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.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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).
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