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.