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; Deronda 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 cruel and depraved 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 Lapidoth, from committing suicide in the Thames. Mirah had arrived in London penniless after running away from her father who, she feared, was planning to sell her into prostitution. 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.

One of the Jewish people Daniel meets is a consumptive visionary named Mordecai, whose passion is for Jewish people to retain their national identity and one day to be restored as a nation. Because he is dying, he wants Daniel to become his intellectual heir and pursue his dream. In spite of being strongly drawn to Mordecai, Deronda hesitates to commit himself to a cause that seems to have no connection to his own identity. Deronda's desire to embrace Mordecai's vision becomes the stronger when they discover that Mordecai is the brother whom Mirah has been seeking. (Their mother has died during Mirah's years abroad.)

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.

Deronda is on the spot to give Gwendolyn advice because he has traveled to Italy to finally meet his mother, who is terminally ill. He learns that he is actually the legitimate son of a famous opera singer Sir Hugo was in love with. She explains that she was the daughter of a rabbi, and forced to marry another religious Jew, despite her hatred for the rigid piety of her traditional Jewish roots; Daniel was a product of that union. At the death of that husband, she entreated the devoted Sir Hugo to raise her son as an English gentleman, never to know that he is Jewish. Upon learning of his true origins, Deronda tells Mirah of his love for her, and they are married. Daniel commits himself to be Mordecai's disciple, and shortly after their marriage, Mordecai dies with Daniel and Mirah at his side. The married couple then begin a journey to Palestine to investigate what they can do to restore the Jewish people to a nationality.

Gwendolen is disappointed at Deronda's placing himself out of her reach, but true to his guidance she resolves to live unselfishly. She sends him a letter on his wedding day, telling him not to think of her with sadness but to know that she will be a better person for having known him.

Characters in "Daniel Deronda"

• Daniel Deronda — The ward of the wealthy Sir Hugo Mallinger and eponymous hero of the novel, Deronda has a tendency to help others at a cost to himself. At the start of the novel, he has failed to win a scholarship at Cambridge because of his focus on helping a friend, 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 with their cause in direct proportion to the unfolding revelations of his ancestry. Eliot used the story of Moses as part of her inspiration for Deronda. As Moses was a Jew brought up as an Egyptian who ultimately led his people to the Promised Land, so Deronda is a Jew brought up as an Englishman who ends the novel with a plan to do the same. Deronda's name presumably indicates that his ancestors lived in the Spanish city of Ronda, prior to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
• Gwendolen Harleth — The beautiful, spoiled daughter of a widowed mother. Much courted by men, she is flirtatious but ultimately self-involved. Early in the novel, her family suffers a financial reversal, and she is faced with becoming a governess to help support herself and her family. Seeking an escape, she first explores the idea of becoming an actress and singer, but Herr Klesmer tells her that she has started too late, that she does not know the meaning of hard work, training, and sacrifice. Gwendolen then marries the controlling and cruel Henleigh Grandcourt, although she does not love him. 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 achieve greater understanding 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. It is true that though the novel is named after Deronda, a greater proportion is devoted to Gwendolen than to 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. Realizing later that her venal father plans to sell her as a mistress to a European nobleman, to get money for his gambling addiction, she flees from him in Europe and returns to London to look for her 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, so that she can support herself.
• Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt — A wealthy, manipulative, sadistic man, Grandcourt marries Gwendolen Harleth and then embarks upon a campaign of emotional abuse. He has a mistress, Lydia Glasher, with whom he has several out-of-wedlock children. He had promised to marry Lydia when her husband died, but reneged on the promise in order to marry Gwendolyn instead.
• Sir Hugo Mallinger — A wealthy gentleman; Sir Hugo fell in love with the operatic diva 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 persuade her to not marry Grandcourt and protect her children's inheritance. In order to punish both women, Grandcourt takes the family diamonds he had given to Glasher and bestows them upon Gwendolen, even forcing Gwendolen to wear them, though she knows that they had been previously worn by his mistress.
• Ezra Mordecai Lapidoth — 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 Jews from the machinations of Haman in the Book of Esther
• Herr Klesmer — A German-Jewish musician in Gwendolyn Harleth's social circle; Klesmer marries Catherine Arrowpoint, a wealthy girl with whom Gwendolyn is friendly. He 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 suffered under her father's dominance; he saw her main purpose as producing Jewish sons. To please him, she agreed to marry a religious man, her cousin, knowing that he adored her and would let her do as she wished after her father died. When her father was dead, she became a renowned singer and actress. After her husband died, she gave her son to Sir Hugo Mallinger to be raised as an English gentleman, free of all the disadvantages she had felt as a Jew. Later when her voice seemed to be failing, she converted to Christianity in order to marry a Russian nobleman. He voice recovered, and she bitterly regretted having given up her life as a performer. Now ill with a fatal disease, she begins to fear retribution for having frustrated her father's plans for his grandson. She contacts Daniel through Sir Hugo, asking him to meet her in Genoa, where she travels under pretense of consulting a doctor. Their confrontation in Italy is one of the novel's important scenes. Afterwards, she tells Deronda where he can recover a chest full of important documents related to his Jewish heritage, gathered by her father.

Literary significance and reception

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 in maintaining that "like may only marry like", i.e., Deronda can only marry his beloved if they are the same race/religion/ethnicity. Hostile critics have suggested that the book promotes 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 understand why. In spite of having had a Jewish-born Prime Minister for many years, Britain's view of the Jews at the time comprised derision, revulsion and prejudice, opinions expressed by several of the British characters in one scene. The fact that Eliot makes a point of comparing the world of the Jews favourably with the society of the British could only have 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, and there were even efforts to rewrite the novel by excising those portions, leaving only the sections pertaining to Gwendolen and deleting references to Daniel's Jewish roots.

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

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

Jewish Zionism in the novel

Daniel Deronda is comprised of two interwoven stories and presents two worlds which are never completely reconciled - indeed, the separation of the two and the eventual parting of one from the other is one of the novel's major themes. 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. Living between these two worlds is Daniel, who gradually identifies more and more with the Jewish side as he comes to understand the mystery of his birth and develops his relationships with Mordecai and Mirah. In the novel, the Jewish characters' spirituality, moral coherence and sense of community are contrasted favourably with the materialist, philistine, and largely corrupt society of England. The inference seems to be that the Jews' moral values are lacking in the wider British society that surrounds them.

Daniel is ideological, helpful, and wise. In order to give substance to his character, Eliot had to give him a worthy purpose. In the light of the contemporary views of Jews, Zionism might seem a strange choice for this purpose. However, Eliot had become interested in Jewish culture through her acquaintance with Jewish mystic, lecturer and proto-Zionist Immanuel Oscar Menahem Deutsch. Part of the inspiration for the novel was her desire to correct English ignorance and prejudice against Jews. Mordecai's story, so easily forgotten beside the glitter and passions of Gwendolen's, nonetheless finishes the novel. Partly based on Deutsch, Mordecai's 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 the latter meets with other penniless philosophers to exchange 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 people all over Europe were caught up in the nationalistic currents of the era. Daniel Deronda is set during the 'epoch-making' Battle of Sadowa, the beginning of the end of Austrian hegemony in Europe. Eliot thus deliberately linked the events of the novel with major historical upheavals. Movements of national unity and self-determination were gathering steam 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 understood in this context. The evidence suggests that her view was that of righting a historical injustice at a time when progressive elements viewed national liberation as a positive.

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 (cf page 406 OUP edition ISBN 0192817876, Chapter 38 in all prints). Mordecai describes himself as the reincarnation of Jewish mystics of Spain and Europe and believes 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. 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).

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 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

• F R Leavis
• Judaism
• Kabbalah
• 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)