My response to Daniel Deronda has been less to marvel that the novel could be at once so brilliant and so problematic as to try to understand the tensions in George Eliot’s vision for it that might have led to the work’s thematic and aesthetic dividedness. This was a key focus in my doctoral dissertation. But before I revisit some aspects of that study, I want to turn back and remember how I became interested in George Eliot in the first place and how I chose her as an author whom I would “work on” for four years of my life, an interest sufficiently consuming that my husband Donald could use it as ammunition in a marital spat. “All you know about is George Eliot!” he accused in one of our more embattled moments. “That’s not true,” I said. But later I thought that to know about George Eliot was to know a great deal.
Eliot is not one of the Victorian authors I loved in childhood. Does any child, I wonder, love George Eliot? Dickens, yes. The Brontës. But George Eliot?
Virginia Woolf describes Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The converse of this statement is that it is not written for children. And are any of Eliot’s works? Most children dislike Silas Marner, once standard seventh-grade reading. I don’t remember liking or disliking it, though I have looked again at the ponderous opening, which distances the setting from the author’s own time. “In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses . . .” begins the long dense opening paragraph, a description of the outcast social standing of itinerant linen weavers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. George Eliot’s early novels are set in country towns of the 1830s or turn-of-the-century rural Midlands (the eras when, respectively, Eliot and her parents were young), but her country villages did not draw me in the way David Copperfield transported me to Suffolk. I was with David, I was David in the Rookery. In the works of George Eliot, the reader is always aligned with the author, looking back into the past through the film of her tolerant nostalgia and through the medium of her meditations. I must also have read The Mill on the Floss as a child since I have among my books an Illustrated Classics edition. But again, the author approaches the story through the distancing mechanism of nostalgia, and Eliot’s Dodsons and Tullivers are no match for Dickens’s Peggottys and “Barkis is willing.” Also it may simply be too perilous to identify with Maggie, a heroine who ends up drowning because there’s no place for her in her provincial world.
The drowning notwithstanding—how plausible is it to be done in by a piece of machinery in a flooded river? Maybe more so in light of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Japanese tsunami, but still . . . George Eliot is perhaps too much of a realist to appeal to children. A realist and a moralist, who would see as blindness the sense of potency such heroines as Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp express and rely on. Eliot’s heroines who believe in their own potency are called egotists. Like Gwendolyn, or even Dorothea, they have to be chastened.
As I think of George Eliot’s world view and I think of my mother’s, with its emphatic faith in the individual, I’m not surprised my mother never handed me a volume of George Eliot when I asked for another book to read from her library’s shelves. It’s perhaps more surprising that there were no George Eliot novels on those shelves, that Eliot, in fact, is missing from the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One curriculum. Fitzgerald was a zealous student of the nineteenth-century novel, so either he didn’t think much of Eliot or he didn’t think my mother would be drawn to her. I try to imagine them in their role-playing games taking on, say, Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon:
Dorothea: “Can I help you, dear, with your great life’s work, your key to all mythologies?
Casaubon (blinking): I don’t think so, my dear. We’re not ready for that yet.
At Gwendolyn and Daniel I stop short. Henry James complains that all Daniel Deronda actually does is pull repeatedly at his shirt collar. Somehow the thought of enacting George Eliot’s characters doesn’t seem much fun. Is it that they are too serious? Perhaps there’s a way they are not dramatic. A reimagining of their scenes doesn’t leave much room for improvisation. It’s not that the characters lack free will; they make moral choices of great import, but they’re enmeshed in webs—that image Eliot is so drawn to—webs of circumstance that are always closing in on them. Eliot is merciless towards their romantic illusions, which the circumstances of their lives crush out of them. Their salvation, if it comes, lies in disillusionment. To be stripped of illusions is the basis for more humble and accurate knowledge.
