Failing at first to understand—how could Gwendolyn have imagined a life for Deronda so distant from her own needs and sphere of reference?—the character is jarred into a sense of her insignificance, “dislodged,” George Eliot tells us, “from her supremacy in her own world.” Hers is “a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy—something spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all anger into self-humiliation.” Yet however “spiritual” this scourging of ego, Gwendolyn feels lost. The reality of Daniel’s marrying Mirah, who to Gwendolyn has been only an insignificant little Jewish singer, causes her to cry out that she is forsaken. Daniel grasps her hand in agonized sympathy. They part. She sobs and collapses, then in hysterical outbursts to her mother keeps asserting, enigmatically and emphatically, she will live.
The letter Gwendolyn writes to Daniel in the wake of this shock is the last time her voice is heard in the novel. She tries to reassure the man she has relied on as a lay confessor:
Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding day. I have remembered your words—that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better—it shall be better with me because I have known you.
I think of Gwendolyn sorrowfully—but also admiringly. Her pain is palpable. She fixes on “grief,” reiterating her worry about Daniel’s grief, but it is Gwendolyn’s grief I share here. Daniel, in departing, has laid out for her an ideal of altruism that he links to Victorian womanhood. To be “the best of women” is not to be a doer of great deeds or a famous actress and singer, like his own mother, but to “make others glad they were born.” It’s almost as if he’s suggesting Gwendolyn become a kind of Dorothea Ladislaw “the effect of [whose] being on those around her,” we are told at the end of Middlemarch in an apology for her not succeeding in an uninspired era to accomplish greater things, “was incalculably diffusive.” Or that she emulate him in his exquisite sympathy for others, though in that he is a man, its very diffusiveness, that word used so affirmatively at the end of Middlemarch, makes it almost a disease of action-inhibiting awareness, at least until he assumes the “social captaincy” of his serving his new-found people. I love the simple honesty of Gwendolyn’s self-doubt. “I do not see yet how that can be,” she avers. And the precision of her final shift of verb tense: “it is better—it shall be better with me because I have known you,” which underscores her hope, her despair, and her integrity in refusing to express false certainty.
Daniel Deronda for me is George Eliot’s most fascinating novel, and it is also among the books of my reading life that I have found most affecting. The struggles of its complicated heroine say so much about the author’s values and her fears—and about my own: a perceived need to rise above egotism, however ebullient, and to find—George Eliot’s phrase—a “wider life,” some purpose larger than the advancement of self, however challenging that quest may prove. It’s also of relevance to me that the wider life her hero Daniel Deronda finds is as a Jew. I share this heritage and also an original ignorance of it, although, unlike Daniel’s, my own discovery of being Jewish has never seemed to offer me either an identity or a direction.
I confess it seems a bit pat to me how the Jewishness for Daniel settles everything. Not to be, as he had assumed, the illegitimate son of the worldly Sir Higo Mallinger, but rather, as he discovers from the mother who sought to deprive him of his heritage, the grandson of a renowned Talmudic scholar—it’s all so providential, allowing our hero full entry to the culture he has already been drawn to. If Gwendolyn, by the novel’s end, can hope only for a yet vaguely defined “better” future, Daniel has found his future in his reclaimed past. He has received his grandfather’s trunk of Jewish documents and is further guided by the inspired union with Mordecai/Ezra, the vatic figure teaching him Hebrew, who serendipitously turns out to be Mirah’s brother.
It is thus not Gwendolyn, and hardly even Mirah, but rather the spirit of Mordecai who metaphorically gets to go off into the sunset with Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s final focus is on the departure plans for the East of Daniel, Mirah, and Ezra. The Mallingers have thoughtfully supplied as a wedding gift “a complete equipment for Eastern travel,” though we are left to wonder what that might consist of—I see flowing head gear. Ezra, as fate would have it, expires before the trip; the novel concludes with an account of his peaceful, measured death, illuminated by the setting sun. His parting words assert his inextricable union with Daniel Deronda. “Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together.”
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