Daniel Deronda
A fresh look at a classic novel
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 014043 427 9. £8.99. Rereading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda at the same time as My Name is Asher Lev, it occurred to me that the story of the latter is actually subsumed into a single chapter of the former. When Daniel finally meets the mother who abandoned him in youth, and uncovers his Jewish heritage, he finds an artist who rejected the narrow confines of a single community in favour of the freedom to perform in the wider world. Just like Asher Lev, you might say. Daniel, though, makes a different choice, to commit his life to ‘separateness with communication’. His mother remarks bitterly, and probably perspicaciously, ‘That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it’.
The issues we debate today as ‘multiculturalism v melting pot’ lie at the heart of George Eliot’s last novel; it remains as controversial today as in 1876. Though not the first favourable portrait of a Jew in English literature – there had already been Walter Scott’s beautiful Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1819) and Dickens’ virtuous Riah in Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), an overdue counterbalance to his villainous Fagin in Oliver Twist – George Eliot was the first to attempt a recognisable portrait of Jewish society. She is thought to have based the character of the scholar and mystic Mordecai on her close Jewish friend Emanuel Deutsch; this too is the source of the uncritical Zionism that is not the least of the novel’s difficulties for today’s reader.
Famously, George Eliot’s attempts to unite two narrative threads, Daniel’s discovery of his parentage and Gwendoline Harleth’s disastrous marriage, pleased neither part of her audience: FR Leavis suggested omitting the Jewish sections, and the first Hebrew translation excised all the Gwendoline material. But it remains an honourable failure, and the profound sympathy between the two protagonists can still move the reader. As Gwendoline repeatedly asserts, ‘It shall be better with me for having known you.’
