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:

"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.

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.

Losing Battles by Eudora Welty

The four hundred plus pages of Eudora Welty's Losing Battles (quotes from the Random House edition of 1970) is dedicated to a little over a day, the Sunday of the Renfro-Beecham family reunion in Banner, Mississippi, at family matriarch Granny Vaughan's old farm homestead. The day also marks Granny's ninetieth birthday. Meticulously detailed by Eudora Welty, much of the day is given over to the family's telling stories of themselves. Gathered together physically by a comically woebegone set of vehicles, the Renfro-Beecham clan is brought together spiritually through the telling of their stories.

The Beecham-Renfros number enough for a good church choir. Granny's daughter and son-in-law died young in a flood, but not before bringing forth a brood of Beechams: Nathan, Noah,Percy, Dolphus, Curtis, and Beulah. Beulah, Mr. Renfro her husband, and four of their five children live with Granny Vaughan at the Banner homestead. Beulah's brothers, their voluble spouses and, in some cases, considerable families, have journeyed from near and far (Southern Mississippi) for what is an annual reunion. The Beechams are joined by Mr. Renfro's two sisters, old-maid Lexie and Auntie Fay who's married to Homer Champion. Homer's the county sheriff and thus a figure of some suspicion to this often times unruly family. The Beecham children seem to harbor a residue of suspicion about every single one of their in-laws, but Homer comes in for special scrutiny owing to his position as a law enforcer. With considerable pride, the Beecham-Renfros refer to the number gathered for their reunion as hundreds. This might be true if one were to include the dogs. Every guest seems to bring at least one, if not several. There's also a veritable tribe of dogs at this reunion.

Everyone attending anxiously awaits the appearance of Jack Renfro, Beulah's eldest boy. Jack is the pride of the family despite the fact he's returning from a stint in Parchman Penitentiary. Beulah tells Granny that Jack's returning on her birthday will be the ultimate gift of her day, "the joy of your life's coming home!"(5). Even though the family is in debt and the farm is suffering, Mr. Renfro has furnished the family home with a brand-new tin roof to welcome this prodigal son home. Likewise, Jack's wife Gloria has donned her wedding dress and sits facing the road with their child Lady May, who was born while he was away. Only Jack's little brother Vaughan, continually eclipsed by Jack, seems less than eager to see him.

At the outset, Jack's absence is left unexplained. There's no indication as to when, or more importantly, why he's expected back and from where. We gradually glean that he's been in the penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. Many stories later, we learn why he's been sent there. The family seems to have but a foggy notion of his doings in Parchman. With the exception of Lexie, no one seems to have any idea as to the length of his sentence. Yet, they have faith he's coming. They are certain that the family gathering itself at the homestead, like some kind of force of nature, will magically draw him back.

The waiting for Jack starts early. Shortly after sun-rise, before the reader is even aware of Jack as a character, the elderly Granny tells Beulah, "He can come right now,"(5) and the reader could be forgiven for believing the reference is to God. Later, when family arrives, Uncle Dolphus greets Granny, his mother, with a kiss and the reassurance, "we'll help you wait on him"(10).

While waiting for him, prompted by a newcomer sister-in-law Cleo, the family begins to tell stories. The first relates how Jack managed to find himself in the pen. Uncle Percy with his thready voice relates the main-line of the story but all interrupt and add to it. The Beecham-Renfros tell stories in a communal fashion. It doesn't take long to realize that the Beecham-Renfros have a limited interest in the facts. Their stories are a mix of history, entertainment, poetry and legend. In telling stories, they are fashioning a family portrait with love and pride. Their stories provide a window on the truths that matter to the tellers. The stories stake out the family, mirror it, love and honor it.

The Beecham-Renfros are salt-of-the-earth, country folk. They are insular, clannish and at war against a range of threats: poor harvest, droughts, and debt. However, their chief enemy seems to be education. One time school teacher Gloria sketches out the dimensions of the threat in a brief elegy she offers Julia Mortimer, a legendary school teacher in Banner who adopted and mentored her in the profession she dropped upon marriage into the Renfro-Beechams. According to Gloria, Miss Julia "didn't want anybody left in the dark, not about anything. She wanted everything brought out in the wide open, to see and be known. She wanted people to spread out their minds and their hearts to other people, so they could be read like books." A doorstep child ignorant of her past, Gloria concludes "people don't want to be read like books"(432). Although opposed to them in many ways, Gloria proves to be of like heart with her adopted family in this sentiment. The Beecham-Renfros are about the pleasures and strengths of the irregular and unexpected. Deep down, Welty's novel seems convinced such treasures don't survive the scrutiny and observation brought by education.

The family is in a pitched battle with all forms of regulation and government. This comes through to comic effect in the family's retelling of Jack's "crime" and trial. Jack suspects his longtime nemesis,shopkeeper/local sheriff Curly Stovall, has taken a family wedding ring from Jack's sister in lieu of overdue bills. Suspecting Stovall's hidden it in his locked safe, Jack roughs Curly and steals his safe, hoisting it up on his shoulders like Atlas shouldering the world. It is later we learn that Jack's sister has a sweet spot for Curly and may have given the ring to him. But, that's a later story.

Jack's arrest for stealing the safe puzzles the family. I never could quite determine what the safe actually did contain. Regardless or its contents, according to Uncle Curtis, "Jack had acted the only way a brother and son could act, and done what any other good Mississippi boy would have done in his place" and, recalling the trail, he claims, "I fully expected'em to throw the case right out the window"(43). In court, Judge Moody asks Jack if he's planning to plead innocent and Jack replies, "Yes sir, I'm needed"(52).

The Renfro-Beecham logic proves alien to the court's. Jack is sent to the penitentiary. Ultimately, by the family's sights, what the court lacks is a proper knowledge. His mother argues, "that judge never got it through his head what it was all about! Born and bred in Ludlow, most likely in the very shadow of the courthouse! A man never spend a day of his life in Banner, never heard of a one of us!"(62). The law is suspect because of it inability to account for circumstance and context, to account for the individual.

The judge Beulah refers to is Judge Moody. Recalling the trial, Uncle Percy says, "Judge Moody's whole battle cry was respect"(56). Judge Moody reads Jack's attack on and theft of Curly as an attack on authority, both the authority of money and law. He concludes, "'You folks around Banner trade at Stovall's store, vote him into office, and raise the roof when you feel like it'"(56). He warns, "You can't go knocking the law down if it gets in your way, you can't keep on packing up the law in the nearest crate big enough to hold it [to steal the safe, Jack ties up Curly in an empty coffin]...and go skipping out the store with a safe, so called....and all without offering this court any better reason than "He's [Curly is] aggravating." Aggravating!'"(56). Still, Jack responds with more of the same family logic: "'Judge, I reckon to do justice to Curly, you got to see him in Banner'"(57). Truth and law must be based on knowledge, and all three are dependent on context. To rule justly, you got to be and know where you're ruling.

Jack gets two years. To make his grandmother's birthday and the reunion, he leaves jail a few days shy of two years. However, outside of maiden Aunt Lexie, few question him when he arrives home like an idol to a wandering people. The family worships Jack. They surround him, pamper him, pepper him with questions, feed him. They break the bad news of his grandfather's passing. They prepare to tell him he has a daughter, although later we learn Gloria has told him this without informing the family she has done so. And, much to his chagrin, Jack learns from a late arriving Homer Champion that a man Jack helped out of a ditch earlier in the day, near Banner, was the same Judge Moody who'd sentenced him to the pen. Jack has acted as a good Samaritan to a man he considers an enemy and this perturbs Jack and his family. Various retributive options are bandied about till Gloria, anxious to keep her husband out of the pen for a spell, takes control and leads him away from his family.

In effect, Gloria, Jack and the baby Lady May go off for a walk. Gloria is anxious to be with Jack alone, both now and in the future and both figuratively and literally. She wishes to peel him from his family. Most immediately, she hopes to deter Jack from his desire to "meet that Judge....sing him my name out loud and clear, and leave him in as good a ditch as the one he had before I saved him. That's all." To which, Gloria replies, "Then it's up to your wife to pit her common sense against you"(112).

Gloria occupies a peculiar place in the family's battle against law, authority and education. While married in to the family via Jack, Gloria wishes for some distance from the Beecham clan. Abandoned at birth, Gloria was taken in by life-long school teacher Miss Julia who groomed her as a school-teacher. Gloria's career as a school teacher in Banner was brought to a sudden end when she fell in love and married Jack while boarding at his parent's.

Yet, all Gloria's efforts to extract Jack from his family and its continual troubles prove fruitless. Trouble finds Jack. While he and Gloria are getting reacquainted on a local outcrop, Banner Top, they hear the Judge's car coming along the road. Jack prepares to descend Banner Top to the road below and to shoo the Judge's car into a ditch nearby. Hoping to stop him, Gloria makes worse the situation by sticking Lady May in Jack's hands just as he's getting ready to descend, warning him, "If you can't be a better example to Lady May-hold her"(119). Jack does so but also begins his ragged descent down the outcrop, Lady May in hand. Gloria follows, and is unable to stop her descent until she ends up across the road. Lady May gets free when Jack gets to the bottom and tries to get to her mother on the other side of the road. Crossing it, she goes right into the path of the Judge's oncoming car. Gloria frantically runs to her and falls on top the baby in the middle of the road. Coming upon them, the Judge's swerves his car off the road to avoid them and runs the vehicle up the outcrop and almost off the edge on the other side. It comes to rest hanging half off of the "jumping-off place" on the side of Banner Top that fronts the Bywee River running below. It hangs precariously, anchored ultimately by Jack's best friend Aycock Comfort who somehow managed to get in the back seat of the car while it swerved off the road to avoid the baby. It's a crazy scene that apparently defies both explanation and the laws of physics.

Jack comes away convinced that the Judge has saved his baby and his wife. Grateful, he feel compelled to help the Moody's get their car down from the precipice, despite the Moody's reservations about his doing so. While Jack eagerly contemplates how he might do so, the judge tells his wife, "I reckon I better go on up there and put the quietus on that boy"(126). They ultimately resort to Gloria to put a stop to Jack's efforts to rescue the car on his own by driving it down the outcrop. Judge Moody asks him, "'have you been made to understand to keep hands off of that car?'" and Jack concedes "Yes sir...My wife's done passed a law'"(127).

While determined to resist Jack's offers of help, Mrs. Moody is clearly interested in getting the Moody car down soon. Yet, events conspire against this. When Curly Stovall happens by soon after, he is inclined to help till the mysterious appearance of events leads him to believe that Jack has set up the entire event to wreak vengeance upon him. He tells Mrs. Moody that he can't help her on a Sunday but promises to come back the following morning. Irritated, she commands her husband to "'shanghai the next thing on wheels that dares to come along here and make'em carry you back to civilization where you can beat somebody over the head till they come and haul us'"(155). Clearly, the civilization and regulation represented by the Moody's can be a thin veneer which washes away under distress.

The next potential Moody savior is a busload of teachers headed to Alliance, across the river from Banner. They're headed their to attend the funeral of Miss Julia Mortimer, a legendary school teacher in the region and a woman who acted as mentor/guardian/scold to Gloria when she was abandoned as a baby. The news of Ms. Julia's death hits Gloria as he she'd been "struck in the forehead by a stone out of a slingshot"(157), a curious Bible allusion which, in a bit of reverse casting, presents Gloria as the philistine. The teachers have headed this way to pick up Gloria on the way to Miss Julia's wake and funeral. As in other of Welty's depictions of small town life, the teachers have come to watch/experience/enjoy her mourning, her grief.

The teachers invite Gloria aboard their bus, reminding her "You're still one of us, Gloria Short. Even though you didn't wear too well or last as long as we did"(158). Finally, in a manipulative fashion, they remind her that "she owes [Miss Julia] the most of all...She loved you the best and prized you the most"(158). But, Gloria resist joining the schoolteachers, arguing that she must look after Lady May, who then comically happens to appear perched high above them on the top of Banner Top overlooking the road. Jack recovers the child. While she might be doing a poor job of looking after Lady May, Gloria protests she can't come along because she's got her hands full. With self-damning words in accord with the anti-education bent of the book, the school teachers add in agreement "'of the living'"(162). They head off without her. Gloria is a woman without a country, neither country nor city, neither civilized or of the land, neither schoolteacher nor Renfro.

With their car stuck on Banner Top with no help in sight, Jack invites the Moody's to come on home with him and Gloria. They accept. Atop a series of tables set up in the front yard of the Vaughn homestead, dinner is getting underway under a large tree. Granny Vaughn has been brought to the table like an icon, "lifted high and carried through the crowd. Little clouds of fragrance seemed to go with her"(175). Taking the place of her deceased minister husband, Brother Bethune, a Baptist minister with "his stand were wedged in to the tree roots by her side"(176). Brother Bethune doesn't simply offer a simple grace or blessing before the meal. Instead, he launches into a a sermon that is one part blessing, one part grace, and one solid part family history. Like the meal itself, it is without seeming boundaries and of prodigious length. He recalls Granny's marriage to Preacher Vaughn who "came here to this beautiful old house to live on their wedding day, and I believe he'd just surrendered to the ministry too, both at the age of eighteen"(182). His choice of the word "surrendered" suggests religion's potential to control. His sermon shows it's potential to ennoble, comfort and entertain.

During the course of the conversation that punctuates Bethune's sermon, Jack reveals that he has actually escaped from Parchman a day before his sentence was up. He does so within earshot of the Judge, attempting to explain his action by telling him, "Our reunion is one that don't wait, sir"(195).

Judge Moody is truly in an odd position at this reunion. Viewed as the villain who unjustly sentenced Jack, Judge Moody has been invited rather suddenly to dinner by the man he harmed. Brother Bethune tries to defuse the situation by introducing the Judge and his wife and by then informing them that the clan gathered is "going to forgive you"(208). The Moodys seem genuinely puzzled as to why the're being forgiven. Mrs. Moody assumes they're being forgiven for having walked in on the dinner and objects that they were invited to dinner by Jack. Uncle Noah replies such an invitation is "plain hospitality...That ain't no guarantee you ain't going to be forgiven when you get here"(208). Feeling he's done nothing wrong, Judge Moody refuses to be forgiven. Pointing to the reciprocal benefits of forgiveness, Brother Bethune implores, "Judge Moody, you do like the majority begs and be forgiven...Don't you want to come back and hear yourself be forgiven?" In the moral economy of common folk of the book, forgiveness addresses equally the needs of both the forgiven and the forgiver. One can satisfactorily forgive even if the action is not recognized by the recipient.

The family is angered by Judge Moody's refusal to accept their forgiveness. They are upset that he can't see he needs their forgiveness. They see Jack and his actions through the eyes of familial love while the Judge viewed him in the considerably cooler eyes of the law and its insistence on facts.