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.