Daniel Deronda (1876) came four years after Middlemarch and was George Eliot’s last novel. She died in 1880, aged 61. I hadn’t read it for many years and was fascinated to get back to this engaging study of what it means to be Jewish, as topical now as it was 148 years ago.
The plot hangs on the mystery of Deronda’s parentage. He has been adopted and brought up by the kindly Sir Hugo Mallinger (we could all do with a man as decent as Sir Hugo in our lives) but has never been told anything about his birth and origin. He has attractive dark curly hair, an olive complexion and Mordechai, a man he first meets in a bookshop. assumes that he is Jewish. Etonian, wise, thoughtful Deronda, of course, says he isn’t. Nonetheless he becomes close to the cerebral, but dying, Mordechai and begins to study Hebrew with him.
Meanwhile, the other half of the plot is about the fascinatingly complex Gwendolen Harleth. Initially irreverently jokey and independent, she cares for nothing much except the impoverished plight of her mother. She reluctantly marries wealthy Henleigh Grandcourt (with a name like that he surely has to be bad news?) who has a past which haunts her, almost literally, and treats her with icy control once he has her. I wonder, though, whether Eliot is trying to tell us something in making Gwendolen childless although I can’t believe that Grandcourt wouldn’t have coldly taken his dues in the bedroom as everywhere else. Is she a secret user of sponges, douches or whatever?
The link is that Grandcourt is Sir Hugo’s nephew. Deronda and Gwendolen meet first, by chance, in a casino in Germany where she is in rebellious flight from Grandcourt’s wooing and she’s gambling profligately. Then we get a hundred pages about her before we meet Deronda again and learn, at some length, who he is. She respects Daniel and comes to regard him as quasi mentor to whom she turns for advice. Of course both her husband and the reader can see that maybe, at heart, it’s more than wisdom she wants. Incidentally, Deronda’s unerring, benign, mature good sense is pretty hard to take in such a young man. Where on earth did he learn it? Surely not in the Eton of the 1850s?
Mirah, rescued from suicide in the Thames by Deronda and placed with delightful friends, turns out to be Mordechai’s sister, a development which the reader sees coming a mile off. Deronda gradually falls in love with her but knows that it would be impossible for her to accept a gentile. The contrast between pious, pretty, conscientious Mirah and haughty, glamorous, ambivalent Gwendolen is one of the driving forces in this novel. Both women have been abused, in different ways, by men and have more in common than is initially obvious. Eliot ensures moreover that we feel desperately sorry for Gwendolen in her eventual, conscience-torn breakdown.
Eliot researched this novel scrupulously and the result is a pretty detailed study of Judaism and its tenets. She certainly finds gentleness and decency there which is often lacking amongst professed Christians and I like that. It works better, though. when she shows it in action, via, for example, the humble, hardworking cheerful Cohen family. Otherwise there is too much detail in the novel and some of the conversations between Daniel and Mordechai seem turgidly didactic, almost as if having discovered it the author feels obliged to share it all. Fair enough, but a novel is arguably not the right place.
While I was rereading this novel, I was frequently reminded of John Sutherland’s sparky essay “ Is Daniel Deronda circumcised?” (1977) so I revisited that too. A highly respected academic, now aged 85, Sutherland wrote several books of essays which wittily explore puzzling plot holes in Victorian fiction including “Is Heathcliff a muderer?” and “Where does Fanny Hill keep her contraceptives?”.
Well is he? If he had been he would surely have been aware of his Jewish origins although even in the 1860s non-Jewish boys were sometimes circumcised for other reasons. Would Eliot, as a Victorian woman, have understood this issue? Sutherland points out that she was always interested in, snd well informed about, science and medicine and would almost certainly have been fully au fait with the details of circumcision. Besides, her long term partner, George Lewes had studied medicine and would have explained if necessary. When Daniel eventually meets the mother who gave him away when he was two, he learns that she hates all things Jewish so it is possible and probable that she prevented her baby boy from undergoing this routine ritual. Sutherland, who explores the issue carefully, therefore concludes that Deronda is uncircumcised. Does he, I wonder, submit to it as an adult, once he embraces his Jewishness fully? Ouch.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Secret River by Kate Grenville
