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korrick 's review for:
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.'Daniel Deronda' is an uncomfortable book, and it will be uncomfortable so long as antisemitism exists. The work posits no questions (where did the hatred for Jewish people come from?) and delivers no answers (how did the fictional scene of casual wishes for antisemitic extermination set the stage for the Shoah?), but instead serves as a marker stone, one of the more prominent in English literature. DD is, as the introduction likes to babble on about, an imperfect work, but much as it doesn't matter if my students get ten questions perfect if the time was allotted for them to do sixty, Evans is working on a higher tier than the vast majority of novelists of both her time, those preceding, and even some of the future. Full of bad faith and undermining that both the introduction and end notes are, the editor does see fit to draw comparisons to Baldwin, who similarly posited neither answers nor solutions to the antiblackness that continues to throttle his questions of origin. Evans' warning is nowhere near as dire, but it is a portrait of warning nonetheless, as with nationalism comes country, and with country comes internationally recognized means of enacting justice. It will take another seven decades after DD for Eichmann to be extradited to Israel, but like any society aware of the hierarchy, the English like their underbelly safely digested in the history books and the scriptures, a people eradicated before a people can come again.
Gwendolyn had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection[.]
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.
He had no idea of a moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he had been told it, that they may be a resentment and disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt themselves or find a supercilious advantage.
Why should a gentleman whose other relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic life?This novel, more than any other I've encountered, illustrates by slow and steady degrees the concepts of the gendered spheres of influence and their artificially constructed realms of influence. Gwendolyn is the interior by conventional rote, Daniel's is the exterior by comparatively obscene freedom, and the tales told of wives and their husbands have all the reliability of the myth of the American Dream, wherein one is raised through a sacrifice of millions and used as proof of quantitative success. Grandcourt is the pinnacle of English civilization, complete with a surname reminiscent of those countries of Norman conquest, and that place on high births a sadistic, phlegmatic patriarch, replete with dictatorial leisure and socipolitical control so fine one can will understand the origins of Big Brother. As such, this is not a comfortable novel by any means, as it affords men the purest presentation of the powers they may execute and the women the purest experience of how said powers are executed upon them. This is the case for both Christian and Jewish, as the person who wrote in the introduction that all the Jewish are constructed as literal angels never looked at Klemser, or Lapidoth, or Leonora Halm-Eberstein, or any of the minor characters who argued and solicited and otherwise lived their lives in countries that had made plain to them that Jewish people did not and would never belong other than as dissolved and destroyed cultural curiosities to be claimed as heritage by and neoliberal type: the last incremental functioning of a sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive genocide.
[H]e never did choose to kick any animal, because the act of kicking is a compromising attitude, and a gentleman's dog should be kicked for him.
Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit should change precisely at the point of matrimony.
You are not a woman. You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out — "this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by fixed recipe.The problem most readers probably have with this book is that there are no sinners and there are no saints; there are only systems and how well the individual survives their intersections. Gwendolyn is a Christian mirror to a Jewish couple, and each woman looks on the other as an object of abject envy while entrapped within their respective patriarchal entrapments. No woman who plays the game ever comes out a saint, and all an author such as Evans can do is tell the truth about such human beings. This is best expressed, much as Tanizaki did with [b:Naomi|34462|Naomi|Jun'ichirō Tanizaki|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1366810659s/34462.jpg|1045331] and Smith with [b:On Beauty|3679|On Beauty|Zadie Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1495961870s/3679.jpg|910752], by putting the pathos on the side of the close third person male narrator and the ethos and logos on the side of the little to none embodied yet still powerfully outspoken female side character/narrator obsession. There is nothing cruel or dehumanizing in letting a representative of a demographic whom the author will never be able to truly represent to speak for themselves, and if if the fates of Gwendolyn and other characters do not seem "feminist" (I have to say, 2000 pounds a year now, converted 161k pounds a year now, converted to 223k dollars, isn't bad at all), it is because, once again, feminism is being interpreted as once again stuffing a human being into a complex ideal instead of being allowed to make mistakes, compromise, and survive through the ugly tenacity such systems of gender intersected with religion intersected with historical persecution breeds among their populations. When Evans ended where she did, she had a hope that the life sustaining Jewish tracts of Ezra, replete with all the complications of Jewish human beings such as Leonara, Mirah, and Lapidoth, had outweighed all the casual wishes of extermination espoused by the perfectly bred English type. The English system may permit the Jewish to survive, but such a situation that rendered such permission of utmost necessity should never have existed in the first place.
I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play — grand, with an iron will...But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.
Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father's will was against it.
She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that 'anybody' regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers.In the end, there are Jewish people marrying Christian people, despite the accusations of racism (one, race is far too young to meld with such a beast as antisemitism; two, antisemitism has persisted so long as to to formulate a veritable enclave of common DNA, so pardon the wariness of the oppressed and do something about the alt-right/Neo-Nazis kthx), necessary critiques of Evans' portrayals of Judaism (however much the editor attempts to undermine such credible evaluations), and an unwritten half, easy, of a book devoted to further adventures of Gwendolyn Harleth and Daniel Deronda. I wish all authors had been half as brave with their last novel, for to go out on a limb for those with little to no political power, all for the sake of a common humanity, very rarely puts food on the table. This work is, in essence, an antithesis to Tolstoy's rant in W&P's epilogue that the printing press had doomed humanity, but it does not mean DD does not stoop to using lazy metaphors for the sake of narrative impetus, or that it was a gripping ride for every one of its 900 pages. What it means is that it undertakes the dull and demoralizing work of fending off the sea lions and status quo critics and other passively murderous sorts long enough for a stereotype to become flesh and bone and bring hope to those who have been condemned to live in that stereotype for seeming perpetuity. If more authors of the past, which no personal identity stake in the matter), had taken it upon themselves to raise up those who are customarily beaten down, we may never have had a Shoah at all. The evil lies not with the imperfect life, but with the complacency that views both said life and its representations and says, oh well. It will never happen to me.
I can't say that he is not active in imagining what goes on in other people—but then he always imagines it to fit his own inclination.
Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honoured and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbours do not admire us.
That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned what is.
Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans: no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way[.]
[T]here will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to – which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophising.
To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from a bridge beyond the cornfields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.