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cattytrona 's review for:
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
daniel deronda? i hardly know her!
insane story. starts out so incredibly strong. the first part is a beautiful piece of character work. eliot conjures gwendolen in such a compelling way, she really skilfully handles shifts in time and perspective, and renders emotion in ways i’m genuinely unsure i’ve read before - but sure have felt! - particularly those unnamed emotions which are neither positive nor negative but something electrically in between.
reading this with adam bede in mind was sort of weird, because the parallels between them are so striking. gwendolen and hetty are separated by class and a century, but they’re both beautiful young women brought down specifically because of their beauty and the confidence and hopes it gives them, and the naivety it hides from them. (also was aware of a conspicuous non-presence of sex in how their lives are told to us, which i’m usually not conscious of in novels of this period, but victorian prudish silence feels more bug than feature for the stories eliot wants to tell, which i think speaks to how ambitious and modern these women feel as characters.) and then you have the eponymous man, who’s good and honest and insightful, despite some flawed reactions, and the secondary woman, who has faith and is basically perfect.
and also both books imo become much less compelling with the backseating of their beautiful fools. i think eliot sees both their stories through stirringly, but my god the damage resolving the lives of these eponymous men does to her endings… society if george eliot named her books after these women and thereby centred them instead… i am fading into silence because i dont want to talk about the other half of the book…
the thing about me is i always think i am going to have special insight and i’ll be able to see what all those other people missed. but no, they were right. the jewish stuff in this sucks in comparison to the rest of it. the zionism is grim, but long before that the damage is done. i like mirah well enough, although she’s embarrassingly thin compared to gwendolen, but she’s mostly interesting because of her strange life, and as an element in the weird emotional snarl between gwendolen and daniel, which is also the best thing about his plot. this isn’t because i’m such a gwendolen head, but because i think this novel is at its most compelling in its emotional work, and in exploring the huge impact of seemingly everyday glances, meetings, feelings, responsibilities.
what doesn’t work is mordecai. this book is a victorian novel in pretty standard ways for about 450 pages, and then suddenly deronda’s on a quest, he has fated bonds, he’s a hidden heir, recognised despite not knowing his upbringing, there’s a chest of mystery parchment– he’s in a fantasy narrative except the magic land he’s to inherit is israel!! it’s insane. and the fantastical nature of this is acknowledged too: ‘it was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.’ until then, eliot does a fairly good job of rendering the kind of prejudices jewish people face in england at that time, not least through deronda, who’s got this interesting disgust he has to unlearn, in what seems to be setting up a fairly mature discussion about it. and then it lapses into this. and the fantasy is not even interesting: it’s so dense and mordecai speaks so exclusively in proselytising and period philosophy, and it’s all conducted in poorly lit rooms (i imagine). deronda finding out about his parentage? interesting. deronda immediately being like yipee modercai? deadening.
so. the two parts of the book fit together strangely, almost surreally, but i dont actually have an issue with that: i actually found gwendolen and deronda’s uneven thoughts towards each other compelling, and i think there’s a reasonable point made about the sort of many lives lived in society. but i wish the halves weren’t so completely uneven and out of balance, and that they were better matched in the interest they held, and the skill with which they’re rendered. but the gwendolen parts are so impressive. i hope she was ok after the close of the novel. i believe she was. i hope daniel falls off a boat.