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.