Marriage is thought about and figured variously by the different characters in Persuasion. For Elizabeth, she pursue Mr. Elliot because he is the means of enhancing her fortune. In assessing him as a future mate, this seems to be the sole criteria she employs. Such a view would imply that to consider other factors is not worthwhile. Clearly, marriage is not looked to for companionship or emotional intimacy.
While Elizabeth and her father's view of marriage is fairly uniform and simple, Lady Russell's views seem equivocal. When Anne is courted by Frederick the first time around, Lady Russell fears Anne will be "sunk by him ino a state of most wearing, anxious, youth-killing dependence"(30). I'm not sure if the state alluded to is necessarily marriage, but it would seem to be so. However, later, she expresses a different conception of marriage. After Anne turns down Charles Musgrave, Lady Russell "began to have the anxiety which borders on hopelessness for Anne's being tempted....to enter a state for which she held her to be peculiarly fitted by her warm affections and domestic habits"(32).
Note-
There is much reference made in Persuasion to natural and unnatural. Anne looks back at her youth and concludes, "She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older-the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning"(33). Such language evokes scientific types of discourse and express a desire for predictable patterns.
Natural is what people expect and others affect in accordance. Everybody's day has a natural pattern. Thus, when the Crofts visit Kellynch Hall, Anne "found it most natural to take her almost daily walk to Lady Russell's, and keep out of the way till all was over; when she found it most natural to be sorry that she had missed the opportunity of seeing them"(34).
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Jane Austen's Persuasion, notes on marriage, love and balance
The inventory and examination of marriages continues in chapters 2 and 3 of Persuasion. We are told of Mrs. Clay, "who had returned, after an unprosperous marriage, to her father's house [Mr. Shephard]"(21). Mrs. Russell deems Mrs. Clay "one who ought to have been nothing to [Elizabeth] but the object of distant civility"(21). Granted,the reader learns to not grant ready credence to all Mrs. Russell's opinions. In addition, Mrs. Clay has faults beyond her marriage history. Yet, Mrs. Russell's cold assessment most probably reflects the rejection a divorced woman was likely to meet with at the time and Austen doesn't offer much in the way of a dissenting murmur. Again, we seem the primacy of marriage offered in this instance of another unhappy one.
Austen turns a corner of sorts with the introduction of the Crofts in chapter 3. Theirs appears to be the one unequivocally happy marriage presented in the book and Austen and Anne Elliot are fascinated by them. We see them first via the second-hand description Mr. Shephard offers Mr. Elliot. Mr. Shephard speaks of Admiral Croft's origins in Somersetshire, his looks, and claims he is "quite the gentleman in all his notions and behaviour"(26). He goes on at a bit more lenght on Mrs. Shephard for she is the oddity apparently. Mrs. Croft is "a very well-spoken, genteel, shrewd lady, she seemed to be...asked more questions about the house, and terms and taxes, than the admiral himself,and seemed more conversant with business"(27).
Near the end of chapter three, we learn that Mrs. Croft is sister to Frederick Wentworth, introducing the book's central relationship/potential marriage, that between Frederick and Anne. Some nine years prior to the start of the book, they had been seriously courting each other and intending to marry. With precision, Austen charts the course and causes of their relationsip. With economy, Austen tells us Fredrick, having "come into Somesetshire, in the summer of 1806...was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling-Half the sum of attraction on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love"(29). Ultimately, two fine characters, according to an inventory of somewhat gender specific qualities, brought together by circumstance, will naturally be attracted to each other and fall in love. The narrator matter of factly relates, "they were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love"(29).
Austen is always fascinated with balance and imbalance. Austen portrays their relationship in terms of an equation, with the two parties as the chief variables. In Austen's telling of the couple, she explains their coming together in an almost fatalistic or scientific fashion, or as if one might actually employ scientific laws in assessing its likelihood. Anne agains expresses her assessment of her affair with Frederick in terms of its unjust imbalances when she thinks of how she at 27 might now advise her 19 year old self. She is certain that such 19 year old would "never receive any [advice] of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good"(32).
Lady Russell seems to use a similar calculus in evaluating a potential marriage between Anne and Charles Musgrave some years later. However, her figuring and balancing is all done towards assessing the value of the variables, the propriety of the match, and the potential benefits accruing to Anne and herself. In considering Charles's suitability, she opines, "while she might have asked for something more, while Anne was nineteen, she would have rejoiced to see her at twenty-two, so respectably removed from the partialities and injustice of her father's house"(32).
Similarly, in her brief synopsis of the course of their affair she seems to be looking for a logical procession. However, she fails to find such a pattern. While Anne and Frederick's acquaintance proceeds in gradual fashion, their falling in love occurs rapidly. Next follows a "short period of exquisite felicity"(30). However, the short duration of their happiness does not lead to Anne's suffering it's exit for a similarly short period. Instead, Austen notes, "A few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance; but, not with a few months ended Anne's share of suffering from it"(31). Here, with these almost scientific sounding assessments, one hears Austen's frustration with the injustice and imbalance so often attending the course of love.
Austen turns a corner of sorts with the introduction of the Crofts in chapter 3. Theirs appears to be the one unequivocally happy marriage presented in the book and Austen and Anne Elliot are fascinated by them. We see them first via the second-hand description Mr. Shephard offers Mr. Elliot. Mr. Shephard speaks of Admiral Croft's origins in Somersetshire, his looks, and claims he is "quite the gentleman in all his notions and behaviour"(26). He goes on at a bit more lenght on Mrs. Shephard for she is the oddity apparently. Mrs. Croft is "a very well-spoken, genteel, shrewd lady, she seemed to be...asked more questions about the house, and terms and taxes, than the admiral himself,and seemed more conversant with business"(27).
Near the end of chapter three, we learn that Mrs. Croft is sister to Frederick Wentworth, introducing the book's central relationship/potential marriage, that between Frederick and Anne. Some nine years prior to the start of the book, they had been seriously courting each other and intending to marry. With precision, Austen charts the course and causes of their relationsip. With economy, Austen tells us Fredrick, having "come into Somesetshire, in the summer of 1806...was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling-Half the sum of attraction on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love"(29). Ultimately, two fine characters, according to an inventory of somewhat gender specific qualities, brought together by circumstance, will naturally be attracted to each other and fall in love. The narrator matter of factly relates, "they were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love"(29).
Austen is always fascinated with balance and imbalance. Austen portrays their relationship in terms of an equation, with the two parties as the chief variables. In Austen's telling of the couple, she explains their coming together in an almost fatalistic or scientific fashion, or as if one might actually employ scientific laws in assessing its likelihood. Anne agains expresses her assessment of her affair with Frederick in terms of its unjust imbalances when she thinks of how she at 27 might now advise her 19 year old self. She is certain that such 19 year old would "never receive any [advice] of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good"(32).
Lady Russell seems to use a similar calculus in evaluating a potential marriage between Anne and Charles Musgrave some years later. However, her figuring and balancing is all done towards assessing the value of the variables, the propriety of the match, and the potential benefits accruing to Anne and herself. In considering Charles's suitability, she opines, "while she might have asked for something more, while Anne was nineteen, she would have rejoiced to see her at twenty-two, so respectably removed from the partialities and injustice of her father's house"(32).
Similarly, in her brief synopsis of the course of their affair she seems to be looking for a logical procession. However, she fails to find such a pattern. While Anne and Frederick's acquaintance proceeds in gradual fashion, their falling in love occurs rapidly. Next follows a "short period of exquisite felicity"(30). However, the short duration of their happiness does not lead to Anne's suffering it's exit for a similarly short period. Instead, Austen notes, "A few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance; but, not with a few months ended Anne's share of suffering from it"(31). Here, with these almost scientific sounding assessments, one hears Austen's frustration with the injustice and imbalance so often attending the course of love.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Persuasion by Jane Austen: notes
Persuasion begins to query the origins and nature of four marriages within the first few pages of the novel. Within that short span, Austen considers two marriages that occur and two that do not, and the findings are dire. Austen believes in the potential for marriage to be one of the chief means of human happiness and personal growth. Yet, while key to happiness and fulfillment, good marriages seem rare in Persuasion.
As noted, we're given a whirlwind look at four in the first few pages. First is that of Sir Walter and his deceased wife. This is not a marriage that lends much credit to the forces at play in the setting-up of marriages in Austen's day. Sir Walter is a shallow and vain man unfortunately married to a substantial woman, Anne Elliot's mother, Elizabeth. Austen writes, "His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment, since to them he must have owed a wife of superior character to any thing deserved his own" (p10, Oxford Edition,1990).
The marriage is far from a meeting of minds conducive to the happiness of both and the benefit of the marriage accrues in shockingly uneven fashion. When Austen lists the blessing of life for Mrs. Elliot, it is hardly surprising thatthere is no mention made of Mr. Elliot. With classic Austen understatement and restraint, Mrs. Elliot is described as "not the very happiest being in the world herself, [she] had found enough in her duties, her friends, and her children, to attach her to life"(11).
In contrast, the marriage confers quite a bit of benefit to Mr. Elliot; while married, Mrs. Elliot "had humored, or softened, or concealed his failing, and promoted his real respectability for seventeen years." Mrs. Elliot raises his daughters with a moderate amount of success. She works to preserve his economic well-being, supplying her "method, moderation, and economy...with her had died all such right-mindedness"(15)
Next up in the marriages considered is one that doesn't occur: Mr. Elliot and Lady Russell fail to marry after the death of his first wife. Austen notes and remains tellingly silent on why Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Russell, "of steady age and character,"(11) never marry after the passing away of the girls' mother. Austen remarks that the public seems to only demand explanation when a woman marries again, not when she doesn't. On the other hand, Mr. Elliot's remaining single apparently requires explanation: he is sacrificing his ambitions for his eldest daughter, 29year old Elizabeth.
Elizabeth's failure to marry is then brought into focus. Austen raises the question of the latter's failure to find a marriageable companion briefly, noting her beauty and alluding to her wondering if she is going to be "solicited by baronet-blood within the next twelve month or two"(13). Originally, she sought the hand of her cousin, the future heir to Sir Walter's title and lands, Mr. William Elliot. For mysterious reasons, he does not pursue her but "purchased independence by uniting himself to a rich woman of inferior birth"(14). The latter is the last marriage observed and speaks to the primary spring governing the making of marriage.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Perhaps it is God's command-volition and providence in Daniel Deronda
In trying to figure out what kind of mother might have raised Mirah, Mrs. Meyrick opines, "A good woman, you may depend: you may know it by the scoundrel the father is....Wheaten flour has to be accounted for'"(223). Partially contradicting the good Mrs. Meyrick, in Daniel Deronda, we are confronted with three young people on the verge of adulthood, Daniel, Gwendolen and Mirah, who grow up outside the strong influence of an adult or moral exemplar. While not literally parent-less, all three are examples of children who play parent to the adult they become, more or less. Fatherless, Gwendolen is the most extreme example with her childish mother who has no influence on her daughter. Mirah is also lacking in parental guidance; kidnapped from a loving mother by a despicable father who then goes on to claim Mirah's mother died. Finally, there is Daniel; raised by his shallow Uncle Hugo, whom he suspects is his father, and willfully ignorant of his mother.
Self-raised as they are, they turn out quite differently. Mirah and Daniel seem to have innate qualities of character and a strong, inborn moral sense that saves them from growing into foolish and amoral adults. Gwendolen is not so lucky; while she's smart enough, she seems prone to a foolishness. Rather than seeing and responding to the potential peril of her situation by a stricter attention to virtue, Gwendolen suspects that if she doesn't cut a few corners, she's not likely to achieve a better station and a position from which she can gain the respect of others and herself. Clearly, while all three start out in a similar circumstance. However, Mirah and Daniel achieve a different fate than Gwendolen thanks to an ability to reflect on life, to see it clearly, and to form and act upon strong inner resolves. Choices are made and rewarded.
Yet, on another level, a great dose of fate seems to play a part in the outcomes of their lives. All three come to crisis moments in their lives, moments when they feel despair and profound uncertainty. All three find themselves in trouble, morally and emotionally. When Gwendolen comes to her crisis, her family's sudden decline in fortune, nobody of moral stature and worth seems available to help her through the difficult situation that ensues. When Mirah and Daniel come to their moment of crisis, they find each other through a remarkable sequence of chance events, and, ironically, both serve as the others rescuer by meeting when they do.
Daniel encounters Mirah in a round-about manner. In speaking of Mirah's resignation to waiting for her mother to appear, Mrs. Meyrick tells Daniel, "It is not in her nature to run into planning and devising: only to submit...About finding her mother, her only notion now is to trust: since you were sent to save her and we are good to her, she trusts that her mother will be found in the same unsought way'"(224). Prone to see providence in many places, Mirah immediately ascribes a divine hand to Daniel's rescue of her. When he comes to help her into the boat, she pauses before agreeing to follow him. She eventually accepts his help, admitting, "You [Daniel] look good. Perhaps it is God's command"(190). In the light of Mirah's stories and perceptions, one could conclude that human's open themselves to providence when they put aside planning and devising and learn to submit and trust.
Considering the affinities and likenesses between the two,the attractive force at work may be an inverse magnetism, with like attracting like. Both are uncommonly beautiful. Both inspire affection and admiration. Both are musical. Both are products of difficult pasts. Both are classic examples of children who are father and mother the adult they become. Yet, despite their lack of parenting, both have parents that afford them a limited love that renders them capable of great love. Both seem uncommonly wise and self-possessed.
They are not identical. Mirah's experience differs from Daniel's situation. She remembers an intense bond with her mother, but is taken from her by her father who then tells her that her mother has died. Living with her father, an ultimately selfish man who shows her a smidgen affection,she enters into his crazy, theaterical life and makes a conscious effort to remove herself from her surroundings and their influence. Daniel is fairly content with his world as a child. The only issue is the mystery and whispers surrounding his mother. This secret brings out a reserve in him, turns him into a bit of a thoughtful loner capable of a great sympathy for folks wronged by circumstance. But, his childhood with his "Uncle" Hugo doesn't provoke Mirah's strenous striving after virtue.
While tutored and sent to wonderful schools, Daniel is also propelled by a love of learning and reflecting upon and applies his learning. Even as a child, he is able to overcome his prejudice in favor of his Uncle Hugo and eventually, even as a young man in his early teens, on his own comes to a fair assessment of his foppish uncle, despite his earlier predilection and worship of the man. In addition, despite the fact that he has no clear and shining examples of virtuous conduct, upon rescuing Mirah, he is eager to act in such a way that his behavior can not possibly shame her, reflecting that, "
Mirah self-educates herself, and, in a testament to Eliot's belief in education and individual will, Mirah's self-education extends to her own moral development. She resolves "'It was my will to keep myself from wickedness; and I prayed for help'"(219). She hates the show business people and routines of her and her father's life and "'when I understood nothing, I shrunk away from all these things outside me into a companionship with thoughts that were not like them; and I gathered thoughts very fast, because I read many things, Shakespeare and Schiller, and learned evil and good'"(213). She does likewise in pursuing Judaism, quietly going about it despite what she suspected was her father's disapproval of her interest. Mirah closely associates Judaism with her mother.
Mirah retreats from the world into a world of memory and literature. However, her virtue she appears to own is not the product of her segregation. Mirah believes this inner world in which she finds refuge is dependent on her remaining good and virtuous. So, when she contemplates leaving her father, she doesn't for she "'dreaded doing wrong, for I thought I might get hateful to myself, in the same way that many others seemed hateful to me. For so long, I had never felt my outside world happy; and if I got wicked I should lose my world of happy thoughts where my mother lived with me'"(214). Mirah's putting of herself apart, has led her to retain a preternatural innocence, or as Eliot observes, "her theatrical training left no recognizable trace; probably her manners had not much changed since she played the forsaken child at nine years of age"(225). Elsewhere, Eliot harps on her innocence by labelling her "a fawn"(187). Throughout the early sketching of her, Eliot makes repeated notice of her diminutive stature. The Meyrick women are also relentlessly described as small (197, 200), yet, miraculously, Mirah is smaller, as indicated by the need for Mab to run out and buy her slippers because none of the small Meyrick's wear a shoe size small enough to fit her. Still, small as she may be, Eliot notes the "cheap clothing" of the slippers "moulding itself on her feet, seemed an adornment as choice as the sheaths of buds"(209). Yet ultimately, Mirah is not a child innocent. Daniel feels that "Mirah was not childlike from ignorance"(225).
Both are reared by men who are strongly inclined to the profane and often appear shallow. This leads both Mirah and Daniel to lead lives of reverence, reflexion and virtue. This reaction is especially pronounced in Mirah's story. In relating her father's habit of mockery, Mirah complains, "'Is this world and all the life upon it but a farce and a vaudeville, where you can find no great meanings?'"(216). Partially mirroring Daniel's path to virtue, Mirah's childhood contact with the vice and pettiness of her father leads her to vigorously pursue virtue in reaction, and, as Daniel vows to be above-board in his dealings with Mirah to keep her clear of the murk that marred his childhood, Mirah "hated all untruth" because she suspects her father has lied about her mother being dead (215).
And, yet, for all their resolve and efforts at self-parenting, circumstance delivers them to a place from which they need rescue. In Mirah's case, she gets to a place in which "'calamity had closed in on me too, and I saw no pathway but to evil'(222). It is at this point that Daniel comes to her and she describes him as an angel and it's hard not to second her perception of him as such.
Daniel's circumstances just prior to the encounter are considerably better than Mirah's on a surface level. Where Mirah is on the verge of suicide, Daniel is at a point where he seems to be drifing, unable to gain a purchase on any useful adult role or purpose. Indeed, this surface discrepancy between their circumstances amidst the myriad ways they mirror each other, affords Eliot an opportunity to suggest the extent of the despair quietly lying hid just under the surface of Daniel's irresolution and uncertainty. In effect, Eliot is saying uncertainty left unresolved is a type of suicide? Purpose is a necessity, oxygen, and without it we lose an essential aspect of ourselves.
Daniel's Uncertainty 188
Mirah-"But now I am commanded to live. I cannot see how I shall live"(193). Earlier,Mirah reads providence into her decision to flee, giving the divine a maternal cloak in her assertion that "'God was warning me; my mother's voice was in my soul'"(220). She sees God's hand in both the good and the bad she encounters. When she gets to London and discovers that the street she grew up on is gone and her mother likely dead, she "shrinks" from the world into a profound despair and believes her "'despair was the voice telling me to die'"(222).
Daniel's being likened to the angelic vision (193) The Meyricks are "'the ministering angels'"(201).
Mirah-"then goodness came to me living, and I felt trust in the living"(211). And, goodness has a powerful effect on the world. Prior to meeting Daniel, Mirah feels that her mother is dead, but, touched by his goodness, she comes to believe the opposite.
Mirah as faun, as small and child-like-187,190,194
taken to
On her first morning with the Meyrick's, she tells her story in the front parlor and Eliot asserts the small, modest room "was as good as a temple"(210) thanks to the presence of the poor and besieged Mirah.
"The moment of finding a fellow creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea"(195).
The Meyrick's home as "two little parlours with no furniture that a broker would have cared to cheapen except the prints and piano, there was space and apparatus for a wide-glancing, nicely-select life, open to the highest things in music, painting, and poetry"(197).
meyrick's "goodwill was being reflected"(200) in Mirah's face.
201-202 Mirah's final blessing seems a version of Mary's magnificat
Mrs. Meyrick's parenting 199
"emotive memory"(205)
"her voice, her accents, her looks, all the sweet purity that clothed her as with a consecrating garment"(207)
In the epigram to chapter 20, Eliot quotes from Alexander Knox as quoted in Southey's Life of Wesley-
"we sometimes meet persons who, in their very mein and aspect, as well as in the whole habit of life, manifest such a signature and stamp of virtue, as to make the judgement of them a matter of intuition rather than the result of continued examination"
In accounting for her aversion to the Count, Mirah confesses, "'I couldn not tell why he was so much worse to me than other men. Some feelings are like our hearing: they come as sounds do, before we know their reason'"(218).
Similarly, Mirah believes that, when she finally achieves an inner clarity or certainty in regards to whether she should or can leave her father, she also gains in her physical, visual acuity (220).
Yet, remarkably, in Eliot's world, these two miserable creatures, both at dead ends without an apparent out, manage to serve as rescuing angels to each other. Daniel's encounter with Mirah, his seeing her virtue under duress and endangered, has a galvanizing effect upon his character. He was in possession of a flabby, intellectual virtue that receives a channeling and direction when he sees Mirah on the verge of drowning herself in the river. And, his sight of her is visionary; she appears to him with the suddenness, clarity and almost kinetic force of a vision. A few moments of gazing at her virtue in distress pivots his life. In mirror fashion, Mirah's life too is changed radically when she sees Daniel who also appears to her like a vision. What is remarkable is how this is a chance encounter. There is something both beautiful and terrible in that. This moment which has such a profound impact on both their lives, which is chiefly responsible in the ennobling of two human beings, occurs by seeming chance. Because chance seems a satisfactionless cause for such a lovely event, many readers may be inclined to see the relentless if irregular hand of some kind of a grace at work.
Eliot certainly lays the ground for the reader so inclined. The event is told with all sorts of heroic, romantic and Biblical allusions. In relating their encounter, Eliot makes odd references to story of baby Moses. Daniel is clearly to be a Moses like figure in the book. Mordecai certainly views him that way. Like Moses, Daniel is "found," or in encountering the distressed Mirah, finds himself down by the river. However, he gets found by found and saved figuratively by literally finding and saving someone else.
Both Mirah and Daniel are in possession of a virtue within and both work to keep that interior virtue alive by various forms of reserve and segregation. But, as she makes manifest by her story, Eliot believes that carefully guarded virtue, that only seeks it's own maintenance, is eventually a spent force (literally rendered as Daniel drifting down the river just prior to his vision of Mirah on the bank), or at best a limited force. Eliot's configuration of the scene suggests that for virtue to thrive, it must be exercised on furthering, succoring and cherishing another virtue. It can't be exercised on itself, on it's own shelter and maintenance. It must find and succor expressions of itself outside itself.
When Daniel first sees her, he initially turns her image into a romance and chides himself for taking an interest only because the woman is beautiful. When he encounters her again, he's in the midst of a mystical moment of reverie. His attention is focused on the landscape of the river at sunset and he is on the verge of losing his sense of himself when he suddenly sees Mirah saturating her cloak. This rapidly closes off his reverie.
Self-raised as they are, they turn out quite differently. Mirah and Daniel seem to have innate qualities of character and a strong, inborn moral sense that saves them from growing into foolish and amoral adults. Gwendolen is not so lucky; while she's smart enough, she seems prone to a foolishness. Rather than seeing and responding to the potential peril of her situation by a stricter attention to virtue, Gwendolen suspects that if she doesn't cut a few corners, she's not likely to achieve a better station and a position from which she can gain the respect of others and herself. Clearly, while all three start out in a similar circumstance. However, Mirah and Daniel achieve a different fate than Gwendolen thanks to an ability to reflect on life, to see it clearly, and to form and act upon strong inner resolves. Choices are made and rewarded.
Yet, on another level, a great dose of fate seems to play a part in the outcomes of their lives. All three come to crisis moments in their lives, moments when they feel despair and profound uncertainty. All three find themselves in trouble, morally and emotionally. When Gwendolen comes to her crisis, her family's sudden decline in fortune, nobody of moral stature and worth seems available to help her through the difficult situation that ensues. When Mirah and Daniel come to their moment of crisis, they find each other through a remarkable sequence of chance events, and, ironically, both serve as the others rescuer by meeting when they do.
Daniel encounters Mirah in a round-about manner. In speaking of Mirah's resignation to waiting for her mother to appear, Mrs. Meyrick tells Daniel, "It is not in her nature to run into planning and devising: only to submit...About finding her mother, her only notion now is to trust: since you were sent to save her and we are good to her, she trusts that her mother will be found in the same unsought way'"(224). Prone to see providence in many places, Mirah immediately ascribes a divine hand to Daniel's rescue of her. When he comes to help her into the boat, she pauses before agreeing to follow him. She eventually accepts his help, admitting, "You [Daniel] look good. Perhaps it is God's command"(190). In the light of Mirah's stories and perceptions, one could conclude that human's open themselves to providence when they put aside planning and devising and learn to submit and trust.
Considering the affinities and likenesses between the two,the attractive force at work may be an inverse magnetism, with like attracting like. Both are uncommonly beautiful. Both inspire affection and admiration. Both are musical. Both are products of difficult pasts. Both are classic examples of children who are father and mother the adult they become. Yet, despite their lack of parenting, both have parents that afford them a limited love that renders them capable of great love. Both seem uncommonly wise and self-possessed.
They are not identical. Mirah's experience differs from Daniel's situation. She remembers an intense bond with her mother, but is taken from her by her father who then tells her that her mother has died. Living with her father, an ultimately selfish man who shows her a smidgen affection,she enters into his crazy, theaterical life and makes a conscious effort to remove herself from her surroundings and their influence. Daniel is fairly content with his world as a child. The only issue is the mystery and whispers surrounding his mother. This secret brings out a reserve in him, turns him into a bit of a thoughtful loner capable of a great sympathy for folks wronged by circumstance. But, his childhood with his "Uncle" Hugo doesn't provoke Mirah's strenous striving after virtue.
While tutored and sent to wonderful schools, Daniel is also propelled by a love of learning and reflecting upon and applies his learning. Even as a child, he is able to overcome his prejudice in favor of his Uncle Hugo and eventually, even as a young man in his early teens, on his own comes to a fair assessment of his foppish uncle, despite his earlier predilection and worship of the man. In addition, despite the fact that he has no clear and shining examples of virtuous conduct, upon rescuing Mirah, he is eager to act in such a way that his behavior can not possibly shame her, reflecting that, "
Mirah self-educates herself, and, in a testament to Eliot's belief in education and individual will, Mirah's self-education extends to her own moral development. She resolves "'It was my will to keep myself from wickedness; and I prayed for help'"(219). She hates the show business people and routines of her and her father's life and "'when I understood nothing, I shrunk away from all these things outside me into a companionship with thoughts that were not like them; and I gathered thoughts very fast, because I read many things, Shakespeare and Schiller, and learned evil and good'"(213). She does likewise in pursuing Judaism, quietly going about it despite what she suspected was her father's disapproval of her interest. Mirah closely associates Judaism with her mother.
Mirah retreats from the world into a world of memory and literature. However, her virtue she appears to own is not the product of her segregation. Mirah believes this inner world in which she finds refuge is dependent on her remaining good and virtuous. So, when she contemplates leaving her father, she doesn't for she "'dreaded doing wrong, for I thought I might get hateful to myself, in the same way that many others seemed hateful to me. For so long, I had never felt my outside world happy; and if I got wicked I should lose my world of happy thoughts where my mother lived with me'"(214). Mirah's putting of herself apart, has led her to retain a preternatural innocence, or as Eliot observes, "her theatrical training left no recognizable trace; probably her manners had not much changed since she played the forsaken child at nine years of age"(225). Elsewhere, Eliot harps on her innocence by labelling her "a fawn"(187). Throughout the early sketching of her, Eliot makes repeated notice of her diminutive stature. The Meyrick women are also relentlessly described as small (197, 200), yet, miraculously, Mirah is smaller, as indicated by the need for Mab to run out and buy her slippers because none of the small Meyrick's wear a shoe size small enough to fit her. Still, small as she may be, Eliot notes the "cheap clothing" of the slippers "moulding itself on her feet, seemed an adornment as choice as the sheaths of buds"(209). Yet ultimately, Mirah is not a child innocent. Daniel feels that "Mirah was not childlike from ignorance"(225).
Both are reared by men who are strongly inclined to the profane and often appear shallow. This leads both Mirah and Daniel to lead lives of reverence, reflexion and virtue. This reaction is especially pronounced in Mirah's story. In relating her father's habit of mockery, Mirah complains, "'Is this world and all the life upon it but a farce and a vaudeville, where you can find no great meanings?'"(216). Partially mirroring Daniel's path to virtue, Mirah's childhood contact with the vice and pettiness of her father leads her to vigorously pursue virtue in reaction, and, as Daniel vows to be above-board in his dealings with Mirah to keep her clear of the murk that marred his childhood, Mirah "hated all untruth" because she suspects her father has lied about her mother being dead (215).
And, yet, for all their resolve and efforts at self-parenting, circumstance delivers them to a place from which they need rescue. In Mirah's case, she gets to a place in which "'calamity had closed in on me too, and I saw no pathway but to evil'(222). It is at this point that Daniel comes to her and she describes him as an angel and it's hard not to second her perception of him as such.
Daniel's circumstances just prior to the encounter are considerably better than Mirah's on a surface level. Where Mirah is on the verge of suicide, Daniel is at a point where he seems to be drifing, unable to gain a purchase on any useful adult role or purpose. Indeed, this surface discrepancy between their circumstances amidst the myriad ways they mirror each other, affords Eliot an opportunity to suggest the extent of the despair quietly lying hid just under the surface of Daniel's irresolution and uncertainty. In effect, Eliot is saying uncertainty left unresolved is a type of suicide? Purpose is a necessity, oxygen, and without it we lose an essential aspect of ourselves.
Daniel's Uncertainty 188
Mirah-"But now I am commanded to live. I cannot see how I shall live"(193). Earlier,Mirah reads providence into her decision to flee, giving the divine a maternal cloak in her assertion that "'God was warning me; my mother's voice was in my soul'"(220). She sees God's hand in both the good and the bad she encounters. When she gets to London and discovers that the street she grew up on is gone and her mother likely dead, she "shrinks" from the world into a profound despair and believes her "'despair was the voice telling me to die'"(222).
Daniel's being likened to the angelic vision (193) The Meyricks are "'the ministering angels'"(201).
Mirah-"then goodness came to me living, and I felt trust in the living"(211). And, goodness has a powerful effect on the world. Prior to meeting Daniel, Mirah feels that her mother is dead, but, touched by his goodness, she comes to believe the opposite.
Mirah as faun, as small and child-like-187,190,194
taken to
On her first morning with the Meyrick's, she tells her story in the front parlor and Eliot asserts the small, modest room "was as good as a temple"(210) thanks to the presence of the poor and besieged Mirah.
"The moment of finding a fellow creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea"(195).
The Meyrick's home as "two little parlours with no furniture that a broker would have cared to cheapen except the prints and piano, there was space and apparatus for a wide-glancing, nicely-select life, open to the highest things in music, painting, and poetry"(197).
meyrick's "goodwill was being reflected"(200) in Mirah's face.
201-202 Mirah's final blessing seems a version of Mary's magnificat
Mrs. Meyrick's parenting 199
"emotive memory"(205)
"her voice, her accents, her looks, all the sweet purity that clothed her as with a consecrating garment"(207)
In the epigram to chapter 20, Eliot quotes from Alexander Knox as quoted in Southey's Life of Wesley-
"we sometimes meet persons who, in their very mein and aspect, as well as in the whole habit of life, manifest such a signature and stamp of virtue, as to make the judgement of them a matter of intuition rather than the result of continued examination"
In accounting for her aversion to the Count, Mirah confesses, "'I couldn not tell why he was so much worse to me than other men. Some feelings are like our hearing: they come as sounds do, before we know their reason'"(218).
Similarly, Mirah believes that, when she finally achieves an inner clarity or certainty in regards to whether she should or can leave her father, she also gains in her physical, visual acuity (220).
Yet, remarkably, in Eliot's world, these two miserable creatures, both at dead ends without an apparent out, manage to serve as rescuing angels to each other. Daniel's encounter with Mirah, his seeing her virtue under duress and endangered, has a galvanizing effect upon his character. He was in possession of a flabby, intellectual virtue that receives a channeling and direction when he sees Mirah on the verge of drowning herself in the river. And, his sight of her is visionary; she appears to him with the suddenness, clarity and almost kinetic force of a vision. A few moments of gazing at her virtue in distress pivots his life. In mirror fashion, Mirah's life too is changed radically when she sees Daniel who also appears to her like a vision. What is remarkable is how this is a chance encounter. There is something both beautiful and terrible in that. This moment which has such a profound impact on both their lives, which is chiefly responsible in the ennobling of two human beings, occurs by seeming chance. Because chance seems a satisfactionless cause for such a lovely event, many readers may be inclined to see the relentless if irregular hand of some kind of a grace at work.
Eliot certainly lays the ground for the reader so inclined. The event is told with all sorts of heroic, romantic and Biblical allusions. In relating their encounter, Eliot makes odd references to story of baby Moses. Daniel is clearly to be a Moses like figure in the book. Mordecai certainly views him that way. Like Moses, Daniel is "found," or in encountering the distressed Mirah, finds himself down by the river. However, he gets found by found and saved figuratively by literally finding and saving someone else.
Both Mirah and Daniel are in possession of a virtue within and both work to keep that interior virtue alive by various forms of reserve and segregation. But, as she makes manifest by her story, Eliot believes that carefully guarded virtue, that only seeks it's own maintenance, is eventually a spent force (literally rendered as Daniel drifting down the river just prior to his vision of Mirah on the bank), or at best a limited force. Eliot's configuration of the scene suggests that for virtue to thrive, it must be exercised on furthering, succoring and cherishing another virtue. It can't be exercised on itself, on it's own shelter and maintenance. It must find and succor expressions of itself outside itself.
When Daniel first sees her, he initially turns her image into a romance and chides himself for taking an interest only because the woman is beautiful. When he encounters her again, he's in the midst of a mystical moment of reverie. His attention is focused on the landscape of the river at sunset and he is on the verge of losing his sense of himself when he suddenly sees Mirah saturating her cloak. This rapidly closes off his reverie.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Eliot's Scientific Examination of Character in Deronda
In the epigram to the first chapter of Daniel Deronda, Eliot compares the novelist to the scientist. She does so again in the epigram to chapter 16. She writes, " Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction...and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action"(164). Eliot's perspective on character is the scientist's; she believes it can be accounted for, it's causes located. Of course, unlike the scientist, the novelist is a creator/locator of effect as well as cause. Daniel Deronda is clearly her hero, a virtuous exemplar, and part of her novel's project is to imagine how such a character might come about.
Unlike the scientist, the novelist is after both the everyday and the exceptional. In focusing on Daniel, Eliot is not looking to the ordinary but the exceptional in the ordinary. Such a character demand exceptional origins, but not too exceptional. The exceptional and extraordinary falls within the scientist's study. This is not necessarily true of the novelist who is working within a much more didactic tradition. To be a bit reductive, as a novelist, Eliot is after a recipe of sorts for a hero. For it to be of some use, it must be practicable. Her task is a difficult one. It is hard to see how she will square all the demands she's placed on herself.
The central, determining fact of Daniel's life is his murky origin and his mysterious and hard to credit reaction to it. Apparently, because he is so happy living with his Uncle Hugo, he has no great curiousity as to his parents and is content with the smidgen of information that Uncle Hugo provides him. When he comes to fear that he might be Hugo's son and a bastard, a fear of discovering more and his sensitivity about what others actually think of him, leads him to develop a reserve. As a reader, his willful ignorance makes sense at a certain level, but ultimately requires some suspension of disbelief.
Because it strains credulity, Eliot's insistence on Daniel's willful and semi-content ignorance indicates it is in her mind an essential foundation to his character. A creature like Daniel must be sui generis. Yet, how to accomplish this outside of making him an orphan or bastard, both of which options carry semantic/literary baggage presenting potential problems. Orphans lack the means that Daniel will need; Eliot still retains a great faith in a classic and traditional education that would not credibly open to many orphans. Bastards traditionally have been portrayed as warped characters by virtue of their position outside society. Yet, Eliot seemingly can't see Daniel growing into who she wishes him to be from traditional, societally sanctioned soils.
Distrusting most parents, Eliot would have her hero be without such a burden and liability; she doesn't want him to inherit the prejudices of a parent nor have his freedom restricted by a traditional parent. Fallen parents wish to replicate themselves, and Eliot is looking to create a less fallen man. Yet, she want him to have the love of a parent; her hero needs to feel loved as a child. However, her hero can't be touched and bound by the parent.
The wonderfully drawn "Uncle" Hugo serves as a solution. Daniel admires him with a filial intensity that is not entirely warranted or rewarded. To be fair, Uncle Hugo does provide him "with what would generally be considered more than the due love and nurture"(175). But, there is clearly a distance between the two. Hugo is shallow. Daniel as a boy seems a more serious and thoughtful than his "parent." thouthe most worldly of men and wonderfully unaware of it. His own education seems to have been largely wasted on him. Discussing futures with Daniel, he warns him away from becoming a don, or to investing his time to heavily in the classics, cautioning, "'unless a man can get the prestige and income of a Don and write donnish books, it's hardly worthwhile of him to make a Greek and Latin machine of himself, and be able to spin you out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse you'll give him as cue. That is all very fine, but in practical life, nobody gives you the cue for pages of Greek'"(177).
Daniel seems very different and actually seems to have taken to learning at some level. At thirteen, his knowledge is primarily from books, but it's clear that he holds it tight. Eliot writes, "he could have talked with the wisdom of a bookish child"(167) and tells of how "he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous"(168). In this latter activity, he seems a version of the novelist herself? Moreover, when the time comes for application, he's capable of letting his learning and its habits inform his experience, as when he first imagines he might be a bastard and "the ardor which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed toward his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown"(167).
In addition to leaving him relatively untouched by a parent or adult, Eliot also seems to work against her scientific endeavor, her recipe for a hero, by gifting him with apparent gifts of character as a child. Eliot does not present Daniel as a blank slate. First, she repeatedly refers to his having a loving nature. She writes, "For in what related to himself his resentful impulses had early been checked by a mastering affectionatness"(178). Likewise, she remarks, "If Daniel had been of a less ardently affectionate nature, the reserve about himself and the supposition that others had something to his disadvantage in their minds, might have turned into a hard, proud antagonism".
It is this ardent loving nature which conditions his response to his circumstances. However, while an ardent loving nature may not be rare, Eliot nevertheless qualifies Daniel's response or reading of his circumstances as rare, again suggesting essential aspects of Daniel's character as inherent. Eliot claims, "the sense of an entailed disadvantage...makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and make the imagination tender"(175). Above, Eliot makes mention of yeast, as in a recipe, yet her account seems more descriptive, like a natural history, rather than prescriptive.
Unlike the scientist, the novelist is after both the everyday and the exceptional. In focusing on Daniel, Eliot is not looking to the ordinary but the exceptional in the ordinary. Such a character demand exceptional origins, but not too exceptional. The exceptional and extraordinary falls within the scientist's study. This is not necessarily true of the novelist who is working within a much more didactic tradition. To be a bit reductive, as a novelist, Eliot is after a recipe of sorts for a hero. For it to be of some use, it must be practicable. Her task is a difficult one. It is hard to see how she will square all the demands she's placed on herself.
The central, determining fact of Daniel's life is his murky origin and his mysterious and hard to credit reaction to it. Apparently, because he is so happy living with his Uncle Hugo, he has no great curiousity as to his parents and is content with the smidgen of information that Uncle Hugo provides him. When he comes to fear that he might be Hugo's son and a bastard, a fear of discovering more and his sensitivity about what others actually think of him, leads him to develop a reserve. As a reader, his willful ignorance makes sense at a certain level, but ultimately requires some suspension of disbelief.
Because it strains credulity, Eliot's insistence on Daniel's willful and semi-content ignorance indicates it is in her mind an essential foundation to his character. A creature like Daniel must be sui generis. Yet, how to accomplish this outside of making him an orphan or bastard, both of which options carry semantic/literary baggage presenting potential problems. Orphans lack the means that Daniel will need; Eliot still retains a great faith in a classic and traditional education that would not credibly open to many orphans. Bastards traditionally have been portrayed as warped characters by virtue of their position outside society. Yet, Eliot seemingly can't see Daniel growing into who she wishes him to be from traditional, societally sanctioned soils.
Distrusting most parents, Eliot would have her hero be without such a burden and liability; she doesn't want him to inherit the prejudices of a parent nor have his freedom restricted by a traditional parent. Fallen parents wish to replicate themselves, and Eliot is looking to create a less fallen man. Yet, she want him to have the love of a parent; her hero needs to feel loved as a child. However, her hero can't be touched and bound by the parent.
The wonderfully drawn "Uncle" Hugo serves as a solution. Daniel admires him with a filial intensity that is not entirely warranted or rewarded. To be fair, Uncle Hugo does provide him "with what would generally be considered more than the due love and nurture"(175). But, there is clearly a distance between the two. Hugo is shallow. Daniel as a boy seems a more serious and thoughtful than his "parent." thouthe most worldly of men and wonderfully unaware of it. His own education seems to have been largely wasted on him. Discussing futures with Daniel, he warns him away from becoming a don, or to investing his time to heavily in the classics, cautioning, "'unless a man can get the prestige and income of a Don and write donnish books, it's hardly worthwhile of him to make a Greek and Latin machine of himself, and be able to spin you out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse you'll give him as cue. That is all very fine, but in practical life, nobody gives you the cue for pages of Greek'"(177).
Daniel seems very different and actually seems to have taken to learning at some level. At thirteen, his knowledge is primarily from books, but it's clear that he holds it tight. Eliot writes, "he could have talked with the wisdom of a bookish child"(167) and tells of how "he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous"(168). In this latter activity, he seems a version of the novelist herself? Moreover, when the time comes for application, he's capable of letting his learning and its habits inform his experience, as when he first imagines he might be a bastard and "the ardor which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed toward his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown"(167).
In addition to leaving him relatively untouched by a parent or adult, Eliot also seems to work against her scientific endeavor, her recipe for a hero, by gifting him with apparent gifts of character as a child. Eliot does not present Daniel as a blank slate. First, she repeatedly refers to his having a loving nature. She writes, "For in what related to himself his resentful impulses had early been checked by a mastering affectionatness"(178). Likewise, she remarks, "If Daniel had been of a less ardently affectionate nature, the reserve about himself and the supposition that others had something to his disadvantage in their minds, might have turned into a hard, proud antagonism".
It is this ardent loving nature which conditions his response to his circumstances. However, while an ardent loving nature may not be rare, Eliot nevertheless qualifies Daniel's response or reading of his circumstances as rare, again suggesting essential aspects of Daniel's character as inherent. Eliot claims, "the sense of an entailed disadvantage...makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and make the imagination tender"(175). Above, Eliot makes mention of yeast, as in a recipe, yet her account seems more descriptive, like a natural history, rather than prescriptive.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Daniel and Gwendolen connections in Eliot's Daniel Deronda
In an earlier posting, I began to ask what Eliot was after in wedding the two strains of her story. I wasn't entirely sure upon a first reading of the book. In re-reading, one does note similarities between the characters.
-Daniel and Gwendolen are both raised by single parents. Sir Hugo has a wife but she doesn't seem to interact with Daniel on any level, much less a parental one. Gwendolen is raised by her foolish, easily-led mother. Daniel by his father. Neither does much in the way of parenting. Eliot comically notes "the lightness with which the preparation of young lives seems to lie on respectable consciences"(174).
-Daniel and Gwendolen are both striking physical specimens who provoke admiration in the literal sense of the word. In the midst of a description of a youthful Daniel's person and talents upon a crowd, the normally loquacious Eliot simply ends, "Everyone was admiring him"(169) as if she must here stop and simply admire herself.
-Both aspire to be gentlefolk, despite the fact that they weren't born to it. But, Daniel never harbors the outsider's perspective. Born to a gentleman's state, he sees it as natural.
Daniel and Gwendolen contrast.
-Unlike the emotionally frigid Gwendolen, Daniel is of a "ardently affectionate nature" which protects him against growing a "hard, proud antagonism" in reaction to the mystery surrounding his origins (171).
-Gwendolen loves her mother but hardly admires her in any sense. Daniel has a profound filial attachment to Sir Hugo. It's a bit hard to credit seeing as Daniel is a fairly subatantial and serious character while Sir Hugo seems like a shallow, good-time Charlie. He is Daniel's hero and when it seems he's harboring a secret suggesting flaws, he experiences a "revolutionary shock" which Eliot likens to that of a believer first doubting his or her "habitual beliefs" and feeling the world "totter"(172).
-Daniel is educated.
-Daniel is susceptible, or sensitive. His hardships and handicaps have had the effect of making him capable of recognizing the pain and suffering of others. The circumstances of his birth have caused him to be kind in the face of like suffering and injustice.
-Daniel and Gwendolen are both raised by single parents. Sir Hugo has a wife but she doesn't seem to interact with Daniel on any level, much less a parental one. Gwendolen is raised by her foolish, easily-led mother. Daniel by his father. Neither does much in the way of parenting. Eliot comically notes "the lightness with which the preparation of young lives seems to lie on respectable consciences"(174).
-Daniel and Gwendolen are both striking physical specimens who provoke admiration in the literal sense of the word. In the midst of a description of a youthful Daniel's person and talents upon a crowd, the normally loquacious Eliot simply ends, "Everyone was admiring him"(169) as if she must here stop and simply admire herself.
-Both aspire to be gentlefolk, despite the fact that they weren't born to it. But, Daniel never harbors the outsider's perspective. Born to a gentleman's state, he sees it as natural.
Daniel and Gwendolen contrast.
-Unlike the emotionally frigid Gwendolen, Daniel is of a "ardently affectionate nature" which protects him against growing a "hard, proud antagonism" in reaction to the mystery surrounding his origins (171).
-Gwendolen loves her mother but hardly admires her in any sense. Daniel has a profound filial attachment to Sir Hugo. It's a bit hard to credit seeing as Daniel is a fairly subatantial and serious character while Sir Hugo seems like a shallow, good-time Charlie. He is Daniel's hero and when it seems he's harboring a secret suggesting flaws, he experiences a "revolutionary shock" which Eliot likens to that of a believer first doubting his or her "habitual beliefs" and feeling the world "totter"(172).
-Daniel is educated.
-Daniel is susceptible, or sensitive. His hardships and handicaps have had the effect of making him capable of recognizing the pain and suffering of others. The circumstances of his birth have caused him to be kind in the face of like suffering and injustice.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Daniel Deronda's character and susceptibility
The reader isn't given a proper introduction to the title character of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda until page 162. We meet him in the opening as a spectator to the show that is Gwendolyn gambling at Leubronn. We see his hand in the necklace that is returned to her from the pawn shop. Then, there's the interlude establishing Gwendolyn's immediate past. Finally, after Eliot returns us to Leubronn in the immediate aftermath of Gwendolyn's sudden departure, we meet him discussing the girl with Malinger and Grandcourt. According to his louche ways, Malinger teasingly asks Daniel if he "won't run after the pretty gambler," and Daniel replies, "Decidedly not"(163). Quickly, we realize that Daniel is a decisive man; taking some of that glow away, piquing our curiousity, Eliot fills us in "history had given him a bias in another direction. He felt himself in no sense free"(163). With a few bold strokes, Eliot gives us a first glance at her Daniel as a virtuous hero.
In keeping with his classically heroic nature, Daniel is a man without firm roots. As a little boy, he lives with the never married Sir Hugo (who marries later, at 45). Sir Hugo refers to himself as Daniel's uncle and when the boy asks after his parent, apparently only once doing so, Hugo tells him that his parents are passed away. According to Eliot, Daniel is so terribly fond of Sir Hugo that he doesn't spend much time as a child pursuing the matter of his passed away parents.
His initial lack of interest in his past is kind of stunning, especially considering his supposed interest in history. Moreover, it's hard to figure out how Sir Hugo could have explained away his having only one real brother, Grandcourt's father, Henleigh Malinger Grandcourt (HMG senior takes his wife's name for unexplained reasons). Nor is his curiousity prodded by his lack of resemblance to any of the generations of Malinger's that hang upon the walls of the family estate.
Eliot memorably describes Daniel as "handsomer than any of them" and as a boy who could have
When a tutor's comment on the origins of bastards suggests that he might be the bastard child of Malinger, Daniel is not sure what to feel about it. Seen as possibly a father rather than an Uncle, the charming and beloved Sir Hugo suddenly appears in the aspect of a deceiver. Daniel finds that the stories of heroic Shakespearean bastards may have a bearing on his own story. He discovers that "the ardor which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed towards his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown"(167). Daniel is a child of imagination and for Eliot this is crucial to a person's living a heroic and a virtuous life. Presented with murkiness, Daniel's imagination is capable of reading his life in light of history, myth and drama, of seeing himself as possibly having a self similar to storybook heroes of yore.
Like Eliot, Daniel is interested in History, especially history of character or how heroes and villains come to be. In the epigraph to the opening chapter, Eliot spoke of the difficulty of locating the start of a story, or, of locating and determining what are the truly determinative causes of a rise or fall. Her own story then demonstrates the difficulty by launching out on an opening only to circle the story to a point further back in the past than the original start of the novel. Sharing his author's interest, the child Daniel has often puzzled over the missing history of great heros. Now confronted with murkiness in his own past, he begins "making conjectures about his own history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous"(168).
However, beyond conferring upon his life a possibly heroic destiny, the mystery of his antecedents also provokes a "premature reserve which helped to intensify his inward experience"(168). He feels that things are being held from him. He decides, if people do not wish to make mention of his past, he should be careful not to prompt them to do so. A curious choice and one that aligns him a bit with Gwendolyn in her love of gambling and uncertainty?
It is the mystery surrounding his origins which profoundly shapes his characters. He wants to know where he comes, is upset that others know this but he doesn't, but is afraid to find out. This position or "experience" as Eliot labels it is in the author's main often the foundation of "the main lines of character" and plays a larger role than any type of formal education via science or literature (171). Yet, his experience is transformed by inherent aspects of Daniel's being. He possesses "an ardently affectionate nature" and "an inborn lovingness...strong enough to keep itself level with resentment"(171). The "indignation which had long mingled itself with his affection for Sir Hugo took the quality of pain rather than of temper"(175). Yet, his consciousness about this origins is a handicap, a "silent consciousness of a grief within, which might be compared in some ways with Byron's susceptibility about his deformed foot"(174).
But, Daniel's handicap, his disadvantage, works towards his nurturing a sympathetic character. While the circumstances and mystery surrounding his birth might made him into a "self-centred, unloving...Ishmaelite," in fact, Daniel is a "rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a mmyriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-wakened susceptibility, charge at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life; it had given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in certain directions, which marked im off from other youths much more than any talents he possessed"(175).
In keeping with his classically heroic nature, Daniel is a man without firm roots. As a little boy, he lives with the never married Sir Hugo (who marries later, at 45). Sir Hugo refers to himself as Daniel's uncle and when the boy asks after his parent, apparently only once doing so, Hugo tells him that his parents are passed away. According to Eliot, Daniel is so terribly fond of Sir Hugo that he doesn't spend much time as a child pursuing the matter of his passed away parents.
His initial lack of interest in his past is kind of stunning, especially considering his supposed interest in history. Moreover, it's hard to figure out how Sir Hugo could have explained away his having only one real brother, Grandcourt's father, Henleigh Malinger Grandcourt (HMG senior takes his wife's name for unexplained reasons). Nor is his curiousity prodded by his lack of resemblance to any of the generations of Malinger's that hang upon the walls of the family estate.
Eliot memorably describes Daniel as "handsomer than any of them" and as a boy who could have
"served as a model for any painter who wanted to image the most beautiful of boys: you could hardly have seen his face thoroughly meeting yours without believing that human creatures had done nobly in times past, and might do more nobly in time to come. The finest childlike faces have this consecrating power, and make us shudder anew at all the grossness and basely-wrought griefs of the world, lest they should enter here and defile"(166).
When a tutor's comment on the origins of bastards suggests that he might be the bastard child of Malinger, Daniel is not sure what to feel about it. Seen as possibly a father rather than an Uncle, the charming and beloved Sir Hugo suddenly appears in the aspect of a deceiver. Daniel finds that the stories of heroic Shakespearean bastards may have a bearing on his own story. He discovers that "the ardor which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed towards his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown"(167). Daniel is a child of imagination and for Eliot this is crucial to a person's living a heroic and a virtuous life. Presented with murkiness, Daniel's imagination is capable of reading his life in light of history, myth and drama, of seeing himself as possibly having a self similar to storybook heroes of yore.
Like Eliot, Daniel is interested in History, especially history of character or how heroes and villains come to be. In the epigraph to the opening chapter, Eliot spoke of the difficulty of locating the start of a story, or, of locating and determining what are the truly determinative causes of a rise or fall. Her own story then demonstrates the difficulty by launching out on an opening only to circle the story to a point further back in the past than the original start of the novel. Sharing his author's interest, the child Daniel has often puzzled over the missing history of great heros. Now confronted with murkiness in his own past, he begins "making conjectures about his own history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous"(168).
However, beyond conferring upon his life a possibly heroic destiny, the mystery of his antecedents also provokes a "premature reserve which helped to intensify his inward experience"(168). He feels that things are being held from him. He decides, if people do not wish to make mention of his past, he should be careful not to prompt them to do so. A curious choice and one that aligns him a bit with Gwendolyn in her love of gambling and uncertainty?
It is the mystery surrounding his origins which profoundly shapes his characters. He wants to know where he comes, is upset that others know this but he doesn't, but is afraid to find out. This position or "experience" as Eliot labels it is in the author's main often the foundation of "the main lines of character" and plays a larger role than any type of formal education via science or literature (171). Yet, his experience is transformed by inherent aspects of Daniel's being. He possesses "an ardently affectionate nature" and "an inborn lovingness...strong enough to keep itself level with resentment"(171). The "indignation which had long mingled itself with his affection for Sir Hugo took the quality of pain rather than of temper"(175). Yet, his consciousness about this origins is a handicap, a "silent consciousness of a grief within, which might be compared in some ways with Byron's susceptibility about his deformed foot"(174).
But, Daniel's handicap, his disadvantage, works towards his nurturing a sympathetic character. While the circumstances and mystery surrounding his birth might made him into a "self-centred, unloving...Ishmaelite," in fact, Daniel is a "rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a mmyriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-wakened susceptibility, charge at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life; it had given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in certain directions, which marked im off from other youths much more than any talents he possessed"(175).
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Further notes of Eliot's Daniel Deronda
All references are to a paperback of the 1995 Penguin edition, edited, annotated and introduced by Terrence Cave
Deronda seems a bit asymmetrical. On the one hand, there is the sad story of Gwendolen Harleth, a classic reprise of the forceful young woman who attempts to defy convention and impose her own will on the choice of her mate. Then, there is the story of Daniel Deronda as he searches for his self, his duty and finds it in his mystical connection to the Zionist Mordecai. There seems a great gap in character between the often times impulsive, thoughtless, egotistical Gwendolen and the almost saintly Daniel. What is the program? What is Eliot after in wedding such odd character and story strands?
It is hard to look to the otherworldly Daniel as example. Moreover, the manner in which his life's dilemma is resolved doesn't seem realistic or convincing. He chances upon his savior Mordecai by such a melange of chance and resolute action and it is difficult to imagine encountering parallel circumstances. It is important to remember that he begins to find Mordecai by attending to the immediate need of his sister when he encounters her on the verge of drowning herself in the lake. And, he is only in the position to do so because he is out in the world, engaged in an effort to free himself from his own mind and self-preoccupations. All this is in keeping with some of Eliot's central beliefs:
Eliot seems at pains to explain, redeem her interest in Gwendolen. The character of Daniel is an easy sell. He's a classic paragon of virtue, a literary figure that is presented as an example. Gwendolen is more of a cautionary tale for the most part, but yet from the beginning, Eliot is limning character and qualities that will ultimately save her, at least according to the value-frame of the narrator, in some small measure. And, I find her the more compelling example. She is a more engaging character and a more human one. It is easy to identify with her and the identification cements a stronger interest in her and how she'll achieve a worthy life. There is a heroic aspect to Gwendolen. She's a girl who has a grandiose self-conception. It is bound up in achieving and expressing itself upon a narrow stage: the social whirl of mid-nineteenth century England. This doesn't necessarily speak to the poverty of Gwendolen's vision. It is hard to imagine her conceiving of or finding another handy stage upon which she might act and rule as she wishes to do. She brings a strong, imperious nature to these narrow, trivial confines. Despite that, the strength of her character is obvious and fascinating. Gwendolen is a queen, a king, a leader, born outside the ranks of the powerful. Her refusal to compromise this vision of herself seems heroic to me.
Early on in the book, when Gwendolen is considering Grandcourt as a future husband, Eliot alludes to the asymmetry of the two stories and their central characters. She writes:
While this may be true in fact, Eliot's assertion here hardly seems borne out by the story which is about to follow. Gwendolen doesn't seem to have a yea or nay upon any good. No man seeks the vote of her affections, nor redirects his course to win them. And, I don't think Daniel looks to even Mirah for confirmation or direction when he launches upon his own good, the vision that Mordecai provides him. Eliot's little apostrophe above, charming as it is, seems oddly out-of-place here. At least after this reader's first reading, the question still remains: what is Eliot after in the wedding of Gwendolen and Daniel's tales?
I will add to this as I encounter answers in re-reading.
Deronda seems a bit asymmetrical. On the one hand, there is the sad story of Gwendolen Harleth, a classic reprise of the forceful young woman who attempts to defy convention and impose her own will on the choice of her mate. Then, there is the story of Daniel Deronda as he searches for his self, his duty and finds it in his mystical connection to the Zionist Mordecai. There seems a great gap in character between the often times impulsive, thoughtless, egotistical Gwendolen and the almost saintly Daniel. What is the program? What is Eliot after in wedding such odd character and story strands?
It is hard to look to the otherworldly Daniel as example. Moreover, the manner in which his life's dilemma is resolved doesn't seem realistic or convincing. He chances upon his savior Mordecai by such a melange of chance and resolute action and it is difficult to imagine encountering parallel circumstances. It is important to remember that he begins to find Mordecai by attending to the immediate need of his sister when he encounters her on the verge of drowning herself in the lake. And, he is only in the position to do so because he is out in the world, engaged in an effort to free himself from his own mind and self-preoccupations. All this is in keeping with some of Eliot's central beliefs:
Eliot seems at pains to explain, redeem her interest in Gwendolen. The character of Daniel is an easy sell. He's a classic paragon of virtue, a literary figure that is presented as an example. Gwendolen is more of a cautionary tale for the most part, but yet from the beginning, Eliot is limning character and qualities that will ultimately save her, at least according to the value-frame of the narrator, in some small measure. And, I find her the more compelling example. She is a more engaging character and a more human one. It is easy to identify with her and the identification cements a stronger interest in her and how she'll achieve a worthy life. There is a heroic aspect to Gwendolen. She's a girl who has a grandiose self-conception. It is bound up in achieving and expressing itself upon a narrow stage: the social whirl of mid-nineteenth century England. This doesn't necessarily speak to the poverty of Gwendolen's vision. It is hard to imagine her conceiving of or finding another handy stage upon which she might act and rule as she wishes to do. She brings a strong, imperious nature to these narrow, trivial confines. Despite that, the strength of her character is obvious and fascinating. Gwendolen is a queen, a king, a leader, born outside the ranks of the powerful. Her refusal to compromise this vision of herself seems heroic to me.
Early on in the book, when Gwendolen is considering Grandcourt as a future husband, Eliot alludes to the asymmetry of the two stories and their central characters. She writes:
"Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?-in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the sould of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of teror or of joy.
What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea of Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affetions."(124)
While this may be true in fact, Eliot's assertion here hardly seems borne out by the story which is about to follow. Gwendolen doesn't seem to have a yea or nay upon any good. No man seeks the vote of her affections, nor redirects his course to win them. And, I don't think Daniel looks to even Mirah for confirmation or direction when he launches upon his own good, the vision that Mordecai provides him. Eliot's little apostrophe above, charming as it is, seems oddly out-of-place here. At least after this reader's first reading, the question still remains: what is Eliot after in the wedding of Gwendolen and Daniel's tales?
I will add to this as I encounter answers in re-reading.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Notes on Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
quotes from Penguin edition of Daniel Deronda, edited with and introduction by Terence Cave, 1995.
From the epigraph of the first chapter, Eliot is interested in cause and effect, the fact and explanation, of character and virtue and she links her task as an artist to that of a scientist. She is going to explore how virtue and its opposite, how character, occurs. Yet, the epigraph acknowledges the difficulty; where do we draw a limit as to causes? Narrative demands a starting point, but determining such a starting point is more than a technical matter of craft. What types of circumstance, background might be thought of as key to a persons development and character. Eliot plays with the starting point of her tale by raising the importance of a starting pointn and then beginning with Gwendolyn gambling at Leubron under the gaze of Deronda, only to then move back to Gwendolyn's coming to Offendene one year prior to her visit to Leubron.
Gwendolyn exterior is the center of the opening pages. Eliot is hesitant to label her beautiful. Instead, she presents Gwendolyn as exotic, evocative of Nereids. We open from Deronda's perspective; he is watching her gamble and is determining whether he thinks she is beautiful, and whether her expression is animated by good or evil. He inclines to the latter conclusion, since her form attracts but fails to calm. Deronda's is not the only person watching and assessing Gwendolyn's exterior. Soon, we are treated to a whole anonymous chorus worth of comments on Gwendolyn's physical appearance. Indeed, later, alone in her room, Gwendolyn's exterior remains under studied fascination, albeit her own, in the scene where she gains calm by observing herself in a mirror after receiving the distressing news of her family's financial misfortune. This scene ends with her kissing her image in the mirror. Immediately, we are induced to think of Gwendolyn with some ambivalence. Certainly she is vain and exceedingly egotistical, but at the same time, as the object of what seems nearly universal fascination, it is difficult to blame her.
Eliot's picture of Gwendolyn's life heretofore is the textbook map to poor character. She has the childish mother who can hardly help herself less her daughters. When her mother bemoans her daughter's behavior, Gwendolyn asks her why she raised her as she did, why she allowed her to become the person she is. Mrs. Davilow objects "'Yourwill was always too strong for me'" and this awakens Gwendloyn's "compunction." Gwendolyn apologizes to her mother by excusing her as a parent. She tells her mother, "'How can you help what I am? Besides, I am very charming"(96). She has no real father, the first dying early on and a deceased step-father who spent little time with his family while alive and that time spent was of such a quality as to "reconcile" the family to his frequent absences.
There are aspects of Gwendolyn's egotism which are appealing. In distinction to expectations, she possesses an appealing resolve, a force of will. After worshipping her form in her mirror, she resolves, "How could she believe in sorrow? If it attacked her, she felt the force to crush it, to defy it, or run away from it, as she had done already. Anything seemed more possible than that she could go on bearing miseries, great or small"(18).
She's shrewd. While she's open with her mother as to her feelings regarding men and Grandcourt, she keeps quiet around her Uncle "for the very reason that she was determined to evade her uncles' control, she was determined not to clash with him"(97). As Eliot put it, "Gwendolyn knew certain differences in the characters with which she was concerned as birds know climate and weather"(97).
Gwendolyn has a natural nobility; she takes to the aristocratic role as if born to it. Eliot goes so far as to suggest that there is such a thing as inherent nobility, or stature, that one comes to by nature rather than birth. As she parades through neighboring Quetcham Hall, home of the Arrowpoints, "she felt exultingly that it befitted her: any one looking at her for the first time might have supposed that long galleries and lackeys had always been a matter of course in her life, while her cousin Anma, who was really more familiar with these things, felt almost as much embarrassed as a rabbit suddenly deposited in that well-lit space"(43).
Childish and narcissistic, Gwendolyn's feelings seem a natural product of her prospects. She is not blind to the narrow choices that her society offers her, and she objects. Arguing against her own experience, Mrs. Davilow advises Gwendolyn that "marriage is the only happy state for a woman" and Gwendolyn calls her on it by replying "I will not put up with it if it is not a happy state. I am determined to be happy-at least not to go on muddling away my life as other people do, being and doing nothing remarkable"(29). Moreover, Mrs. Davilow isn't necessarily interested in Gwendolyn finding the love of her life; as she comically muses to herself "'It would not signify, her being in love, if she would only accept the right person'"(94). Gwendolyn's objections, even mixed with her characteristic bragaddocio evidence a strength of character and a great deal of justifiable aspiration. Gwendolyn declares "There is nothing I enjoy more than taking aim-and hitting'"(340. Yet, such determination has little scope to exercise itself.
There's a dark, aberrant side to Gwendolyn's narcissism. In a scene that nicely prefigures both Gwendolyn's majestic faults and virtues that Eliot elaborates on as the plot develops, Gwendolyn rejects her cousin Rex's "love-making." Shortly after, her mother finds her "sobbing bitterly" and complaining that "'there is nothing worth living for'"(82). When pressed, Gwendolyn explains "'I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them'"(82). Initially she pursues Grandcourt in hopes of rejecting him, a punkish maneuver that seems feuled by an antipathy that extends beyond Grandcourt to the structure of societal expectations imposed upon her by virtue of her gender. In effect, she wishes to win society's prize so as to then toss it down in derision. Wow.
Similarly, shortly after meeting Grandcourt,an enormously wealthy and powerful figure, the nearly penniless Gwendolen insists on considering him. In part, Eliot is mocking Gwendolen here? It feels as if we are meant to find her debating the prospect of accepting Grandcourt as an act hubris on the part of a young girl with few options. Yet, as with so many of Eliot's sketches of Gwendolen, while we may laugh a bit out of habit and thoughtlessness, further consideration compells an admiration of her unwillingness to concede to the way things are, the unjust place a young girl like her continually finds herself in by virtue of prejudices of her time. She refuses to play along. And, sadly of course, one could argue she is punished for it? Or, is Eliot suggesting something else with this novel: does Gwendolen end up punished because she ultimately does give-in and does play along by accepting the odious Grandcourt?
Or, are we debating an impossibility. Gwendolen can't but play along with the script dealt her. Outside of Grandcourt, she has few real options, or at least few real options that might allow her to develop, exercise and express her uniquely powerful character. For all her daring and bravado, Gwendolyn retains an awareness that she's extraordinarily limited by her time and place. Perhaps it is this combination which gives rise to her fits of existential anxiety. Eliot terms it a "spiritual dread" but hedges "this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her or with any human relations. She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone, when for example, she was walking without companionship and there came some rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself"(63-64). When she experiences this in the past, she's "recovered the indifference to the vastness in which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world in which her will was of some avail...she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire"(64).
Earlier, Eliot contrasted Gwendolyn's naturally nobility with her cousins lack of the same and finds it puzzling. Gwendolyn's nobility seems born of something within her, of her nature. As the first chapters epigraph suggests, Eliot is looking at character and identity as a novelist but with a scientist's frame of cause and effect. The entire novel can be considered a query on identity, examining both the causes and effects of identity. She goes toward locating its causes by defining it as an inherent source of self, as a collection of duties imposed upon a person by their ancestors, history, and the time and place of their birth. With her portrait of Gwendolyn, she also suggest part of its source lies in biology. As to its effects, the book would seem to posit a sense of identity as a determinative bedrock of character.
As mentioned, Gwendolyn is lacking in some of the constituent elements. While in possession of a regal, imperious nature, she lacks a necessary connection to something larger than herself, some entity that might roots her to something outside herself. It is a lack springing from her childhood circumstances and upbringing. In addition to lacking a serious parent, or any type of guiding adult, Gwendolyn lacks roots. Writing of Gwendolyn, Eliot laments, "Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth's chilhood, or endeared to her by happy family memories! A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sound and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but by a sweet habit of the blood"(22). Eliot believes in a sustaining, childhood connection to place as "this blessed persistence in which affection can take root"(22).
Daniel too lacks strong roots, although the nature and effect of his lack is different. Daniel has some connection to a place: he's grown up in the orbit of Sir Hugo Malinger and in his various homes. However, his connection to Malinger is tenuous. One of the central oddities of the book is Daniel's seeming complacency in the face of the mystery surrounding his origins. Nobody tells him much that makes sense and he doesn't push the issue. He simply assumes that he might be the son of Sir Hugo, born out of wedlock. This causes him some anxiety. Unlike Gwendolyn, Daniel's absence of a past causes him to worry about his future; he is never able to dedicate himself to any particular future since he imagines that it should somehow be initimately determined by his past. He's convinced that if he were to know the details of his past, the course of his future would obviously suggest itself. More on Deronda's character in a future posting.
From the epigraph of the first chapter, Eliot is interested in cause and effect, the fact and explanation, of character and virtue and she links her task as an artist to that of a scientist. She is going to explore how virtue and its opposite, how character, occurs. Yet, the epigraph acknowledges the difficulty; where do we draw a limit as to causes? Narrative demands a starting point, but determining such a starting point is more than a technical matter of craft. What types of circumstance, background might be thought of as key to a persons development and character. Eliot plays with the starting point of her tale by raising the importance of a starting pointn and then beginning with Gwendolyn gambling at Leubron under the gaze of Deronda, only to then move back to Gwendolyn's coming to Offendene one year prior to her visit to Leubron.
Gwendolyn exterior is the center of the opening pages. Eliot is hesitant to label her beautiful. Instead, she presents Gwendolyn as exotic, evocative of Nereids. We open from Deronda's perspective; he is watching her gamble and is determining whether he thinks she is beautiful, and whether her expression is animated by good or evil. He inclines to the latter conclusion, since her form attracts but fails to calm. Deronda's is not the only person watching and assessing Gwendolyn's exterior. Soon, we are treated to a whole anonymous chorus worth of comments on Gwendolyn's physical appearance. Indeed, later, alone in her room, Gwendolyn's exterior remains under studied fascination, albeit her own, in the scene where she gains calm by observing herself in a mirror after receiving the distressing news of her family's financial misfortune. This scene ends with her kissing her image in the mirror. Immediately, we are induced to think of Gwendolyn with some ambivalence. Certainly she is vain and exceedingly egotistical, but at the same time, as the object of what seems nearly universal fascination, it is difficult to blame her.
Eliot's picture of Gwendolyn's life heretofore is the textbook map to poor character. She has the childish mother who can hardly help herself less her daughters. When her mother bemoans her daughter's behavior, Gwendolyn asks her why she raised her as she did, why she allowed her to become the person she is. Mrs. Davilow objects "'Yourwill was always too strong for me'" and this awakens Gwendloyn's "compunction." Gwendolyn apologizes to her mother by excusing her as a parent. She tells her mother, "'How can you help what I am? Besides, I am very charming"(96). She has no real father, the first dying early on and a deceased step-father who spent little time with his family while alive and that time spent was of such a quality as to "reconcile" the family to his frequent absences.
There are aspects of Gwendolyn's egotism which are appealing. In distinction to expectations, she possesses an appealing resolve, a force of will. After worshipping her form in her mirror, she resolves, "How could she believe in sorrow? If it attacked her, she felt the force to crush it, to defy it, or run away from it, as she had done already. Anything seemed more possible than that she could go on bearing miseries, great or small"(18).
She's shrewd. While she's open with her mother as to her feelings regarding men and Grandcourt, she keeps quiet around her Uncle "for the very reason that she was determined to evade her uncles' control, she was determined not to clash with him"(97). As Eliot put it, "Gwendolyn knew certain differences in the characters with which she was concerned as birds know climate and weather"(97).
Gwendolyn has a natural nobility; she takes to the aristocratic role as if born to it. Eliot goes so far as to suggest that there is such a thing as inherent nobility, or stature, that one comes to by nature rather than birth. As she parades through neighboring Quetcham Hall, home of the Arrowpoints, "she felt exultingly that it befitted her: any one looking at her for the first time might have supposed that long galleries and lackeys had always been a matter of course in her life, while her cousin Anma, who was really more familiar with these things, felt almost as much embarrassed as a rabbit suddenly deposited in that well-lit space"(43).
Childish and narcissistic, Gwendolyn's feelings seem a natural product of her prospects. She is not blind to the narrow choices that her society offers her, and she objects. Arguing against her own experience, Mrs. Davilow advises Gwendolyn that "marriage is the only happy state for a woman" and Gwendolyn calls her on it by replying "I will not put up with it if it is not a happy state. I am determined to be happy-at least not to go on muddling away my life as other people do, being and doing nothing remarkable"(29). Moreover, Mrs. Davilow isn't necessarily interested in Gwendolyn finding the love of her life; as she comically muses to herself "'It would not signify, her being in love, if she would only accept the right person'"(94). Gwendolyn's objections, even mixed with her characteristic bragaddocio evidence a strength of character and a great deal of justifiable aspiration. Gwendolyn declares "There is nothing I enjoy more than taking aim-and hitting'"(340. Yet, such determination has little scope to exercise itself.
There's a dark, aberrant side to Gwendolyn's narcissism. In a scene that nicely prefigures both Gwendolyn's majestic faults and virtues that Eliot elaborates on as the plot develops, Gwendolyn rejects her cousin Rex's "love-making." Shortly after, her mother finds her "sobbing bitterly" and complaining that "'there is nothing worth living for'"(82). When pressed, Gwendolyn explains "'I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them'"(82). Initially she pursues Grandcourt in hopes of rejecting him, a punkish maneuver that seems feuled by an antipathy that extends beyond Grandcourt to the structure of societal expectations imposed upon her by virtue of her gender. In effect, she wishes to win society's prize so as to then toss it down in derision. Wow.
Similarly, shortly after meeting Grandcourt,an enormously wealthy and powerful figure, the nearly penniless Gwendolen insists on considering him. In part, Eliot is mocking Gwendolen here? It feels as if we are meant to find her debating the prospect of accepting Grandcourt as an act hubris on the part of a young girl with few options. Yet, as with so many of Eliot's sketches of Gwendolen, while we may laugh a bit out of habit and thoughtlessness, further consideration compells an admiration of her unwillingness to concede to the way things are, the unjust place a young girl like her continually finds herself in by virtue of prejudices of her time. She refuses to play along. And, sadly of course, one could argue she is punished for it? Or, is Eliot suggesting something else with this novel: does Gwendolen end up punished because she ultimately does give-in and does play along by accepting the odious Grandcourt?
Or, are we debating an impossibility. Gwendolen can't but play along with the script dealt her. Outside of Grandcourt, she has few real options, or at least few real options that might allow her to develop, exercise and express her uniquely powerful character. For all her daring and bravado, Gwendolyn retains an awareness that she's extraordinarily limited by her time and place. Perhaps it is this combination which gives rise to her fits of existential anxiety. Eliot terms it a "spiritual dread" but hedges "this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her or with any human relations. She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone, when for example, she was walking without companionship and there came some rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself"(63-64). When she experiences this in the past, she's "recovered the indifference to the vastness in which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world in which her will was of some avail...she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire"(64).
Earlier, Eliot contrasted Gwendolyn's naturally nobility with her cousins lack of the same and finds it puzzling. Gwendolyn's nobility seems born of something within her, of her nature. As the first chapters epigraph suggests, Eliot is looking at character and identity as a novelist but with a scientist's frame of cause and effect. The entire novel can be considered a query on identity, examining both the causes and effects of identity. She goes toward locating its causes by defining it as an inherent source of self, as a collection of duties imposed upon a person by their ancestors, history, and the time and place of their birth. With her portrait of Gwendolyn, she also suggest part of its source lies in biology. As to its effects, the book would seem to posit a sense of identity as a determinative bedrock of character.
As mentioned, Gwendolyn is lacking in some of the constituent elements. While in possession of a regal, imperious nature, she lacks a necessary connection to something larger than herself, some entity that might roots her to something outside herself. It is a lack springing from her childhood circumstances and upbringing. In addition to lacking a serious parent, or any type of guiding adult, Gwendolyn lacks roots. Writing of Gwendolyn, Eliot laments, "Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth's chilhood, or endeared to her by happy family memories! A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sound and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but by a sweet habit of the blood"(22). Eliot believes in a sustaining, childhood connection to place as "this blessed persistence in which affection can take root"(22).
Daniel too lacks strong roots, although the nature and effect of his lack is different. Daniel has some connection to a place: he's grown up in the orbit of Sir Hugo Malinger and in his various homes. However, his connection to Malinger is tenuous. One of the central oddities of the book is Daniel's seeming complacency in the face of the mystery surrounding his origins. Nobody tells him much that makes sense and he doesn't push the issue. He simply assumes that he might be the son of Sir Hugo, born out of wedlock. This causes him some anxiety. Unlike Gwendolyn, Daniel's absence of a past causes him to worry about his future; he is never able to dedicate himself to any particular future since he imagines that it should somehow be initimately determined by his past. He's convinced that if he were to know the details of his past, the course of his future would obviously suggest itself. More on Deronda's character in a future posting.
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