Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda

Cover of 1995 Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Deronda Cover of 1995 Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Deronda
Author	George Eliot
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publication date	1876
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

Daniel Deronda is a novel by George Eliot, first published in 1876. It was the last novel she completed, coming after Middlemarch and Felix Holt and the only one set in the contemporary Victorian society of her day. Its mixture of social satire and moral searching with a sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist and Kaballistic ideas has made it a controversial final statement of one of the greatest of Victorian novelists.

The novel has been filmed three times, once as a silent feature and twice for television. It has also been adapted for the stage, most notably in a production in the 1960s by the 69 Theatre Company in Manchester with Vanessa Redgrave as Gwendolen Harleth.

Plot summary

Daniel Deronda is two intertwined tales united by the title character. Deronda was raised by a wealthy man, Sir Hugo Mallinger, but his relationship to the man is ambiguous--he is widely believed to be his illegitimate son though Sir Hugo never says so. He becomes attracted to the beautiful, arrogant and willful Gwendolen Harleth, whose family experiences a reversal of fortune shortly after the novel begins. In order to save herself from becoming an impoverished governess, Gwendolen marries the wealthy but depraved, cruel Henleigh Grandcourt, despite having promised his mistress (Lydia Glasher) she would not do so.

Deronda, in the meantime, rescues a poor but beautiful Jewish singer, Mirah, from committing suicide in the Thames. Mirah had arrived in London penniless after running away from her father who, she feared, was planning an arranged marriage for her. Deronda puts Mirah in the care of the mother of a friend and then assists in her search for her mother and brother, from whom she was taken by her father as a child. While Deronda helps with this search he is introduced to London's Jewish community. Eliot introduces the reader to Jewish ways in a positive fashion, while Mirah and Daniel become closer. The virtuous Mirah's behavior is contrasted with the selfish Gwendolen's, as Mirah rejects an advantageous marriage to a (Christian) friend of Daniel's, and seeks out work as a singer to pay for her keep.

Gwendolen, meanwhile, has become emotionally crushed by her cruel, manipulative husband, as well as feeling horror for causing Lydia Glasher's children by Grandcourt to be disinherited. When Henleigh Grandcourt is drowned during a trip abroad, Gwendolen is consumed with guilt for wanting him dead and hesitating to help him--in contrast to Deronda's saving of Mirah from a similar fate. Gwendolen hopes for a future with Deronda, but he instead urges her onto a path of righteousness in which she will help others in order to alleviate her own suffering.

Then, Sir Hugo tells Deronda that he is actually the legitimate son of a famous opera singer Sir Hugo was in love with. Deronda goes to meet his mother in Italy, where she is on her deathbed. She explains that she was the daughter of a rabbi, and forced to marry another religious Jew, despite her hatred for her Jewish roots; Daniel was a product of that union. At the death of that husband, she entreated the fawning Sir Hugo to raise her son as a proper Englishman, never to know his origins. Upon learning of his true origins, Deronda tells Mirah of his love for her, and the two decide to go to Palestine to start a new life in the Holy Land.

Characters in "Daniel Deronda"

• Daniel Deronda — The ward of the wealthy Sir Hugo Mallinger and eponymous hero of the novel, he has a tendency to help others at a cost to himself. So it is that when we first meet him he has, due to helping Hans Meyrick, failed to get a scholarship himself at Cambridge, has been travelling abroad and has just started to study law. He often wonders about his birth and whether or not he is a gentleman. As he moves more and more among the world-within-a-world of the Jews of the novel he begins to identify more with their cause in proportion to the unfolding of the revelation of his birth. Eliot took the story of Moses as part of her inspiration for Deronda. As Moses was a Jew brought up as an Egyptian who would ultimately lead his people to the Promised Land, Deronda is a Jew brought up as an Englishman who ends the novel about to work to do the same.
• Gwendolen Harleth — The beautiful, spoiled daughter of a widowed mother. Much courted by men, she is flirtatious but ultimately uninterested. Shortly after the beginning of the novel, her family suffers a financial reversal, and she is faced with becoming a governess to help support her family and herself. Seeking an escape, she first explores the idea of becoming a singer, but Herr Klesmer tells her she will always be an average singer but perhaps in 5-6 years time she might be good enough to earn a living. Despite not loving him, she then marries Henleigh Grandcourt. Desperately unhappy she seeks help from Deronda who seems to offer her understanding, moral support and the possibility of a way out of her guilt and sorrow. As a psychological study of an egoist struggling to a greater realisation of herself and others through suffering Gwendolen is for many Eliot's crowning achievement as a novelist and the real core of the book. F R Leavis famously felt that the novel would have benefited from the complete removal of the Jewish section and the renaming of it as Gwendolen Harleth. Certainly although the novel is named after Deronda more of the book is devoted to Gwendolen than Deronda himself.
• Mirah Lapidoth — A beautiful Jewish girl who was born in England but taken away by her father at a young age to travel the world as a singer. Realising later that her father plans to marry her off to make money for himself, she abandons him in Europe and returns to London to look for he estranged mother and brother. When she arrives in London she finds her old home destroyed and no trace of her family. Giving in to despair she tries to commit suicide. Rescued by Daniel, she is cared for by his friends while searching for her family and work.
• Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt — A wealthy, manipulative, sadistic man, he marries Gwendolen Harleth and then embarks upon a campaign of emotional abuse towards her. He has a mistress, Lydia Glasher, with whom he has several out-of-wedlock children. He had promised to marry her when her husband died, but reneged on the promise in order to marry Gwendolyn instead.
• Sir Hugo Mallinger — A wealthy gentleman, he fell in love with Contessa Maria Alcharisi when she was young, and agreed, out of love for her, to raise her son Daniel Deronda.
• Lush — Henleigh Grandcourt's slavish associate. He and Gwendolen take an immediate dislike to one another
• Lydia Glasher — Henleigh Grandcourt's mistress, a fallen woman who left her husband to bear Grandcourt's children. She confronts Gwendolen in an effort to get her to not marry Grandcourt, and not disinherit her children. In order to punish both women, Grandcourt takes the family jewels he had given to Glasher and bestows them upon Gwendolen, even forcing Gwendolen to wear them though she knows who had them before her.
• Ezra Mordecai Cohen — Mirah's brother. A young Jewish visionary suffering from consumption who befriends Daniel Deronda and teaches him about Judaism. A Kabbalist and proto-Zionist, Mordecai sees Deronda as his spiritual successor and inspires him to continue his vision of creating a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Named after the biblical character Mordecai who delivers the people from Israel from the machinations of Haman in the Book of Esther
• Herr Klesmer — A German-Jewish musician in Gwendolyn Harleth's social circle, he marries a wealthy girl whom Gwendolyn is friendly with, and also advises Gwendolen not to try for a life on the stage. Thought to be partly based on Franz Liszt.
• Contessa Maria Alcharisi — Daniel Deronda's mother. The daughter of a rabbi, she had an arranged marriage to a religious man but wanted to be a stage performer. After her husband died, she gave her son to Sir Hugo Mallinger to be raised as a Christian, and she converted, keeping her origins a secret to the rest of the world. On her deathbed, she contacts Daniel so that she can see her son one last time. Their confrontation in Italy forms one of the climaxes of the novel.

Influence on Jewish Zionism

Written during a time when Christian Zionism (called at that time "Restorationism") had a strong following, Eliot's novel had a positive influence on later Jewish Zionism. It has been cited by Henrietta Szold, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and Emma Lazarus as having been highly influential in their decision to become Zionists.

Some modern critics (notably Edward Said) point to the novel as a propaganda tool to encourage British patriation of Palestine to Jews. The novel is explicit in sending the non-Christians to a non-Christian land, and also maintaining that "like may only marry like", i.e., Deronda can only marry his beloved if they are the same race/religion/ethnicity. Critics who are hostile to the book have suggested that this indicates a fundamentally racist view of marriage. However, the German-Jewish pianist Klesmer marries the Englishwoman Catherine Arrowpoint, suggesting that Eliot's views on this are subtler than these critics suggest.

In its day the Jewish section of the novel was met with bafflement by the non-Jewish reading public, which made up the majority of Eliot's readership. Looking at depictions of Jews in other novels such as Dickens' Oliver Twist and Trollope's The Way We Live Now, it is easy to see why. In spite of having had a Jewish-born Prime Minister for many years, the accepted view of the Jews in the Britain of the time was one of derision, revulsion and prejudice, opinions expressed by several of the British characters in the book in one scene. The fact that Eliot makes a point of comparing the world of the Jews favourably with the society of the British would have only served to heighten the hostile reaction to this element of the book. Some readers felt that the Jewish sections of the book were its weakest part, and there were even efforts to rewrite the book by excising those portions and leaving only the sections pertaining to Gwendolen, and with Daniel having no known Jewish roots.

Conversely, some Hebrew translations made by East European Zionists in the late 19th and early 20th Century concentrated on the Jewish-Zionist parts and excised or greatly abbreviated the other parts.

Needless to say, among the Jewish community of Eliot's time, Daniel Deronda was greeted with enormous warmth. It was the first time the community felt they had been represented fairly by a major British novelist.

Jewish Zionism in the novel

Daniel Deronda comprises two stories under one title. It presents two worlds in one book, which are never completely reconciled - indeed the separation of the two, and the eventual parting of the one from the other is one of the main themes of the book. There is the fashionable, familiar, upper class English world of Gwendolen Harleth and the less familiar society-within-a-society inhabited by the Jews, most importantly Mordecai (or Ezra) Cohen and his sister, Mirah. Between these two worlds is Daniel himself who gradually begins to identify more and more with the Jewish side as he comes to understand the mystery of his birth through his relationship with Mordecai. In the book the spirituality, moral coherence and sense of community of the Jewish characters is contrasted favourably with the materialist, philistine and largely corrupt society of England. The inference seems to be that the moral values of the Jews are lacking in the wider British society which surrounds them.

Daniel is ideological, helpful, and wise. In order to give substance to his character, George Eliot had to give him a worthy purpose in his life. In the light of views of the time on Jews, Jewish Zionism might seem a strange choice for this purpose. In fact Eliot had become interested in Jewish culture through making the acquaintance of Immanuel Deutsch, a Jewish mystic, lecturer and proto-Zionist active at the time. Part of the inspiration for writing the novel was her desire to correct contemporary ignorance and prejudice towards Jews in England. Mordecai, so easily forgotten beside the glitter and passions of Gwendolen's story, nonetheless finishes the novel. Partly based on Deutsch, his political and spiritual ideas are among the core messages of the book, just as Felix Holt's politics are the core intellectual element of his novel. In a key scene in Daniel Deronda Deronda follows Mordecai to a tavern where Mordecai meets with other penniless philosophers to discuss ideas. There follows a lengthy speech in which Mordecai outlines his vision of a homeland for the Jews where, he hopes, they will be able to take their place among the nations of the world for the general good.

It should be remembered that at the time idealistic, thinking people all over Europe were being caught up with the nationalistic currents of the time. Daniel Deronda is set during the 'epoch-making' Battle of Sadowa which saw the beginning of the end of Austrian hegemony in Europe; Eliot thus deliberately links the events of the novel with major historical upheavals. Movements of national unity and self-determination were gathering apace in Germany and Italy and were seen as progressive forces at odds with the reactionary, old regimes of empires such as those of Austria-Hungary and Russia. Eliot's enthusiam for the Zionist cause should be seen in this light. The evidence suggests that her view was that of righting a historical injustice seen through the eyes of a time when progressive people saw national liberation as a positive thing. It is not clear that she envisaged or even considered the possibility of a disenfranchisement of the Arab population as being the outcome of such a process.

Nonetheless the overt Zionism and sympathy for the Jews caused considerable upset at the time and remains controversial to some critics today.

Kabbalah in the novel

A major influence on the novel is the Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah which is directly referred to in the text. Mordecai describes himself as the reincarnation of Jewish mystics of Spain and Europe, believing his vision to be the fulfilment of an ancient yearning of the Jewish people. Many of the encounters between Mordecai and Deronda are described in quasi-mystical terms (cf Mordecai's meeting with Deronda on the River Thames). The inclusion of this overt mysticism is extraordinary in the work of a writer who, for many, embodies the ideals of the liberal, secular humanism of the Victorian age but in fact Eliot had a lifelong interest in spirituality and the occult, despite her stated agnosticism and rejection of formal religion (cf The Lifted Veil by George Eliot).

In fact Daniel Deronda is full of references to spiritual, archetypal and mythological imagery from the Kabbalism of Mordecai to the encounter of Lydia Glasher with Gwendolen among a group of standing stones and Gwendolen's reaction to the image of a dying man. Of all of the novels of the Victorian era, the inherent mysticism of Daniel Deronda and its analysis of religious belief as a progressive force in human nature brings its author closest to the works of Dostoyevsky.

See also

• George Eliot - Adam Bede - the Mill on the Floss - Silas Marner - Romola - Felix Holt - Middlemarch
• F R Leavis
• Judaism
• Kabbalah
• Middlemarch
• Zionism

External links

• Daniel Deronda at Project Gutenberg
• Daniel Deronda at IMDb (1921)
• Daniel Deronda at IMDb (1970) (TV)
• Daniel Deronda at IMDb (2002) (TV)