography of Eliot, and a timeline of her life. The introduction points out that this is not only the most globe-trotting book by Eliot, it's pretty much the most widely-spread novel of the time. Daniel Deronda and Co. travel the globe, as well as the length and breadth of England. There are also extensive (but not difficult to follow) flashbacks and flash-forewards, and two separate storylines throughout. And Daniel Deronda, like some sort of reluctant guardian angel, travels between both storylines, giving out good advice and saving people along the way. Daniel Deronda is an excellent hero, because he frankly could have turned out to be a preachy pain-in-the-ass, but Eliot always pulls back from going quite that far. He is a genuinely good person, who cannot turn away from a friend in need, particularly if that friend is a beautiful woman. He's also a very intelligent and educated person, which makes it believable when so many men seek him out for help. And he isn't proud of the fact that he's asked to advise literally everyone he meets, all the time. He's kind of alarmed by it, which is endearing.
And then there's our girls. Oh, Eliot writes wonderful women! But in particular, we've got our two girls: Gwendolen Harleth, spoiled society miss, and her opposite, Mirah Lapidoth, shy, mis-used Jewess. Gwendolen just knows she was meant to lead a life of pampered luxury, and behaves accordingly. Mirah has spent her life on the stage, sought after by men for her beauty, and detests it because her father kidnapped her as a child and forced her into acting, making the supposedly glamorous life a kind of slavery for her. The story is as much their's as Deronda's, and Eliot switches between the three effortlessly. For a 700+ book, the pacing was excellent, and even her soliloquies about the Jewish faith, or the hardships of poverty, or the inadvisability of marrying simply for money, were all riveting. I was worried that the book would have a lot of preaching in it, it was apparently written after Eliot became close friends with a number of Jewish intellectuals and got involved in their fight for equality, but she managed to get her thoughts across without moralizing.
And now I'm excited to read Middlemarch! -
This is not a quick or easy read.
There are parts that I should have reread, but this is hard to do when reading an eBook, so I missed some things.
After reading
Middlemarch I was disappointed in this book.
Though Gwendolen was an unlikable spoiled girl at the outset, I thought she was a more interesting character than the character Daniel himself. This was a serious flaw for me that a novel called
"Daniel Deronda" the eponymous character himself was upstaged by another character in terms of holding my interest. Daniel himself and was boring.
Though
George Eliotwanted to present Jewish characters in a sympathetic way, I thought her portrayals of the Cohen's was riddled with stereotypes.
George Eliot despite her intentions, couldn't rise above stereotypes.
