The inspiring principle which alone gives me courage to write, is that of so presenting our human life as to help my readers in getting a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence.
George Eliot especially believed people could touch one another individually, as, for example, when Dorothea’s goodness moves egotistical Rosamond Vincy to one unselfish moment or when Daniel acts as a benevolent influence on Gwendolyn. The selfish or narcissistic characters are susceptible in these encounters to expanding their moral sympathies. They glimpse “those vital elements which bind men together” and take their first steps beyond private egotism and suffering. Eliot believed one can overcome the insistency of a desire by considering whether its fulfillment means a deprivation for another person, or grasp from others’ suffering that one’s own share of trouble is “not excessive.” Thus, to understand one’s links to others becomes a guide for proper conduct. “Community of interest is the root of justice; community of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love,” she writes in “Leaves for a Notebook.”
But the ideal of altruistic self-restrained participation in community is only half the vision. George Eliot’s intention to affirm the best influence of religion and society in elevating human nature persists throughout her fiction. But such idealism is increasingly in conflict with a more pessimistic view of her own day and age. Mid-Victorian society appalls George Eliot because of its essential immorality, and numerous of her letters from the 1860s and ’70s express her dismay. Instead of the old “plain living and high thinking,” there flourishes a prosperity that strikes her as vulgar, impersonal, and frantic. People lose proper values in “more and more eager scrambling after wealth and show.” England is a restless society “of ‘eels in a jar,’ where each is trying to get his head above the other.” The results of material progress strain her faith in moral progress. How can one believe in progress when the world is so clearly getting worse?
Daniel Deronda represented the climax of my thesis, for I saw it as the novel in which George Eliot’s idealism and pessimism finally splinter. Middlemarch’s integration of her melancholy perception of a modern world with her hopes for human nature and a better future meant the severe constriction of idealism. Such muted optimism then worried her—again I quote from her letters—“lest the impression which [the novel] should make . . . for the good of those who read should turn to naught.” She was particularly disturbed when The Spectator labeled her a “melancholy” author. In Daniel Deronda, motivated in part by the intention to show human life as its most inspiring, George Eliot develops the idealized milieu of Judaism, in which man’s “higher plane of thought and feeling”—a phrase from the letters—flourishes unchecked by any realistic negative circumstances, with elements of myth, fantasy, and the occult, as critics have noted, coming in to further the hero’s quest. But at the same time that Deronda finds his providential identity, Gwendolyn, in her part of the story, is granted less relief from the oppressive conditions of environment (it’s interesting that Daniel Deronda is George Eliot’s only novel with a contemporary setting) than is any previous George Eliot heroine. I know the author wants Deronda’s departure to be a therapeutic scourging of Gwendolyn’s ego. But it does seem cruel that he gets to have a “social captaincy,”—such a cleverly equivocal phrase finessing the question of religious faith—while she is left with more conscience but little more direction or larger life than when he first met her. He gets to discover his proper community, and she . . . well, one wonders what will become of her. “Poor Gwendolyn,” as Eliot so often refers to her, humbled and stripped of her illusions, is still far from any meaningful self-realization. Yes, she has been saved from real evil, from hatred and self-delusion. Of course, that’s important. But what can she go on to do? Lead a less glittering life. Be kind to her mother and sisters? Engage in modest charitable activity? Try a second marriage, maybe to Rex? The options as I have played with them seem plausible but insufficient. Ultimately I do not know how Gwendolyn might become “the best of women, such as make others glad they were born”—or even if that is the destiny one should hope for her.
iv
THE JUDAISM, FROM WHICH Gwendolyn is excluded, might, strangely, have become part of my own self-realization. It turns out that it hasn’t, but I believe I understand its appeals as a subject and cause for George Eliot. First of all, it’s in keeping with her stress on “those vital elements which bind men together” to be eager to combat prevalent anti-Semitism. As G. H. Lewes writes to Blackwood, “Just as she had formerly contrived to make one love Methodists [see Adam Bede], there was no reason why she should not conquer the prejudice against Jews.” Then Eliot’s friendship with Emmanuel Deutsch in the 1870s familiarized her with the Zionist cause, and
